Somewhere in my collection of books at home I have a book written by Donald Rumsfeld in the 70's describing how to get your way in bureaucratic politics. I've never read it completely from cover-to-cover, but it seemed to me Rumsfeld was probably the quintessential bureaucratic *playa*: someone who might embarrass Machiavelli with his backstabbing shenanigans. (Then again, in his own twisted way, Machiavelli was the perfect idealist, and so too might be Rumsfeld. One can't condemn without deeper understanding.)
Some of Rumsfeld's ideas about modern war, like dropping the armor and going for speed, make a lot of sense - but then, only in the context of blitzkrieg, not slogs like Iraq turned into, where you need all the armor you can get.
Apparently Rumsfeld remains widely-hated in the Pentagon. Maybe the most-hated defense secretary ever! (That's the fate of lots of *playas*, actually - just ask certain rap singers, bewildered by all the "haters".) Getting the precise answers as to why is Rumsfeld is despised is likely to be very-educational.
Some teasers:
No decision was ever final unless it was the position taken by Rumsfeld. The Executive Steering Group on Iraq he maligns was established to supervise DOD implementation of agreed policies because the White House lost confidence Secretary Rumsfeld would carry them out. Even in the ESG, DOD was routinely represented by people who claimed no knowledge of agreed policy or professed themselves powerless to implement it because Rumsfeld disagreed.
Beyond throwing sand in the gears of interagency cooperation, Rumsfeld just wasn't a very good secretary of defense. The secretary's paramount responsibility in wartime is to translate the president's political objectives into military plans. Bush's objectives for Iraq were clear: regime change, control of nuclear weapons. A military plan that bypasses Iraq's cities and has no dedicated plans or forces for WMD control is poorly aligned with those goals, and that was nobody's job but Donald Rumsfeld's. Rumsfeld spent his time challenging individual units assigned in the force flow -- work that majors should be doing -- instead of concentrating on the work that only the secretary can do.
By treating the military leadership as an impediment rather than the chieftains of a very successful organization, he unnecessarily alienated an important constituency for any president, especially in wartime. ... Military leaders typically want a wide margin of error in campaign plans, because they have a rich appreciation for how much can go wrong, how many elements come into play in unexpected ways. In his determination to show that agility had overcome quantity, Rumsfeld accepted an enormous amount of risk to achieve the president's goals. When military leaders tried to draw attention to the masked risk or increase force levels to reduce it, they were excoriated.
...And let us speak of command climate. Rumsfeld defends his constraints on the size of the force in Iraq by claiming the military didn't ask for more. That may well be true, but this was more than two years into Rumsfeld's tenure, in which he had promoted officers to top positions because they shared his vision of a transformation of warfare in which the judgment of ground combat officers was considered "industrial age thinking." After the punitive treatment of Shinseki, and promotion to top positions of "pliant" (James Kitfield's term) generals, the military might be forgiven thinking the civilian leadership didn't want to hear it.
...His "snowflakes" -- the personal queries from the secretary that came in abundant blizzards -- were a terrible way to manage a large organization. ... Good executives establish clear priorities for an organization; Rumsfeld ran DOD with scattershot directives that kept everyone off balance.
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