Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [157]
I also understood that the President’s objectives would face stiff resistance from the iron triangle of Congress, defense contractors, and the permanent DoD bureaucracy. What I had encountered in the 1970s was as strong as ever. As before, I anticipated resistance to any significant changes from some military officers—current as well as retired—who saw themselves as protectors of their service’s traditions. Senior members of Congress would also fight changes for a variety of reasons: some to protect pork for their constituents; some to preserve the jurisdiction of their committees and subcommittees; some to lend a hand to friends within the Department; and some because they had honest disagreements with the President’s agenda and about the best way forward.
A shift in Washington had taken place since I left the Pentagon in 1977. The relationship between the executive and legislative branches had evolved from proper congressional oversight to what was becoming legislative micromanagement. The Defense Department was receiving between four and eight hundred letters every month from members of Congress, in addition to countless phone calls. All of these inquiries initiated a flurry of bureaucratic activity to resolve them.
In a memo I drafted soon after my return to the Department, I wrote about the challenge posed by the increasingly intrusive role of the Congress. The Defense Department was “tangled in its anchor chain,” I wrote. The memo continued:
The maze of constraints on the Department forces it to operate in a manner that is so slow, so ponderous and so inefficient that whatever it ultimately does produce is late, wasteful of taxpayer dollars, and has the unintended result of leading to still more letters of complaint and calls of criticism from Congress, more critical hearings and more condemnation in GAO [General Accounting Office] reports, to be followed by a still greater number of amendments, restrictions and requirements to try to correct the seeming mismanagement…. Over time, the regulations and requirements that have been laid on are so onerous that…they are smothering incentive, innovation and risk taking.12
I was astonished, for example, to discover that the legislation authorizing the Department of Defense’s budget had exploded from a bill totaling 16 pages in 1977 when I left the Pentagon to a whopping 534 pages in 2001.13 I knew that Washington lobbyists had invested many years, sizable political contributions, and a great many golf games and private dinners to build intimate relationships with key members of the House and Senate, as well as with select DoD officials. “It is hard to imagine how a collection of such talented, intelligent, honorable, dedicated, patriotic people, who care about the security of the U.S. and the men and women of the armed forces, could have combined to produce such a mess,” I dictated in a note to myself that May. “And yet, they conclude that nothing should be done to clean up the mess.”14 Well, I was going to at least give it a try.
As ambitious as the President’s transformation agenda was, at its core was a humble recognition of the limits of our intelligence capabilities. I wanted everyone in the Department to be aware that, no matter how much information we collected and no matter how much we planned, surprise was inevitable. No large, complex plan ever gets executed as written. A belief that assumptions will play out as planned is a dangerous form of intellectual arrogance. It can lead to confusion and paralysis when those assumptions turn out to be wrong, as they often will. I believed the dangers