Rumsfeld's Unfinished Plans
He talked about 'transforming' the military, but it didn't turn out that way
A year ago, President Bush hosted a meeting with then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the Oval Office. The president had some questions about how, exactly, they were faring with efforts to revolutionize the military's way of planning and fighting-known in military parlance as transformation.
This far-reaching change toward a smaller, more high-tech force was to be a cornerstone of Rumsfeld's legacy, and he had a vested interest in the answer. But it wasn't a good one. Before Rumsfeld had a chance to respond, Pace gave the president his score card: an 8 (out of 10) for shifting the military's culture and thinking, but only a 4 for actually making the changes happen. Startled, Rumsfeld asked Pace to write a memo explaining what he meant, according to defense officials-and he asked his own senior civilian team to do the same. But Pace's answer was hardly news to many within the Pentagon, who privately confessed that they considered Pace's score to be, if anything, overly charitable. Today, new Defense Secretary Robert Gates has yet to say much about transformation. It's been largely pushed to the background by the immediate needs to, if anything, expand the military-a move consistently resisted by Rumsfeld.
Those needs were brought into sharp relief last week when, amid the political byplay over the defense budget, the Pentagon announced that the 4th Infantry Division would return to Iraq just 7
Back in 1999, these were just the sort of problems that presidential candidate Bush promised to fix in an address at the Citadel that is widely considered to be the road map for his military-transformation plans. He lauded "men and women who love their country more than their comfort" but lamented a military in which "even the highest morale is eventually undermined by back-to-back deployments ... shortages of spare parts and equipment, and rapidly declining readiness." He took a swipe at the military missions of the Clinton years. "We will not be permanent peacekeepers, dividing warring parties," he said. "This is not our strength or our calling."
As president, he turned to Rumsfeld to press transformation changes on the Pentagon bureaucracy. Though Rumsfeld had long served on commissions involving space and missile defense, "he came to the job being not much engaged in this transformation debate," says Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments President Andrew Krepinevich, who served in a key Pentagon planning office in the 1990s. The Pentagon struggled to define what, for instance, transforming the military meant-no small feat. Rumsfeld often asked, "Well, what does it mean to you?" recalls Krepinevich. "I got the impression he was groping on this issue."
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