By His Own Rules

Pete Pace took over from Dick Myers as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the fall of 2005, a transition facilitated by the four years Pace had spent as vice chairman. Myers had faced criticism for failing to challenge Rumsfeld or to fully represent the concerns at times of other members of the Joint Chiefs. But there was little expectation that Pace would prove any more assertive in the top military post.

During his time as vice chairman, Pace had shown the same deference toward Rumsfeld as had Myers. Both generals, in public appearances with the secretary, usually in the Pentagon press room, had taken pains to avoid any sign of disagreement. Both believed as a matter of principle in the confidentiality of their discussions with the secretary. They also figured their chances of influencing Rumsfeld were greater if their private debates were not played out in the press.

But even behind closed doors, it was not evident that either military adviser had provided much resistance to the secretary. Rumsfeld frequently noted that he spent more time with his chairman and vice chairman than had his predecessors, and the secretary’s aides contended that with all the give-and-take between the secretary and his top military advisers, it was difficult to identify who was influencing whom. Still, the perception was widespread that the generals had allowed the chairman’s office and Joint Staff to lose some of their power and independence.

Because Rumsfeld was comfortable with him and because he was well known to other senior administration officials, Pace had long been considered the likely successor to Myers. Known in the Pentagon as “Perfect Pete” for his unflappable personality, straight bearing, and telegenic appearance, the senior Marine had a reputation as a good communicator and a skilled manager with a witty streak. He used his humor to handle Rumsfeld. Taken to task by the secretary at one meeting for not having his brief together, Pace showed up at the next session wearing a flak jacket. Although Rumsfeld considered several other candidates, Pace had no serious competitors for the chairman’s job, according to Staser Holcomb, who participated in the deliberations. Noted Larry Di Rita, “With Rumsfeld during this period, continuity mattered a lot.”

To replace Pace as vice chairman, Rumsfeld chose another familiar face—Admiral Ed Giambastiani, who had served as Rumsfeld’s top military aide before taking over the military’s Joint Forces Command in 2002. In that position, the admiral had overseen a number of Rumsfeld’s initiatives aimed at transforming the U.S. military and revising NATO’s Atlantic command structure.

The selections of Pace and Giambastiani signaled that Rumsfeld was opting for loyalists and proven team players in the Pentagon’s uniformed leadership as he confronted continued criticism about his own management. So it was all the more surprising when Pace, at a news conference in late November 2005, less than two months after assuming the chairmanship, challenged Rumsfeld directly on a matter involving the treatment of detainees in Iraq, not by U.S. troops but by Iraqi forces.

Mounting evidence of abusive actions by Iraqi forces had prompted U.S. commanders to deliver warnings to Iraqi officials and instructions to U.S. troops to report mistreatment and, whenever possible, to step in to prevent it. Friction was evident between U.S. and Iraqi forces in the field, with Iraqis questioning demands for humane treatment of enemy fighters who themselves showed little respect for the laws of war.

U.S. officers cautioned the Iraqis that failure to curtail abusive behavior could tarnish the image of the new security services, risk a loss of Iraqi public support, and jeopardize other foreign assistance. Privately they also worried about U.S. troops getting drawn into an Iraqi dirty war.

At the Pentagon news conference in November, Rumsfeld and Pace were asked about the obligations of U.S. troops faced with misconduct by Iraqi forces. Pace asserted that American forces were responsible for intervening to prevent inhumane treatment. But Rumsfeld interjected with a correction. “I don’t think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it’s to report it,” he said. Pace insisted that he had meant what he said. “If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it,” the general reiterated.

Rumsfeld didn’t appreciate being contradicted by Pace in public, and the incident left strained relations between the two men. As Pace recounted several years later in an interview, “That made the secretary and me uncomfortable for a while.” Characteristically, the secretary also refused to drop the matter. “For several weeks after that,” Pace recalled, “he had his folks looking at all the wording of all the documents to see whether or not there was some way to change what I had said in a way that would make it closer to what he had said.”

In private, Pace continued to stand his ground, contending that the matter was, in his words, “very black and white” and explaining the importance of keeping it black and white so that U.S. forces would not be confused about their obligations. Pace had considered the point significant enough to depart from his usual rule about avoiding a public show of disagreement with Rumsfeld. But the episode remained a very rare example of the general taking issue with the secretary. For the rest of their service together, Pace was careful to appear to be in lockstep with Rumsfeld.

Politically, Iraqi voters had passed an important milestone in October 2005, approving a new constitution by a large margin. The referendum had occurred with little violence, to Rumsfeld’s great relief. The threat of a surge in terrorist attacks, similar to the Tet Offensive by communist insurgents in Vietnam in 1968, had been a serious concern for U.S. officials. The CIA, in a three-page secret assessment before the referendum, had concluded that while insurgents lacked the organization or military formations to carry out a Tet-like offensive in Iraq, they could create the perception of one with far fewer numbers. After the vote, Rumsfeld had sent Casey and Lieutenant General John Vines, the top U.S. operational commander in Iraq, a memo congratulating them for “excellent work” and citing a voter turnout rate of 60 percent and involvement by Iraqi security forces “at every level.”

A few days later, on October 21, Casey presented Rumsfeld with options for reducing the number of U.S. combat forces in Iraq in early 2006. The general argued that a successful referendum and continued improvement in Iraq’s security forces would provide a “strategic opportunity to demonstrate progress” by cutting U.S. troop levels. But Casey also warned that conditions feeding the insurgency would not be resolved in the coming year. He anticipated that Iraq was in for another protracted transition period and that insurgents would try to use violence to influence the process. Nonetheless, he recommended dropping from seventeen brigades, which had been the base level in 2005, to fifteen brigades—a reduction of about 12,000 troops from nearly 140,000—and keeping one brigade on reserve in Kuwait as a hedge against uncertainty. Iraqi security forces totaled 211,000 at that point and were projected to reach 270,000 by mid-2006 and 325,000 by mid-2007.

The proposed reduction in U.S. troops, Casey argued, could underscore the Bush administration’s stated intention to “stand down” American forces as Iraqi forces “stood up.” Moreover, it could lessen the exposure of U.S. forces. And it could send a strong signal that the campaign plan was on track. But Casey also worried that withdrawing too quickly might unhinge the development of Iraq’s security forces and that it might diminish the effectiveness and flexibility of U.S. forces. Further, if it were misperceived as a U.S. retreat, the move could create expectations for continued reductions.

The speed and timing of a drawdown in U.S. force levels depended in large part on estimates about the development of Iraqi security units—estimates that were more art than science. A system of monthly reports that graded individual Iraqi units had been instituted in the spring. But the evaluations—known as Transition Readiness Assessments—were proving unreliable predictors of future performance.

In an embarrassing disclosure before the Senate Armed Services Committee on September 29, Casey testified that only a single Iraqi battalion was capable of independent operations—a significant step back from just several months earlier, when he had reported three battalions at the top rating. Military officials explained that the ratings were based on judgments by officers embedded with the Iraqi units, judgments that were highly subjective and that tended to fluctuate as the officers rotated in and out.

Such complications frustrated Rumsfeld. Although he never suggested to Casey that the system be junked, the secretary clearly appeared to Casey to be bothered that his own general was struggling to describe the assessment methodology to Congress.

In November, Rumsfeld received a twenty-seven-page report done by the U.S. command in Iraq assessing counterinsurgency operations in the country. Based on an extensive survey, the report measured the performance of U.S. and Iraqi forces against the list of historically proven counterinsurgency practices compiled by Kalev Sepp a year earlier when the campaign plan was drafted. It found that U.S. strategy and operations “generally align with the best practices of history’s successful counterinsurgencies.” But it also concluded that forces were falling short in a number of areas, with wide disparities in the practices of individual units.

U.S. troops, for instance, were having particular trouble establishing secure areas and isolating the insurgents from the population. “There are no ‘white areas’ in Iraq where the population is not subjected to intimidation,” the study concluded. “Many areas remain ‘safe’ for insurgents due to the size of Iraq and resource limitations.”

The report also expressed concern about the Iraqi police, who were regarded as crucial to achieving stability but who could not be developed effectively “under the pressure of insurgent violence and intimidation” and interference from the Ministry of Interior. Additionally, the study cited a lack of unity of effort among U.S., Iraqi government, and nonmilitary foreign agencies and a shortfall in money and manpower for commanders.

When Rumsfeld wrote Casey on November 15 after reviewing the paper, he expressed interest in a recommendation to establish a center on counterinsurgency, which Casey had already taken steps to set up in Iraq. The secretary also took note of a chart outlining successful counterinsurgency practices. “We clearly need to continue to shape our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan along those lines,” he wrote.

From the study it was evident that U.S. troops were struggling to understand the kind of conflict that Iraq had become. The lessons of counterinsurgency warfare, which American forces had learned during the Vietnam era, had never been taught to the ranks now fighting in Iraq. Casey himself had not realized how hard it was going to be to adjust the thinking and performance of his forces from a conventional war to an antiguerrilla campaign.

If the commanders and their troops were having trouble grasping the different tactics required, it was, in Casey’s view, even more challenging for Rumsfeld and the rest of the senior civilian leadership in Washington. To the extent they had any familiarity with war, it was conventional, not guerrilla-style. They spoke in black-and-white terms of victory, exit strategies, and end states, not the less tangible, less quantifiable terms of negotiated solution, public opinion, and extended commitment more characteristic of counterinsurgency warfare.

Casey and Abizaid wrestled with how to articulate the nature of the Iraq War to Rumsfeld, particularly the demands that combating an insurgency placed on U.S. soldiers to go out on patrols and interact with local Iraqis. The commanders received snowflakes from the secretary questioning, in so many words, the need for U.S. soldiers to be driving around so much, given the risk of being blown up by roadside bombs. “I’d try to explain,” Casey recalled. “I’d say, ‘Look, this is a counterinsurgency environment, and to be successful you have to have contact with the population, and to have contact with the population, you have to be outside of your base.’”

Casey perceived that over time Rumsfeld’s understanding of the special nature of the conflict deepened. But it was still a stretch for the secretary. “I don’t mean this in a negative way,” Casey reflected, “but I think the baseline that he was operating on was so different that it took more than I was able to muster to get him to understand it better.”

To help inform Rumsfeld, Casey took advantage of the secretary’s visit to Iraq in December 2005 to hand him a copy of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, a recently published book by Army lieutenant colonel John Nagl, a West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar who had led a tank platoon in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and who had served as operations officer with a U.S. armored battalion in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. In his book, Nagl compared the British military’s successful counterinsurgency experience in Malaysia from 1948 to 1960 with the U.S. military’s difficulty adapting and winning in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s. Nagl himself had been working next door to Rumsfeld for months as a military assistant to the deputy secretary of defense, although Rumsfeld had never sought to discuss counterinsurgency warfare with him.

For all the effort Casey himself had put into understanding the strategies and tactics of fighting an insurgency, the general may have been slow to appreciate some of the fundamentals and therefore may have been less able to communicate them to Rumsfeld. Critics later faulted Casey for failing in particular to give high enough priority to ensuring the safety of Iraqi civilians in Baghdad and other major cities, concentrating instead on going after enemy fighters.

Casey knew the argument—that in conducting a counterinsurgency campaign, a central focus on protecting the local population was necessary to deny insurgents a critical base of support. But he considered it even more important to bolster the perception of the Iraqi government as a sovereign power. That was more likely, he thought, to bring the population around than anything U.S. forces could do.

Moreover, Casey tended to concentrate U.S. military activity on hunting down the enemy rather than on shielding the Iraqis, figuring that succeeding at the first would automatically result in the second. But other officers, including Casey’s own chief strategist, Colonel Bill Hix, took issue with this judgment. “Early on, General Casey had a principal focus on the enemy,” Hix said in an interview. “This focus was shared by many in Iraq. I think there was a feeling that if we were pressuring the enemy, killing him, we were taking care of the population. Others were less sanguine about that because no other agency was effectively addressing the Iraqi population. There were significant discussions within the senior leadership concerning this issue. My point in these discussions was that we should not be so complacent about the Iraqi population just being a tactical asset. We should be doing more to cultivate their support—in part by protecting them—because in counterinsurgency, the people are the prize.”

All too often, Hix said, he found among U.S. field commanders a misguided expectation that if their troops took care of the enemy, other government entities would step forward to care for local Iraqis. But those other entities either didn’t exist or weren’t adequately resourced to provide government, economic, and reconstruction assistance. “When I talked to nearly every U.S. and coalition brigade commander over the summer of 2005, they all said, ‘I don’t have a partner out here to deliver on any of the expectations of the population, so even when I get security in an area, there’s nobody to do anything else,’” Hix recalled. It was a crippling gap in the Rumsfeld/Casey approach.

Several times a year, Rumsfeld met with the Defense Policy Board, a group of outside advisers who served as a kind of sounding board for the Pentagon leader. Among the members were two former secretaries of defense (James Schlesinger and Harold Brown), a former secretary of state (Henry Kissinger), a former speaker of the House (Newt Gingrich), some retired four-star officers, and others with high-level experience in national security affairs.

The board meetings generally lasted two days, with much of the time devoted to briefings that ranged widely from updates on developments in North Korea or the Middle East to reviews of Defense Department personnel reform, Army troop rotations, or changes in the Pentagon’s regional and functional command structure. Typically, at the end of the second day, Rumsfeld would arrive to discuss with members what they had covered. Always looking for facts, phrases, and arguments he could use in his battles elsewhere, he took extensive notes during the sessions, writing on yellow legal pads.

Iraq was noticeably absent from the board’s agendas during the early months of the war. But requests from several frustrated board members eventually led to briefings on the war being added. One of the board’s favorite briefers became Army colonel Derek Harvey, a foreign area officer specializing in the Middle East and working for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Harvey had traveled extensively in Iraq, meeting with tribal leaders, observing U.S. interrogations of insurgents, and poring over uncovered Iraqi documents. He had concluded that the insurgency was much more robust, more extensively organized, and better financed than U.S. officials generally understood. In Harvey’s view, the insurgency was driven largely by former beneficiaries of the Saddam Hussein regime aiming to regain influence and power and having the money, the weapons, and the will to carry on the fight for a long time.

An outspoken man with strong opinions, Harvey was a controversial figure in the intelligence community, and his detailed descriptions of an escalating threat contrasted with Rumsfeld’s portrayal of the insurgents as dead-enders and thugs. But at the board’s urging, Rumsfeld agreed to hear Harvey’s analysis.

Seated around a conference table in his office with other senior Pentagon authorities in late 2004, a skeptical Rumsfeld peppered the colonel with questions about his take on the war. Harvey explained that his information had been developed from various sources, including interrogation data, intercepts, and documents. He didn’t mind the push back from Rumsfeld. What struck him most was the seeming timidity of everyone else in the room. “The interesting thing is that no one else said much, no one stepped in,” Harvey recalled in an interview. “I looked around occasionally, and people were looking at their feet. I realized I wasn’t getting any help.”

Rumsfeld considered Harvey’s presentation significant enough to recommend it to Bush, who received the briefing in December 2004. But the colonel was never invited to return to update Rumsfeld. Harvey contended that the secretary and the military commanders in Iraq became focused on the wrong threat. In his view, they spent too much time on targeting al-Zarqawi and other foreign fighters and not enough on how best to deal with the old Sunni oligarchy that Harvey considered the heart, brains, and brawn of the insurgency. He argued that more should be done to address this group through engaging tribal leaders, offering economic incentives, and undertaking other initiatives. “There was an antipathy toward tribal leaders and dealing with legitimate leaders of communities who were viewed as tainted by the old regime,” Harvey said later. “This ended up isolating them and contributing to their fears of a Shia government that would be sectarian.”

A number of Defense Policy Board members were increasingly bothered by the discrepancies between the information they received from Harvey and the much more sanguine view of Iraqi developments conveyed by Rumsfeld and other senior administration officials. They confronted the secretary about the differences and encouraged him to hear from other sources. The most vocal challenges at the board meetings came from Ken Adelman, Rumsfeld’s old friend, who had been one of the biggest supporters of the invasion, predicting in the Washington Post that it would be a “cakewalk.”

Disgusted with the management of the war and disillusioned with Rumsfeld, Adelman argued with the secretary during a session in December 2005 over the rotation of U.S. troops in and out of Iraq, contending that tours of a year or less undercut their ability to develop the kind of familiarity with Iraqi culture and local communities necessary in counterinsurgency warfare.

Several heavier hitters on the board weighed in as well. Jack Keane, the retired Army general who had been a Rumsfeld favorite, questioned the strategy. Eliot Cohen, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and an authority on civil-military relations, challenged discrepancies between Rumsfeld’s optimistic accounts and the grim developments on the ground.

At one point Schlesinger told Rumsfeld bluntly, “Mr. Secretary, there’s just too much happy talk coming out of this building. In the long run, that doesn’t help you because when the happy talk doesn’t materialize in a happy situation, you lose credibility.’” Rumsfeld appeared to make a note of Schlesinger’s remark, although he did not respond.

Keane knew from his own contacts with Harvey that the intelligence analyst was periodically invited to brief Cheney and others in the vice president’s office. Harvey was asked to craft questions that the vice president could then put to Rumsfeld about the situation in Iraq. Keane surmised that Cheney was also pressing the secretary. But Rumsfeld appears to have remained confident about the course that had been set in Iraq. There is nothing in the files of the message traffic between the secretary and Casey indicating that, with each other, they fundamentally questioned the strategy being pursued. To the contrary, they figured that if they could just get to the election of a new Iraqi government at the end of 2005 and see steady improvement in Iraq’s security forces, they could turn the corner in the war.

Chris Williams, a former congressional staffer and onetime special assistant to Rumsfeld who chaired the Defense Policy Board from 2004 to 2006, saw the criticism from board members getting to the secretary. “I think towards the end he was really saddened and frustrated by the relative pessimism of the board on Iraq,” Williams said in an interview. “He so wanted things to go well and wanted to see signs of improvement. When the board would challenge pretty strongly on the way things were going and what needed to be done, he would typically come back with individual items that he would cite as evidence that it wasn’t going as badly. But I think it was a forest and trees sort of thing. He was concentrating on individual trees as opposed to the forest. You know, he handpicked every member of that board, knew many of them for years, decades in some instances. And to hear their sadness, pessimism, frustration—it was painful to him.”

On November 30, the Los Angeles Times reported that as part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military had secretly paid Iraqi newspapers to publish stories that inflated the image of U.S. forces while negatively portraying insurgents. The articles were written by U.S. military “information operations” troops, translated into Arabic, and then placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a small Washington-based firm named the Lincoln Group.

Rumsfeld was surprised to learn of the propaganda effort. The day the story appeared, he sent a copy to Casey, Pace, Edelman, Abizaid, and Di Rita with a note of concern. “The attached article could be troubling,” he wrote. “Please see if you can provide me the facts. It also would be helpful for me to understand how you are organized for communications: How well-connected to you are your public affairs people? How well-connected are your public affairs people to the people who may have been in a position to make such decisions? If what is described in this article is accurate, we may have public affairs concerns across the board that could make everything we do harder.”

Doing battle on the information front had posed a dilemma for Rumsfeld for months. Early in the administration’s war on terrorism, the secretary had recognized that the fight would be much more than physical battle. He had spoken of a “war of ideas” that had to be waged against Islamic extremists in schools and mosques throughout the Muslim world. But the U.S. government, in his view, was inadequately set up to explain its policies abroad and desperately needed a coordinated “strategic communications” effort to help sustain foreign support. By contrast, the enemy had demonstrated considerable adeptness in getting its own message out.

An initial Pentagon attempt in 2002 to develop a more aggressive communications program had turned into a public relations disaster. No sooner had the department’s policy branch created an Office of Strategic Influence than reports emerged that consideration was being given to planting false news stories to influence policy makers and public sentiment in friendly as well as unfriendly countries. Rumsfeld called the reports distorted and declared that the military would not be permitted to tell lies to promote U.S. policies or views, but he quickly concluded that the office had been irreparably damaged by the coverage and shut it down.

The existence of the office had been controversial within the Pentagon itself; some senior public affairs officials had eyed it suspiciously as a threat to their efforts to distribute factual information about the U.S. military. An ensuing policy debate over what to do next only deepened the divide between those in public affairs and those in psychological and information operations, who at times rely on propaganda and misleading information to advance military objectives. Arguments about who should control the Pentagon’s message, under what circumstances, and toward which audiences went unresolved, leaving Rumsfeld unable to establish a coherent, effective communications policy.

By seeming to blur the lines between transparent spin and clandestine propaganda, the Lincoln Group’s activities in Iraq added to the internal Pentagon split. Officials in public affairs pointed to the hypocrisy of trying to promote democratic principles, freedom of speech, and political transparency in Iraq while the U.S. military was paying to disseminate propaganda in Iraqi news media. The psychological operations camp, in turn, defended such operations as necessary to combat the enemy’s own intense propaganda efforts.

But Rumsfeld himself remained uncertain about how to proceed. In March 2006, more than three months after the Lincoln Group’s operations had come to his attention, he sent another snowflake to half a dozen senior subordinates seeking advice. “We need to sort out what we think about the way the Lincoln Group is going about executing their contract in Iraq, and whether or not that is the right way to accomplish what is needed. I am not convinced that is the case. Please get back to me within a week with a recommendation as to how we should proceed.”

Rumsfeld never did manage to define a strategic communications plan that worked. Just before leaving office, when asked at a town hall meeting with Pentagon employees to assess the Defense Department’s performance in the war of ideas, he gave it a D-plus.

As he struggled with the war in Iraq in 2005, Rumsfeld faced the next critical juncture in his drive to transform the U.S. military: It was time again for another Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) of military strategy, weapons, and force structure. The last QDR in 2001, during Rumsfeld’s initial months in office, had advanced arguments for a more flexible, adaptable military and had begun to highlight such rising concerns as homeland defense and counterterrorism. But the review had left the structure of U.S. forces and most weapons systems largely intact.

With Rumsfeld settled into a second term, there was much speculation that he would use this next QDR to effect radical change. These periodic assessments were not necessarily binding in their recommendations about which weapons and programs to fund. But given the time and effort devoted to them, the reviews carried great weight, and for a defense secretary like Rumsfeld looking for powerful levers to reshape the Pentagon, they provided an important opportunity to frame strategy and budget decisions for the next four years.

Clearly, the case for change had become even stronger by 2005 than it had been in 2001. Several years into the fight against a troublesome insurgency in Iraq and against elusive terrorist networks like al Qaeda around the world, U.S. forces still appeared at a loss to understand the enemy and seemed to lack the right strategies and capabilities to win. While the Pentagon remained flush with planes, ships, and precision-guided munitions—all useful in large conventional battles—it was desperately short of other kinds of troops, weapons, and specialized skills useful in unconventional conflicts and postwar reconstruction operations.

Moreover, although homeland defense had been identified as the Pentagon’s number one mission, how to carry it out had grown increasingly problematic. In the previous QDR, for instance, military planners had assumed that National Guard units would stay at home and serve as the nation’s primary domestic security force. By 2005, because of the demands of the war in Iraq, reserve units were nearly tapped out.

Given a huge federal budget deficit and mounting war costs, there was also pressure to make hard budget choices about less relevant weapons systems. Rumsfeld thus seemed to have considerable wind at his back to apply the hard lessons of the previous four years, to challenge service chiefs resistant to having their budgets cut, and to insist on major revisions in strategy and force structure. Indeed, fostering the notion that sweeping change was in store, some defense officials in early 2005 floated the possibility that Rumsfeld would convene a high-level summit similar to that held in Key West in 1948, when James Forrestal brokered an agreement among the service chiefs on their roles and missions.

A classified document setting the “terms of reference” for the QDR and signed by Rumsfeld in March 2005 provided a new, expansive vision for the U.S. military, putting less emphasis on waging conventional warfare and more on dealing with insurgencies, terrorist networks, failed states, and other nontraditional threats. By giving higher priority to a larger set of possible security challenges, the document went beyond notions of military transformation previously touted by the Bush administration. Officials predicted that the shift in strategy could result in a significant reordering of funds, diverting money away from major weapons programs, such as tactical fighter jets and aircraft carriers, and toward more ground troops. Or it could lead to a different mix of troops that would favor specialized areas such as intelligence gathering, foreign-language skills, and civil affairs work. There was also speculation that the review could result in greater investment in new technologies, such as improved drone aircraft, better computer network defenses, and new measures for countering biological or chemical attacks.

But after setting the themes for the QDR, Rumsfeld largely took a back seat, turning over much of the daily management to subordinates. His diminished role was a marked contrast with the hands-on, day-today involvement he’d had in the 2001 review. This time, the demands of the war were keeping him otherwise occupied. Talk of a Key West-type summit eventually faded, and signs emerged that the review might not produce such radical change after all.

Rumsfeld did step in during the summer of 2005 to make a decision about the overall force-sizing concept for the military. In the 2001 review, he had decided to stay essentially with the two-war model adopted in the 1990s after the Soviet Union’s demise, although he refined it a bit into a metric known as “1-4-2-1.” That metric called for a U.S. military large enough and sufficiently well equipped to defend the U.S. homeland (“1”), to conduct smaller-scale peacetime operations in as many as four regions (“4”), and to “swiftly defeat” adversaries in two overlapping military campaigns (“2”) while preserving the option to “win decisively” in one of those campaigns by forcing a regime change (“1”).

But within days of completion, Rumsfeld’s revised model already appeared out-of-date, when the United States found itself fighting a war in Afghanistan that did not fit any of the major conflict scenarios envisioned in the review. Nor had the 2001 QDR adequately provided for a protracted war on terrorism and a prolonged rotation of Army and Marine forces into and out of Iraq. By 2005, it was evident that a new force construct was needed to achieve a better balance among domestic defense, the antiterrorism campaign, and conventional military requirements. Some officials proposed moving to a metric that provided for only one conventional fight in order to make room also for an irregular one like the prolonged counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq. The service chiefs, though, were reluctant to dispense with the two-war model altogether. They argued that the United States, in order to deter aggression, needed to continue asserting its ability to fight in more than one area of the world at the same time.

Rumsfeld agreed. Besides, he didn’t like the idea of discarding the 1-4-2-1 metric reached only four years earlier. “He said he’d worked in big corporations, and people there did not like it when strategies were switched on them,” recalled a senior strategist in the Pentagon’s policy branch. “He said he didn’t like to change things just for the heck of changing them, and we were really going to have to convince him that something needed to be changed here.’”

The final QDR report, issued in early 2006, did not explicitly repeat the earlier metric. Rather, it divided U.S. military activities into three areas—homeland defense, irregular warfare, and conventional campaigns—and sought to spell out the requirements for each. But it stipulated that in the conventional category, the Pentagon would be expected to maintain a two-war capability.

In the end, the programmatic changes ordered by the review were relatively modest. Rumsfeld’s desire to make the military more mobile and lethal, more capable of dealing with emerging threats from terror groups and insurgents, was plainly visible in such decisions as a 15 percent increase in the size of Special Operations forces. His interest in improving the ability of U.S. forces to strike quickly anywhere in the world could be seen in provisions for doubling the procurement of attack submarines, for arming submarine-launched Trident missiles with conventional warheads, and for starting the development of next-generation long-range strike systems. Investment in new forms of warfare was also evident in a decision to double the number of unmanned aerial vehicles and to begin a $1.5 billion, five-year effort to develop countermeasures against genetically engineered bioterror agents.

But in general, the review was better at defining new threats to U.S. forces and outlining a strategy for dealing with them than at laying out the programs to realize that strategy. Initial hopes that the yearlong assessment would order far-reaching changes in spending priorities had been largely stymied by the resistance of the military services. The review left all the largest acquisition programs—the Air Force’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Army’s Future Combat System, and the Navy’s DD(X) destroyer—unscathed. Missile defense and space systems were reaffirmed. And no provision was made for a major expansion in ground force numbers. Instead, the final report concluded that the existing size of the force, both the active and reserve components across the services, was “appropriate to meet current and projected operational demands.”

The 2005 QDR process was notably more collegial than previous ones, with fewer instances of interservice battles, and the review’s recommendations were strongly endorsed by the military services. But the cost of such unanimity was compromise and an essentially cautious outcome on the programs. “I think the QDR was as strong as it could be and still have everybody signing up to it,” observed Ryan Henry, who as principal undersecretary for policy played a leading role managing the process.

Rumsfeld, who personally drafted the preface to the final report, seemed to play down the significance of the exercise by portraying it more as just another transformative step than as a major breakthrough. “There is a tendency to want to suggest that documents such as this represent a ‘new beginning,’” he wrote. “Manifestly, this document is not a ‘new beginning.’ Rather, this department has been and is transforming along a continuum that reflects our best understanding of a world that has changed a great deal since the end of the last century. This study reflects the reality that the Department of Defense has been in a period of continuous change for the past five years.”

A favorite Rumsfeld notion that featured prominently in the QDR was something defense officials called “building partnership capacity.” Shorthand for providing U.S. assistance to partner nations around the world, the phrase represented an indirect approach to fighting terrorism and promoting freedom through collaboration with indigenous forces and local government institutions. Rumsfeld and aides saw it as an alternative to the dreaded “nation building.”

The concept has particular significance in the vast, worldwide task of combating terrorism, which requires enlisting host-country police to track and capture terrorists, teaming with foreign militaries, sharing intelligence with foreign partners, and strengthening border surveillance in remote and unpopulated regions. In the long run, an effective counterterrorism campaign depends on convincing entire societies to reject terrorist propaganda and recruitment.

Afghanistan was cited as a prime example of what could be achieved through such leveraging. Iraq was supposed to have been another. Before the war, Rumsfeld and other senior officials spoke enthusiastically of ousting Saddam Hussein in order to enable the Iraqi people to move toward a democratic system, not to build one for them.

In the autumn of 2004, during a series of brainstorming sessions that Rumsfeld held with senior aides on drafts of a strategic plan for the larger war on terrorism, the notion of an indirect approach had come up again. Officials reasoned that the more other countries, particularly in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia where terrorist networks were rooted, could be leveraged as proxies and surrogates in the counterterrorism campaign, the less the battle could be portrayed as a religious clash between Islamic extremists and the United States. Considering that the fight would probably be a long one, officials figured that the more partners were involved, the less exhausting the struggle would be for America.

But beefing up security assistance to foreign partners involved maneuvering through a patchwork of legal restrictions and complex divisions of responsibilities among U.S. government agencies. It might mean drawing on the Pentagon for military training, the State Department for police training, the Department of Homeland Security for border protection, and the Treasury Department for financial enforcement. Coordinating such efforts often required months of work.

In general, foreign aid programs were traditionally administered by the State Department, not the Pentagon. Rumsfeld was keen to revolutionize the process and invest the Defense Department with authority to deliver aid and training. “The secretary believed that we had this outdated, Cold War set of authorities, which were inappropriate for the twenty-first century,” recounted one participant in the deliberations. “The pitch was not just to make some minor adjustments to foreign aid. It was to blow up the entire regime of foreign aid that had come out of the Cold War because it needed to be overhauled for the world we were living in.”

In a briefing to Bush in January 2005, Rumsfeld and Feith proposed terminating the existing U.S. foreign aid and security assistance systems and creating a new set of laws and institutions that would feature “building partner capacity,” among other approaches. Although the president wasn’t ready to attempt such a drastic overhaul, Rumsfeld had already begun to chip away at the old order. At his urging, the Pentagon had received congressional authority and funding to train and equip the militaries and police forces in Iraq and Afghanistan without going through the State Department. It also had gotten approval to reimburse coalition partners for logistical and military support provided in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Throughout 2005, Rumsfeld moved to expand these train-and-equip authorities worldwide. He argued that the new authority was needed for time-sensitive, urgent terrorist threats to the United States that would not wait for the normal budget process under the State Department’s authority. Moreover, he contended that the budgets necessary in a post- 9/11 world would be impossible to derive from the strapped foreign affairs resources.

Some foreign affairs specialists inside and outside the government, who worried about a creeping militarization of U.S. foreign policy, argued against giving the Pentagon greater train-and-equip authority. They warned it could lead to the growth of a separate military assistance effort not subject to the same constraints applied to foreign aid programs that were administered by the State Department. Such constraints were meant to ensure that aid recipients meet certain standards, including respect for human rights and protection of legitimate civilian authorities.

Many lawmakers, too, were initially cool to Rumsfeld’s request. The Armed Services committees in both the House and the Senate declined to write the provision into their original defense authorization bills, citing concerns about a lack of jurisdiction and an absence of detail about where the money would be spent. But the Pentagon pressed its case, with senior commanders helping persuade reluctant congressmen. “This was the most heavily lobbied we’ve been by the Pentagon in the several years I’ve been here,” one Senate staff member recalled. “They really, really wanted this.”

At the State Department, Rice also threw her support behind the measure, overruling lower-ranking staff members who had argued that existing laws were sufficient and cautioned against granting the Pentagon such flexibility. She joined Rumsfeld in a letter to Congress in the summer of 2005 urging passage of the legislation.

The measure passed in December 2005 as part of the 2006 National Defense Authorization Act. Under section 1206, Congress granted unusual authority for the Pentagon to spend as much as $200 million of its own budget to train and equip foreign military forces to carry out counterterrorism operations in their own countries or to join with U.S. forces in operations elsewhere (in Iraq, for instance).

Some strings were attached. Before the money could be spent, the Pentagon had to get approval from the State Department—a dual-key provision to ensure that Pentagon security needs met State Department foreign policy objectives. Moreover, the new authority could not be used to provide any assistance to countries blacklisted by other U.S. laws for human rights abuses or other reasons. And it was allowed for the training and equipping of only military forces, not of police. Further, the authorization was stipulated to expire after two years, far short of the open-ended mandate that Rumsfeld had sought.

Still, it was a precedent-setting victory for Rumsfeld. And in an associated measure (section 1207 of the same act), the defense secretary also received authorization to transfer $100 million in Pentagon funds to the State Department for use in its new office overseeing reconstruction activities in foreign countries. The idea of shifting Pentagon money to the State Department had been almost as controversial as letting the Pentagon spend train-and-equip funds, but the initiative was part of Rumsfeld’s same ultimate objective—a more flexible foreign assistance system that would allocate money as needed among whatever agencies were best suited for delivery.

Also near the end of 2005, Rumsfeld put the finishing touches on a broad directive intended to ensure that the next time U.S. troops went to war, they would be better prepared for its aftermath. The new order required U.S. forces to give the same priority to planning for postconflict stability operations as they did to preparing for the fight.

For a Pentagon leader who had come into office generally averse to U.S. troops getting enmeshed in extensive postwar reconstruction efforts, the directive was a breakthrough. Rumsfeld never acknowledged that he had erred in the Iraq War preparations. But when presented with a 2004 Defense Science Board study that excoriated the U.S. military for its insufficient attention to postconflict operations, the secretary ordered that the board’s recommendations be incorporated into a formal directive. Countless previous studies by think tanks had made the same point but had gone unheeded. This time, with the difficulties in Iraq fresh on his mind, Rumsfeld took some action.

“This was a very specific instruction to issue a directive, and I think people were surprised,” said Jeffrey “Jeb” Nadaner, the deputy assistant secretary for stability operations. “He could have just said, let’s implement this study, or let’s harvest a few recommendations and figure out a way to do them. But he was ordering a formal document.”

The eleven-page directive assigned long lists of specific responsibilities to the Pentagon’s various civilian branches, military services, and regional commands. For instance, it instructed the Pentagon’s undersecretary for personnel to develop methods for recruiting people for stability operations and to bolster instruction in foreign languages and cultures. It ordered the undersecretary for intelligence to ensure that “suitable” information for stability operations be available. And it directed the undersecretary for policy to create a “stability operations center” and to submit a semiannual report to the secretary of defense.

Although some of the boldest steps that had been suggested by defense scholars, such as the creation of separate constabulary units and other specialized forces to handle stability operations, were not adopted, the document was an important milestone that bluntly asserted postconflict planning as a core mission of the Defense Department.

The biggest sticking point in drafting the directive had been a decision over who should monitor compliance. The Army had sought the job, but Rumsfeld made it clear to Nadaner and other staff members that he did not want the Army in the role of executive agent. “He was emphatic about it,” Nadaner recalled. “He said at a meeting that when the Army gets things, it runs away with them, and he can’t find out what’s going on or get to the bottom of things.” Nadaner suspected Rumsfeld had in mind the Army’s slowness in dealing with the Abu Ghraib scandal. The oversight job for postconflict stability operations was assigned to the Pentagon’s policy office.

Traditionally, the Pentagon had left the business of collecting human intelligence to the CIA. The special skills required in espionage, plus the years of undercover work, lent themselves more to civilians than to soldiers. Besides, the Pentagon already had a lot of other intelligence to manage. Information gathered through satellite imagery, phone intercepts, and computer monitoring was a normal province of the Pentagon’s large intelligence organizations—the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

But the global battle against terrorist networks had put a new premium on the kind of intelligence that can be gained only by having a spy in the room. Terrorists were less susceptible to overhead surveillance, wiretapping, and other mechanical and electronic means of intelligence gathering. U.S. commanders were confident that they could take out terrorist networks if they knew the hiding spots. The main problem lay in locating them. “This was something that came up in almost every combatant commanders’ conference—the need to find, fix, and finish,” Rumsfeld recalled in an interview. “We had the ability to finish. We just couldn’t find and fix things.”

The Pentagon leader considered it problematic that military forces should have to rely on the CIA for on-the-ground information. He and his aides had been frustrated with the lack of timeliness or usefulness to them of some information the agency had provided in the past. Because the CIA serves the information needs of Washington decision makers, it often has different priorities than do military commanders, who want tactical information their forces can use in combat operations. And Rumsfeld was keen to avoid another situation like the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, where the CIA’s better preparatory fieldwork had left U.S. forces reliant on agency operatives. If the military was to take a leading role in the global hunt for terrorists, as Rumsfeld intended, it would have to reduce its traditional dependence on the CIA for intelligence.

For months after the administration declared war on terrorism, the secretary mulled how far he could go in expanding the Pentagon’s capabilities to gather intelligence and recruit sources abroad. The Defense Department had established a human intelligence service in 1993, but it was never as expansive as the CIA’s operations directorate and tended to leave surreptitious intelligence missions to the agency.

Historically, Pentagon lawyers had contended that the Defense Department lacked authority to conduct such missions. But Rumsfeld’s general counsel, Jim Haynes, argued otherwise, as did some in the Special Operations community, who maintained that such authority had long existed but hadn’t been exercised as a matter of custom.

Among those insistent on the Pentagon’s authority was William G. “Jerry” Boykin, a onetime head of the Army’s highly skilled, supersecretive Delta Force. Boykin had been frustrated by the refusal of Pentagon leaders, dating to the U.S. hostage situations in Beirut in the 1980s, to approve clandestine operations. In planning rescue operations then, Boykin recalled, proposals to recruit informants or to infiltrate commandos to conduct surveillance were denied on the grounds that such activities were a CIA responsibility. Similarly, in Mogadishu in the 1990s, U.S. Special Operations forces relied on the CIA for information to target warlords.

In February 2003, Boykin, then a two-star general, interviewed with Rumsfeld for a top job in the newly created office of undersecretary for intelligence—the office that Rumsfeld had set up to get a firmer handle on all the department’s intelligence activities and that Cambone had been picked to head. Looking over Boykin’s résumé and noting the general’s commando experience, Rumsfeld recalled his own annoyance at having had to sign orders in 2001 placing military Special Operations units under CIA authorities for operations in Afghanistan.

“Why did I have to do that?” Rumsfeld asked. “We’re going to war, and I’m the secretary of defense. I’m responsible for these people, and I’m being told I have to put them under CIA authorities. That didn’t seem right to me.”

Boykin went on to serve as a deputy to Cambone in charge of “warfighting support,” while Rumsfeld oversaw the formation of small spy teams, each staffed with two or three Special Operations troops and dispatched to countries in the Middle East, North Africa, Asia, and South America where al Qaeda or affiliated groups were suspected of operating. Initially called “operational control elements,” the teams were assigned to lay the groundwork for potential military operations, including such clandestine missions as capturing or killing terrorism suspects. They engaged in some of the same spy craft typical of CIA operatives—using false names and nationalities, establishing front companies, recruiting agents, and cultivating sources in government or Islamic groups.

But the teams generated concern at the CIA, where they were regarded as dangerously amateurish and potentially disruptive of the CIA’s own operations. Intelligence officials complained that the military units sometimes carried out missions without the knowledge of local CIA station chiefs. Worries about the qualifications and preparation of the military operatives were exacerbated in 2004, when members of a team operating in Paraguay shot and killed an armed assailant who tried to rob them outside a bar. In another incident, members of a team in East Africa were arrested by the local government after their espionage activity was discovered.

CIA officials argued that the military teams should come under the control of agency station chiefs, while State Department officials lobbied for tighter supervision by local U.S. ambassadors. Even the military’s own regional commanders were not sure what authority they had over the teams.

“Rumsfeld decided he was going to wage a battle for intel supremacy with CIA, and it caused nothing but problems,” said a general who handled intelligence matters for one of the regional commands at the time. “He decided that the Pentagon was going to do whatever it wanted. He didn’t want the station chiefs in charge of human intelligence; he didn’t want military source operations subordinated to the CIA. He just got into a battle, and it wasn’t a healthy battle.”

Some lawmakers, too, grew worried that the Pentagon was creating a parallel intelligence-gathering network separate from the CIA and free of congressional oversight. While CIA covert activities must be authorized by a presidential finding, and while the agency must report to the Senate and House intelligence committees, the Pentagon’s lawyers determined that no such reporting requirement applied to the military teams. Moreover, there were indications that beyond these teams, even more secretive military groups were engaged in spying without having notified Congress. In early 2005, for instance, journalist Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker on U.S. military reconnaissance missions inside Iran to gather information on nuclear, chemical, and missile sites.

Alarmed, House lawmakers demanded the Pentagon provide a more detailed account of its military espionage. In closed-door sessions with Cambone in early 2005, they questioned the Pentagon’s authority to conduct certain intelligence missions and insisted such activity at least be reported to Congress. In response, Cambone presented a finely parsed argument that had been crafted with Rumsfeld and with Pentagon attorneys, asserting that while the U.S. teams operated clandestinely, they did not engage in covert action.

Under U.S. law, “clandestine” refers to actions that are meant to go undetected; “covert,” going a step further, refers to operations for which the U.S. government denies responsibility. Covert action requires notification to senior congressional leaders, but clandestine activity does not. Cambone noted that for an action to be covert, the government must be looking for deniability and the opportunity to influence a foreign government. Both conditions must be met, Cambone stressed.

Similarly artful interpretations were advanced to excuse the military intelligence activities from other disclosure rules. Under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, for instance, the Defense Department must report certain actions related to the positioning of forces for war. But if the Pentagon’s intelligence activity could be considered preparatory for war, this reporting requirement wasn’t applicable. Another section of the Code, Title 50, mandates that all executive-branch departments keep Congress informed of intelligence activities. But the law does not cover “traditional” military activities and their “routine support”—terms that could be applied to the military intelligence effort given the broad, limitless scope of the war on terrorism.

Several key House leaders—David Obey (D-WI), John Murtha (D-PA), and Bill Young (R-FL)—found such arguments less than persuasive, even after Rumsfeld personally met with them to argue his case. To compel Rumsfeld to be more forthcoming about the secretive missions, Obey, as the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, introduced an amendment to the 2006 defense appropriations bill requiring the Pentagon to notify Congress of any “special military activities” (spy missions) being conducted in countries on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism (Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, and Cuba).

Eager to head off the legislation, the White House intervened. Andy Card phoned Obey with a promise to help develop an arrangement with Rumsfeld that would meet congressional concerns. Obey agreed to withdraw his amendment. But in a November 2005 floor statement, the congressman publicly voiced concern that the Pentagon was engaged in some “highly inappropriate and highly dangerous” missions.

Rumsfeld subsequently agreed to disclose Pentagon spying operations to Congress on a graduated scale—the more sensitive the operation, the fewer people on the Hill would be notified. In addition, the Pentagon promised to submit a quarterly report on its intelligence activities. But defense officials made it clear that they were agreeing to the procedures as a matter of respect and comity, not law.

Rumsfeld also moved to ease strains with the CIA by establishing a set of procedures for resolving disputes over the activities of the spy teams as well as over a separate issue involving the allocation of forces. In July 2005, the secretary signed a two-page memorandum of understanding with Porter Goss, who had replaced George Tenet as CIA director. Under the agreement, the Pentagon stopped short of placing the military field teams under CIA supervision or even giving local CIA station chiefs veto authority over the activities of the teams, but it promised to try to coordinate the activities with station chiefs. And if a chief objected to a particular mission, the issue would be pushed up the chain of command for adjudication.

A similar arrangement for resolving disputes with U.S. ambassadors over spy team activities was worked out between Rumsfeld and Rice. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld changed the name of the intelligence teams to “military liaison elements” to suggest a more cooperative relationship between them and local embassy personnel. And the Pentagon instituted a more rigorous system for selecting and training operatives and for screening proposed military intelligence operations.

The tensions over the deployment of the military intelligence teams was only one of a number of controversies spawned by Rumsfeld’s mammoth effort to overhaul the Pentagon’s entire intelligence apparatus. The secretary had signaled the importance to him of this undertaking by installing his top troubleshooter, Steve Cambone, as undersecretary for intelligence in 2003. Charged with making the intelligence bureaucracy more responsive to the needs of field commanders, Cambone pushed for greater coordination among existing branches and rearranged spending priorities.

He directed regional commands to set up “joint intelligence operations centers” meant to bring analysts and collectors of intelligence closer together with those who use the information. He instituted a more centralized system for assigning surveillance and reconnaissance assets around the world. He combined what had been separate budgets for strategic and tactical systems into a single Military Intelligence Program and exercised tighter oversight.

Some of the moves brought noticeable improvements in intelligence support for combat forces, but they also stirred resentment and resistance among those who regarded Cambone as overly controlling and inexperienced in the intelligence world. Enamored with space-age technology, Rumsfeld and Cambone invested heavily in new satellite programs, including a Space-Based Radar system promising the capability to spot moving targets on the ground in any weather—a very expensive proposition that skeptics warned could not be done at reasonable cost. The project was canceled after Rumsfeld left.

Other initiatives reinforced perceptions among some in the intelligence community that the Pentagon’s new intelligence directorate intended to compete with rather than complement the CIA. The Defense Intelligence Agency, for instance, substantially increased its human intelligence branch, expanding the ranks of case officers, linguists, interrogators, and technical specialists. Defense officials explained that the swelling intelligence corps was necessary to provide technical and administrative support for growing numbers of Special Operations forces engaged in counterterrorism missions abroad.

On the domestic front, the Pentagon also stepped up intelligence gathering and became embroiled in allegations of unwarranted snooping on U.S. citizens. A program called the Counter-Intelligence Field Activity, set up in early 2002 to coordinate military counterintelligence operations, was revealed in late 2005 to have collected information on antiwar protestors after the invasion of Iraq. The disclosure prompted outcries from civil liberties groups and from some Democratic lawmakers, who charged that the Pentagon had crossed the line from justified force-protection activities to unacceptable spying on legitimate political action. A subsequent internal investigation concluded that a database for storing threat reports had indeed been improperly used. Defense officials promised to tighten rules governing the collection and retention of such domestic threat reports, but the Pentagon program was eventually shut down in 2008.

The biggest threat to Rumsfeld’s intelligence designs came in 2004 when Congress, responding to the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, moved to establish a new spymaster office to oversee the nation’s intelligence community. The initiative could have drained the Pentagon’s new intelligence office of much of its authority. But Rumsfeld and Cambone argued successfully against weakening the defense secretary’s control over the Pentagon’s intelligence agencies, contending that ceding authority to the new director of national intelligence would stand in the way of getting timely information to soldiers on the ground.

Some senior military intelligence officers considered such claims exaggerated. Both James Clapper, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who headed the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and Air Force general Michael Hayden, who then ran the National Security Agency, testified secretly before Congress in the summer of 2004 that putting their agencies under the new director’s control would not harm their work. Shortly after the testimony, Rumsfeld called the men to the Pentagon for lunch, where he told them they were out of line because their agencies provide combat support and should be solely under the Pentagon’s authority. When Clapper’s five-year job contract was up in mid- 2006, Rumsfeld didn’t renew it.

Ultimately, the need for an undersecretary for intelligence was accepted within the Defense Department and credited with providing a more coordinated Pentagon position on intelligence matters. But the position’s development under Rumsfeld owed much to the secretary’s close relationship with Cambone, which had both positive and negative implications for what was accomplished.

As a result of Rumsfeld’s strong backing, Cambone was able to get things done faster and more effectively. At the same time, some programs were pushed through with such corner cutting that they failed to receive the kind of thorough vetting they would have received under other circumstances. “I think Rumsfeld got what he wanted in terms of having somebody he could turn to and trust on a daily basis in the intelligence area,” said Rich Haver, who advised the secretary on intelligence matters for two years. “But the very strength of his relationship with Steve became a crutch.”

Indeed, the secretary often turned to Cambone for help on a number of the department’s most sensitive issues, whether detainee affairs, missile defense, or cross-border operations in Pakistan. Even Gordon England, the deputy secretary, was not always privy to what transpired between the two.

“When Steve left and I took his job for a few months,” recalled Robert Andrews, who had been one of Cambone’s deputies, “the first person I talked to was Gordon England, and Gordon said, ‘You know, there were a lot of things between Steve and the secretary that I never knew about. Sometimes Steve would tell me and sometimes he wouldn’t.’”

Cambone’s exceptional status lent his undersecretary’s post an extra dimension. Although the job called essentially for setting policy and budgets, not for running operations, Cambone became intimately involved in helping shape some of the military’s most secretive missions. Before seeking Rumsfeld’s approval for such missions, officers planning them often reviewed details with Cambone, whose support could make all the difference in persuading the secretary to sign off on them.

“It became apparent that the way to get to Rumsfeld was through Cambone,” said Andrews, who worked on Special Operations issues in the Pentagon’s policy branch before joining the intelligence office in 2006. “So what happened was, the unconventional war, the Special Operations war, started being run through the undersecretary for intelligence.”

In December 2005, Rumsfeld formally designated Cambone next in line to take charge of the Defense Department in the event the secretary and deputy secretary died or were incapacitated. Previously, the secretary of the Army had been the department’s third in line, but this struck Rumsfeld as inconsistent particularly with wartime reality, where the Army secretary tended to be a less central player. “Steve was the person most intimately involved in operations,” Rumsfeld explained. “So I just rearranged the pecking order, or what they call the order of succession.”