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DONALD RUMSFELD: OLD MAN IN A HURRY

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shawa
CNO

Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004

Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2005 1:01 am Post subject: DONALD RUMSFELD: OLD MAN IN A HURRY

WOW!!
A very long article, but if you want to KNOW Donald Rumsfeld and what he's all about, this is a MUST READ!
An amazing, brilliant man with the guts to get it done!! A man in a hurry to accomplish a job that he estimated would take a full 8-10 years.

August 31, 2005
Donald Rumsfeld: Old Man in a Hurry
By Thomas P. M. Barnett

~SNIP~

An excerpt:

Quote:

THOSE ARE THE BASIC RULES, and there are no others. That is also a rule.

The Slurg has become the birthing room for something called the Joint Capability Integration and Development System. In plain English, the Slurg is the venue in which senior civilian officials and military officers have begun to engage in up-front comparisons of each service's acquisition strategies. That means head-to-head competition between programs in a rigorous environment that focuses on capabilities, not service shares. The Slurg makes the JCIDS ( jay -sids) possible by getting all the necessary players around the table and forcing a truly "joint" discussion: joint among the services, joint between the civilian and military sides of the house, and joint between the force provider (Pentagon) and the force consumer (Combatant Commands).

This is the Holy Grail of jointness, or the historical process of operational integration among the services that stretches back to 1986, when Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols Act in response to-among other things-the embarrassment of the 1983 invasion of Grenada, a comedy of interservice errors that could have resulted in the Bay of Pigs if there had been any competent enemies on the scene. Goldwater-Nichols sought to force greater integration and cooperation among the four services by diminishing the power of the service secretaries and increasing the power of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the various regional battle commanders. To a certain extent it's succeeded, as the four services now "fight joint" even if they don't "buy joint."

JCIDS, then, is the quest to create future weapons systems and platforms that are joint from the start, not service-specific capabilities that are later forced to adapt to one another, probably once a war is already underway. If jointness were a religion, then the concept of being "born joint" would be the equivalent of the Immaculate Conception-an article of pure faith.

The very secret Slurg is the Round Table of jointness. It is the altar of transformation. It is a very exclusive room. It will go down as the single biggest organizational legacy of Rumsfeld's reign.

RUMSFELD IS LEANING forward, almost standing up out of his chair, and he's talking about the ongoing experiment of Iraq. "We've got people out there who are so good, and they've got the guts to call audibles, and they do," he says. "And I think it's admirable. I mean, the idea that the president of the United States, the secretary of defense, or the combatant commander in Tampa could tell our people in Iraq or Afghanistan what they're supposed to do when they get up in the morning just isn't realistic. These soldiers and sailors and marines and airmen are so good, and their leadership is so good, that they are doing an enormously complex task the way it should be done. It's different in every part of that country. If [Commanding General] George Casey designed a template and dropped it down and said, 'Here's what each division should do . . . each brigade,' it wouldn't work! Because the situation is different in the north, in the south, in Baghdad. . . . We've got rural problems out west. So what he has to do is get very good people, give them the right kind of leadership, encourage them to be bold and to take risks, and to communicate back what they need, what they're doing, get ideas from others-and go out and do their best, and that's what they do."

So Donald Rumsfeld is not at war. In fact, a postwar feeling pervades Rumsfeld's office, and his focus has returned full-time to leaving a much different Pentagon in his wake. He has told those who need to know that he intends to stay until the end of the second Bush administration, and he's aiming to lock in the big changes he's setting in motion. If he had been around just one term, anyone could have reversed all of this with a few strokes of a pen. Now, well, it will take another Rumsfeld to un-Rumsfeld this Pentagon when he's done and out the door in January 2009.

"Change takes time," he says. "Any CEO in a corporation, you ask him what the rough amount of time to do it, and it's eight or ten years."

Now Rumsfeld is working the "gearbox" issues, as he likes to call them. He's gotten way down into the guts of the Pentagon's machinery, making changes that will redefine how things are planned, how people are employed, how resources are acquired, and how America fights and wins both the wars that lie ahead and the inevitable nation building that must follow. And he aims to make those changes permanent, because "you can get backsliding, but if you go down deep enough in this institution, where nobody notices and nobody sees it and nobody understands it and it's hard to figure out, and you get those things going right, they're going to go on for a long time. Once they're ingrained, they'll go on that way until somebody spends enough time, enough effort, to go in and readjust them down there. But you can't do it superficially along the top. It just doesn't happen."

To go along with all the other ongoing transformation, this gearbox approach of Rumsfeld's is producing two huge philosophical sea changes in the Pentagon that have implications for the entire United States government that will reach across the decades to come. First, the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review, to be released in the fall, will shift China from "near-peer competitor" to a rising power whose emergence we need to guide. It also will enshrine the notion that nation building is something the military does, finally reversing the long-standing Powell Doctrine to conform with what's happening in the real world, because dealing with failed states is a fact of life in a global war on terrorism, especially when terrorists seek sanctuary in them.

But perhaps most stunning are Rumsfeld's plans for something he calls the National Security Personnel System, which will radically redefine civilian and military service in the Defense Department, changing from a longevity-based system to a performance-based system. Already, radical new features of this plan have been field-tested in the Navy, where, in the past, so-called detailers told sailors where they were going on their next assignment-with little warning and like it or not. Eager to break that boneheaded tradition, the Navy is experimenting with an eBay-like online auction system in which individual servicemen and -women bid against one another for desired postings. As Admiral Vern Clark told me, "I've learned you can get away with murder if you call it a pilot program."

So Clark is pioneering a system by which, instead of sending people to places they don't want to go on a schedule that plays havoc with their home life, "they're going to negotiate on the Web for jobs. The decision's going to be made by the ship and the guy or gal. You know, we're going to create a whole new world here."

The plan is designed to save the services money and effort by reducing early departures from the ranks by people who just can't take it anymore. The Navy's so-called "slamming" rate, meaning the percentage of job transfers against a person's will, has hovered at 30 to 35 percent in recent years. That means the Navy has been pissing off one third of its personnel on a regular basis. Now, under this program, the slamming rate is down to less than one percent. More profoundly, Clark's pilot program has already spread to the other services, and in turn could well change the very nature of civil service throughout the United States government.

AFTER CONSIDERABLE time with the top-ranking civilian and military leaders of the Pentagon, a new picture of Donald Rumsfeld has emerged for me, and I now believe something that I would have thought preposterous before: There are no "Rumsfeld wars." Of course, he's integral to how the Pentagon has conducted these operations, and he deserves all the credit and blame any defense secretary naturally receives as a result. But they're not his wars, and they never were. And in that, critics of the war might have something. The rationales behind the Iraq war belonged to the departing neocons Wolfowitz and Feith (who took pains in an interview to lecture me on the correct usage of the word neocon). And of course the president.

Rumsfeld does not seek those badges of war because he does not understand why any SecDef would claim them. He is a technician, not a warrior; a businessman, not an ideologue. He sees his main job as taking care of every single move made up to the first shots being fired. He wants it lighter, faster, simpler, leaner. And he wants that whether or not you give him wars to wage. It just so happens that in his time there have been wars to wage.

The war decisions are somebody else's business. But once you give him those wars to wage, he will use them at will as his proving grounds, sending one force over, bringing another one back. Four armed services existed at the outset of the Rumsfeld era, but only one military force will remain when he's gone.............Cont'd

Read it all at:REAL CLEAR POLITICS
_________________
“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776)

dusty
Admiral

Joined: 27 Aug 2004
Posts: 1264
Location: East Texas

Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2005 2:00 am Post subject:

A lot of Americans have no idea what a great intellect Rumsfeld is. The absolute right man at the right time in the right job. History will back this statement up I believe. Dusty _________________ Left and Wrong are the opposite of Right!

GenrXr
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy

Joined: 05 Aug 2004
Posts: 1720
Location: Houston

Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2005 3:20 am Post subject:

dusty wrote:

A lot of Americans have no idea what a great intellect Rumsfeld is. The absolute right man at the right time in the right job.
History will back this statement up I believe.

Dusty

I agree and thanks shawa for another gem of a find.
_________________
"An activist is the person who cleans up the water, not the one claiming its dirty."
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing." Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Founder of Conservative Philosophy

markasass
Lt.Jg.

Joined: 22 Aug 2004
Posts: 131

Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2005 4:15 am Post subject:

GenrXr wrote:

dusty wrote:

A lot of Americans have no idea what a great intellect Rumsfeld is. The absolute right man at the right time in the right job.
History will back this statement up I believe.

Dusty

I agree and thanks shawa for another gem of a find.

Ditto. FWIW, this is yet another example of Bill O'Reilly opening up his big yap before he has all the necessary information. Just like he so ignorantly smeared and slimed the Swiftees, tacitly defended Rather in Memogate, and let Hanoi John get away with prevaricating murder, he's been calling for Rumsfeld's resignation or termination. As usual, at least as far as the military is concerned, BOR just doesn't get it and/or he seems too busy to learn the truth for himself.

PS: If you don't mind, I am going to forward BOR the referenced article on the great, powerful, and wonderful wizard of DoD. Perhaps it's not too late to teach this old dog, i.e., canis familiaris oreillyis, a new trick? LOL.
_________________

"Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. To all the people you can. As long as you ever can." - Wesley

DLI78
PO3

Joined: 10 Nov 2004
Posts: 273

Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2005 4:40 am Post subject:

Quote:

Now, under this program, the slamming rate is down to less than one percent. More profoundly, Clark's pilot program has already spread to the other services...

That is sad. What about tradition? The blindfold, the dart, the over-the-shoulder-toss in the general direction of the assignment dart board, and the inevitable call from your branch, "Oooh, bad luck, pal. Korea again."

Seriously, it sounds like Rumsfeld is doing right what FDR did right in WW2, which is set general policy and let the generals run the army.
_________________
DLI 78
Army Linguist
1978-1986

markasass
Lt.Jg.

Joined: 22 Aug 2004
Posts: 131

Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2005 5:00 am Post subject:

DLI78 wrote:

Quote:

Now, under this program, the slamming rate is down to less than one percent. More profoundly, Clark's pilot program has already spread to the other services...

Yeah, why not longevity over merit? After all, it's worked so well in academia? LOL.
_________________

"Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. To all the people you can. As long as you ever can." - Wesley

shawa
CNO

Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004

Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2005 7:13 am Post subject:

Excerpt from the article:

Quote:

And since 9/11, no one in Pentagon history has used people like Rumsfeld has, and he's broken more rules and requirements than anyone thought possible.

When the president wanted the Taliban dislodged in Afghanistan as quickly as possible after 9/11, Rumsfeld backed General Tommy Franks's quick-and-dirty plan using an unprecedented mix of Special Forces, precision bombing, and CIA paramilitaries to exploit the on-the-ground capabilities of the anti-Taliban Afghani warlords and their forces. That experiment proved to be an eye-opener for Rumsfeld regarding the potential of Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and he quickly anointed the Tampa-based command as the lead Combatant Command in the global war on terrorism, taking what had always been a bastard-stepchild command that supported other commands and instantly turning it into one that now receives support from others. In the Pentagon, this was profound, like the rich father designating his chauffeur's son as his new heir.

By doing so, Rumsfeld not only transformed the role of SOCOM, he designated it as a cannibalizing agent within the U. S. military, saying to the rest of the armed forces: Go be more like them! In the summer of 2003, Rumsfeld skipped over an entire generation of army senior generals to bring a four-star "snake eater" out of retirement to serve as his army chief of staff. Plucking General Pete Schoomaker from his retirement ranch nearly three years after he left the service as the boss of Special Operations Command was a serious kick in the pants to a hidebound Army that was struggling to transform itself under General Eric Shinseki, who, despite coining the term transformation, had fallen out of favor with Rumsfeld for, as one senior aide put it, becoming too fixated on improving the Army's efficiency in combat without questioning the relevance of the capabilities he was developing, as in, Great force, wrong war. Schoomaker was down in Texas meeting with one of his ranching partners (everybody in this crowd, it seems, has a ranch) when he got a call on his cell phone. At first he thought it was a joke. "You've got to be kidding," he told Rumsfeld. "I'm not interested."

"That's not a good enough answer," Rumsfeld replied. "You've at least got to come talk."

So Schoomaker drove twenty-one hours straight back to his home in Tampa and then immediately flew up to Washington and spent the weekend with Rumsfeld. "By the time we got through talking . . . you get to a point where it's your duty to do things," says Schoomaker. "It's totally illogical. My wife, she thinks it's nuts." Now Schoomaker is redesigning the Army's century-old division structure (fifteen to twenty thousand troops each) into something far more flexible and modular, or what he calls "brigade units of action" (thirty-five hundred to four thousand troops each). That's eighteen divisions, a cold-war structure, a structure for fighting the Russians, morphing into almost eighty brigades to face new enemies, brigades that are interchangeable among the active-duty force, the Army Reserves, and the National Guard. This is nothing less than returning the Army to its frontier days of cavalry-sized field units and leaving behind the division-driven history of two World Wars and the entire cold war. In a generation, the divisions will remain only as ceremonial vestiges of a type of war that no longer exists. That's the idea anyway.

In return, Schoomaker made Rumsfeld promise that there'd be no divisions cut (so the manpower pool wouldn't change) and that he'd buy the general some "head room" with thirty thousand extra active-duty troops. Rumsfeld agreed, even as he knew he'd catch hell from Congress for having to admit the Army needed more men as the insurgency heated up in Iraq in the summer of 2003. After all, Eric Shinseki's parting shot to Rumsfeld had been to testify that the Pentagon had vastly underestimated the number of ground forces needed to secure postwar Iraq. Schoomaker told me that Rumsfeld went to the president directly on that one. And to emphasize the importance of getting the people right before talking about the weapons, Schoomaker got Rumsfeld's promise to push back the production of the Army's superexpensive, all-encompassing Future Combat Systems to the latter years of the second administration to give the general additional time to boot up the new brigade structure. Rumsfeld agreed without question. In the Building, this is providing what they call "top cover." Get past the wire-brushing, bond with the guy, and he'll go to the mattresses for you.

This sparked my interest.
So Rummy was so impressed by SOCOM that it became the LEAD command in the GWOT, and is now RECEIVING support from all other commands. And he goes and gets Pete Schoomaker to be Army Chief of Staff.
Looks like Rummy knows a good man when he sees one! The former head of SOCOM.
It was General Schoomaker who set up the Able Danger Unit back when he was head of SOCOM. He retired at the end of 2000, and Able Danger was shut down shortly after he retired.

Connection?? Hmmm. Just another tidbit to put in my Able Danger file.
_________________
“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776)

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