Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [118]
While some Americans questioned everything the military did, there was another segment of the country that was inclined to do the opposite. There was a tendency to be so proud of the men and women in uniform that we thought of military leaders as infallible. Having served for close to twenty years in the regular Navy and the reserve, I had a healthy respect for the military and an appreciation for military advice.* But as secretary of defense my role was different. “The U.S. Secretary of Defense is not a super General or Admiral,” I wrote in Rumsfeld’s Rules. “His task is to exercise leadership and civilian control over the Department for the Commander-in-Chief and the country.”
Control wasn’t what a lot of people had in mind, however. I quickly faced what successive secretaries of defense have faced: a powerful set of forces known as the iron triangle—a network of entrenched relationships among the military and civilian bureaucracies in the Defense Department, the Congress, and the defense industry. With more or less permanent positions, those in the iron triangle knew that the secretary of defense and the department’s political appointees of either party were temporary. They could delay and simply wait out policies they did not favor. One responsibility in serving as head of the Defense Department is to look as far down the road as possible, point the department in the direction it needs to go, and then, to the extent possible, build momentum that will be hard to reverse.
Among the most important issues that faced us at the Pentagon in the mid-1970s was the selection of a new main battle tank for the Army. At the time, the expectation was that the new tank would be used to defend against a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. As ambassador to NATO, I had worked to achieve a higher level of standardization of military equipment among our NATO allies as a way to save taxpayer dollars and improve logistical efficiencies. NATO standardization also helped to off set the Soviets’ advantage of a free hand to standardize weapons systems among the Warsaw Pact countries. Early in my tour at the Pentagon, I issued a memorandum to the department that set forth the importance I placed in standardization, and that I expected planners working on the new main battle tank to follow that lead.15
The Pentagon, however, was going in a different direction. Late in the afternoon of July 20, 1976, Deputy Secretary Clements and Secretary of the Army Martin Hoffmann asked to see me, along with a number of other senior officials. They were in sharp disagreement over competing tank proposals from Chrysler and General Motors.
The Army leadership strongly recommended the General Motors tank design, which had a standard diesel engine and a 105 millimeter Howitzer cannon, the weapon size the Army had used for years. The Army had no doubts its position would prevail. Its leaders seemed to assume my role in the decision would be to approve their recommendation. In fact, they were so certain of their position that they had already sent out a press release to members on the relevant congressional committees announcing that General Motors had won the contract. It was a classic example of the iron triangle in action.
However, Deputy Secretary Clements and Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Dr. Malcolm Currie had come to a different conclusion. They favored Chrysler’s design: It could be filled with a larger, 120 millimeter cannon and it had, for the first time, a turbine engine instead of a diesel. They pointed out that our major NATO allies—including the British, French, and West Germans—had tanks with 120 millimeter cannons. They also argued that the turbine engine would be more agile and efficient than the diesel.
I listened to