Word: rumsfeldism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Indeed, Rumsfeld answers the question of whether he misjudged the postwar challenges with a trademark Rumination. "Let me give you a perspective," he says. "You come into these jobs--there's not a lot of time for reflection--you better know two-thirds of the things you're gonna need to know when you get in here, 'cause you're not going to have time to learn three-quarters. You can learn an eighth or a quarter or a third, but you can't learn it all. And the same thing is true in a big, massive project like...
...this case, that somebody was Jay Garner, a retired three star Rumsfeld knew since the two had worked together studying U.S. space policy three years before. This was probably Rumsfeld's first misstep: giving a retired general the job of organizing postwar Iraq--a job in which Garner would have to compete for money and manpower with a dozen other active-duty four-star generals. Rumsfeld didn't have a lot of great options. The Pentagon doesn't have an agency for peacekeeping or nation building or anything in between, and neither the military nor the White House regarded those...
Perhaps, but the U.S. lost four to six months in the process of deciding that its initial plan was the best one after all. A Pentagon civilian close to Rumsfeld admits, "We shouldn't have disbanded the army...
...Rumsfeld's world, all that was long ago. For weeks he has been itching to get back to wrestling his real nemesis, not Saddam or Osama bin Laden but what he sees as the need to remake the military to fight villains like them for the next 25 years. Known as transformation, the initiative was the first fight he picked when he returned to Washington in 2001. At the time, he wanted to shrink the military and reduce its footprint overseas, in part by cutting the Army by two or three divisions. There was talk of killing cold war weapons...
...even after 9/11 changed everything, it didn't change Rumsfeld's zeal to reform or the essential outlines of his plan. Some of his ideas are very specific. He is weighing whether to move U.S. military bases out of Western Europe now that the cold war is over and shift forces east to Poland and Romania to be closer to the hot spots of the Middle East. He has asked the Navy whether its constant presence in, for example, the Mediterranean makes it harder to steam quickly to conflicts elsewhere. He wants the Air Force to think less about pilots...