Word: pentagonal
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...general officer to name the No. 1 theme of Rumsfeld's latest Pentagon tour, and the answer probably won't be war. At the heart of Rumsfeld's activism is a desire to re-establish civilian control over a military that ran circles around the Clinton Administration. Not long after arriving in 2001, Rumsfeld announced plans to "transform" the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines into lighter, faster, stealthier fighting units. To the guys in uniform, "transform" meant not only cuts but also civilian oversight, so the military did what it does best: it prepared for a long siege. Rumsfeld...
...make that happen." But one man was no match for the nation's four military services. Rumsfeld found he could not make a move without its being leaked to the newspapers, and pretty soon he knew he was beaten. Right after Labor Day in 2001, Rumsfeld declared "the Pentagon bureaucracy" a mortal enemy of the U.S. The next day, the Pentagon was attacked by terrorists...
...their feud for a real war, and over time the need to transform things seemed to disappear, partly because the terrorist attacks opened the cash spigot and hard choices didn't seem necessary. Instead of having to choose either weapons of the future or those of the past, the Pentagon last year bought both. Rumsfeld has canceled only a single major weapons program in two years, the $11 billion Army Crusader artillery gun, while allowing such dubious programs as the Air Force's $200 million F22 Raptor fighter and the Navy's $2 billion Virginia-class submarines to move forward...
...Secretary Thomas White, a former Enron executive who vainly tried to thwart Rumsfeld's decision to kill the Crusader, was one more mistake away from losing his job. "It's pretty clear that the Army is going to be the big loser," says Lawrence Korb, a top Reagan-era Pentagon aide. "If it were not for the war in Afghanistan and the looming war in Iraq, I'm sure they would already be cutting two Army divisions...
...with that, the Pentagon chief began to tap dance. His reply, according to a Republican Senator in the room, was a classic Rumsfeldian fugue--complete with interesting hand gestures--mentioning reductions and foreign troops and steady progress. Or, as the G.O.P. Senator described it later, "it was a five-minute, total nonanswer, just unbelievably obtuse." Another Republican Senator put it this way to TIME: "Rumsfeld believes in his own magic...