Don’t miss this important David Von Drehle/Washington Post article that provides a decent overview of the reorganization of the Defense Department under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during preparations for the Iraq War. This is an important issue that has been festering since the Reagan Administration and has major domestic and foreign policy implications (previous posts on the issue are here). However, the issue tends to fly somewhat beneath the radar screen for various reasons, not the least of which is the depth of the issue and the overshadowing effect of related issues, such as detainee policy.
Into this mini-vacuum of analysis, Mr. Von Drehle does a good job of framing the issue:

Diving in, he found his marching orders in a speech given by candidate Bush at the Citadel in 1999, calling for a “transformation” of the great but lumbering U.S. military. The Cold War force was built around big foreign bases and heavy weapons “platforms,” such as tank columns and aircraft carriers. With the Cold War over, Bush said, America should use the chance to “skip a generation” of weaponry and tactics to seize the future of warfare ahead of everyone else. A transformed military would be lightly armored, rapidly deployable, invisible to radar, guided by satellites. It would fight with Special Operations troops and futuristic “systems” of weaponry, robots alongside soldiers, all linked by computers. This force would be unmatchable in combat, Bush predicted, but it should not be used for the sort of “nation-building” that characterized Pentagon deployments to Haiti and the Balkans under Clinton.

Little of this was entirely new. Since Vietnam, Pentagon leaders — including the younger Rumsfeld — had been searching for more efficient, less entangling, ways to project U.S. power. Even the Army, perhaps the most hidebound of the services, had begun a complete reorganization to make itself easier to deploy. “Some things had been done since the end of the Cold War,” Rumsfeld conceded in the interview.
But the Pentagon is the world’s biggest, richest bureaucracy, with an annual budget larger than the entire economies of all but about a dozen nations — bigger than Switzerland or Sweden. The leviathan managed to shrug off most deep and lasting changes. Thus, when Rumsfeld took office in 2001, he recalled, “we were located pretty much where we had been located, geographically, around the world. We still had the same processes and systems and approaches.”
Some of the most important changes on Rumsfeld’s menu were also the toughest, because of the entrenched interests involved. Weapons programs and bases provide jobs in nearly every congressional district. Republican or Democrat doesn’t matter when it comes time to protect those jobs, so the programs and the bases endure even after the strategy behind them has expired. Some defense secretaries quail before this status quo, but not Rumsfeld. Shortly after taking office, he began questioning continued funding for the Crusader supercannon, an artillery piece designed to destroy Soviet tank columns that no longer existed, and the Comanche helicopter, another Cold War relic. Such efforts made him a hero in the military think tanks but earned him a lot of enemies on the Hill. By late summer 2001, Washington was buzzing with rumors that Rumsfeld would soon resign.
Then came September 11.

Read the entire article, which Mr. Von Drehle will be discussing today on washingtonpost.com/liveonline at noon, Houston time.
The Pentagon is a notoriously tradition-bound organization where new ideas that do not come through the normal chain of command are viewed by Pentagon generals with skepticism. Nevertheless, over the past 25 years, the Pentagon has increasingly embraced intellectual ideas from non-conventional sources. For example, Andrew Marshall in the late 1970’s and early 80’s argued from an obscure Pentagon office that wars could be revolutionized by precision bombs, unmanned planes and wireless communications that would allow the American military to destroy enemies from a distance. Similarly, the work of the late Pentagon iconoclast John Boyd and his acolytes in revolutioning the way in which the American military approaches war in the late 20th and early 21st century has been well-chronicled in Robert Coram’s book, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (Little, Brown 2002).
Consequently, it is important to remember that things are not always as they seem on the surface in regard to the American military. For example, the Pentagon brass often fought tooth and nail against the innovative ideas of people such as Boyd, Marshall, and now Rumsfeld, primarily because their ideas often ran contrary to the sacred cow military appropriations that the Pentagon hierarchy aggressively protect. On the other hand, you will not learn from the superficial media accounts that it took leaders such as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell over the past two decades to open up and accept recommendations from lower Pentagon sources such as Boyd and Marshall that have revolutionized and dramatically improved America’s ability to conduct war in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq. But for the willingness of leaders such as Messrs. Rumsfeld, Cheney and Powell to listen to these unconventional sources of information, the traditional Pentagon brass would have squelched those innovative ideas before they would have ever seen the light of day.
For an interesting discussion of the WaPo article and these issues, check out this Gregory Djerejian post and related comments over at The Belgravia Dispatch. For another interesting strategic view of Rumsfeld’s conduct of the war against Islamic fascism, check out this TigerHawk post.