Pentagon iconoclasts
With his slicked-back hair, rimless glasses, and a cast-in-iron jaw, this Secretary of Defense wields a clout like few others.
He brings a corporate executive's brazen ambition to scrap old ways, even if it rankles the top Pentagon brass. A national security crisis has emboldened him to transform the military, to exert greater civilian control over the services, and even to poach on the State Department's supremacy in foreign policy.
His name: Robert McNamara. The year: 1962.
The description also, of course, could be about Donald Rumsfeld, the current Defense secretary who exactly four decades later is embarked on a course with uncanny parallels to the early 1960s.
Today, as he visits Gulf-based troops in what he insists is not a victory tour, the tale of McNamara holds lessons that are both encouraging and cautionary: Civilian-led transformation of the military, for all its difficulties, is possible. One's record in battle can be very different from one's record in the corridors of Washington. (McNamara reshaped the military for the cold-war era, but oversaw a flawed campaign in Vietnam.) A strong personality can be both a crucial asset and a hindrance in an effort that ultimately requires cooperation in Congress and the military.
Rumsfeld and his team, now relishing US military successes, have already been confronted with some of these lessons.
"They've acted in many ways the way McNamara's whiz kids did," says former Defense Secretary Harold Brown, who was also McNamara's Air Force secretary. "That produces a predictable negative reaction from senior uniformed military people."
Prior to Sept. 11, Rumsfeld's plans for lighter, yet more lethal, US forces faced setbacks in skirmishes with the uniformed services. Now, the question is whether he can translate his victory-bolstered clout into a lasting overhaul of the armed forces.
This month, he quietly submitted to Congress legislation that would radically reshape the Pentagon's military and civilian workforces. And the departure last week of Army Secretary Thomas White could pave the way for a shakeup of that service's top leadership.
Despite the military's overwhelming success in Iraq, Rumsfeld has made no secret of his belief that the Army must transform itself from a force designed to thwart a Soviet invasion of western Europe.
It was McNamara who pushed the military to adopt that force structure at President Kennedy's direction, says Alain Enthoven, who headed McNamara's systems-analysis office and now teaches business at Stanford University. Instead of depending on massive nuclear strikes, Mr. Enthoven says McNamara wanted stronger conventional forces, and expanded the president's menu of options to include the Special Forces now favored by Rumsfeld.
Equally important were McNamara's changes in how the Pentagon evaluated weapons and spent money. His pack of number-crunching whiz kids such as Enthoven wrested budgetary control from admirals and generals.
The Sept. 11 terror attacks, like cold war 1960s standoffs in Cuba and Berlin four decades earlier, fed Rumsfeld's new urgency for change. Both McNamara and Rumsfeld saw a military unprepared for the range of conflicts that might lie ahead.
And after a decade when President Clinton deferred to military wisdom, Rumsfeld also concluded generals and admirals had amassed too much power, says former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb, who now directs the Council on Foreign Relations' National Securities Studies program.
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