An op-ed in the Washington Times, typically fairly conservative, from Jack Kelly.

Washington Times
September 28, 2005
Pg. 16

A Strategic Exit?

By Jack Kelly

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. On balance, he has been a terrific secretary of defense.

Mr. Rumsfeld's efforts to reform a baroque, wasteful, and frequently corrupt Pentagon procurement process have been heroic . . .

Mr. 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 . . .

But the balance is shifting. Mr. Rumsfeld has always had flaws (as do we all), and his flaws have caught up with his many virtues.

My concerns about Mr. Rumsfeld are both stylistic and substantive. Mr. 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 Mr. 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 the Rumsfeld 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" . . .

Mr. Rumsfeld is almost always the smartest man in any room he enters. The problem is, he is too well aware of this . . .

Mr. 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 . . .

Substantively, 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 Mr. Rumsfeld has it in for them. I don't think that is true. But such a widespread perception becomes a reality . . .

Mr. 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.

Would the Pentagon--and the SysAdmin force--do better with somebody beyond Rumsfeld? Very possibly. But given the overall bias of the military and the Bush Administration in general, the far greater likelihood is that we'd get a reactionary type who would pull the military back from such operations, promising only the warfighting focus.

Rumsfeld does have his faults, but he's less likely to do harm in his final months than somebody else brought in to play caretaker til the end of this administration. The backsliding from the Big War crowd would predominate in his absence, making it all the harder for the Rumsfeld-after-next to go seriously long in creating the SysAdmin function.