Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [231]
By Christmas 2001, Franks was ready to brief the President on an initial cut. Bush invited us to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on December 28. With the President’s permission, I opted to join them by video teleconference and have Franks travel to the ranch alone. The President and Franks rarely had a chance to talk to each other one-on-one. I wanted this visit to be an opportunity for them to do just that.
When Myers and I joined the teleconference, the President and Franks seemed to be getting along well. Bush’s respect for him was bolstered by Franks’ quick and successful military campaign in Afghanistan. It also was clear that Franks’ experience in the Afghan campaign had honed his capabilities and built up his confidence.
I often thought of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s insightful observation that “plans are worthless, but planning is everything,” which I had adopted in my collection of Rumsfeld’s Rules. With the first contact with the enemy, elements of any plan generally have to be tossed aside. Split-second improvisation, experience, and leadership take over. Still, careful preparation is invaluable. Becoming acquainted with facts, terrain, people, capabilities, and possibilities helps military leaders cope and adapt, as they must, when new circumstances inevitably arise and it becomes necessary to adjust, recalibrate, or even discard the original plan.
I suggested that Franks start by focusing on the key assumptions underlying his plan—that is, what he expected to be happening inside and outside Iraq if war came. I believed that key assumptions needed to be the foundation of any contingency plan, but I had found that military planners did not always cite them or give them the probing, intense consideration they merited. In meetings at the Pentagon, I emphasized that failing to examine the assumptions on which a plan is based can start a planning process based on incorrect premises, and then proceed perfectly logically to incorrect conclusions.3
I was particularly concerned, for example, when I was shown the contingency plan for a possible conflict on the Korean Peninsula. By then our intelligence community’s assessment was that the North Korean regime had at least one or several nuclear weapons, yet the old war plan did not factor that absolutely essential assumption into its calculus.
Similarly, I urged the military planners to think carefully about the range of possible Iraqi responses to possible U.S. military actions. This iterative process was also happening at levels well below ours. Franks was getting input from State Department advisers and CIA analysts present at CENTCOM. With a continually evolving diplomatic and intelligence landscape, the Iraq plan was never fixed. Planning would take place until President Bush actually made his final decision and signed an order to execute, and on every day thereafter as new circumstances evolved.
In Texas, Franks went through each of his key assumptions, giving the President an opportunity to consider them and comment. As was usually the case, many of the major assumptions CENTCOM relied on in the political-military sphere came from the intelligence community. Military planners are not necessarily experts in the language, culture, history, and politics of the people in the Defense Department’s wide and varied spheres of operation. One assumption was that Iraq possessed WMD, and that advancing U.S. troops could come under chemical or biological attack. Another of Franks’ considerations was that Saddam’s most loyal forces might turn the capital into