Donald Rumsfeld, who was the youngest, oldest, and possibly most dangerous secretary of defense in American history, passed away Wednesday at the age 88.He took the job at 43, and stayed for just over a year under President Gerald Ford. His first stint was not without consequences. His second term, which lasted six more years under President George W. Bush, ended with his firing at the age of 74. He was partially responsible for the war on Iraq and for its terrible conduct that resulted in thousands of deaths, including over 4,400 American casualties, and the destabilization in the Middle East.AdvertisementEight retired U.S. Generals used the term Abysmal in a letter signed in 2006 calling for Rumsfeld's resignation. Rumsfeld did write Bush a resignation letter one day before the midterm elections. This was in anticipation of the Democrats taking control of both houses of Congress due to the unpopularity of the wars. Bush accepted the resignation the next day.AdvertisementAdvertisementRumsfeld was a skilled bureaucratic infighter for most of his career. It all began in 1963 when he was elected as the first Republican congressman from Illinois. On one of his secret tapes President Richard Nixon refers to Rumsfeld as a ruthless little tyrant (Nixon intended it as high praise). Henry Kissinger once called Rumsfeld "the most ruthless man that I have ever met" (a statement he no doubt used with envy).AdvertisementNixon hired Rumsfeld in 1970 to first run the office for economic opportunity, then to be ambassador to NATO and then to serve as White House counsellor, and then to become his chief of staff. Rumsfeld hired Richard Cheney, a former congressional aide to serve as his assistant. Both of their positions were strengthened when Nixon resigned. Ford had been close friends with Rumsfeld during his time in Congress. Rumsfeld and Cheney managed to get Kissinger out his White House job of national security advisor and turned Fordand Republican Partyagainst dtente with Soviets. This was likely the reason for Kissinger's tactical admiration as well as strategic hostility.Rumsfeld made a fortune as the CEO of Searle Pharmaceuticals and two other companies after Ford's defeat in 1976. Rumsfeld returned to defense policy in the 1990s and was a member of a few commissions. At the end of the decade, the most important panel assessed North Korea's capability to build missiles. It concluded that the CIA had gravely underestimated the threat. Rumsfeld was George W. Bush's first choice for CIA director after his election. Bush's original choice for defense secretary Dan Coats failed to pass the interview because he was not sufficiently enthusiastic about missile-defense. Cheney, now Bush's vice president-elect suggested Rumsfeld as a replacement. Donald Trump fired Coats, who was then appointed director of national intelligence.AdvertisementAdvertisementCheney-Rumsfeld's tag team changed history in a way no combination of vice president, defense secretary (or any other officials that do not include the president) has ever done.The pair, both bureaucratic masters and administrators, was first able to run circles around their rivals in power and influence. Rumsfeld sent an assistant to the National Security Council meeting, where they were expected to lose. He announced that no decision could be made without the secretaryor. If that failed, Cheney would enter the Oval Office and convince Bush to reverse the decision. This pattern would change during Bush's second term. Bush realized the destructive nature of the game they were playing.AdvertisementRumsfeld also distrusted the CIA's assessment that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction or links to al-Qaeda in the days leading up to the invasion. This distrust stemmed from Rumsfeld's experience with the North Korean commission to evaluate its ballistic missile capabilities. Instead, he created his own intel unit, codenamed the Office of Special Plans. This was a rogue unit that cherry-picked raw data and promoted bogus sources to confirm his prejudices.AdvertisementCheney-Rumsfeld's tag team changed history in a way no combination of vice president or defense secretary has ever done.His advocacy of another idea, which he had picked up from a late 1990smilitary transformation commission, was perhaps more disastrous. It held that computerized intelligence networksand highly accurate smart bombsboth spawned through the microelectronics révolutionwere now so precise and agile that the U.S. could win all wars with only a few troops on the ground.AdvertisementRumsfeld reduced the number of troops required to defeat ISIS from 500,000 to 140,000. Rumsfeld proved to be correct in one way. With the help of smart bombs, sensors, and small numbers of ground troops, an extremely small numberof troops could overthrow the 4th largest army in the world and capture Baghdad. Rumsfeld was wrong in a way he didn't believe mattered, but in fact mattered a lot: the 140,000 troops that were sent to Iraq to assist with intelligence and sensors weren't enough to secure the territory. The invading Americans had conquered one village and then moved on to the capital leaving chaos and worse.AdvertisementRumsfeld was so rigid about the idea of transformation, even after the second phase of war had begun, he refused acknowledgement that there was an Insurgency. He ordered his aides to not say the word. (He dismissed resistance fighters in the Vietnam War as unorganized dead-enders. He knew enough about Vietnam War to know that, if there was an insurgency he would have to devise a counter-insurgency strategy. This would require keeping many troops on the ground for a long period of time. He didn't want this at all.Rumsfeld was not very concerned about Iraq. Rumsfeld saw the battlefield only as a laboratory for his new idea of modern warfare. He wanted to use the success of the invasion of Iraq to threaten other dictators that were obstructing U.S. expansion in the post-Cold War period, which many considered to be a time of unchallenged American dominance.AdvertisementRumsfeld's plan was to have no plan. The result was catastrophe.Rumsfeld took over the planning of stability operations for the next phase of the Iraq war from the State Department during the build-up to war. Rumsfeld refused to allow anyone at the Pentagon to address the matter. He did not want any stability operations, also known as nation-building. So the U.S. entered the war without any plan. Rumsfeld had a plan. This was not an oversight. The result was catastrophe.Rumsfeld was also an excellent dissembler. Rumsfeld was also a consummate dissembler. He wrote thousands of memos to his aides during his tenure as defense secretary. Many of these memos became known as snowflakes. Rumsfeld wrote a memoir called Known and Unknown in which he culled some of those snowflakes but also rewrote some historical sections to make it appear that he never requested fewer troops than what the generals recommended. He also acknowledged the possibility that there might be an insurgency and was open to dissenting opinions from subordinates and officers, something that elicited laughter from many generals who had read the book.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThis was one of his most intelligent snowflakes, and it was written seven months after the invasion in October 2003.We lack the metrics we need to measure whether we are winning or losing in the global war against terror. Do we capture, kill, deter, or dissuade more terrorists each day than the madrassas, radical clerics, and other terrorists who are training, recruiting, and deploying against our country?This was an excellent question. Rumsfeld could have answered it much sooner, or two years earlier. Rumsfeld never acted on this insight, which is even more important. Rumsfeld never gave anyone the task of devising a metric or altering U.S. strategies to meet this challenge. It is easy to conclude that the memo was theatrical or, to put it another way, ass-covering.AdvertisementIt could also have been the result of laziness and scramble-headedness. Rumsfeld, for example, penned about military transformation as the basis for a war strategy for Iraq and for a overhaul of the Pentagon. This guide will show him a new way to calculate what weapons to buy and how to organize armed forces. Rumsfeld was secretary of defense for six years, but he only killed two weapons systems in that time, the Cheyenne helicopter, and the Crusader artillery gunnon. These relics were not well received even by the Army, which had both.Rumsfeld did not admit any wrongdoing in his memoir. He only acknowledged a few errors, which he attributed to others (usually the CIA, Democrats, media or anyone who misled him). Rumsfeld could seem a bit oblivious for someone who has been in public life so long. One of his most memorable lines was uttered to answer a National Guardsman who was on his way to Iraq and wondered why they had given him so many weapons not suitable for the battle. Rumsfeld responded with a shrug: You go into war with the army that you have, and not the army that you might wish or want to have later.AdvertisementThis logic might work if you are suddenly invaded and have to defend yourself with what you have, no matter how inadequate. Rumsfeld was the one who started the war in Iraq. He had ample time to put together a better army for going to war. The truth is that he didn't want to build a better army. He didn't believe he would need one.His memoirs title refers to another gem in his collection of comic-book sage declarations, this one from 2002.AdvertisementThere are known knowns, and there are also things that we are certain to know. We also know that there are known unknowns. This means we know there are things we don't know. There are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know.AdvertisementThis is a very common truism and the stuff of Epistemology 101. Rumsfeld used it multiple times to excuse not anticipating bad turns such as insurgency. (Even though a lot of people predicted that turn, he didn't listen to them). In short, it was a excuse for getting things wrong.Errol Morris' 2014 documentary, The Unknown Known features a segment in which Morris questions Rumsfeld about the lessons he has learned from Vietnam War. Rumsfeld was a White House chief staff officer, a congressional member, an ambassador and a White House ambassador during the Vietnam War. Here's Rumsfeld's complete answer to the Morris question.Some things work out and some don't. It didn't. It was a lesson.Donald Rumsfeld may have been a shallow man despite all his talents and experiences.Listen to Slow Burn to learn more about the events leading up to the Iraq War and Donald Rumsfeld's role in it.
