Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [158]
A second critical task was to adapt operations as needed and shift resources quickly. That required us to have forces that were agile and could move rapidly. For these lighter forces to be as capable as more traditional heavy forces, far greater precision was required. And to take advantage of the improved precision of our weapons, our forces needed more accurate targeting intelligence.
We also had a responsibility to capitalize on advances in science and engineering. During many years of involvement with national security issues I had seen impressive technological breakthroughs used to vastly improve our military capabilities. When my father served in World War II, for example, it could take dozens of harrowing combat aircraft sorties to ensure that our forces could knock out a single military target. By 2001, however, technological advances had made it possible for a single aircraft to destroy multiple targets with precision on a single sortie.
Because new military systems would only be as good as the human beings who volunteered to operate them, we also needed to make better use of our most valuable asset: the men and women, military and civilian, who make up the Department. This led to one of my high-profile battles as secretary of defense.
For Defense Department civilian employees—some seven hundred thousand strong—the existing personnel system was a tangle of contradictory rules and regulations and, as a result, was counterproductive. The system did not move people into the positions for which they were best suited, nor did it reward good performance. As I knew well, the ability to hire and reward the most talented and move underperformers into other lines of work was essential to success in the private sector. Yet due to congressional restrictions and the influence of government labor unions, it was nearly impossible for senior DoD officials to recruit, promote, transfer, or replace civilian workers efficiently. As a result, instead of trying to fire underperforming workers and hiring new ones, managers were turning to uniformed military personnel and outside contractors, because they could be brought in rapidly to do a job and then be moved out when the job was done. Billions of tax dollars were supporting antiquated personnel systems that were undermining the important work of the Department of Defense.
We made it a high priority early on to address this by proposing a modern personnel system befitting one of the largest, most technologically advanced workforces in the world. I worked with a team at the Pentagon, led by a tenacious undersecretary for personnel and readiness in Dr. David Chu, and a determined secretary of the Navy in Gordon England, to develop and launch the National Security Personnel System. The new system permitted considerably more mobility among the Pentagon civilian workforce and instituted pay for performance. Bush offered his full support for the plan, yet it barely survived several union-led attempts to roll it back.* The Department and many of its civilian employees benefited from the changes Chu and England proposed, but it was met with vigorous opposition, especially from the employees’ unions.
Those within the Department who felt the new system would not work in their favor tried to stir up fear and uncertainty among the workforce. Nobody likes to have their job performance reviewed or questioned—indeed, the Pentagon had become arranged in such a way that an effective review system was all but impossible. My determination to untangle the system