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Foreign Affairs
A Tale of Two Secretaries
By Eliot A. Cohen
Eliot A. Cohen is Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and a book reviewer for Foreign Affairs. He is the author, most recently, of Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime.
The Great Transformation
It takes remarkably little time for a Washington witticism to become a cliche. Such has been the case recently with the quip that Donald Rumsfeld may not have been a very good secretary of defense, but he is a remarkable secretary of war.
In early September 2001, the Defense Department looked to be in poor shape. Since Rumsfeld had taken over, there had been much talk of "defense transformation" — the successor term for the "revolution in military affairs," a supposedly new way of waging war — but little evidence of it. Senior military officers, excluded from early studies arranged by the new secretary, grumbled to the press that the Bush administration was treating them even worse than the Clinton administration had. This discontent may have reflected naive expectations that the Republicans would show up with genial smiles and open wallets, but the friction was real — as was the irritation of many on Capitol Hill and in the press who were put off by Rumsfeld's caustic style.
A planned $18 billion increase in the defense budget, meanwhile, most of it earmarked for personnel costs and not envisioned as part of a series of further increases, fell far short of what many felt was needed to make up for the shortfalls of the previous several years. Difficult decisions such as the cancellations of major weapon systems appeared necessary yet were not forthcoming. In the works was a Quadrennial Defense Review that spoke of shifting away from a narrowly defined set of two major contingencies as the chief planning construct for the Pentagon, but there did not seem to be much of a link between words and programs.
Then came September 11. From the moment the secretary dashed out of the burning Pentagon to rescue wounded subordinates, perceptions of his leadership reversed. In a time of war, Rumsfeld's disagreeable brusqueness appeared as refreshing honesty; his uncomfortably hard edge became the kind of resolution required of a leader; his willingness to badger his generals was not an absence of diplomacy but a firm hand on the reins. From the object of polite derision at cocktail parties, he became the hero of satirical skits on Saturday Night Live. For the armed forces fighting the war on terrorism, meanwhile, money was suddenly no object. Plans for this year's defense budget increase shot to nearly $80 billion, and talk of hard choices was put off.
The jape about the two secretaries reflects a certain truth, one borne out by historical experience: the great war ministers of the past, such as Abraham Lincoln's ferocious secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, would rarely have succeeded in peacetime. But to understand defense policy as merely a function of personality would be inadequate. The pre-9ffi11 frustrations emerged not so much because of Rumsfeld's personal style as because of the inherent difficulties in guiding a behemoth such as the Defense Department onto a new course. And the post-9ffi11 amity obscures the tough questions that remain on the table: Is the Pentagon headed for . . .