Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [156]
In fact, the transformation agenda that I supposedly brought with me to the Pentagon in January 2001 was not of my making. In my first meeting with the chiefs, I made a point of asking for their thoughts on what they believed “transforming” could mean for the Department.7 I had not written on the issue of defense transformation, nor did I consider myself in the circle of national security experts who had promoted the idea throughout the 1990s. I was, however, generally open to proposals for reforming and adjusting old institutions and making them more responsive to contemporary circumstances. This, after all, was what I had done during my earlier service in government, and in business.
The President had given me explicit guidance to make the Defense Department “lethal, light and mobile.”8 On the campaign trail, Bush had promised to direct his secretary of defense to begin “an immediate, comprehensive review of our military—the structure of its forces, the state of its strategy, the priorities of its procurement.” He was reasonably specific about what he wanted the end result to be:
Our forces in the next century must be agile, lethal, readily deployable, and require a minimum of logistical support. We must be able to project our power over long distances, in days or weeks rather than months. Our military must be able to identify targets by a variety of means—from a Marine patrol to a satellite. Then be able to destroy those targets almost instantly, with an array of weapons, from a submarine-launched cruise missile, to mobile long-range artillery. On land, our heavy forces must be lighter. Our light forces must be more lethal. All must be easier to deploy. And these forces must be organized in smaller, more agile formations, rather than cumbersome divisions.9
I knew that accomplishing even one of Bush’s stated goals could preoccupy the Department and its leadership for years. Working toward all of them simultaneously in the Pentagon—an institution that moved with all the speed and dexterity of a half-million-ton oil tanker—would be formidable. People naturally prefer to cling to established ways of doing things. Change is hard. Large organizations especially favor practices they have already mastered, even if those practices, fashioned decades before, are outdated. But the problems we faced, by almost all accounts, were serious. There was an acquisition system with excessive costs and redundancies. Too little attention had been paid to military housing and other infrastructure, as declining defense budgets shifted priorities to preserving costly and, in some cases, out-of-date weapons programs. Yet the resistance to change remained. In my first months in office, more often than not I heard from senior officials: “Don’t change anything. Everything is fine.”10
A searing reality was that there were people in the world who were working hard to think of novel ways to harm us. The key to transforming the Department, as I saw it, was through encouraging its civilian and military leaders to be more forward-looking, and to think freely, not conventionally. In my view, transformation hinged more on leadership and organization than it did on technology. Precision-guided weapons and microchips were important, but so was a culture that promoted human innovation and creativity. In the information age it was critical that we be able to transmit information rapidly to the people who needed it. More often than not what prevents that is not a computer or a piece of equipment, but outdated organization charts and layers of bureaucracy.
We couldn’t afford to be constrained by the way the Department was organized, trained, and equipped today because our ever adapting adversaries were seeking to exploit our weaknesses tomorrow. I often noted that the United States then faced no peers with respect to conventional forces—armies, navies, and air forces—and, as a result, future threats would likely lie elsewhere. Even so, I accepted