Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [351]
Some in the Army took actions that in my view bordered on insubordination. The Army’s Congressional Affairs office, for example, sent talking points to allies on Capitol Hill arguing that my “decision to kill Crusader puts soldiers at risk” and would cost lives.19 Ending the Crusader was “[r]eminiscent of unpreparedness in [the] late 1930s,” the talking points alleged. “OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] is looking for a quick kill to demonstrate their political prowess,” they continued. The talking points concluded that “[a] decision to kill Crusader puts the relevance of land power, hence the Army, in question.”20 A colonel on the Army staff called up my military assistant. “Now your boss is going to get what’s coming to him,” the colonel said. “We’ve got Congress on our side. We’re going to stick it up where the sun don’t shine and break it off.”
The Army’s top leaders, Tom White and Eric Shinseki, were visibly unhappy with my decision and also unhelpful. Before his appointment, Secretary White had been an Army one-star general who, after retiring, was a senior vice president at Enron.* In the months that followed my decision to cancel the artillery system, White had not been cooperative in moving the Army away from the Cold War weapons system toward the agile and more mobile force President Bush had campaigned for and which I sought. White’s narrow focus on and advocacy for the institutional interests of a single service was no longer acceptable in a world that demanded jointness and integration of the Army with Marines, sailors, and airmen. The Army needed better, more forward-leaning leadership. On April 25, 2003, I called White into my office for a chilly meeting. I told him I was prepared to accept his letter of resignation, though he had not drafted one. In retrospect I had made a mistake in putting a retired Army general in as the secretary—at least one who was so unwilling to upset the entrenched bureaucracy and help lead the Army into the new century.
Eventually Congress and the Army supported my decision on the Crusader, but it came at a high cost to me in frayed relationships with a few influential members of Congress and a number in the retired Army community. What I knew was that our nation needed the Army to be relevant for the twenty-first century, and that canceling the Crusader was the right decision for the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, and, most important, for our country. Now, almost a decade later, no one is clamoring to reinstate the Crusader.
One year after the Crusader dustup, I added to the tensions with my recommendation of a retired four-star Special Forces general, Pete Schoomaker, to be the new Army chief of staff when General Shinseki completed his tour. Some took the decision to bring him out of retirement as a vote of no confidence in the senior Army leadership. In fact, I’d first proposed the job to Shinseki’s vice chief, General Jack Keane, seeing institutional benefit to continuing to promote from within the active-duty force. Keane declined for family reasons. While there were certainly other active-duty Army general officers at the three-and four-star level who had proven themselves, I recognized that the next chief would face significant internal resistance to the changes we needed to effect. I decided I wanted someone at the top of the Army who had the ability and desire to jar the institution and transform it into the expeditionary force our country needed. For many hardened Army traditionalists who came of age in a time of a fixed, defensive force designed to repel an assault