By His Own Rules

Any defense secretary intent on challenging the status quo at the Pentagon is likely to find the going tough. Bureaucratic by nature and beholden to tradition, the U.S. military doesn’t change easily, and lots of groups—the military services, defense-industry contractors, politicians representing affected districts—have vested interests in ensuring things stay the way they are. So a case can be made for taking a cold, hard approach in trying to overhaul military structure and programs. But Rumsfeld made matters more difficult for himself with a management style seen as needlessly impolite and unforgiving.

Less easy to justify—and more dangerous from the standpoint of a Pentagon leader’s political survival—is letting relations with Congress go bad. Yet here, too, tensions for Rumsfeld flared early, not just with Democrats on Capitol Hill, which could be expected, but with Republicans as well. And again, Rumsfeld’s style was a factor—he could be as abrupt and dismissive toward lawmakers as he was toward generals and admirals.

The problem went beyond manners and wasn’t entirely Rumsfeld’s fault. For in his way, Rumsfeld initially tried to reach out to the Hill. He hoped to engage Congress in substantive discussion about how the Pentagon could better address new threats. Instead, he found parochialism and indifference, which merely confirmed a view he harbored of the legislative branch as not up to its responsibilities of thinking big or exercising proper oversight of federal agencies.

GOP lawmakers considered themselves the ones who had done the most when the White House was in Clinton’s hands to carry the banner for such Republican causes as national missile defense, improved military readiness, and greater defense spending. After George W. Bush took office, they expected these issues to be addressed quickly, correcting the wrongs of the Clinton years.

Rumsfeld shared those concerns but didn’t appear as definite about how to proceed. He sought time to study the issues and to proceed methodically. “While the Hill group was saying, ‘This is what you need to be doing,’ Rumsfeld was saying, ‘Let’s take a step back; let’s elevate the debate; let’s deconstruct things,’” said Robert Rangel, who was then the senior Republican staff member for the House Armed Services Committee and later became Rumsfeld’s senior civilian assistant.

Rangel remembers Rumsfeld trying to get lawmakers to think about the big picture but finding most of them not particularly interested. Only a small group of members tended to regard themselves as real defense specialists and paid attention to the subject. The rest had more parochial concerns about facilities in their districts or defense contracts for constituents.

“He kept sending up some of the think pieces that folks were bringing to him or that he was writing himself and asking, ‘What do you think?’” Rangel recalled. “He was wrestling with these issues at the fifty-thousand-foot level, saying come up and play, but the members didn’t know how to deal with that. I can remember as a staffer trying to figure out how to seize on this opportunity because in many respects it was something brand new and different. Rumsfeld just operated differently. He was not a Bill Cohen, who tended to curry the favor of Hill members. Rumsfeld really wanted to open up and bring members along with his thinking. But it just never worked. There was just no connection there.”

Victoria “Torie” Clarke, who had joined Rumsfeld’s staff as his chief spokesperson, also has a recollection of Rumsfeld and senior lawmakers talking past each other. On visits to the Hill, Rumsfeld spoke of needing to revamp the U.S. military in the face of new threats posed by weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, cyberwarfare, and space warfare. “And I swear, members would practically reach over and pat him on the head and say, ‘Now, how many ships are you going to build in my backyard?’” Clarke said in an interview. “They could not change their frame of reference.”

But it wasn’t just this in-my-own-backyard myopia on the part of lawmakers that bothered Rumsfeld. He regarded members of Congress as intrusive and overreaching. In his view, since his first stint as defense secretary, too many laws governing military activities had been passed, too many reports had been mandated by Congress, too many requests for information had been issued. The growth in the size of the annual Defense Authorization Act—from sixteen pages in the Ford era to more than five hundred pages now—said it all.

Rumsfeld started jotting down his concerns in a paper titled “The DoD Challenge.” It began with the assertion that the “Defense establishment is tangled in its anchor chain.” Commonly referred to now as “the anchor chain memo,” Rumsfeld showed an early version of it in March 2001 to Senator John W. Warner (R-VA), the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Within a couple of months, it had expanded to five pages and listed twenty-eight ways in which the Pentagon was hampered by congressional requirements or antiquated internal policies and processes.

“This situation has undoubtedly evolved over the past decades as a result of a series of instances that caused distrust between the Congress and the Department,” Rumsfeld wrote. “Unfortunately, the result has not been improved oversight. Quite the contrary, each new layer of control and micromanagement has compounded the problem of accountability. From a practical standpoint, DoD no longer has the authority to conduct the business of the Department, and, as a result, its performance is deteriorating. . . . The regulations and requirements that have been laid on are so onerous that, over time, they are smothering incentive, innovation and risk taking.”

The memo led to a “freedom-to-manage” initiative by Rumsfeld aimed at drafting legislation to remove some of the crippling regulations and requirements from running the Pentagon. The idea was to use the same approach as that taken in deciding military base closures—that is, to establish an independent commission charged with submitting recommendations that Congress could then only vote up or down, not amend. But the freedom-to-manage plan didn’t sit well with some on the Hill, and nothing ever came of it.

Actions by Rumsfeld that either inadvertently or intentionally offended members of Congress didn’t help his cause. The senior Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Duncan Hunter of California, was angered when he found himself assigned to a seat in the rear of a Pentagon plane ferrying officials to South Carolina for the funeral of a longtime congressman, Floyd Spence. In another instance, Rumsfeld went against the advice of his legislative affairs director and sent a harsh letter to the senior Democrat on the committee, Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, in response to Skelton’s remarks about a shortage of troops.

“A lot of people would have said, ‘Okay, Ike, you and I have a disagreement, why don’t you come out here for breakfast and let’s talk about it,’” recounted Powell Moore, who handled legislative affairs for the Pentagon at the time. Moore saw the letter before it was sent and tried, without success, to persuade Rumsfeld to tone it down, noting that Skelton was popular on the Hill and the congressman’s colleagues would not appreciate seeing him treated unkindly by the new secretary.

Even more irksome to GOP congressional leaders was Rumsfeld’s reluctance to hire congressional staff for political appointee positions at the Pentagon. Historically, a number of these posts were filled by Hill aides, who brought with them a useful knowledge of the inner workings of government and helpful congressional connections. But Rumsfeld tended to see Hill staffers as lacking managerial experience and as beholden to congressional influence.

Some congressional aides who interviewed for Pentagon positions in the new Bush administration complained afterward of having been treated cavalierly and made to feel that their Hill background had little relevance to Defense Department employment. “They’d be asked something like, ‘You know, in the executive branch you have to manage things, in the executive branch you have to make decisions, while on the Hill you don’t have to manage anything or make decisions, so do you think you can make that adjustment?’” Moore said.

Some of the most influential members of Congress weighed in to try to give their aides a boost—among them, Senate majority leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, who promoted Sam Adcock, and Republican senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, who sought a position for Jay Kimmitt. But even these powerful lawmakers were rebuffed. Frustrated and angry, Lott summoned Rumsfeld to a blunt meeting with a group of senior Republicans, where the defense secretary heard complaints about the perceived mistreatment of job applicants and other grievances.

After the meeting, Lott pulled Moore aside to register his own complaint about one of Rumsfeld’s aides, Steve Herbits, a former staffer from the Ford era who was again assisting Rumsfeld as a senior adviser. Lott was opposed to Herbits for his openly gay sexual orientation and for his record of contributions to Democratic causes. Lott said he would exercise his senatorial prerogative to place a hold on all pending Defense Department nominees, delaying their confirmation by the Senate, until Herbits was gone.

Herbits left in May when his transition stint had been scheduled to end, although he returned periodically over the next three years to advise Rumsfeld and to carry out various projects. Moore then asked whether Rumsfeld wanted Lott informed of the departure of Herbits so that the hold on Pentagon nominations could be lifted. “Hell, no!” the secretary asserted. But Lott did find out, and the nominations were allowed to proceed.

Inside the Pentagon, Rumsfeld’s tensions with the service chiefs bubbled over in late May during an emotional session in the Tank, the chiefs’ conference room. The secretary opened the meeting with a defense of his actions since coming to the Pentagon, emphasizing that he was determined to take a fresh look and so had gone outside the military for help. He added that it had never been his intention to be exclusionary.

Admiral Vern Clark complained that he still hadn’t been given a copy of the latest version of the overall strategy paper being written for Rumsfeld by Andrew Marshall. The service leaders were worried about that paper because it appeared to prescribe major shifts in the military, with new emphases on Asia and on long-range precision weaponry and less on large ground forces.

The meeting ended with new resolve by Rumsfeld to start holding intensive discussions with senior military as well as civilian officials in the weeks ahead in connection with the Quadrennial Defense Review. By then, the study panels that Rumsfeld had set up in his initial weeks had proven to be a largely useless exercise, yielding no clear way forward. With little direction from the top and riven by the conflicting views of members, the panels had produced a great hodgepodge of recommendations. “No one knew what transformation was about, so you had in these study groups an awful lot of rehashed diagnoses of the problem as opposed to coherent solutions for how to fix them,” said Paul Gebhard, one of Rumsfeld’s special assistants.

Over the next few weeks, Rumsfeld and his team conducted an intensive series of almost daily meetings with the service chiefs that eventually yielded general agreement on the need for a new strategy for sizing and shaping U.S. forces. During the Cold War, U.S. strategy was based on the possibility of global war with the Soviet Union. That had given way at the start of the Clinton administration to the notion that the U.S. military needed to prepare instead for the possibility of two major regional conflicts being fought almost at the same time—most probably one in the Middle East and the other on the Korean peninsula.

But this two-war construct had not held up particularly well in the 1990s as U.S. troops found themselves stretched thin not by major regional conflicts but by smaller fights in such places as the Balkans and by multiple peacekeeping missions. Moreover, a new array of dangers made military planning more problematic. Increasingly, planners had to worry about the possibility of terrorists coming across U.S. borders, missiles reaching U.S. territory, hackers attacking U.S. information systems, and enemies of one sort or another using chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. The Pentagon thus required a more flexible, more realistic strategy, one that placed a greater emphasis on homeland defense and on smaller-scale contingencies.

“The current strategy isn’t working,” Rumsfeld declared on June 21, 2001, in his first public appearance before Congress since his January confirmation. The testimony provided an important marker for the evolution of Rumsfeld’s thinking to that point. In back-to-back hearings before the Armed Services committees in both the Senate and the House, the secretary outlined a more layered strategy that he said would be tested further as the Quadrennial Defense Review wore on.

The new strategy had several parts. First, it softened the old requirement that the military be ready to win two regional wars at once, calling instead for U.S. forces to be able to swiftly defeat one enemy while at least holding a second enemy at bay. Second, it included a provision for a limited number of small-scale contingencies. And third, it added a specific requirement that the U.S. homeland be defended, although just what that should mean remained vague even to Rumsfeld and the rest of the Pentagon leadership.

Evident, too, in Rumsfeld’s remarks to Congress were emerging signs of a more aggressive U.S. military posture. To the old concept of simply deterring enemies, Rumsfeld added a new emphasis on dissuading them from even thinking of developing certain weapons or taking menacing action. And he mentioned doing more to reassure friends and allies of America’s ability to respond.

The secretary spoke as well of the need to base future procurement decisions less strictly on shaky predictions about specific threats. In a world of greater uncertainty, he argued, such decisions should rest more on projections of new capabilities that would give the United States a clear edge against all adversaries. This notion of “capabilities-based planning,” as opposed to the “threat-based planning” of the past, was a controversial one. While it promised greater flexibility, it ran the risk of making some questionable new weapons easier to justify.

But Rumsfeld was clearly attempting to set the basis for what he hoped would be a profound shift toward a significantly restructured armed forces and toward new weapons choices, a shift that favored investment in such high-tech areas as space, information systems, and intelligence gathering. His statement showed him focused sharply on a set of threats very different from the single, overwhelming Soviet menace that he had confronted as secretary of defense before. As much as he had appeared in his first months in office as a kind of Rip Van Winkle character, awakening to new realities of Pentagon management after a quarter century away, his strategic view was very current.

The new strategic guidance represented progress toward defining Rumsfeld’s transformation mantra, but it was only a first step. What followed over the summer were extensive discussions between Rumsfeld and the Pentagon’s senior leadership on how to translate the guidance into decisions about force structure and weapons systems. The discussions often turned heated.

Eager to free up money to fund futuristic systems like missile defense, unmanned and robotic vehicles, precision munitions, and space satellites, Rumsfeld and his team appeared intent on making cuts in force size. Proposals circulated to eliminate two Army divisions, three Air Force wings, an aircraft-carrier battle group, and more. The chiefs complained that such reductions were being conceived before the actual missions that the military might have to carry out had been adequately defined.

Compounding matters were budgetary pressures. Bush’s decision to go with a $1.35 trillion tax cut meant that less money would be available for the rise in defense spending that the military services had expected. In June 2001, the White House announced an $18.4 billion increase in military spending, raising the total to $329 billion, but that was only about half the increase that Rumsfeld had requested and that the military chiefs had deemed necessary.

The smaller-than-desired increase was explained as a stopgap measure meant to stabilize the military budget while Rumsfeld devised far-reaching changes in strategy, weapons, and troop structure. But the decision suggested that Rumsfeld’s reshaping would have to proceed more slowly. After paying for additional essentials such as spare parts, training, and fuel for ships and aircraft, the proposed budget hike left little for transformation initiatives. If money for these was to come from anywhere, it would have to be from troop cuts.

A central question in Rumsfeld’s discussions with the chiefs thus became how much risk to take in the short term by reducing troop levels and lowering the readiness of military units in the interest of the long-term restructuring of forces and investments in new systems. “Here’s the problem that the Joint Chiefs faced,” retired general Hugh Shelton recalled years later. “We all understood that we had to look out twenty years, but we also were concerned about reaching a balance. You just can’t be interested in who you’re going to have to fight years from now. You have to preserve your force in the meantime.”

Shelton and the other chiefs were concerned that Rumsfeld was so focused on buying new technologies that he wasn’t fully accepting the near-term risks involved. “He wanted it both ways,” Shelton said, meaning the benefits of long-term investment without the danger of short-term vulnerability.

Military planners surveying the world at the time saw a number of potential hot spots that could draw the United States into a conflict in the near term. What if the North Korean regime fell apart violently? If China tried to bully Taiwan? If the nuclear face-off between India and Pakistan worsened? If the Middle East plunged into war? Not to mention the possibility of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

But Rumsfeld and his aides argued that no one was likely to challenge the U.S. military directly in the short term. In this they were supported by Andy Marshall, whose strategy paper, written at Rumsfeld’s request after taking office, had essentially concluded that the world looked relatively safe for the moment, so the United States could afford to concentrate on the longer term. Marshall contended that the United States had entered a period of global hegemony, giving it time and opportunity not only to extend its power but also to prepare for future military competitions.

Outside the Pentagon, proponents of change grew impatient with the lack of decision. Ken Adelman, a longtime Rumsfeld friend and former aide, published a piece in the Wall Street Journal titled “Stop Reviewing; Start Reforming” in which he accused the administration of “tiptoeing” around sweeping changes at the Pentagon. “So far, there’s been more storm than reform,” Adelman wrote. “Enough ‘reviews.’ It’s clear what needs be done.”

Rumsfeld was not pleased. “He came up to me afterwards at someone’s house,” Adelman recalled, “and, typical Rumsfeld, said, ‘Joyce was really steamed by your column.’ He told me I was a friend, and how could I do that to him. He poked his finger in my chest. I did feel badly.”

By summer, tensions were so high that Rumsfeld, in a meeting with senior civilian and military officials, issued what sounded like a threat simply to quit. “The president has asked me to do a hard job, and we’re going to have to do this together,” he said, according to notes taken by a participant. “And if we can’t, then I’m going to go back to New Mexico because I have better things to do with my time. I need you guys to work with me; I don’t need you guys working against me.”

Adding to the strain was a concern among the chiefs that the minutes of some of their sessions with Rumsfeld, drafted by the secretary’s staff, did not reflect what had been said or decided. Repeatedly, Shelton tried to set the record of a meeting straight, telling Rumsfeld the minutes were incorrect. “It happened a number of times,” Shelton recalled. “A lot of frustration developed out of that.”

Rumsfeld never got comfortable meeting with the military chiefs alone in the Tank. As the Quadrennial Defense Review discussions intensified, he stopped going to the inner sanctum of the chiefs altogether. He had been livid when he read a newspaper story with details of one of his supposedly secret Tank sessions, believing the leak had come from the military side. “The Tank leaks,” he complained to Shelton.

“He was very upset about it, and he came into the Tank and basically said something that I never thought I’d hear a secretary say, and that was that he didn’t have much use for us as a body,” recalled retired general Jim Jones, the former Marine commandant. General Eric Shinseki, the Army’s chief of staff, thought the leak had come from Rumsfeld’s office and told him so. “The secretary didn’t stay long,” Jones said. “It’s clear he wasn’t there to smoke the peace pipe.”

Asked years later about his decision to shun the Tank, Rumsfeld said that when he tried to engage the four-star officers as a group, he found them reticent and overly inclined to back one another. “There was a reluctance to speak out on anything other than their own service,” he said in an interview for this book. “It varied from individual to individual, but there apparently had evolved or developed within the department a pattern whereby if a broad subject came up that involved one service, then the other three services would not opine on that too much—at least not opine in any way that was anything other than very agreeable to whatever it was that that service chief was proposing.”

Instead of conferring with the chiefs on their turf, Rumsfeld set up a different forum that became known as the Senior Level Review Group. It met in the secretary’s conference room and included not just the uniformed service leaders but the department’s senior civilian leadership. While initially established to work on the Quadrennial Defense Review, the group—abbreviated SLRG and pronounced “slurg” in Pentagon acronym parlance—became a fixture of Rumsfeld’s tenure. Never really a decision-making body, it was used more by Rumsfeld as a sounding board, where a wide range of issues would be briefed and debated. The assumption of those who attended SLRG meetings was that the decisions would be made elsewhere—or already had been.

“It was very Socratic,” said one regular civilian participant. “Rumsfeld used the session a lot to watch how people debated each other, how they answered his questions. Occasionally he’d throw a little bomblet on the table to see what would happen. Then as the debate progressed, he would try his ‘What-I-think-I-hear-you-saying-is.’ And then he would lay out, ‘Here’s-the-way-I’m-going-to-talk-about-it, how-do-you-all-feel-about-that? ’”

The chiefs never really accepted SLRG sessions as a substitute for Tank meetings with the secretary and frequently wished they could return to talking with the secretary alone, without a larger chorus of civilian officials.

Rumsfeld came to learn that before some of the SLRG meetings in the summer of 2001, the chiefs would confer among themselves in the Tank. In fact, this would sometimes delay the start of the secretary’s meetings. “It just frustrated him no end,” said Andy Hoehn, one of Rumsfeld’s senior strategists. “He’d say, ‘Why are they down there? Why can’t they just have this conversation in front of me?’ I could never be sure, but I often wondered whether the intense pace of the secretary’s meetings that summer—every day for several hours—was in part intended to avoid the chiefs precooking stuff.”

In a memo later in the year to several of his top civilian staff members, Rumsfeld expressed his satisfaction with the pattern that had been established of mixing the chiefs and senior civilians together. “It worked,” he wrote. “We were able to hear their individual views.”

He drew a distinction between these individual views and the “collective views” of the chiefs that emerged from their separate meetings in the Tank. While sounding receptive still to the collective view, he encouraged each of his civilian aides to consider ways of drawing out the individual opinions of the military leaders. “Sometimes a collective view is a compromise, and that is understandable and fine,” Rumsfeld said. “Finding ways to build them into the process and for each of you to learn their perspectives first-hand is a helpful thing to do.”

By August 2001, Rumsfeld was in retreat, under fire from all sides. Not only were the chiefs proving resistant to his direction, but members of Congress were signaling their opposition to suggested cuts in troops and traditional weapons systems. And conservatives were complaining that the Pentagon had not received the money needed for the renewed buildup they had expected. Indicative of the anger on the right, William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, called on Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to resign to highlight “the impending evisceration of the American military.”

“This is one of the most interesting situations I’ve ever seen in a long time,” Representative Norm Dicks, a promilitary Democrat from Washington State, told Time magazine. Rumsfeld “says he wants the military to stop saying they can fight two wars on two fronts simultaneously. But he has opened more fronts in Washington than any defense secretary in memory.”

Speculation that Rumsfeld would be the first member of the Bush cabinet to go was widespread and openly reported in news publications. Mindful of his early stumbles, Rumsfeld confessed to a reporter, “I was not in the rhythm of the place.” He also said he had learned a lesson, which he summed up as, “It would be foolhardy to try to micromanage from the top . . . every aspect of everything that is going on.”

Having taken office with such promise, how had the savvy Rumsfeld gotten into such trouble so soon? Part of the problem could be blamed on unrealistically high expectations for a quick, radical Pentagon overhaul—expectations that had been set not by Rumsfeld but by Bush during the campaign. Further, there was some question as to whether the time was even right for a dramatic transformation. Historically, reform had come easier in the wake of a major military defeat or in the face of a looming crisis, none of which was the case in 2001.

Then, too, Rumsfeld faced tighter fiscal constraints than expected. And he was still having to operate with only a few handpicked aides because of lengthy delays in filling the Pentagon’s forty-eight slots for political appointees. Also missing was a political constituency in Congress for painful changes in the military. As Cheney remarked in defense of his old friend Rumsfeld, anyone would have had trouble reforming the U.S. military after “years of neglect.” Or, as Rumsfeld and his aides frequently could be heard saying, “Change is hard.”

But Rumsfeld bore some of the blame. Although his goal—to redesign an outmoded military—was commendably ambitious and important, he disregarded some of his earliest Washington lessons. Most notably, he neglected to engage the very people whose support he needed most to achieve the transformation he sought. Rather than draw the military brass into feeling personally invested in the process of change, Rumsfeld engendered attitudes of distrust, suspicion, resentment, and downright hostility. He had tried to change course in June, launching into an unprecedented series of intense meetings with the chiefs on an almost-daily basis. But by then the damage had been done. Relations remained strained.

The picture with Congress wasn’t any more encouraging. His refusal to consider some senior Hill aides for Pentagon jobs had been only the start of a larger pattern of what members came to see as Rumsfeld’s seeming disregard for them. He had been slow to share his thinking about his strategic review and had delayed presenting proposed changes to the defense budget. Lawmakers, like the chiefs, had felt excluded from the process.

Rumsfeld did make renewed efforts to reach out to Congress about the time he engaged the chiefs, but then defense conservatives on the Hill were riled afresh by a surprise decision in June to end training at a bombing range on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques by May 2003. Before the reverberations from that decision faded, congressional antagonism was deepened by a Pentagon move to mothball a third of the ninety-three-plane B-1 bomber force and consolidate the remaining fleet by shifting planes from Georgia and Kansas to Texas and California. “I am discouraged, I am frustrated and I am angry,” Senator Pat Roberts, a hawkish Republican from Kansas, told Rumsfeld at a hearing.

The bomber decision sparked strong opposition not just from lawmakers in states with B-1 bases but from businessmen and Air National Guard officers as well. Privately, Rumsfeld blamed Air Force officials for mishandling the plan. But publicly, the controversy emerged as the first major test of Rumsfeld’s ability to bring sweeping change to the military. If he could not cut back on the troubled B-1 force, how could he ever tackle an Army division or a carrier battle group?

Expectations of a new Pentagon era began to fade. Instead, the revised conventional wisdom held that Rumsfeld’s review would fall short of the bold rhetoric of Bush’s Citadel speech. Still, the White House showed little sign of easing him out. Indeed, Cheney told the Washington Post that Rumsfeld was well suited to carry on the fight. “It is going to be tough, and he’s going to have to break some china,” Cheney said. “But he’s just the guy to do it.”

Rumsfeld appeared to shrug off much of the criticism. A friend who dined with him and Joyce that summer in New Mexico asked about all the attacks in the press. The Rumsfelds didn’t flinch. “Good grief,” Joyce said, laughing it off. “It’s nothing. It isn’t ten percent of what garbage we got dumped on us the last time we were down there.”

Rumsfeld went on the offensive. To make the case that he was engaging with Congress and with the chiefs, he had his staff tally the numbers of meetings and then boasted about them. He put out word that he had held 361 meetings with “200 or 300” members of Congress and had conferred with the military leaders 320 times. He also spoke of “93 events with the press of various types.” That was quantity, of course, not quality. But for Rumsfeld, an incurable counter, the metrics mattered.

Rumsfeld’s relations with Shelton, which had started chilly, grew frostier. In various ways, Rumsfeld kept making it clear that he considered the chairman’s position somewhere off to the side, not in the straight chain of command that ran from the president to the secretary to the regional combatant commanders. Although the chairman is a key military adviser, he does not, by law, have direct command over any forces.

Shelton thought Rumsfeld was handicapping himself by failing to recognize how helpful a chairman could be in coordinating various military activities. But Rumsfeld insisted on dealing with his regional commanders directly and hearing their suggestions and recommendations unfiltered through the chairman’s office.

Nor did Rumsfeld make a secret of his view that the 1986 Department of Defense Reorganization Act, enacted since he had last served as defense secretary, placed too much power in the hands of the chairman. Known as the Goldwater-Nichols Act, the legislation sought to diminish the rivalry among the military services by enhancing the chairman’s role. What irked Rumsfeld about it was its designation of the chairman, without the service chiefs, as the principal military adviser to the president, the National Security Council, and the secretary of defense.

“He felt that the chairman’s position had been elevated higher than it should have been,” Shelton said. “As the top civilian in the Pentagon, he felt perfectly capable of going over to the White House without having the chairman tailing along. I got the feeling he’d just as soon go to NSC meetings without having the chairman present because he really didn’t feel that he needed the chairman.”

Rumsfeld wanted the Pentagon to speak with one voice and insisted his staff and the Joint Staff coordinate views inside the building before engaging with the State Department and other agencies. Previously, Joint Staff officers had been accustomed to dealing directly in interagency discussions, coordinating positions and then bringing them to the secretarial level for a decision. Rumsfeld sought to put a stop to that, showing little tolerance for close collaboration with the State Department. He also did not like interagency working groups at lower levels, preferring issues to be hashed out among senior officials.

“He was very, very closed about his willingness to share things with the other agencies,” remarked John Abizaid, then a three-star Army general in charge of the Joint Staff ’s policy branch. This side of Rumsfeld had surprised Abizaid. “I had this idea that because Rumsfeld had so much experience in government, he’d be very collaborative with the other agencies,” the general said. “But he wasn’t.”

The chiefs as a group customarily issued letters to Congress on topics of particular concern. Called “twenty-four-star letters” because they were signed by all six four-star members of the Joint Chiefs—the four service leaders plus the chairman and vice chairman—they carried unusual authority. But Rumsfeld objected to the chiefs giving strategic advice outside channels. “It just drove him nutty,” Abizaid said.

As the senior military officer with the secretary on a trip to Russia in 2001, Abizaid caught an earful from Rumsfeld about the Joint Staff. More than six years later, the general still recalled Rumsfeld, during the plane ride back from Moscow, describing Joint Staff officers as arrogant and unsupportive of him. Abizaid sought to assure him that the officers did respect their oaths to the Constitution and the chain of command. “You tell us what you want us to do, and we’ll do it, but we can’t guess,” Abizaid said. “And we’re not trying to tell you what to do.”

“Well, sometimes I think you are trying to tell me what to do,” Rumsfeld said. After letting the subject drop for a bit, Rumsfeld came back to it again during the plane ride. “I just feel like there’s too much resistance to change,” he said.

Persistently troubled by the power of the Joint Staff, Rumsfeld explored the possibility of trimming it by merging its protocol, legislative liaison, and legal functions into the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He presented this as an efficiency move, but Shelton considered it an obvious power play.

Shelton argued the importance of the chairman having his own group of specialists. He noted that under Title 10, the chairman is supposed to render independent advice, so it is critical for him to have his own set of lawyers. The chairman has many contacts with Congress, so it helps to have his own legislative office. And the chairman entertains many visiting foreign counterparts and other dignitaries, so he needs his own protocol office. “We’ve done a lot to try to pare these offices down,” Shelton told Rumsfeld. He couldn’t resist observing that the secretary’s staff was much bigger than his own, and he suggested that Rumsfeld look there for economy measures.

Unable to get anywhere with Shelton or later chairmen, Rumsfeld continued looking for allies in the department. In 2002, he asked the department’s historian, Alfred Goldberg, for an opinion on the merger idea. Goldberg wrote back warning that such a move would be perceived as diminishing the role of the Joint Chiefs and could well stir up a political storm. He also cautioned Rumsfeld against thinking the reorganization could be achieved simply on his own authority as secretary. “Congress may want the last word,” Goldberg said.

Nowhere was the strain more pronounced between Rumsfeld and the chiefs than in the secretary’s relationship with General Eric Shinseki. In style alone, the two men had difficulty relating. Shinseki’s natural reticence contrasted with Rumsfeld’s loquaciousness. The secretary liked to engage, to ask questions, and to get answers. Shinseki tended to keep his replies short and avoid extended conversation. “I would watch Rumsfeld try to draw him out, but Shinseki was not easily brought into a discussion,” Hoehn said.

Shinseki tended not to put himself forward. He preferred to work in groups and build consensus. A well-mannered officer, he resented Rumsfeld’s often harsh, abrasive treatment of subordinates and what he perceived as arrogance and, at times, overbearing infringement on the prerogatives of military leaders.

On the issue of military transformation, the two men actually shared a commitment. In fact, Shinseki, who had taken charge of the Army two and a half years before Rumsfeld arrived, had launched a program of change months earlier. Shinseki’s initiative was aimed at the same goals that interested Rumsfeld—the creation of a lighter, more agile force. “If you don’t like transformation, you are going to like irrelevance a lot less,” Shinseki had told his soldiers, pushing to overcome stiff resistance in Army ranks to some of the changes. Rumsfeld liked that statement so much that he later added it to his published collection of rules.

Shinseki wasn’t a natural reformer. He had to be pushed by Shelton and Cohen into coming up with a plan for change. Nonetheless, he had conceived a plan and was going forward with it before transformation was made fashionable by Rumsfeld. “He felt that he was doing the right things,” said Staser Holcomb, one of Rumsfeld’s senior assistants who tried to mediate between the secretary and the general. “He didn’t really believe he needed the secretary’s help in transforming the Army.”

Rumsfeld found Shinseki’s program insufficiently aggressive and somewhat unintelligible. The program envisioned not one but in effect three armies existing side by side, each representing a separate stage of development. There was a “legacy force” consisting of the Army essentially as it was before the Soviet Union’s demise, an “interim force” featuring more agile combat-brigade teams built around a new wheeled, armored vehicle called the Stryker, and an “objective force” of the future. Questions existed even within the Army about exactly what Shinseki’s transformation program was trying to fix and where it would lead. Although Rumsfeld hadn’t figured out yet what kind of new Army he wanted, he knew Shinseki’s notion wasn’t it.

Army officials tended to regard Rumsfeld as simply biased against their service. Ground forces did not factor into the types of future systems he seemed to favor, systems that emphasized airpower, space operations, and intelligence gathering. His senior military assistant was a Navy officer, and the civilians he had picked as other special assistants tended, like Rumsfeld himself, to be ex-Navy. And he had been heard making little digs at the Army. “You just got this clear feeling that the Army wasn’t high on his priority list, that he saw it as anachronistic, that the new way ahead was going to be high-tech weapons in space,” Shelton said.

Rumsfeld’s closest aides from that period insist he was not anti-Army. But they also note that the Army did little to help its case with the new secretary. Just the briefing style of senior Army officials tended to reinforce the service’s image as plodding and uncreative. The contrast was greatest with the Navy, whose military leader, Admiral Vern Clark, seemed to figure out early how best to communicate with Rumsfeld.

“Clark would come in for a forty-five-minute meeting with three slides,” said Steve Bucci, then an Army colonel serving as one of Rumsfeld’s military assistants. “On those slides there might be three bullets each, none even a complete sentence. He’d lay them in front of the secretary but would hardly refer to them. He’d just start chatting with the secretary, and they’d have a dialogue. The secretary would ask questions, Clark would respond, and generally by the end of the session, Clark got whatever he wanted.

“The Army would come in for a forty-five-minute meeting with fifty-two slides dense with words. They’d start speaking, and the secretary would interrupt to ask a question. They would answer as directly and succinctly as possible, then get back to the slides. Then he’d ask another question, and they’d answer that one. And frequently there wasn’t a third because by that point he was so frustrated at not getting the dialogue he wanted. Most of the time the Army guys didn’t get what they wanted because they never got their point across.”

The first clash between Rumsfeld and Shinseki had occurred in the early days of the administration. It involved a decision by Shinseki in late 2000 to issue black berets to all soldiers instead of just to Army Rangers, an elite, highly trained combat group. Shinseki had intended the move to symbolize his larger transformation effort by erasing one of the lines between the Army’s heavy and light forces. But it set off a storm of controversy in the Ranger community, where the wearing of a black beret had been considered a hard-won right and the exclusive mark of their unit.

With members of Congress and officials in the new Bush White House sympathetic to the Rangers’ protests, Rumsfeld urged Shinseki to reconsider. But the Army chief refused to budge. Finally, in mid-March 2001, Rumsfeld ordered Shinseki to appear with Wolfowitz at a news conference and announce what amounted to a retreat by the Army general. To regain a sign of their distinctive status, the Rangers were given new tan berets in place of the old black ones.

“I don’t think Rick ever recovered with Rumsfeld, in terms of Rumsfeld’s confidence,” said retired general Jack Keane, who was vice chief of the Army at the time under Shinseki. “I think Rumsfeld lost confidence in his judgment.”

The beret episode suggested that while Rumsfeld often held out for his way, Shinseki at times could be equally stubborn and poorly attuned to Washington politics. But the most crucial showdown between the two men in 2001, which involved the future size of the Army, ended in Shinseki’s favor.

The Army had come down in size significantly during the 1990s, dropping from 710,000 to 482,000 active-duty troops, organized principally into ten divisions. The Army Reserve and National Guard also had shrunk, from 756,000 to 560,000. Even so, one of Rumsfeld’s early study panels challenged the continuing need for so many ground forces, suggesting the era of major tank battles was over, and as the Quadrennial Defense Review got under way in earnest in late spring, proposals emanated from Rumsfeld’s office to cut Army forces by another hundred thousand active-duty soldiers and another hundred thousand National Guardsmen.

“That’s what we thought their agenda was,” recalled retired general Kevin Byrnes, who was the Army’s representative to a Quadrennial Defense Review working group. “In order to pay for missile defense, in order to pay for over-the-horizon attack and precision weapons, we thought the Army’s bill was going to be about 20 percent of its active-duty manpower and about a third of the manpower out of the National Guard. And we could see some of their analysis being manipulated in that direction.”

Army representatives argued that the demands of peacekeeping operations in the Balkans and elsewhere were already stretching the force too thin and limiting progress on transformational initiatives. If troop levels were going to be reduced, Army officials contended, expectations of what the Army could deliver in war and in peace-enforcement operations would need to be scaled back. Rumsfeld’s aides pointed to war-gaming scenarios suggesting that trade-offs were possible—more airpower, for instance, in place of ground troops. But Army officials regarded the scenarios as rigged against them.

“One day a war game would be run that showed five Army divisions would be needed for the fight, but the next day, the game would show only two divisions,” Byrnes recalled. “Why was that? Because the game would suddenly assume that enemy forces had decided to line up neatly along roads where airpower could take them all out. Now, do you think an enemy would ever do that—continue to line up fifty meters apart on roads even after their first brigade gets wiped out?”

The Army pushed its case hard, attempting to explain in great detail not only the troop requirements for major wars and for forward deployments in Europe and Korea but also the intricacies of its system for rotating forces. A decisive moment came in mid-August when, ahead of a senior-level meeting with Rumsfeld, a draft of a planning-guidance document was sent to service chiefs and service secretaries calling for the elimination of two Army divisions and four National Guard divisions. Shinseki, in Hawaii at the time, fired off a strongly worded letter to Rumsfeld and flew back ahead of schedule to attend the meeting, expecting a confrontation. But the future size of the Army never came up in the session with Rumsfeld, and the idea of cuts was dropped. Wolfowitz had come around to agreeing with the Army and had persuaded Rumsfeld to leave troop levels where they were.

While the Army had managed to avoid the ax for the time being, no one thought Rumsfeld had ceased his campaign. The Armed Forces Journal International ’s September issue carried a picture of Rumsfeld on the cover with the headline “Why does this man hate the United States Army?”

Shortly after the September 11 attacks, when it was clear that the United States would be embarking on war in Afghanistan and probably elsewhere, Wolfowitz felt a certain vindication about having spared the Army. “Aren’t you glad now that you didn’t try to downsize the Army?” he asked Rumsfeld. The secretary emphatically agreed.

It took months to assemble but midway through Rumsfeld’s first year as secretary, his top civilian leadership team was finally confirmed by Congress and in place. The group represented a mix of some who had dealt with Rumsfeld before and some entirely new to him. The more familiar faces ended up in some of the more nuts-and-bolts positions—Edward C. “Pete” Aldridge, an aerospace-industry executive who had headed the Pentagon’s planning and evaluation unit when Rumsfeld first served as defense secretary, returned this time to be the undersecretary for acquisition, and Dov Zakheim, a budgeting and programs specialist who had dealt with Rumsfeld on earlier projects, took over as comptroller.

But in two of the most sensitive high-level jobs—the undersecretary for policy and the Pentagon’s general counsel—Rumsfeld chose people previously unknown to him who would prove the most controversial on his staff. During his previous stints in government, Rumsfeld had tended to surround himself with aides who knew him well—Cheney foremost among them. Similarly, at Searle and General Instrument, Rumsfeld had leaned heavily on one or two close friends.

For the key job of undersecretary of defense for policy, Rumsfeld had hoped to pick someone he knew and respected—William Schneider Jr., the conservative arms control specialist who had served on the missile-threat commission. But Schneider, who operated a consulting business, declined the job for financial and family reasons, agreeing instead to serve as head of the Defense Science Board. The policy job was also discussed with Richard Perle, a prominent national security expert who, like Rumsfeld, had been a tough Cold Warrior decades earlier and who, like Wolfowitz, was closely identified with the neoconservative community. But Perle also preferred to continue with various business interests and settled instead to chair the Defense Policy Board.

In the end, Rumsfeld selected Douglas Feith, an attorney with strong neoconservative views and experience on the NSC and in the Pentagon under Reagan but no history with Rumsfeld. Some people who knew Feith questioned whether he had developed sufficient gravitas and perspective for the job and whether he had the management talent to handle the giant policy branch, with its staff of 1,800 employees. Feith himself hesitated, wondering if he was up to the task. But he came enthusiastically recommended by Wolfowitz, Perle, and several other prominent figures on the right who considered him very able, intelligent, and assertive.

The selection of Feith reinforced the neoconservative tilt of the Pentagon’s policy branch already signaled by Rumsfeld’s decision to accept Wolfowitz as his deputy. “Ultimately, Doug was Paul’s decision, and Rumsfeld sort of went along with it,” said Steve Herbits, who was involved in the candidate search.

Similarly, Rumsfeld went more on the recommendations of others than on firsthand experience in selecting Jim Haynes as general counsel. A former general counsel of the Army when Cheney was defense secretary, Haynes had not only a connection with the vice president but an even closer connection with Cheney’s counsel, David Addington. It was Addington who had hired Haynes as his own special assistant in the Cheney Pentagon and had then promoted him to the Army job, and it was Addington and Cheney who were now backing him with Rumsfeld.

Unlike Feith, Haynes wasn’t a particularly ideological thinker. But with Cheney and Addington as his patrons, he came to be seen by others in the Pentagon as doing the bidding of the vice president’s office in his management of the Pentagon’s legal processes and in the legal advice he provided Rumsfeld on a range of critical issues involving, among other things, the treatment of detainees, interrogation techniques, and intelligence-gathering authorities.

Ken Adelman, a longtime friend who had served as an assistant to Rumsfeld at the Pentagon during the Ford years, recalls being puzzled by the choice of Haynes. Adelman had been visiting at Rumsfeld’s house shortly before Rumsfeld was to interview Haynes for the job.

“He always cared deeply about his general counsel,” Adelman said in an interview. “But when I was at his house that time, he said, ‘Hey, do you know this guy Jim Haynes?’ I said, ‘Yeah, he was in the Army, a lawyer.’ He said, ‘That’s right. I’m going to see him tomorrow about being general counsel.’ I asked, ‘Do you know him?’ He said, ‘Very little but I may end up with him.’ I thought, Isn’t that peculiar, because here was a guy who had worked in Washington and had hung around Washington where there are thousands of lawyers you know who are competent. Why would he go with this guy who he’d spent ten minutes with? I couldn’t understand that.”

To manage his inner office, Rumsfeld had relied initially on his old friend Steve Herbits as well as on Steve Cambone. But with Herbits no longer involved full-time by late spring, Rumsfeld turned to a newcomer, Lawrence Di Rita, a onetime Navy officer and former chief of staff to Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. Di Rita had joined the Pentagon staff early in the new administration to work on congressional relations. Boyish and engaging, Di Rita quickly developed a rapport with Rumsfeld, taking over the role of senior special assistant. (The role was really chief of staff, but much like Ford, who had avoided the use of that term when Rumsfeld worked for him in the White House, Rumsfeld now preferred simply to designate Di Rita a special assistant.)

As is common with defense secretaries, Rumsfeld also had a staff of military assistants. Customarily, the senior military aide was a three-star officer. Thinking he could make do with someone more junior, Rumsfeld at first picked a one-star officer, Rear Admiral J. J. Quinn. But it quickly became evident that a single-star admiral, even as the secretary’s representative, could not be as effective as a more senior officer in a Pentagon bureaucracy exceedingly mindful of rank. So by May, Quinn was gone, replaced by Vice Admiral Ed Giambastiani.

Still, Cambone emerged early as, and remained, the most influential figure around Rumsfeld. He held several titles during Rumsfeld’s time in office—in policy, program analysis, and intelligence—but essentially Rumsfeld used him as the ultimate Mr. Fix-it, having great confidence in his loyalty and a high regard for his intelligence and effectiveness.

Cambone also had a brash, smug side that could be alienating. In his first major assignment spearheading a senior-level working group for the Quadrennial Defense Review, Cambone came off as contemptuous of the uniformed military, often lecturing them or dismissing their notions as outmoded. This compounded the resentment and frustration that many felt toward the new secretary, and it was enough to worry some of Rumsfeld’s longtime associates.

Staser Holcomb, for one, saw in Cambone the same arrogant streak that he recalled in the systems analysts who had served under Robert McNamara in the 1960s. Holcomb tried counseling Cambone to ease up on his penchant to criticize the services.

“Cambone exhibited a lot of the characteristics of someone who didn’t understand the military culture,” Holcomb said in an interview. “I would talk to Steve about that and say, ‘We’re trying to make this work; we’re trying to get the service chiefs to talk to the secretary of defense, and if you adopt an attitude that says it’s hopeless, then you’re not helping the secretary.’ He sort of acknowledged that.”

Holcomb, joined by Herbits, urged Rumsfeld to rein Cambone in. “The secretary didn’t like us telling him that, but we were persistent,” Holcomb recalled. In time, Cambone did become more adept in his dealings.

Asked once in an interview about his close working relationship with Rumsfeld, Cambone was hard-pressed to explain it. Other members of Rumsfeld’s inner circle, notably, Di Rita and the head of public affairs, Torie Clarke, often charmed the secretary with humor and upbeat chatter. Di Rita, too, served as a regular squash partner for the secretary, who was an avid player. Cambone didn’t play squash and wasn’t known for having a sunny disposition; in fact, his pessimistic tendencies had earned him the office nickname “Eeyore.” But he was not easily unsettled by Rumsfeld and showed a strong no-nonsense, down-to-business determination that clearly appealed to the secretary.

“We reflected different sides of Rumsfeld,” Feith observed about himself and Cambone. Feith, the strategist, liked to think of himself as Rumsfeld’s big-picture half. Cambone, the technocrat, represented the administrative side. “For instance, in the event of an international crisis, my first reaction would be to try to identify what U.S. interests were involved and then think about how they could be protected,” Feith explained in an interview. “Cambone’s mind, by contrast, would go immediately to organizational issues like which regional commanders would take charge, what ambassadors needed to be included, and what should be done from the Pentagon.”

Feith also considered himself to be Rumsfeld’s conservative soul mate in a way that Cambone wasn’t. But Rumsfeld paired the two in the fall of 2001, designating Cambone the principal deputy to Feith, even though each man didn’t particularly care for the other. Shortly afterward, on a flight back to Washington, Rumsfeld asked Feith how he and Cambone were getting along. Relations were strained, Feith told Rumsfeld. The secretary urged him to try harder to make the relationship work.

Rumsfeld made a point soon after taking office of arranging for weekly private meetings with Bush. From his previous experience in government, he knew how important it was for a cabinet member to have face time with the president. And he did not have with Bush the close relationship he had enjoyed with Ford. He would have to build one while in office.

The meetings were kept small and lasted less than an hour. Bush usually had his chief of staff and national security adviser present, and Rumsfeld nearly always brought the Joint Chiefs chairman. The agendas ranged widely, and Rumsfeld put considerable time each week into figuring out how best to use the opportunity. Frequently, Rumsfeld would try to flag Bush about an issue that was months away from requiring a decision but for which he would begin to lay the groundwork. According to several aides who helped Rumsfeld prepare for the meetings, he wanted, first, to avoid surprising the president later and, second, to receive guidance that would help him decide how to position himself and the department.

“He would ask, ‘What is it that the president needs to hear,’” recalled Ryan Henry, who served as deputy head of policy later in Rumsfeld’s tenure. “He really tried to become a student of how the president thought, what he needed.” Rumsfeld’s approach reminded Henry of a key lesson in management that someone once told him: “You’ve got to understand your own job and your boss’s job and your boss’s boss’s job, and what you do in life is, you give your boss things that will make him look good to his boss.”

Henry said most people who go in to see their boss are interested in how to make themselves look good. “I didn’t see Rumsfeld think about that at all,” Henry remarked. “It was, ‘What is it that the president needs?’ That’s what he was focused on.”

Shelton, a close observer of the interaction between Rumsfeld and Bush in the first months, saw a strong bond forming. “Bush had a great deal of respect for Rumsfeld, a great deal of confidence in him,” Shelton said years later. “He would defer to him quite frequently. He would ask his opinion on a number of subjects frequently in the meetings. I got the feeling very early on that the secretary was very comfortable making recommendations to the president that had not been vetted with very many people in the room at the time, which is always a dicey thing to do.”

The sessions not only offered Rumsfeld a chance to talk to the president out of earshot of other NSC members but also afforded him a certain bureaucratic cachet as a result. It was no secret at the upper reaches of the Pentagon that the secretary was seeing Bush on a regular basis, enhancing the perception that Rumsfeld had clout at the White House and was elevating defense issues in the president’s mind.

On the NSC staff, the private Bush/Rumsfeld link was viewed more apprehensively since it sometimes complicated efforts to gain the secretary’s compliance with guidance issued by the staff in the president’s name. Resistant by nature to accepting direction from lower-level officials, Rumsfeld more than once was heard by his own aides rejecting some directive sent over by NSC staff. “I don’t take guidance from staff,” Gebhard remembered him saying. “If the president wants me to do something, he’ll tell me.”

In time, when Powell learned of the Bush/Rumsfeld meetings, he requested and received the same access. Only one other cabinet official, the Treasury secretary, was granted such regular private sessions during Bush’s period in office.

It hadn’t taken long after the formation of the new administration for the expected clashes to start between Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and Powell’s State Department. A number of decisions in its early months in office signaled the Bush administration’s intention to take a harder line or more unilateralist approach in international affairs. The moves often came over the arguments of State Department officials for greater emphasis on diplomacy or allied cooperation. These actions included a tougher posture toward North Korea, abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol, withdrawal of support for the World Court, and the announcement, with no allied consultation, that the United States was ready to move “beyond” the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty to deploy missile defenses. The administration also declared its opposition to internationally drafted enforcement mechanisms for a biological-weapons treaty and to a ban on nuclear testing. And Rumsfeld declared an intention to pull U.S. forces out of NATO peacekeeping operations in Bosnia.

In public, Rumsfeld and Powell minimized their disagreements, despite the background leaks by subordinates telling a different story. And even in private, the interactions between them were largely cordial. They kept in frequent contact, speaking nearly every morning in an early conference call with Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser. But the two men were not close, and it became evident early on that an alliance had taken shape between Rumsfeld and Cheney and their staffs, often in opposition to Powell and the State Department.

This antipathy between the two sides went beyond specific policy disagreements into a general clash of philosophies and style. Powell, noting the prominent roles of Wolfowitz and Feith in Pentagon policy making and the presence of Perle at the head of the Defense Policy Board, regarded Rumsfeld’s group of senior civilians as motivated largely by neoconservative ideology. He saw his own staff, on the other hand, as an appropriate mix of nonpartisan professionals and political appointees.

On a more personal level, Powell was bothered by Rumsfeld’s behavior at times. Stories of Rumsfeld’s harsh treatment of subordinates at the Pentagon filtered back to Powell through his many military contacts. And in his own dealings, Powell sometimes found Rumsfeld’s cutting humor nettlesome and was frustrated by Rumsfeld’s proclivity during interagency meetings to stall or obstruct when issues weren’t going his way.

For their part, Rumsfeld and his senior aides tended to pride themselves on having more talent and generating more creative ideas than officials at the State Department. They often suspected Powell of pursuing an agenda more in his own interest than in the president’s. And they frequently surmised that Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, were behind press accounts describing sharp policy divisions within the administration.

Although leaking to the media to advance a particular interest in an internal government debate was a time-honored Washington practice, Rumsfeld declared he wanted no part in such dealings. And he ordered his aides not to talk to reporters about interagency battles. In early September 2001, Rumsfeld drafted a memo for his files on the subject. “I want to talk to the senior staff about not knocking the NSC, the State Department or individuals or anyone in the Executive Branch of the federal government,” he wrote. “If you’ve got a problem, come and see me.”

Aides who later recalled the gag order portrayed it as a sign of Rumsfeld’s fierce loyalty to the president. But it also served Rumsfeld’s purposes in interagency battles to see Bush and declare that the Pentagon staff had nothing to do with this or that article exposing administration rifts. He could blame the State Department or NSC staff instead.

Rice had principal responsibility for refereeing the growing strain between the secretaries of defense and state. But nearly a generation younger than Rumsfeld, Powell, and Cheney and less forceful by nature, Rice had never aspired to be a domineering figure in the mold of Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s adviser. Scowcroft had been her mentor when Rice served under George H. W. Bush as director of Soviet and Eastern European affairs on the NSC staff, and Scowcroft’s low-key approach was more her style. While close to George W. Bush, she was more coordinator than director and was not one to knock heads to get something done.

At the same time, Rice was reluctant to pass along the differing views of the principals in the form of “options papers” to the president. She was more inclined to try to devise what she called a “bridging proposal” among contrasting opinions. This was supposed to mollify all the principals and relieve Bush of having to choose one department’s position over another. But the approach bothered Rumsfeld, who thought the president should receive options papers.

Already by the summer of 2001, Rumsfeld was growing impatient with Rice’s management. He complained about endless White House meetings called by the NSC adviser. He also griped that detailed agendas were all too often not provided for the meetings in advance, so that he could not be sure what was going to be discussed. At a small lunch in his office on June 25, Rumsfeld told the State Department’s John Bolton, “We have all of these meetings which never seem to decide anything, they just get scheduled one after the other, and, my goodness, the president’s never there.”

As a case in point, differences remained unresolved throughout the spring and summer of 2001 over what to do about Iraq. State Department officials had pressed for a narrowing and tightening of economic sanctions, while Pentagon officials had advocated developing a strategy to aid an anti-Saddam Hussein resistance.

Frustrated in his dealings with Rice, Rumsfeld would at times simply bypass her and go directly to Andy Card, the president’s chief of staff. As a former White House chief of staff himself, Rumsfeld felt a certain kinship with Card. In fact, from time to time he offered Card advice on how to do the job. “He would call me up and say, ‘You know, when I was chief of staff, I would question this or that or whatever,’” Card recalled in an interview. “Sometimes he would say, ‘I would never have let that happen. ’ And I would say, ‘It’s a different time,’ or whatever.”

For the most part, Card said, he appreciated the advice, generally viewing it as an expression of empathy on Rumsfeld’s part rather than a critique. But there were occasions as well when Card felt Rumsfeld was talking down a bit to a subordinate.

In his first months, the top diplomatic priority for Rumsfeld was to put a stake through the heart of the ABM Treaty. The defense secretary was in wholehearted agreement with Bush’s own pledge to move aggressively in constructing a system for protecting the United States against ballistic missile attack, and the three-decade-old treaty with the Soviet Union represented a major obstacle to the kind of flight testing the Pentagon was eager to undertake.

Bush had no intention of building a system as ambitious as Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, which had envisioned a comprehensive umbrella of space-based weapons aimed at blocking a massive Soviet attack. Instead, he wanted to create a defense against strikes by handfuls, not hundreds, of missiles—the levels of forces that Iran or North Korea might acquire in the future.

Still, the program that Rumsfeld quickly launched in his first months was considerably more expansive than what had existed during the Clinton years. He sought to shift the focus from a single-site system to a broad-based research, development, and testing effort aimed at the deployment of layered antimissile systems. The intention was to examine a number of previously untested technologies with the potential to create defenses able to intercept missiles at various ranges and phases of flight. This kind of network of defenses—which might include sea-based and airborne systems as well as land-launched interceptor missiles—would clearly breach the constraints of the ABM Treaty.

As the administration set its sights on removing the treaty impediments, divergent camps labeled the attempt either a bold move befitting the world’s sole superpower or arrogant unilateralism that would offend traditional and potential allies. With Bush’s first U.S.-Russian summit meeting coming up in June 2001 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Bush and his top advisers met to hammer out an approach. Powell argued against delivering an ultimatum at the outset and gratuitously offending Moscow. In his view, the Pentagon had not progressed far enough operationally on missile defense to require ending the treaty, so there was still time for a deal. Rumsfeld and Cheney disagreed and were eager to get out of the treaty, determined not to risk obstacles that could prevent the country from making progress on a missile-defense system.

No progress was made on missile defense at the Ljubljana meeting between Bush and Russian president Vladimir V. Putin, and during the summer top administration officials continued to debate what to do. Powell proposed either withdrawal or negotiation to modify or replace the treaty. The NSC staff developed a third option: to “set aside” the treaty and allow for testing and development. But none of the principals appeared to favor this one.

For the administration, what to do about the treaty represented part of a larger diplomatic challenge, which was how to recast the U.S. relationship with Russia in view of lessened concern about nuclear arsenals and more about threats from rogue states seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. Administration officials spoke of the need for “a new strategic framework.” In tandem with addressing the ABM Treaty, Bush and his team wanted to reduce U.S. offensive nuclear forces, either in agreement with Russia or unilaterally.

To this end, while deliberations on what to do about the treaty were under way, Rumsfeld undertook a “nuclear posture review” to recommend a new level of offensive nuclear forces given current global circumstances. Rumsfeld also spent a considerable amount of time with Wolfowitz and Feith on the question of how U.S. officials could persuade the Russians to cooperate. One approach was to work out what Rumsfeld called “alternative futures”—contrasting visions of the worlds the Russians could choose to inhabit, defining a choice between the world of the advanced economies and the world of the rogue regimes.

The prospect of tampering with the ABM Treaty was a politically divisive issue on Capitol Hill, where treaty-preserving Democrats and treaty-busting Republicans had long been split on the issue. Appearing before Congress in June in his first public testimony since confirmation, Rumsfeld ran into sharp opposition to nullifying the treaty and tough questioning about the high cost and unproven effectiveness of the national missile-defense system.

Nonetheless, at a meeting of principals in July ahead of a gathering of the Group of Eight leaders in Genoa, Italy, Rumsfeld made clear his eagerness to get out of the treaty as soon as possible, saying its provisions were already restricting what the United States could do. He suggested that Bush at Genoa raise the issue one-on-one with Putin and in effect warn the Russians that formal notice of U.S. withdrawal from the treaty would be coming. On July 22, Bush did tell Putin that the United States was proceeding with missile-defense preparations, so an understanding needed to be reached on what would happen to the ABM Treaty. Later in the summer, Rumsfeld made the same point with Putin in Moscow. Putin, in turn, pressed for a successor treaty and a new treaty on offensive nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, inside the Pentagon, the Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation issued unpublicized warnings that the expanded missile-defense program being devised by the new administration would prove unaffordable. “We told them basically, ‘You’re making the problem we already have worse,’” Soule said. “The problem we had before was too many programs and not enough money for the ones we’re doing, and you’re adding a lot more program than you’re adding money.”

But rather than cut back, Rumsfeld created a special, separate process for monitoring the missile-defense program, a process that had a less formal structure than other major defense-acquisition programs. Gone were the detailed operational requirements and specific milestones normally applied by Pentagon officials to new weapons systems under development. Gone, too, was even a stipulation that the system be built to a specific, identified threat. Instead, the department’s missile-defense organization was essentially instructed to pursue a more general set of capabilities and produce a set of land-based, sea-going, and airborne antimissile systems that could be knit together into some kind of overarching, yet-to-be-defined architecture.

Rumsfeld knew the power of a good narrative. In 1976, when he had last been secretary of defense, he had put together a scary briefing on the Soviet threat to help sell a military budget increase to Congress. He had had a master storyteller—Defense Intelligence Agency analyst John Hughes—deliver it to lawmakers during invitation-only sessions held for them at the White House. Looking back, Rumsfeld considered it one of the most successful tactics he had employed—so successful, in fact, that he wanted to try something like it as secretary the second time. “I want a story, and you’re a good storyteller, Haver,” Rumsfeld said to Rich Haver, his special assistant for intelligence, one day in April. “You’re going to give this brief.”

This time Rumsfeld envisioned a briefing focused on the threats presented by terrorism, weapons proliferation, and rogue nations. He wanted it delivered, as the previous one had been, at the White House to small groups of lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats. He had a wider audience in mind, too—Pentagon officials, outside defense analysts, members of the national security establishment, maybe even some leaders of industry, academia, and the media. The idea was to educate opinion leaders on how the world had changed and to build a constituency on Capitol Hill and elsewhere for the increased spending and shifts in programs and weapons that Rumsfeld hoped would mark his transformation initiative.

He brought in Newt Gingrich to work with Haver. A former speaker of the House who had resigned from Congress in 1998, Gingrich had remained an influential voice in the powerful neoconservative wing of the Republican Party. He had known Rumsfeld for years, and after Rumsfeld became secretary, Gingrich, a prolific memo writer—rivaling even Rumsfeld in that category—would often deliver advice on a range of subjects. Of all the outside advisers that Rumsfeld would hear from, Gingrich topped the list as most frequent contributor.

Rumsfeld proposed that the threat briefing address five subjects: the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the delivery means for those weapons, terrorism, information warfare, and the technology revolution. Russia and China were to be assiduously avoided so as not to suggest the specter of a new cold war. Instead, the focus was set on North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Latin America. Also to be highlighted were al Qaeda, the USS Cole, Khobar Towers, and other examples of global terrorism.

“This was supposed to be one story,” Haver recalled. “It would start with the enemy, meaning the proliferators and the means of delivery, then it would move to the central concern, which was terrorism—Osama bin Laden and all, and remember, this was before 9/11—then it would deal with the idea that these people could move into cyberspace where they could do egregious damage. Finally, there would be a discussion of the technology backdrop, with all this change being projected to happen in the first twenty-five years of the twenty-first century, raising the question of what this will do to determining who’s a superpower and who isn’t, what it will do to our economic position, our Defense Department. We drew this up on the back deck of Newt’s house. We sketched it out over a number of afternoons.”

After a few months, Rumsfeld wanted a dry run of the briefing. “Don’t make it too long,” the secretary had advised. Gingrich shot back, “Don, length isn’t your enemy, boredom is—don’t get the two confused!” Rumsfeld remembered that, and during the dry run, he let Haver know when the presentation was boring him.

Rumsfeld offered more guidance. The briefing should never be the same from week to week. He wanted it to “breathe,” to be constantly renewed to take account of the latest developments. He also wanted it tailored to specific audiences. The point was to create buzz in Washington. “I want congressmen and senators talking to their buddies down in the cloakroom and in the athletic center and over in the cafeteria—‘Gee, did you hear that brief yesterday?’” Haver recalled Rumsfeld saying. “I want the media asking, ‘Can we see this?’”

Not everyone would like the briefing, Rumsfeld figured. “He told me, ‘The Army is going to hate this because this isn’t about the clash of Russia’s Third Shock Army and the American 82nd Airborne south of the Fulda Gap,’” Haver said. “He knew where the resistance was going to come from, and that’s why he had Gingrich there, because Newt knows almost everybody in the Army.”

With this briefing, Rumsfeld was looking not just for something that would sum up where the Bush administration wanted to go with transformation. This wasn’t supposed to be a sales pitch in the classic sense of “Please buy this or that high-priced program.” It had a grander purpose. “He was looking for the next Mr. X article,” Haver said, referring to the seminal Foreign Affairs article written in 1947 by George F. Kennan that laid out what became the policy of containing the Soviet Union.

The first briefing was slated for September 17. Rumsfeld had reserved the Roosevelt Room at the White House and had arranged for the White House mess to handle the catering. He did not want Bush or Cheney to attend, but he did want them to pass through the room, to make cameo appearances. It was all masterful stagecraft.

The first group was to be made up of friends of the administration in Congress, lawmakers who could be counted on to give a sympathetic hearing and provide constructive feedback. Rumsfeld intended to meet with them individually over the following month to gather their views on how the briefing had gone. Already he had invitation lists in mind for the next five or six briefings.

“He had it thought all the way out through the end of 2001 and into the middle of 2002,” Haver said. “He wanted to run the briefings about every two or three weeks. He had the congressional calendar in front of him so that he could stage them around the time when members would actually have time to come listen. He never wanted more than twelve people in the room because, he told me, ‘I want you to have eye contact with everybody; I want everyone to feel as though you’re briefing them, you’re not briefing an audience, and if you have twenty people in a room, it’s an audience.’ He said twelve is the maximum number you could have to enable them all to think they’ve had a personal experience. He wanted Wolfowitz or himself there to chime in from the sidelines, to observe what we were doing. But he told me, after it gets rolling, ‘I don’t want to be there for everyone, this isn’t the Don Rumsfeld show.’”

He was also thinking about having the briefing converted into a book, like the Pentagon-issued Soviet Military Power books of the 1980s describing the buildup of Soviet forces. “We put together a helluva brief,” Gingrich recalled.

But it never got delivered. The September 11 attacks forced postponement of the inaugural presentation. And although Haver and Gingrich kept tinkering with the material, Rumsfeld never could decide on an appropriate time to unveil it. Besides, after September 11, the briefing seemed somewhat superfluous. Its point had been made.

The head of U.S. Strategic Command, Admiral Richard Mies, was the keeper of perhaps the deadliest war plan in the Pentagon’s files—the SIOP, or Single Integrated Operating Plan, a benign-sounding title for the list of nuclear targets that the United States might strike in the event of war. The plan had been routinely updated every two years, so right on schedule, Mies showed up one day in Rumsfeld’s office to do a review with the secretary. No sooner had Mies begun his briefing than Rumsfeld interrupted. “Why am I reviewing this plan right now?” the secretary asked, according to a participant in the meeting. “You started this during the previous administration, and nobody came back to see what had changed. I need to give you new guidance before you spend all this time working on the plan.”

Rumsfeld was frustrated. Here was yet another case of planning going on in the department, very important planning, that seemed to have a momentum all its own. He’d been told in the levers briefing that the war plans, devised by the regional and functional commanders, were one of the keys to controlling change in the department. From these plans came the requirements for weapons and troops on which the military services then built their budget requests.

“He understood that war plans drove force levels, they drove capabilities and the rest of it,” said Ed Giambastiani, at the time a three-star admiral who was serving as Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant. “So he knew that if you didn’t get those right, then you’d unnecessarily plus up some area or provide too much impetus.”

Rumsfeld was bothered to discover that the assumptions had gone unexamined for years, that the war plans no longer reflected new realities. What were the assumptions inherent in those plans about whether a particular country, say, North Korea, had nuclear weapons or might be close to acquiring them? What had happened to a potential adversary’s military capabilities over time? All that had to be taken into account. So did the Pentagon’s move under the Bush administration toward a new defense strategy that would be putting greater emphasis on winning battles speedily and employing more agile, more capable, and perhaps smaller numbers of forces.

On one of his working Saturdays in August, Rumsfeld arranged to meet in his conference room with Shelton and the director of operational plans on the Joint Staff and all the section chiefs overseeing war plans. Up to that point, the process for assembling a war plan had been very stylized, very prescriptive. It normally began with the secretary of defense issuing guidance to a regional commander on what assumptions to make about the enemy and about U.S. objectives, although the guidance was usually something that a colonel on the Joint Staff had drafted and then passed for approval to the undersecretary for policy. After that, planners spent months detailing how the war would be fought—what troops would be necessary, how they would be equipped, and what logistical support would be needed. Intricate timetables were developed for deploying the forces in very specific order.

For the major cases—involving war against North Korea or Iraq, or defense of Taiwan, for instance—the approach was essentially the same: mobilize a large portion of the U.S. military; deploy them over many months to the region in question with lots of food, fuel, and spare parts and long supply chains; then fight to the finish. The plans had little room for partial measures. They were designed to assume conditions of either world peace or World War III.

Sitting in his large conference room with the Joint Staff officers, Rumsfeld intended to go through each plan. He wanted first to focus on just the assumptions that had gone into the planning, assumptions about such factors as the size, weaponry, and tactics of the enemy force in question. “If you get the assumptions right, a trained ape can do the rest,” Rumsfeld used to assert with a laugh.

By “right assumptions,” though, Rumsfeld did not mean precise predictions. “He didn’t believe anyone could predict the future, no matter how much intelligence was available,” Feith recounted in his memoir. “The point of his skepticism was to make sure that the planning accounted for the possibility that important things might happen that no one had predicted. Commanders should therefore plan to be surprised. That meant planning to maintain broad capabilities, flexible tactics and an open mind ready to adapt to events as they develop. He wanted his commanders to talk adaptability and agility, not predictions.”

The August session, initially intended to last several hours, took much of the day as colonel after colonel presented a war plan and Rumsfeld pressed each about the assumptions, often making it clear how outdated they had become and how necessary it would be to start incorporating the new thinking of the Bush administration. “They were just briefing what was on the shelf,” Rumsfeld said, recalling the experience a couple of years later.

One of the plans with which he took particular issue that day detailed a U.S. invasion of Iraq. “He almost laughed at the force structure in it,” Shelton recalled. “It was for four hundred thousand troops or more, and he said, ‘You know, that’s nothing more than what was left over from Desert Storm,’” referring to the 1991 Persian Gulf War. “He said, ‘You guys need to go back and take another look. We can do this a lot faster and with less force.’ I think his mind-set was, Iraq had a broken, tired army with very little capability left, and we needed to have our urine tested if we thought we were going to need as many forces as before to take out Saddam Hussein.”

The long day of briefings confirmed for Rumsfeld his worry that the war plans were woefully outdated. In fact, the entire process for keeping them current needed to be changed, he concluded. Regarding the previous two-year cycle for revising and reviewing plans as much too long, he was determined to compress the time dramatically, wanting it cut to months, even weeks.

In late August 2001, Bush announced that Air Force general Richard Myers would step up from vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and replace Shelton, whose four-year stint as chairman was expiring at the end of September. It seemed a logical choice, widely interpreted as a further sign of Rumsfeld’s fondness for airpower. Myers was the first non-Army general in more than a decade to hold the military’s top job and was the first Air Force general to have it in almost two decades. Myers more than Shelton had appeared to embrace the transformation slogan, and his earlier post as head of U.S. Space Command only reinforced the expectation that the Bush administration would pursue an expanded U.S. military role in space. Myers had also served in Asia and the Pacific—as a commander of U.S. forces in Japan and Hawaii—a fact that was taken as an indication of Rumsfeld’s own view that China would be the next great military threat.

But what may have mattered most for Rumsfeld in picking Myers was the secretary’s comfort level with the general. Low-key, down-to-earth, and self-effacing in spite of his size—he stood six feet, four inches tall—Myers was not the type likely to provide a powerful counterweight to the sometimes overbearing defense secretary. Though considered a straight shooter, Myers also had a reputation for being unfailingly loyal, so any differences he might have with Rumsfeld’s leadership could be expected to stay behind closed doors. He was the kind of troubleshooter who could be counted on to avoid self-promotion and the limelight. “He’s not a pound-on-the-table guy,” General Michael Ryan, the Air Force chief of staff at the time, told a reporter. “He works these issues with his intellect, not necessarily his brawn, even though he is a big guy.”

Shelton liked Myers, but his personal pick had been Admiral Vern Clark, who could be very outspoken and animated. Rumsfeld had also looked hard at Clark, who in fact had been a finalist for the job along with Myers. The admiral, though, was somewhat ambivalent about taking the position. While he would eventually learn how to get along with Rumsfeld, becoming one of the secretary’s favorite chiefs, he felt no particular rapport with him at the time. Nor did he think the secretary trusted him or the other chiefs.

“My position was, I would do this if they wanted me to do it, but it wasn’t something that I wanted,” he recalled years later. Still, at Rumsfeld’s urging, Clark had interviewed with Bush and Cheney, then was invited back for another round. He told the president of his ambivalence.

When Clark met with Rumsfeld again, he bluntly expressed his concern that the two of them hadn’t developed the kind of relationship he thought was important between a secretary and chairman—the kind that had existed, for instance, between Cheney and Powell. He felt unsure of just what Rumsfeld believed, given all the studies on transformation that had been generated, some of which Clark found silly. He was critical of Rumsfeld as well for taking a negative view of the Joint Staff.

After the meeting, Clark stopped in Shelton’s office and recounted the conversation. “Well, I’m not going to be the chairman,” the admiral told Shelton, adding that it was evident from the look in the secretary’s eyes.

Clark’s willingness to be so frank, even at the risk of forfeiting the top military job in the department, didn’t surprise Shelton. Clark’s forthrightness was the main reason that Shelton favored him as his successor; Clark would tell Rumsfeld what he thought. It was no surprise to Shelton when Rumsfeld settled on Myers. “I knew that Rumsfeld would view Dick as a more pliable, moldable personality than he would Vern Clark,” Shelton said later.

Rumsfeld’s interest in the selection of military leaders extended well beyond the choice of chairman. In late spring, he had put the services on notice that he intended to become personally involved in the promotion of all three- and four-star officers. While the secretary had always been the one to sign off on such appointments in the past, the actual decisions had tended in most cases to rest with the service chiefs.

But Rumsfeld was never one to accept rubber-stamp status. If he was going to be approving promotions, then he wanted to be sure he knew the people he was approving. He also understood, again recalling the levers briefing, that the senior military officers he chose would be key to effecting change in the department.

The task of informing the chiefs and service secretaries of the new selection procedures fell to Staser Holcomb, the retired three-star admiral who had served as Rumsfeld’s military assistant during the Ford years. Rumsfeld had put Holcomb in charge of regularly culling through the candidates recommended by the services. From now on, Rumsfeld wanted at least two candidates for each job and intended to do his own extensive interviewing.

All the services resented the move to some extent, since the assignment of general officers constituted one of the most important powers of a service secretary and his chief. The loudest objection came from Shinseki. It was one thing for Rumsfeld to play a prominent role in deciding who would head the regional commands or occupy senior Joint Staff positions, Shinseki argued. It was another for him to take a greater say in other positions that were not joint and that Shinseki saw as internal to the Army.

“He just didn’t see why that was any of the secretary’s business,” Holcomb said. “I’d say, ‘Come on, Rick, in our system, you can’t stick the secretary of defense. If he wants to be involved, he will be involved.’”

A main worry in military ranks was that Rumsfeld’s increased involvement in the selection process risked making military officers more sensitive to the views of outsiders who could influence the secretary’s judgment, particularly the secretary’s personal advisers or the civilian political appointees on his staff. The services believed they already had an effective system for assessing officers moving up through the ranks. By the time someone was ready to be considered for a top job, an extensive record existed. For someone on the outside to step in and begin recommending other candidates seemed to open the system to questionable influence.

An additional concern among Army officers in particular was how Rumsfeld’s perceived bias against their service might play in the selection process. Word quickly emerged of Army candidates receiving what seemed especially tough grilling by the secretary in interviews. “We had to prepare people for the way Rumsfeld liked to humiliate them when he interviewed,” recalled Montgomery Meigs, a retired four-star Army general. Once, after confronting Rumsfeld over the treatment of Army candidates, Shinseki returned to a group of fellow four-star officers and told them that the secretary had thrown him out of the office for objecting so strongly. Over time, Army officers noted that fewer regional-command and high-level Joint Staff jobs were going to their service.

In a speech to Defense Department employees on September 10, 2001, Rumsfeld declared that the main threat to a more efficient and innovative defense structure was not outside the Pentagon but inside. “The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America,” Rumsfeld began. “From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With brutal inconsistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk. . . . You may think I’m describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world. But their day, too, is almost past, and they cannot match the strength and size of this adversary. The adversary’s closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.”

The speech, titled “Bureaucracy to Battlefield,” was billed as the kickoff to the department’s Acquisition and Logistics Excellence Week. But it was really Rumsfeld’s declaration of war on the department, and it revealed his level of frustration after trying to grapple with all the inefficiencies he had cataloged since his arrival. He complained of innovation being stifled “not by ill intent but by institutional inertia.” The challenge, he asserted, was “to transform not just the way we deter and defend, but the way we conduct our daily business.” Wasteful spending and redundant tasking were robbing the military of money and personnel that could be better applied to the battlefield, Rumsfeld went on. “I have no desire to attack the Pentagon,” he said. “I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself.”

Echoing his anchor chain memo, he listed a string of deadweights on the department: “Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building because it’s stored on dozens of technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible. We maintain 20 to 25 percent more base infrastructure than we need to support our forces, at an annual waste to taxpayers of some $3 billion to $4 billion. Fully half of our resources go to infrastructure and overhead, and in addition to draining resources from warfighting, these costly and outdated systems, procedures and programs stifle innovation as well. A new idea must often survive the gauntlet of some 17 levels of bureaucracy to make it from a line officer’s to my desk.”

To his previous calls for new weapons and forces to counter new threats, Rumsfeld added another transformation goal: a revolution in Pentagon management and business practices. At the same time, he recognized that the forces of the business world that separate the strong from the weak don’t apply in government. “Business enterprises die if they fail to adapt, and the fact that they can fail and die is what provides the incentive to survive,” he said. “But governments can’t die, so we need to find other incentives for bureaucracy to adapt and improve.”

The rest of his lengthy remarks that day contained a blueprint of initiatives for revamping Pentagon business practices—“to shift our focus and our resources from bureaucracy to battlefield,” as Rumsfeld put it. They included closing some bases, eliminating some advisory boards, revising acquisition processes, modernizing financial systems, cutting headquarter staffs, reducing duplication of effort among the services, and overhauling the department’s forty-year-old system for planning, programming, and budgeting, to name a few.

Rumsfeld intended to vest responsibility for leading this business revolution with a newly created group to be called the Senior Executive Council, consisting of the service secretaries and the undersecretary for acquisition. The group, he said, would “scour the department for functions that could be performed better and more cheaply through commercial outsourcing.” It would launch a review of the Pentagon agencies responsible for logistics, information services, and accounting systems. It would ask and, he hoped, answer such tough questions as, Why is the Defense Department one of the last organizations around that still cuts its own checks? When an entire industry exists to run warehouses efficiently, why does the Pentagon own and operate many of its own? At bases around the world, why does the military pick up its own garbage and mop its own floors rather than contracting services out, as many businesses do?

“The battle against a stifling bureaucracy is also a personal priority for me and for the service secretaries, one that will, through the Senior Executive Council, receive the sustained attention at the highest levels of this department,” Rumsfeld pledged.

The idea for the council had been the brainchild of Steve Herbits, who was himself a student of organizational decision making. Rumsfeld had entrusted Herbits with much of the initial search for candidates to fill the service secretary posts and other key positions. The resulting cast consisted of Navy secretary Gordon England, a former executive vice president of General Dynamics Corporation; Air Force secretary James Roche, a former executive with Northrop Grumman Corporation; and Army secretary Thomas White, a former senior executive at Enron Corporation.

In the interest of fostering a sense of teamwork among the three nominees, the men were briefed together for their confirmation hearings, and the staffing for each was provided by a service other than the one each was to lead. The aim was to counter the traditional parochialism that tended to capture the secretaries as they went to work representing their services. Rumsfeld even went so far as to hire a business executive—Ken Krieg, a vice president at the International Paper Company—to serve as executive secretary for the group.

“He was looking for a council of seniors,” Krieg recalled. “The plan was to take the senior-most appointees and give them a forum where they could lean on each other to talk about the forces of change, as opposed to letting the natural centrifugal forces of the department pull them apart.”

But the council never really got off the ground. Pressing demands from other events, particularly after the September 11 attacks, Wolfowitz’s own disinterest in business management, and Rumsfeld’s own reluctance to use the group doomed it. During the Quadrennial Defense Review process, Rumsfeld became accustomed to doing business through the SLRG, which included not only the service secretaries but the military chiefs, and he stuck with that forum. “He never showed up to a single meeting” of the Senior Executive Council, Roche said several years later.

“I think there are a thousand and one reasons, and I’m not even sure I understand them all,” Krieg said, reflecting on the council’s failure to gel. “There probably was not a common set of expectations. There was a lack of time as the secretaries got engaged in the press of events. And the centrifugal force of the place captured them all.”