Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [155]
Though the President was considering Wolfowitz for the ambassadorship to the United Nations, he seemed far more interested in serving as deputy secretary of defense. I knew Wolfowitz would be an unusual pick. He did not have the industry background or deep management experience traditional for successful deputy secretaries of defense.* I worried that a man with such an inquisitive, fine mind and strong policy interests might not take well to many of the crucial but often mundane managerial duties—making the hundreds of nonpolicy related decisions—that would come with the deputy post. Still I had had some success over the years in making unorthodox hiring choices. From my prior experiences with Wolfowitz, I knew that he would provide thoughtful insights. I expected to be able to take more time in the day-to-day management of the Department, though if we became engaged in a major conflict, that would have to change.
Wolfowitz was not confirmed by the Senate until March, two months after the presidential inauguration, a critical period in which we suffered from not having even a single Bush appointee confirmed and on the job with me in the Department.† The slow pace of Wolfowitz’s confirmation turned out to be a model of swiftness compared to the other four dozen presidential appointees for the Pentagon. It took months and months—almost a full year—to have many of the President’s nominees confirmed by the Senate. “The process is outrageous,” I lamented to the Joint Chiefs.5 We suffered from the absences of secretaries of the Army, Navy, Air Force, the undersecretary of defense for policy, and the assistant and deputy assistant secretaries. These were people needed to carry out the work of the Department. The problem was not only the delay in the Senate. It also took months for the President’s nominees to receive the security clearances they needed to undertake their work. The White House personnel office was painfully slow in vetting candidates. The cumulative effect was that on average we operated with 25.5 percent of the key senior civilian positions vacant over the entire six years of my tenure, causing serious harm to the Department’s activities.*
Despite the dysfunctional clearance and confirmation process, I had to get going quickly on an assessment of the Department and, more broadly, America’s circumstance in the world. I sought out someone whose advice I had valued during my first Pentagon tour: Andy Marshall was still working in the department, though his work was less in vogue during the prior Bush and Clinton administrations, in part because of his cautions on China and Russia. After a few weeks on the job, I asked him to join me for lunch—not privately in my office, but in the lunchroom where senior officials often grabbed a sandwich or a bowl of soup. In the status-conscious Pentagon, I wanted to send a message that I valued Marshall’s thinking. Over lunch, Marshall warned that the Pentagon bureaucracy was as resistant to change as ever.
It was clear that there would be challenges, especially with some of the leaders in the Army. Some of its senior officers were aware that I had overruled the Army on the M-1 tank decision in the mid-1970s. Over time, the Army and other quarters of the Washington defense establishment had raised pointed concerns about what was characterized as my defense transformation agenda. Early on, a story line developed, possibly because of my work on the Space Commission and Ballistic Missile Threat Commission, that I entered the Pentagon with a pet theory about relying more on technology and less on traditional ground forces. This line became the framework for myriad news reports and books about various aspects of my tenure this time as secretary of defense. That myopic focus on technology as a way for some to try to describe