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Jewish World Review Sept. 27, 2005 / 23 Elul, 5765 Go, Rummy, go — home By Jack Kelly
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
It saddens me to write these words, because I respect and admire him so.
But it's time for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to move on.
Rummy, on balance, has been a terrific secretary of defense.
Rumsfeld's efforts to reform a baroque, wasteful, and frequently corrupt
Pentagon procurement process have been heroic.
What Rumsfeld has done to seize the high ground in space, and to advance
ballistic missile defense will benefit this nation for decades to come.
Rumsfeld shook the military out of Cold War thinking and an obsolescent Cold
War basing structure. He has been the driving force behind a long overdue
and badly needed transformation.
And those of us in the heartland will always fondly remember Rummy for
demonstrating so vividly, in their interchanges in the early stages of the
Iraq war, that the Pentagon press corps is "stuck on stupid."
But the balance is shifting. Rumsfeld has always had flaws (as do we all),
and his flaws have caught up with his many virtues.
My concerns about Rumsfeld are both stylistic and substantive.
Rumsfeld's management of the department of defense has been highlighted by
two techniques — "wire brushing" and "snowflakes" — that have long since
passed the point of diminishing returns.
"Giving someone the wire brush means chewing them out, typically in a way
that's demeaning to their stature," explained Thomas Barnett in a favorable
profile of Rumsfeld in Esquire in August. "It's pinning their ears back,
throwing out question after question you know they can't answer correctly
and then attacking every single syllable they toss up from their defensive
crouch. It's verbal bullying at its best."
"Wire brushing" was at first arguably necessary to shake generals and
admirals out of parochial service concerns and Cold War modes of thinking,
but it is inherently disrespectful of general officers, the most competent
and dedicated public servants we have.
Another characteristic of Rumsfeld's management style are memoranda asking
pointed questions to which subordinates are supposed to drop everything in
order to respond. There are so many of these that people in the Pentagon
refer to them as "snowflakes."
The sheer volume of "snowflakes" makes all management in the Pentagon crisis
management. This is exhausting, hard on the morale of subordinates, and
detrimental to long range planning. Not even Eskimos can tolerate
"snowflakes" every single day.
Rumsfeld is almost always the smartest man in any room he enters. The
problem is, he is too well aware of this.
In this way, Rumsfeld reminds me of General Douglas MacArthur, a gifted
military man too well aware of his own gifts. In the end, he accomplished
less than Dwight Eisenhower, a man of more modest (though still substantial)
gifts, but who was modest about them.
There is another similarity between MacArthur and Rumsfeld. MacArthur chose
for his closest aides sycophants more noted for their loyalty to the Great
Man than for their abilities. To the limited extent that Rumsfeld takes
advice, he takes it mostly from a small coterie of intellectuals whose
combined military experience is zero, and whose management experience is not
much greater.
Rumsfeld was a terrific CEO in the private sector, but this, too, is
sometimes a problem in the Pentagon. In business, efficiency and
effectiveness overlap so much they are virtually synonyms.
This isn't true in the military, where efficiency is often the enemy of
effectiveness. It's efficient to use just enough force to accomplish what
you need to do. But that's not what's effective in war. If your enemy
shows up with a knife, bring a gun. If he has a gun, bring a howitzer,
preferably two.
On the substantive level, I don't think Rummy "gets" ground warfare. He was
hugely wrong — and "wire brushing" victim Gen. Eric Shinseki completely
right — about the number of troops required to pacify Iraq. Still, he
persists in trying to fight the war with too few troops.
In a war that's being fought almost entirely by the Army and Marine Corps,
this is a big failing. Army officers think Rumsfeld has it in for them. I
don't think that is true. But when a perception is as widespread as this
one is, it becomes a reality.
Rumsfeld has, on balance, been a great secretary of defense. But the longer
he remains in office, the less likely it is that he'll be remembered that
way.
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© 2005, Jack Kelly |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
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