Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [121]
During my first weeks at the Pentagon, I met with Andy Marshall, the Defense Department’s Director of Net Assessment, the Pentagon’s internal think tank, which examined the relative strengths of the United States and the Soviet Union.* Marshall demonstrated that the Soviet Union had been gaining ground relative to the United States. America had been slipping toward a position of rough equivalence. The projections of future trend lines did not bode well for the United States.
I compiled the data into a booklet called Defense Perspectives that provided an easy to understand set of statistics, charts, and graphs—numbers of personnel, tanks, helicopters, submarines, ships, and the like. The data told an important story: While the United States and the USSR were still roughly equivalent in their respective capabilities, the trend lines were clearly adverse to America, and if our respective levels of investment were to continue, we would drop below the band of rough equivalence.9
In addition to the Defense Perspectives booklet, I organized briefings, which I led along with John Hughes, a respected, long-serving intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Hughes had briefed President Kennedy and his national security team during the Cuban Missile Crisis.* He prepared classified overhead photography from U.S. satellites and other sources that showed in vivid, powerful pictures the Soviet military buildup. The Hughes presentations—at varying degrees of classification, depending on the audience—gave an impressive visual texture to the data we had assembled.10
Beginning in early 1976, I began to host early evening briefings for small groups of senators and congressmen in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, directly across from the Oval Office. We called them “smokers” back in those days, since many of us still smoked cigars or pipes. Our invitations to the White House for a private, classified briefing were well received. Attendance was excellent. President Ford and other senior national security officials would drop by, giving the briefings added weight and a sense of unanimity within the administration.11
After one of the briefings, Congressman Les Aspin of Wisconsin, a Democrat and senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, walked out impressed. An opponent of increasing military investment, he muttered, “I can see I’ll have to invent a new set of arguments.”12
We conducted unclassified briefings for a variety of influential Americans—labor leaders, business leaders, religious leaders, and public policy experts with national security backgrounds. I knew that more opinion leaders needed to know the facts about the Soviets’ military capabilities if I was to successfully convince them of the imperative for more investment in our military.*
Moscow began to take notice of our efforts. The Soviets condemned my briefings as “disgraceful.” In the fall of 1976, after the Senate moved toward increasing the defense budget, I received an intelligence cable from American officials in Moscow that cited a report in the Soviet government’s news service that condemned me “for justifying the US military build-up on the basis of the ‘hackneyed myth about the ‘Soviet threat’…despite repeated Soviet assurances that the USSR threatens no one, does not increase its defense expenditures from year to year and seeks instead a reduction of all nations’ defense budgets.”13
The record is now clear that the Soviets lied about their defense budget. The Soviet