Word: rumsfeldism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...familiar with the frustrations of building missile defenses as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Back in 1975, when Rumsfeld was Gerald Ford's Defense Secretary--he's the only person to have held the job twice--he inherited the Pentagon's first attempt at a missile-defense shield, the $25 billion Safeguard system, designed to protect 150 Minuteman missiles dotting North Dakota...
...cost and technology woes plagued Safeguard. Rumsfeld, a onetime G.O.P. Congressman from Illinois, knew it. Even worse, the Soviets were rendering Safeguard useless by putting multiple warheads atop each of their missiles. After three months as Defense Secretary, under orders from Congress, Rumsfeld shut it down. Safeguard's ghostly remains still litter the prairie just south of the Canadian border...
...last week, when Rumsfeld, three months into his second tour of duty as Defense chief, launched an offensive to build another missile defense, it was a surprising new chapter. And when President Bush stepped to the microphone at the National Defense University and declared his unswerving commitment to the costly and controversial project, "Rummy," as old friends call him, stood by proudly. He had reason to beam. After all, Bush was reading from Rumsfeld's script. As head of a 1998 panel weighing the ballistic-missile threat faced by the U.S., Rumsfeld had helped build political pressure for just...
...lobbyists all know a major overhaul of the U.S. military is coming down the pike, but they don't know its shape or form. The only person who does is the Defense Secretary, and the stakeholders are desperately parsing everything that looks like a leak from his office. But Rumsfeld is playing his cards so close to his chest that the Senate Armed Forces Committee is threatening to delay ratifying Defense Department appointees to protest being kept in the dark...
...Rumsfeld simply smiles, icily, through the cacophony. It will be his job to sift and synthesize the slew of contradictory proposals that emanate from these panels, and set priorities. It may have announced itself as the most conservative administration since Reagan, but the Bush team has refrained from simply throwing money at the military in the Reagan fashion. Indeed, it stuck pretty much with the defense budget figures of the Clinton Administration, planning to first undertake a comprehensive review to ensure that monies are wisely spent on remaking the military. Rumsfeld's secretive style may actually help him keep...