Where Rumsfeld Went Wrong

A talent and affinity for bureaucratic infighting pervaded Rumsfeld’s career, and ultimately degraded his performance as defense secretary. Eager to assert control over the massive Pentagon bureaucracy, he shut out views that contradicted his own.

Bradley Graham’s em>By His Own Rules< is a valuable, thorough and fair-minded look at the long career of Donald Rumsfeld, with particular emphasis on Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Pentagon in the Bush years. The story that emerges is that of an intelligent, hard-working, innovative, abrasive, blinkered and oddly indecisive secretary of defense, whose failings contributed to catastrophe in Iraq. Graham, a former Washington Post reporter, provides some insights into how Rumsfeld’s vast experience before becoming Bush’s defense secretary shaped his thinking in ways that would be problematic. For instance, a 1990s commission on missile threats that Rumsfeld headed got briefings from overly cautious CIA analysts averse to contemplating anything hypothetical (such as what Iran might do with rocket engines it reportedly had acquired). But the lesson Rumsfeld seems to have absorbed — that intelligence agencies must be pressured or circumvented regarding hidden WMD threats — is a dangerous one. A talent and affinity for bureaucratic infighting pervaded Rumsfeld’s career, and ultimately degraded his performance as defense secretary. Eager to assert control over the massive Pentagon bureaucracy, he shut out views that contradicted his own, such as Gen. Eric Shinseki’s concerns about how many troops might be needed in an occupied Iraq. Disdainful of State and other departments, Rumsfeld dragged his feet in interagency collaborations and became detached from non-military aspects of the Iraq situation. Indeed, a certain detachment even from military facts on the ground set in, as Rumsfeld focused on the wider, and rather abstract, need for military and DoD “transformation,” which he and a group of aides formally defined as “a process that shapes the changing nature of military competition and cooperation through new combinations of concepts, capabilities, people, processes, and organizations that exploit our nation’s advantages and protect against our asymmetric vulnerabilities to sustain our strategic position, contributing to peace and stability in the world.” Such an emphasis evokes the recent trend of companies striving to become “learning organizations” through techniques such as filing frequent reports on what went right or wrong and what was learned in some or another event. It can be useful, but it can also be a distraction from doing business, and might make an organization more rather than less bureaucratic amid a flood of memos and buzzwords. In practice, a key element of Rumsfeld’s “transformation” was pressing the military to make do with smaller numbers of forces, in expectations that technology would be more crucial than manpower in 21st-century wars. This idea is not necessarily without merit; it received a degree of vindication from early successes in Afghanistan. But it is not applicable to all wars, and in Iraq its limitations began to manifest as early as in the looting that occurred immediately after Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed. Rumsfeld often demanded that his subordinates rethink assumptions and display intellectual flexibility, but in crucial ways he failed to exhibit those virtues himself. Even as the situation in Iraq deteriorated sharply, Rumsfeld held fast to notions that U.S. troop levels there were adequate and that a larger force would be counterproductive in that it would curb Iraqi progress toward independence. Graham rightly describes as a “grave misjudgment” Rumsfeld’s lack of recognition by mid-2006 that a new strategy was needed. Just before that November’s election, Rumsfeld sent Bush a memo titled “Iraq – Illustrative New Courses of Action” that acknowledged that “what U.S. forces are doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.” However, after calling for a “major adjustment,” the memo went on to list various options that tended to be fairly minor. “The basic thrust,” Graham notes, “was to draw down U.S. troops and shift to an advisory mission.” Rumsfeld, be it noted, was not calling for a surge, but it mattered little anyway because while he was writing that memo, Bush was interviewing Robert Gates to be the next defense secretary. By His Own Rules is a long book that gives due recognition to Rumsfeld’s successes, in the Bush years and before. Most importantly, though, it contributes to a much-needed understanding of what went wrong.