Donald Rumsfeld Defense Department Established: 1947 2003 Budget: $364.6 billion Full-time Employees: 2,041,038 Rumsfeld's Salary: $171,900 Web Site: www.defense.gov Overall Grade: B+ Back To Overview And Other Cabinet Grades

National Journal
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Friday, Jan. 24, 2003

Donald Henry Rumsfeld, at the halfway point of President Bush's first term, is already the most controversial secretary of Defense since Robert Strange McNamara took over the Pentagon in 1961 and tried to change its course in radical ways.

Like McNamara, Rumsfeld, 70, fervently believes he has a mandate from the president to change strategy, tactics and hardware, whether the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Congress like it or not. And like McNamara, Rumsfeld came to office from corporate America and was determined to impose its practices on the world's largest enterprise, the Department of Defense.

Both secretaries ran into heavy seas early on in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill as they ordered course changes. Rumsfeld commissioned a whole series of against-the-wind studies on defense issues in his first months, turned to a couple of outsiders -- a retired admiral and a former Army secretary-for advice, and kept the Joint Chiefs at a distance. And he offended a lot of people in the process. "I applaud what he is trying to do, but absolutely abhor the way he is trying to do it," said one high-ranking flag officer of Rumsfeld's exclusionary management style. The officer added that some members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that Rumsfeld's dismissiveness of the senior brass stems from his conviction that generals and admirals ran around their civilian bosses during the Clinton years. Rumsfeld, as a result, supposedly felt that he had to reassert civilian control over them.

Again, as with McNamara, military leaders resented being elbowed aside by Rumsfeld's civilian whiz kids. Their nemesis in McNamara's time was Alain C. Enthoven, Mr. Systems Analysis. Now it is the bristly -- many say arrogant -- Stephen Cambone, who, as Rumsfeld's director of program analysis and evaluation, fills Enthoven's old post.

The way Rumsfeld wrote off Congress in his first two years -- when he refused, in the view of many lawmakers, to tell them what he was thinking and doing before he did it -- brought roars of protest from senators and representatives. Predictions abounded through most of 2001 that Rumsfeld would resign or be fired because he had so antagonized Congress.

But Bush stood behind his man at the Pentagon. And then came Sept. 11 -- a cataclysmic event, which needed a reassurer and explainer. Rumsfeld became that person, Bush's man out on the point in the war against terrorism.

Before Sept. 11, who would have guessed that the traditionally close-to-the-vest Rumsfeld would become the administration's TV star? But there he was, explaining better than anyone else how and why the administration was fighting terrorism all over the world. Bush, upon learning how popular Rumsfeld had become with female viewers in TV land, even called his Defense secretary "Rumstud."

In managing the war against terrorism, Rumsfeld has earned his stripes. The war in Afghanistan --although far from perfect because senior leaders of Al Qaeda remain at large -- was, on the whole, an excellent and often creative performance in which the military broke out of old modes of thinking, often at Rumsfeld's urging. American forces waged a short and successful campaign, overthrowing a government in two months with just handfuls of U.S. troops on the ground. Those U.S. Special Forces troops, who galloped around Afghanistan on horseback with laptop computers calling in bomber strikes on the Taliban, have become a poster image for the administration. And Rumsfeld, with others' help, has brought about the biggest changes in two generations in U.S. strategic policy: dumping the Antiballistic Missile Treaty; winning unprecedented money for missile defense; and helping to make thinkable what long has been unthinkable -- talk of new kinds of nuclear weapons and of perhaps using them pre-emptively. The wisdom of those policies is debatable, but Rumsfeld's role in bringing them about is real.

Make no mistake: Rumsfeld's relations with Congress and many in his own building are fair to poor, but his leadership on the war and on policy pull him up to a B+.

Inside Influence Grade: B
Rumsfeld has an inside track at the White House through Vice President Cheney, who recommended his friend and former White House colleague for the Pentagon post. Adding to his influence is that Rumsfeld's conservative views on most defense issues conform to Bush's. And Rumsfeld has won many internal battles with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell over some of the big issues in defense and foreign policy. But he hasn't, of course, won them all.

Rumsfeld, according to White House officials, argued against putting United Nations inspectors back in Iraq before taking any action against Saddam Hussein. Powell, however, won over the president on inspections and the need for a coalition approach to warfare.

Rumsfeld has been influential at the White House in arguing against the ABM Treaty. He's also been influential in arguing for space warfare, including the quick deployment of a thin missile defense; in telling the world loud and clear that the United States stands ready to wage pre-emptive wars to disarm other nations, perhaps even using nuclear weapons to do it; and in keeping U.S. troops on a tight leash in Kabul rather than deploying them all over Afghanistan to keep the peace.

The Defense secretary overcame early Office of Management and Budget opposition to making big increases in Bush's military budgets. His fights with Powell were, and are, for real and are not a figment of the press's imagination, according to administration officials who have witnessed them firsthand. But win or lose, Rumsfeld has stayed on message and retained his influence in Bush's inner circle. All of this adds up to the above-average grade of B for inside influence.

Hill Clout Grade: C
Although his performance since Sept. 11 has stopped Washington's political vultures from circling over him, Rumsfeld is still at odds with Congress. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle fault Rumsfeld -- a former congressman himself -- for ignoring the clubby approach to politicians, for not keeping them briefed during crises, for not telling them in advance before major decisions are made, for not asking for enough money, and for not doing enough to modernize, and "transform," the military for the different challenges of the 21st century.

Asked earlier this month to appraise Rumsfeld's performance, Sen. Joseph R. Biden, D-Del., the outgoing chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, responded, "I don't think he has much regard for Congress. People respect him, but Powell has much better relations with the Congress than he does. I don't think he and Cheney believe Congress is a particularly important institution, and act accordingly. I mean that sincerely."

Rumsfeld drew praise last year for asking for a big increase in the fiscal 2003 Defense budget. But Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., who took over the chairmanship of the House Armed Services Committee this month, and Rep. Norman Dicks, D-Wash., a senior member of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, are at the forefront of those in Congress charging that the Defense secretary has not fulfilled Bush's campaign promise to modernize the American military.

Dicks adds that Rumsfeld and company do not consult him and other senior lawmakers overseeing the Pentagon nearly enough. "The Reagan administration had our committee over there (to the Pentagon) once a month for breakfast," Dicks said. "This administration is more aloof. It isn't that anybody dislikes anybody. But they're not laying out what they're going to do." Several senators agreed, including Republican subcommittee chairmen.

"I am discouraged, I am frustrated and I am angry," said Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, over not being consulted about Rumsfeld's 2001 decision to retire 33 B-1 bombers, 18 of which were stationed in Kansas and Georgia. Rumsfeld later apologized, telling Roberts, "There is no question but that it was not handled well."

In a recent letter, Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, chairman of Senate Appropriations, and Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, D-Hawaii, protested the decision to postpone funding two of the Army's recently developed lighter and faster brigades that feature new-style wheeled armored vehicles. The powerful senators said that the Pentagon action "is yet another example of the disregard of the Congress, and the existing law, by the senior leadership of the Defense Department."

Sen. John W. Warner, R-Va., chairman of Armed Services, said that Rumsfeld messed up by keeping Congress in the dark last year about his decision to cancel the Army's Crusader artillery systems. "Our guys went ballistic about it," Warner told National Journal. "We cannot go through another perturbation like that with the Congress."

Warner also fumed behind closed doors recently about not being briefed adequately by Rumsfeld on Pentagon policies on Iraq and North Korea, according to an op-ed column by Robert Novak that the senator would neither confirm nor deny. "I will not tolerate a continuation of what's been going on the last two years," Novak quoted Warner as telling White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr.

Despite the recent mobilization of Senate Republicans to defend publicly Rumsfeld's relationship with Congress, it remains no better than average, rating a C.

Political Imperatives Grade: A
Voters wondered after Sept. 11, with a relatively untested president in the White House, whether they were safe from even-deadlier terrorist attacks. But Rumsfeld became the national equivalent of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in reassuring the nation week after week in clear, measured, we're-in-charge words that Bush, the commander in chief, had a Pentagon that was doing everything possible to prevent another attack and to chase down the terrorists who had staged the first one. The political gain here was huge for the administration.

Rumsfeld has also kept the conservative defense hawks on board with his quick wins of two of their key demands: scrapping the ABM Treaty and going full-speed ahead on missile defense. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., then-chairman of Armed Services, and other arms controllers found themselves shouting down a well in arguing with Rumsfeld against deploying a missile defense before tests had proved it would work. Rumsfeld, who as a civilian had headed a commission that studied the missile threat to the United States, marshaled his arguments and helped drown out the doves.

Before Sept. 11, the idea of announcing to the world that the United States might attack a nation-in advance, even possibly with new kinds of nukes, to disarm an enemy of its weapons of mass destruction -- would have drawn howls of protest. The United States, after all, had denounced Israel's pre-emptive attack against an Iraqi nuclear plant in 1981. But thanks in part to Rumsfeld's policy arguments, the deep wounds of Sept. 11 and the Defense secretary's successful push to bring a war against Saddam Hussein to the top of the Bush agenda, this nation has a controversial strategic doctrine that features pre-emptive war.

In a further irony, the war against terrorism also blunted criticism of Rumsfeld's flagging efforts to "transform" and modernize the military-one of the political imperatives Bush gave him before Sept. 11. Rumsfeld came in with the widespread expectation that he would cancel many multibillion-dollar weapons designed during the Cold War, an expectation candidate Bush had raised in his campaign speeches. But with minor exceptions, Rumsfeld hasn't done that. He has, however, used the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda to bolster his argument that the Pentagon needs a new way to wage war. Rumsfeld has encouraged the use of unmanned weapons like the Predator, a remote-controlled spy- and attack plane, in the Afghan war, and the U.S. has relied more on the mobility and stealth of Special Forces and precision weapons than on conventional forces. These changes are helping him project a sense of transformation.

Finally, Rumsfeld and the Pentagon's fairly seamless, and very public, escalation of military pressure on Saddam Hussein through the steady march of 150,000 troops and millions of tons of war materiel to the Middle East is no small feat, and is a classic threat of force to achieve political ends. For all of these reasons, score Rumsfeld an A on political imperatives.

Running The Department Grade: C
Rumsfeld, again like McNamara before him, has been throwing out whole shelves of Pentagon heirlooms, including old war plans, command-and-control arrangements, and organizational structures. That, in itself, is not all bad. But in doing all of this housecleaning, said a senior Pentagon executive, Rumsfeld and his team have not been civil. And their behavior has undercut their effectiveness and polarized the building.

Tending to three huge Pentagon budgets at once, as Rumsfeld has to do -- spending the last one, selling the current one and planning the next one -- is a job hard enough to overwhelm any Defense secretary. But if a Defense secretary cannot harness the building-the civilian bureaucrats, the military leaders, and especially the Joint Chiefs and their staff -- then the whole thing can run off course. "You have to strategically lead the building," said the senior executive. "Some of the senior people on the Rumsfeld team still haven't mastered the budgetary process or the regular dialogue you have to have with the uniformed military leaders and the leadership of the Congress. And the continuous dialogue has got to be two ways. I give Rumsfeld a C grade for running the building, because of his awkwardness in the budget."

Loren Thompson, a defense industry consultant who heads the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., and keeps in close touch with Pentagon civilians and military officers, said, "Rumsfeld's management style has been too exclusionary. The key decisions tend to be made in too small a circle. His team has yet to come up with a good management model for the building -- one that would allow stable and continuous oversight of key issues. There seems to be an ad hoc quality to things."

A flag officer no longer working at the Pentagon, but still plugged tightly into it through almost daily contact with generals and other leaders, says that there really are two Don Rumsfelds -- "Mr. Outside and Mr. Inside."

On "Mr. Outside, I give him high marks," said the flag officer. "He's very persuasive on Television. He comes across as a take-charge guy who knows what he's doing. He has the confidence-building ability that [former Defense Secretary Caspar W.] Weinberger had."

But "Mr. Inside" is not so good, said the officer. Rumsfeld has given too much power to a few civilians whom the military doesn't like -- particularly Steve Cambone, whom the flag officer described as "a very intelligent, abrasive son of a bitch." Rumsfeld "won't let the armed services play in his game."

Moreover, all of the services resent the fact that Rumsfeld doesn't take their advice, doesn't like opposition, and "tends to appoint as his senior military advisers people who won't buck him. It appears to me he doesn't want a take-charge military guy," said the flag officer. "He wants a guy who rolls his way. And that's what he selected." The current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the vice chairman, the officer said, are not the kind of men to stand up to Rumsfeld the way Colin Powell did when he was Joint Chiefs chairman. "Colin Powell would disagree with the secretary, when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He had some knock-down, drag-out fights with the Defense secretary and, I'm sure, the president. And you need guys like that."

The fact that Rumsfeld has alienated many in the building he commands and has not gotten his hands around the budget process gives him a C for his running of the department.

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