Known and Unknown

by Donald Rumsfeld

  Bush first asked to hear my views about the Defense Department.1 I ventured that the Department seemed to have drifted somewhat since the end of the Cold War. President Clinton had not seemed to have a comfortable relationship with the military, due in part to the accusation that he had evaded military service during the Vietnam War. Clinton’s early foray into defense policy on the issue of gays in the military exacerbated the problem, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by its then chairman General Colin Powell taking the rare step of publicly exposing a disagreement with the President.2 Once burned, Clinton seemed to have left the department largely to its own devices.3

  That presidential remove, I suggested, had had consequences. It provided the senior officials in the Pentagon the latitude to operate relatively free of top-level strategic direction. Under those circumstances, moreover, various members of Congress were better able to promote their particular interests, sometimes at the expense of sound national policy. In the combatant commands, four-star admirals and generals had wielded considerable power, and for years had been called, I thought inappropriately, commanders in chief. To my thinking, the United States had only one commander in chief, and it was the elected president.4

  “The task for the incoming secretary of defense will be to implement what you promised throughout the campaign,” I said. “You will need to fulfill your pledge that ‘help is on the way’ for the United States military.” If the President-elect hoped to achieve the goals for the Department of Defense that he had outlined over the course of his campaign, he would need a secretary of defense willing to adjust the arrangements that many in the Pentagon had grown comfortable with—that of a light-touch administration that sanctioned their activities from a respectful distance. The task for his new secretary would not be to simply tweak existing policies and practices at the margins.

  Bush nodded in agreement. He had outlined ambitious plans for the United States military, emphasizing his view that it needed to accelerate its transformation toward agility, speed, deployability, precision, and lethality. Bush did not strike me as one who worried about ruffling feathers, but he had not served in Washington and had never had to tangle with a bureaucracy as entrenched and powerful as that of the Defense Department, the defense contractors, and congressional interests closely tied to the status quo. I cautioned that military officers as well as career civilian officials in Defense and throughout the executive branch would be wary of reforms that impinged on their acquired authority.

  I highlighted an additional challenge to the President-elect. Many members of Congress wanted further cuts to the Defense Department budget. I was convinced the budget needed to be increased significantly to correct the shortfalls of the prior decade and to ensure a military force suitable for our nation’s strategic requirements. America’s armed forces had been reduced by more than half a million personnel. The defense budget had been cut by $50 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars from the time President Clinton took office in 1993. Yet while defense investment had been reduced sharply, as Bush had noted in his campaign, military deployments had tripled.

  I raised other issues with him that I believed the department faced, including: the requirement to begin testing and deploying ballistic missile defenses; improvements to homeland security; a strengthened effort on information warfare; and the urgent need to improve our country’s intelligence capabilities.5 Some of these issues, particularly missile defense, had become polarized. I thought Governor Bush’s record of reaching across the aisle to Democrats in the Texas state legislature boded well for garnering bipartisan support for national security programs.

  In short, our conversation reflected my belief that the Department of Defense had some longstanding problems and that fixing them would unquestionably require breaking some crockery and bruising more than a few egos. I was direct about this with Bush. He was an experienced executive and politician and knew that what he had promised on the campaign trail with respect to defense policy was important and needed, but that it carried political risk—for the President and for his secretary of defense.

  Bush considered those thoughts, and seemed to appreciate them. Unlike our previous meeting, he asked few questions. He appeared to be more interested in having me talk. He next asked my views on the CIA. Having previously served as secretary of defense, I assumed that if the President-elect was thinking about me for a position in his administration, it would most likely be at the CIA.

  I thought Bush and the members of the National Security Council would need to exert a stronger hand in setting the intelligence community’s priorities, to ensure they reflected the administration’s policy objectives. How would the Agency, for example, balance its resources among collecting intelligence on rogue regimes pursuing weapons of mass destruction, analyzing trends in global warming, collecting energy price information, and considering the threats from AIDS or cyberwarfare? Would the CIA spend more or less resources hunting down war criminals in the Balkans or trying to track down terrorists? These were decisions on priorities that would need clear direction from the President and his senior advisers. My experience had led me to believe that direction had been lacking.

  “Turbulence in the intelligence community has been a problem,” I told him. There had been six CIA directors and seven directors of the Defense Intelligence Agency between 1987 and 2000. “If a corporation changed its management almost every other year,” I said, “it would go broke—and it ought to.” Bush laughed. I suggested that he nominate someone who could remain in the position long enough to make substantial progress.

  Bush asked how I felt about taking a role in his administration. “I’m not eager to go back into government,” I replied, “but I would consider it if you thought I could be helpful.” However, I advised, there were a number of things he would need to be aware of before coming to a decision.

  I cautioned him that after more than two decades in the private sector, running two Fortune 500 companies, serving on a number of boards of directors, and being involved in a number of nonprofit activities, my personal situation was complex and my business responsibilities were extensive. While not connected to major defense contractors, I did have ties to a number of companies, some of which did business, however loosely, with the federal government. Extracting myself from all of those relationships would be difficult—not to mention costly.

  I also informed him that like many families across America, ours had not been immune to the problem of drug addiction. Two of our children, Marcy and Nick, had found themselves caught up in that personal torment, and the experience had been heartbreaking and difficult for Joyce and me. But by December 2000, Marcy and Nick were both in recovery. Marcy had been clean for more than a decade and was active in the community of recovering addicts. I wanted the President-elect to be aware of this, so I shared our family’s experience with him, as I had with Cheney, who had known our children since they were little. Bush listened with understanding.*

  “You might be better off considering candidates who had fewer complications in their lives,” I suggested to him. Bush said he appreciated my position and asked me to forward to him or Cheney the names of people I thought might be appropriate for DoD or CIA. I promised to do so.

  Before our meeting ended, I had one other thought I wanted to share. I had observed over the past few years that there were ways of behaving that could invite one’s enemies to act aggressively, with unintended but dangerous consequences.6 The American withdrawal under fire from Somalia in the early 1990s was an example. In like fashion, American leaders did not act forcefully in response to al-Qaida’s fatal attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. The cumulative effect, I cautioned, suggested to our enemies that the United States was not willing to defend its interests. “Weakness is provocative,” I said to the President-elect, who nodded in agreement. “But so is the perception of weakness,” I added.

  As I saw it, a decade of hesitation and half measures had undermined our national security. The incoming administrati
on would need to give the country strategic direction and build up our defenses and intelligence capabilities. Anyone assuming those posts would need to have that in mind.

  I wanted Bush to know that if he selected me I would not intend to simply preside over the department or agency. “Governor, if I were to serve in your administration I would be leaning forward,” I said. “If you would be uncomfortable with that, then I would be the wrong man for the job.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Here We Go Again

  After my meeting with Bush, Joyce and I spent the Christmas holidays with our family at our home just north of Taos, New Mexico. Dick Cheney called me the afternoon of December 26 to talk about the names I had passed along for the CIA and the Pentagon. I had suggested that they consider Jim Woolsey, who had been Clinton’s CIA director, and Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic senator from Nebraska for secretary of defense.1 I liked the idea of someone who could give the administration bipartisan appeal. I also mentioned a CEO like General Electric’s Jack Welch, who had been a successful manager and had a distance from politics. But I had another, more unorthodox notion that I wanted to suggest. “Dick, here’s an interesting idea,” I began. “What if—”

  “Hold on, Don, I’ve got another call,” Cheney interrupted. “Let me get back to you.”

  Ten minutes later Cheney rang me up again. “We don’t need any more advice, Don,” Cheney said. “That was the President-elect calling. He told me to tell you he wants you to be secretary of defense.”2

  “Actually before we were interrupted, I was going to suggest you as SecDef,” I told Cheney.

  It was an idea similar to one I had suggested to President Ford a quarter of a century before, that Nelson Rockefeller, in addition to being the vice president, might also have substantive responsibilities running a cabinet department. There was nothing in the Constitution that prevented such an arrangement. Cheney had run the Defense Department before. I felt that if anyone could handle both positions, it was Dick.

  Cheney didn’t sound surprised by the suggestion. “The President-elect had the same idea,” he acknowledged. But Bush ultimately concluded that running a cabinet agency could conflict with bringing in Cheney as a key adviser on a wider range of policy matters and raised a question about having a sitting vice president regularly testify to Congress.

  I told Dick I wanted to discuss Bush’s offer with Joyce and think about it more before giving my answer. Later that day, I decided to accept the nomination. The young man who had joined me at the Office of Economic Opportunity as my special assistant back in 1969 would become one of the most influential vice presidents in American history. And to my amazement, I would go from having been the youngest secretary of defense in our country’s history to the oldest.

  When I left the Pentagon in 1977, the Carter administration reversed many of our decisions seemingly just because they were made by the prior administration. I was not going to do the same. I wanted to understand the rationale behind the Clinton administration’s decisions before making changes.

  Eleven days before the inauguration, I met with President Clinton’s outgoing defense secretary, Bill Cohen. I had known him when he was a Republican senator from Maine and was eager to hear his thoughts. Measured and knowledgeable, he touched on more than fifty issues he expected I would have to deal with as his successor. A number of them proved prescient. He mentioned the threat posed by Iraq’s attacks on U.S. and British aircraft in the northern and southern no-fly zones. Noting the recent terrorist bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, he raised the dangers posed by al-Qaida and its leader, Osama bin Laden. He also suggested that it might make sense to appoint a combatant commander to be in charge of protecting the American homeland from attack.3 Cohen’s briefing was enormously helpful as I prepared to testify as a nominee for secretary of defense for the second time.

  When I was nominated by President Ford in 1975, the major issue of the day had been détente with the Soviet Union. Now, with the Cold War behind us, there had been upbeat talk during the 1990s of a “peace dividend” that would allow the U.S. government to spend more on domestic programs by reducing investment in national security. Some analysts and scholars had argued that we were at the “end of history”—that the United States and its democratic principles were beyond ideological challenge in the world.4

  If the world was moving steadily and irreversibly toward democracy and capitalism as some claimed, perhaps there was less need for a robust U.S. national security strategy. Focusing only on the short term and the immediate rather than taking time to consider longer-term potential challenges is an understandable temptation. There is often pressure for the seemingly urgent to crowd out the important. The post–Cold War holiday from strategic thought that characterized much of the prior decade turned out to be not a luxury but a dangerous misjudgment. Overconfidence had spawned complacency. U.S. intelligence capabilities had atrophied, and U.S. operations from Somalia to Haiti had communicated uncertain American resolve. The problems of Islamist extremism, the nuclear weapons programs of North Korea and Iran, the threats from ballistic missile programs, and the crumbling of the United Nations’ containment measures for Iraq had been exacerbated.

  I doubted we had reached a golden era when nations would pound their swords into plowshares. If there was anything new at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it was the status of the United States as the sole great power in the world, voluntarily shouldering enormous responsibilities for global humanitarian assistance, peace, and prosperity. Dean Rusk, the secretary of state during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, once observed that “only one-third of the world is asleep at any given time and the other two-thirds is up to something.”5 Though to many our world seemed relatively peaceful, we needed to understand that the world of the twenty-first century, with weapons of unprecedented lethality and availability, is dangerous and untidy.6

  Not surprisingly, many of the questions at my Senate confirmation hearing tended toward short-term political considerations rather than long-term strategic considerations. The most contentious issue was Bush’s call to withdraw the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Among other provisions, the treaty, signed by the Americans and the Soviets during the Nixon era, barred even the testing of antimissile technologies, let alone any deployment. Bush wanted out of the treaty so we could proceed with the development of a missile defense program.

  In 1983, I was present in the White House when President Reagan announced his ballistic missile defense initiative. Though critics on the left derided his plan as an attempt to achieve Star Wars–like armaments, Reagan was a strong proponent. Bush now hoped to carry Reagan’s legacy forward by building on two decades of planning, research, and design, and get to the point of actually deploying an operational system.

  With the Soviet empire gone, with the Russian government seeking improved relations with the West, and with a number of impressive technological advances, I was surprised to see what had changed in congressional discussions of the issue—practically nothing. Opponents of Bush’s plan used arguments almost identical to those wielded against Reagan. Sometimes they were the same arguments from the same people.

  Critics were still contending that a missile defense program was not technologically feasible. Increasingly, however, testing indicated that such a system could work. Of course the tests also included some failures. But as I learned from my time in the pharmaceutical business, the development of important products often requires years of trial and error, and a failure can be a valuable learning experience. A zero-failure mentality means no one will try anything, and nothing new will be developed.

  Critics also contended the system would cost too much. I pointed out that the defense budget was less than 3 percent of our country’s gross domestic product, and that missile defense was less than 3 percent of the defense budget. Was the prospect of protecting Los Angeles or Atlanta from a dictator with a rogue missile not worth that cost? It seemed that a number of the bigge
st spenders in Congress suddenly became penny-pinchers to block defense programs they opposed.

  Some senators argued that missile defense would be destabilizing, and lead to a new arms race or alienate the Russians.7 In answering their concerns on this score, I recalled lessons that had been reinforced when I chaired the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission. “The problem with ballistic missiles, with weapons of mass destruction…,” I suggested, “is they work without being fired.”8 To the extent that hostile regimes or terrorists could threaten America, our interests, our friends, and our allies with ballistic missiles or chemical or biological weapons, they could alter our behavior and perhaps cause us to acquiesce to actions that we would otherwise resist. Further, our lack of a missile defense system encouraged enemies to invest in offensive missiles to which we remained vulnerable. With an increasing number of nations working to advance their ballistic missile technology, vulnerability was not a strategy I favored for America in the twenty-first century.

  Those arguments made little headway with senators such as Carl Levin, then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Over the years I would differ many times with Levin, who often wore his partisan-ship, like his half-glasses, right on the tip of his nose. Levin cloaked his passion with his studied prosecutorial demeanor but seemed curiously immune to reason on missile defense.

  After forging no new ground on missile defense, the senators at the hearing turned to other matters. Senator Pat Roberts posed what I thought was the most interesting and important question at my confirmation hearing. “What’s the one big thing that keeps you up at night?” the Kansan asked. There were a number of things I might have mentioned—North Korea, Iran, Iraq, nuclear proliferation, cyberwarfare, or terrorism. But if anything were to keep me up at night, I knew it was my concern about the quality of our intelligence. As I had said to Bush during our meeting in Austin, our country’s most important national security challenge was “improving our intelligence capabilities so that we know more about what people think and how they behave and how their behavior can be altered.”9 We needed an ability to uncover what our enemies were thinking and what motivated them. I believed that with more knowledge of that sort we would be better able to alter an enemy’s behavior before they launched an attack, rather than waiting and having to take action after an attack.10