Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [1]
CHAPTER 25 The Agony of Surprise
CHAPTER 26 War President
PART IX
Into the Graveyard of Empires
CHAPTER 27 Special Operations
CHAPTER 28 Little Birds in a Nest
CHAPTER 29 Kabul Falls, Karzai Rises
PART X
Saddam’s Miscalculation
CHAPTER 30 Out of the Box
CHAPTER 31 The Case for Regime Change
CHAPTER 32 A Failure of Diplomacy
CHAPTER 33 Exit the Butcher of Baghdad
PART XI
The Occupation of Iraq
CHAPTER 34 Catastrophic Success
CHAPTER 35 Mission Accomplished?
CHAPTER 36 Too Many Hands on the Steering Wheel
CHAPTER 37 Liberation from the Occupation
PART XII
Wartime Detention
CHAPTER 38 The Least Worst Place
CHAPTER 39 The Twentieth Hijacker
CHAPTER 40 Law in a Time of War
CHAPTER 41 The Road Not Traveled
PART XIII
Pulling On Our Boots: Challenges and Controversies Beyond the War Zones
CHAPTER 42 Katrina and the Challenge of New Institutions
CHAPTER 43 Gardening
CHAPTER 44 The Army We Had
PART XIV
The Long, Hard Slog
CHAPTER 45 Hands Off the Bicycle Seat
CHAPTER 46 The Dead Enders
CHAPTER 47 Eyes on Afghanistan
CHAPTER 48 Iraq’s Summer of Violence
CHAPTER 49 Farewells
CHAPTER 50 After Tides and Hurricanes
Acknowledgments
List of Acronyms
List of Illustrations
Notes
Photographic Insert
Author’s Note
An internet search of “known unknown” in the autumn of 2010 resulted in more than three hundred thousand entries, a quarter million of which were linked to my name. There is an entry on Wikipedia. The reference has been turned into “poetry.” That poetry has been set to music. And that was just on the first page of the search results.
Yet for a phrase seemingly so well known, there is some irony in the fact that its origins and meaning remain largely unknown.
The phrase first became publicly linked to me in early 2002. Toward the end of one of my Pentagon press briefings, a journalist told me that “reports” were suggesting the absence of a link between Saddam Hussein’s regime and terrorists seeking weapons of mass destruction. These unidentified reports, the questioner suggested, were evidence of a lack of a “direct link.”
Putting aside the substance of the reporter’s question—at least for the moment—I raised a larger point about the limits of human knowledge. I responded:
Reports that say something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me because as we know, there are known knowns: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns: that is to say we know there are some things [we know] we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult one.
At first glance, the logic may seem obscure. But behind the enigmatic language is a simple truth about knowledge: There are many things of which we are completely unaware—in fact, there are things of which we are so unaware, we don’t even know we are unaware of them.
Known knowns are facts, rules, and laws that we know with certainty. We know, for example, that gravity is what makes an object fall to the ground.
Known unknowns are gaps in our knowledge, but they are gaps that we know exist. We know, for example, that we don’t know the exact extent of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. If we ask the right questions we can potentially fill this gap in our knowledge, eventually making it a known known.
The category of unknown unknowns is the most difficult to grasp. They are gaps in our knowledge, but gaps that we don’t know exist. Genuine surprises tend to arise out of this category. Nineteen hijackers using commercial airliners as guided missiles to incinerate three thousand men, women, and children was perhaps the most horrific single unknown unknown America has experienced.
I first heard a variant of the phrase “known unknowns” in a discussion with former NASA administrator William R. Graham, when we served together on the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission in the late 1990s. Members of our bipartisan commission