Word: rumsfeld
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...economy kept sputtering and Congress enacted a $1.35 trillion tax cut, those rosy surplus projections began to shrink. Military health-care costs rose faster than missile-defense bills. The budget situation became almost impossible. For months, many analysts had been saying the only way Congress might go along with Rumsfeld's reforms was if he sweetened the deal by sprinkling goodies on key districts. But now the extra money was drying up. Rumsfeld went to the White House in July to ask for $38 billion more for next year's military budget, and he came away with less than half...
...month ago, when it seemed things couldn't get any worse, Rumsfeld floated a plan to close dozens of military bases over the next eight years. That proved, if nothing else, that he was serious about cuts, but it was tantamount to declaring war on Capitol Hill. And with that announcement, Rumsfeld reactivated a reserve unit that had outlived its enemy--the secret anti-Clinton operation formed inside the Pentagon in 1993. When Clinton arrived that year and announced his plan to loosen rules on gays in the military, a network sprang up overnight between uniformed officials in the Pentagon...
Officers saluting the Secretary in the corridors of the Pentagon but working behind the scenes to thwart him--this was something that didn't often happen 25 years ago. The CLASSIFIED stamp on Rumsfeld's plan was hardly dry before copies found their way to Capitol Hill. By Aug. 3, it was apparent that lawmakers from both parties would bury any cuts he proposed. Republicans were locked and loaded; Democrats pretended to be sympathetic, just for fun. Says Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a former Army officer: "He was sailing into the teeth of a storm everywhere he looked...
...give you a rule," Rumsfeld said last Friday, an hour or so after he announced that he would let the services reform themselves. He put pen to yellow foolscap and spoke as he wrote. "It goes something like this: 'If you deal with a senior officer, you can be almost absolutely certain that he is capable of doing a number of things very, very well--even though the thing you are dealing with him on may not be one of those things...
That sounded as if Rumsfeld was a little resentful of the way the brass had undercut his reforms. Sure enough, an aide later translated: Don't expect generals and admirals to spend a lifetime in the bureaucracy and then be able to tear it up and start over. "I thought about this the other day," Rumsfeld continued. "That's always been true, and I should have known it, but I never formulated it in my head." It is possible, of course, that by making the military responsible for cutting itself Rumsfeld is retreating to fight another day and with...