Armed Forces Transformation Dies Aborning

Seven months ago, Donald H. Rumsfeld began his second tour as Defense secretary with what seemed like a presidential mandate for change. During the campaign, George W. Bush assailed Clinton management of the Pentagon and called for a transformation of the armed forces to prepare them for future challenges.

Rumsfeld’s appointment seemed like a no-brainer. He was a respected manager who had served four terms in Congress and then been ambassador to NATO, White House chief of staff and Defense secretary in the Ford administration. After that, he successfully led several large tech companies.

Rumsfeld lost little time in challenging Pentagon orthodoxy, setting up a series of secretive review panels from which uniformed personnel were largely excluded. He said he wanted to wrest control of the Pentagon away from Congress, close excess bases, outsource support services and make a break with Cold War thinking. It sounded like exactly what Bush wanted.

But then things started to go sour. Rumsfeld’s lengthy strategic review produced few new ideas. The White House didn’t give him the funding increase he wanted. Congress complained about lack of consultation. Senior military leaders began anonymously bad-mouthing him. Today, only a few paces from his office on the Pentagon’s power corridor, career civil servants are taking bets on how soon he’ll leave.

What went wrong? First, a cliffhanger election and a baroque appointments process delayed the seating of Rumsfeld’s management team until early spring. As a result, the strategic review was poorly coordinated and disconnected from political realities. Then the president decided to push ahead with tax cuts as his top legislative priority. With Congress fencing off entitlement surpluses and a cooling economy reducing tax receipts, little was left for military increases.

When Rumsfeld did get his team in place, it proved amazingly maladroit at dealing with Congress and the military bureaucracy. Since the changes Rumsfeld wanted threatened entrenched interests, finesse was required. Instead, much of what the team said and did was gratuitously offensive to its most important constituencies.

Finally, Rumsfeld and other Bush defense advisors underestimated their predecessors. They thought the decay of the military reflected Clinton administration indifference, when in fact it resulted from the same political constraints now plaguing Rumsfeld’s team.

The administration’s military goals are the right ones. The Pentagon needs to make a break with Cold War orthodoxy. It needs to spend a lot more on modernizing aging aircraft, fixing a broken shipbuilding program and realizing the benefits of the information revolution. The only way of affording these investments is to save money in the areas Rumsfeld targeted.

But the Clinton team also saw the need for change. What the Clinton team never figured out was how to overcome opposition to change. Now Rumsfeld faces the same challenge.

Consider the case of long-range bombers. Every study the Pentagon does of future air power finds the nation needs more stealthy bombers that can strike distant targets without being dependent on overseas bases. But proposals to build more stealthy B-2s in the Clinton years were opposed by an Air Force dominated by fighter pilots. And Rumsfeld’s proposal to retire a third of the Air Force’s chronically deficient B-1 bombers was opposed by senators with B-1 bases in their states.

Multiply this entrenched resistance and you see the task Rumsfeld faces in bringing change to the Pentagon. Every worn-out weapon, redundant job and superfluous base has determined defenders.

So Rumsfeld’s reformation would probably be moving slowly even if his first months had gone flawlessly. His mistakes have underscored the difficulty of changing a powerful institution with deep political roots.

In the absence of urgent threats or huge surpluses, the Pentagon is going to change very slowly and not necessarily in ways that policymakers might prefer.