Rumsfeld's Unfinished Plans
He talked about 'transforming' the military, but it didn't turn out that way
One of the big obstacles throughout Rumsfeld's tenure would remain the legendary Pentagon bureaucracy. Despite Rumsfeld's reputation as a hard-charging CEO bound to rein in spending on pricey (and politically popular) Cold War-era weapons and programs, "no big programs got canceled during his tenure," says Krepinevich. "He could be acerbic and brutal, but in terms of translating that into action, that didn't happen." Andrew Hoehn, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy under Rumsfeld, says that "concepts, rather than things" were what he was most interested in. "So if you're looking for, did he kill one of the major aircraft programs, well, his notion of transformation wasn't about the big systems. He was very keen on changing thinking and culture."
To that end, Rumsfeld streamlined notoriously slow systems within Pentagon for getting new equipment out into the field. He sought, too, to move bases out of "old" Europe and revamp a command structure and imbue it with "more creative tension," adds Hoehn. Though many systems he championed, like national missile defense, were inherited, Rumsfeld made great strides expanding budgets for research and development, as well as pushing for more easily deployable systems like the Stryker brigades for the Army and agile combat ships for the Navy, says Brookings Institution analyst Michael O'Hanlon. Special operations forces grew substantially under his tenure, as did the ability to destroy targets with the deployment of thousands of global positioning system-guided all-weather bombs.
But his legacy will be Iraq, a war that has derailed his transformation plans even as it continues to shatter many of the assumptions upon which its programs were built. "He had meant his legacy to be transformation of the military and preparation for future combat," says Kagan. "His assumption was that Iraq was going to be a brief excursion and not the defining struggle of our time. It's not at all what he wanted or intended to be judged by," he adds. "But it is what he will be judged by in the end."
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