Goodbye Don

Don Rumsfeld’s got to go! Democrats, Republicans, retired generals, and girl scouts everywhere are screaming for Don’s head. Based on his performance over the past five years, I add my voice – electronically - to the chorus. That Rumsfeld should be dismissed is the easy part; who would replace him is the question? The Secretary of Defense job is the most difficult in government and possibly in the world, and even defining the required characteristics of the candidates is very difficult.

First, the candidate must be very intelligent, and the people selected for the post since it was established during the Truman administration have met that test to one degree or another. Intellectually, it is a far more demanding than any other cabinet post and it requires years of preparation. Based on their life experiences, most past secretaries appear to have been ready to assume the post.

Secondly, the candidates must be strong enough to maintain civilian control over the senior military officers who advise them. Here the picture is a little murkier since grading the incumbents is more subjective and times have changed. The officers coming out of W.W.II seem to have been larger than life and far more swashbuckling than the bureaucrats who have succeeded them in the technical world of today’s military.

My all time example of an officer who had strong opinions and required significant oversight was Gen. Curtis Lemay who rose to become Air Force Chief of Staff. As I recall his bellicose advice coming out of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he must have been a difficult man for any politician to face down. Certainly the last several Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have gone out of their way to constantly restate the military commitment to honor civilian oversight.

General MacArthur was the last senior military man to seriously challenge his orders, but President Truman was up to the task of setting that situation straight by relieving the general of his command of allied forces in Korea, not that there wasn’t political hell to pay for it, including possible loss of the presidency in 1952.

That leads me to discuss two secretaries whose strength is undisputed, Robert S. McNamara, and the present incumbent, Donald Rumsfeld. Both men occupied the position in times of great national and international stress, Vietnam and Iraq. Out of both of these difficult periods came complaints that the military had not pushed hard enough on the civilian overlords.

A casual and personal review of the characteristics of McNamara and Rumsfeld leads me to think that both men were confident in their intellect to the point of hubris. McNamara was positively brilliant and was convinced that he could develop information systems that captured the situation in Vietnam and the world that gave him insight not available to those who were not his equals. So it is with Rumsfeld, a man of supreme intellectual confidence and one who appears unable to bear the loss of a single debating point with his subordinates or the media.

In reviewing the list of DOD secretaries it is difficult to find anyone whose combination of brilliance and arrogance is up to that of McNamara or Rumsfeld. While others such as Harold Brown and William Perry were clearly brilliant, they seem in retrospect not to have been so completely overbearing in their approaches to subordinates. James Schlesinger, too, was a brilliant occupant of the office and was known to not suffer fools gladly – and cast a rather broad definition of those in the category. But these men were in office during times that did not call for them to dominate those in the Department such as those that faced McNamara and Rumsfeld.

So, while Rumsfeld is certainly getting close to the end of his tenure at the Pentagon, the world situation since 9/11 which led to the events in Iraq and Afghanistan and the problems looming with Iran and North Korea, the president should give serious consideration to the person he chooses to replace the DOD Secretary. Clearly, an individual so brilliant as to intimidate the officer corps and with the hubris to pay little attention to the members would be a poor and possibly disastrous choice.

We’re no longer facing down the Kremlin and the philosophy of mutually assured destruction has taken on an altogether new meaning as we face the amorphous threat of such organizations as al Qaeda and its suicidal agents. A person with the sense and competence of Frank Carlucci or the political savvy of Melvin Laird, Harold Brown, or William Cohen would settle the nerves of the girls scouts – mine too.

Blog on!

Wild Bill