Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [160]
In my view it was certainly proper that I be involved in senior promotions. Indeed, it was the secretary of defense who had to make the recommendations to the President, and it is the President who makes the nominations to the U.S. Senate. I saw it as an important responsibility. I had had a good relationship with many of the military leaders I worked closely with as secretary under President Ford. I was the one who came to the defense of then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, George Brown, when many were calling for him to be fired. But because my new system represented a major change in how the Department currently operated, it caused considerable contention. Despite the pushback, however, it resulted in an exemplary bench of officers.
I remembered during my first year at Searle that I had ruffled some feathers as I raised questions about the old way of doing business. That was also the case at the Pentagon. It was clear that there were some in the Department who felt I was brusque or asked more questions than made them comfortable. In a large bureaucratic institution, Newton’s laws of physics apply: A body at rest tends to remain at rest, and a body in motion tends to remain in motion. I was determined that the Department of Defense accelerate forward.
Then, at President Bush’s specific direction, I launched an unprecedented, comprehensive review of America’s global defense posture. This was one of the most fascinating, well conceived, and fruitful projects we implemented at the Pentagon. But it too rankled several groups—some in the military, some in foreign governments, and some in the State Department—stirring up a veritable trifecta of harrumphing, protest, and consternation. Admiral Jim Ellis told me what his Naval Academy physics professor had taught him: “If you want traction, you must first have friction.” We were generating more than our share of heat.
The way our forces were stationed overseas was so outdated, it was as if they had been frozen in time for the decades since Berlin and Tokyo fell in 1945, the armistice halted the Korean War in 1953, and the Cold War ended in 1991. Of the quarter million troops deployed abroad in 2001, more than one hundred thousand were in Europe, the vast majority stationed in Germany to fend off an invasion by a Soviet Union that no longer existed. An additional one hundred thousand were in East Asia and the western Pacific, vestiges of the occupation of Japan in World War II and the Korean War. Those deployments were obviously not taking into account the twenty-first-century reality that Germany was now one of the wealthier nations in Europe and that Japan and South Korea were among the most capable and self-sufficient in Asia.
Yet the status quo persisted in the Department; senior DoD officials were not questioning those deployments. Some combatant commanders seemed to feel they owned the forces and assets under their commands, and were loath to part with them. I started to pepper officials with what seemed to me obvious questions. Was it still wise to have large numbers of our forces in a defensive posture in western Germany to deter a tank invasion from the Soviet Union? Did we still need so many thousands of troops stationed in South Korea when the Korean people were increasingly irritated by the American troop presence, and given that Korea could well afford to do considerably more to defend its own territory? Was the enormous investment the American taxpayers were making