Reagan Administration Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger died Monday at the age of 88 after a short illness. Weinberger is best remembered for a combative style that likely had something to do with his indictment in the Iran-contra affair (for which he was later pardoned), but his impact on the American armed services is his far more important legacy.
At the time that Weinberger took over the Defense Department in 1980, the Pentagon was still in its post-Vietnam War funk that was exacerbated by the malaise of the Carter Administration. Although the Pentagon is a notoriously tradition-bound institution where new ideas that do not come through the normal chain of command are viewed by top Pentagon brass with skepticism, Weinberger developed a culture at the Defense Deparment that 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).
The Pentagon brass often fought tooth and nail against the innovative ideas of people such as Boyd and Marshall — and continues to do so today with regard to Donald Rumsfeld’s ongoing reorganization of the Defense Department — primarily because those new ideas often ran contrary to the sacred cow military appropriations that the Pentagon brass traditionally protect. However, Weinberger was instrumental in instituting the cultural changes at the Pentagon that altered that institutional mentality, and leaders such as Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell over the past two decades opened up and accepted recommendations from non-traditional Pentagon sources that have revolutionized and dramatically improved America’s ability to conduct war in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
But for Cap Weinberger’s leadership, the traditional Pentagon brass would have likely squelched those innovative ideas before they would have ever seen the light of day. That is not what you will read about in the traditional obituaries of Weinberger, but it may be his most important contribution as a governmental servant.