Robert Switzer

Anyone remember when the Bushies called Rumsfeld Rumstud?

After 9-11, Donald Rumsfeld’s astringent, decisive, clear, no-nonsense platform manner certainly impressed. Like his pal Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld was someone who definitely looked and sounded as if he knew what he was talking about.

Shortly after that, I remember reading about Rumsfeld’s ambitious plan, called ‘Transformation’, that was designed to totally change the military from a slow, bureaucratic industrial-age behemoth to a light, fast, smart information-age force.

As I read about ‘Transformation’, I kept getting deja vu. I’d read it all before. The smaller-lighter-faster rhetoric read a lot like contemporary management theory, the kind of stuff written by business gurus like Tom Peters.

In a previous post, I talked a bit about how much Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the entire Bush entourage resembled the current state-of-the-art in corporate top management. It was all there — the imperial arrogance, the absolute refusal to acknowledge even obvious error, the magical thinking, the isolation, the yes-men echo chamber. And of course, they also exhibited the will to play as dirty as necessary to advance their pet agendas.

None of this should come as a surprise as Rumsfeld, Cheney and company had spent a significant portion of their lives as top executives of large corporations. And it’s equally unremarkable that the corporations led by these men were part of industries with significant government insulation from the vagaries of the free market these same men seem so rhetorically fond of.

In large, static bureaucracies such as large government contractors, pharmaceutical companies, and think tanks, the core competency is looking right, sounding right, and having the ability to vanquish and marginalize internal rivals.

And ole Rumstud was good at all of the above. Along with pal Cheney, he was able to slap down Colin Powell and contain Condoleezza Rice.

Unfortunately though, ole Rumstud finally found himself in a position where he would have to produce a specific, unambiguous result. And no amount of handwaving could get him off the hook, though it wasn’t from a lack of trying.

He still looks and sounds as if he knows what he’s talking about. Only now, even the dumbest among us recognize that the man is stone cold incompetent. A general who served under Rumsfeld put it this way, “Rumsfeld is incompetent tactically, strategically, and operationally”.

What the country needed during Rumsfeld’s tenure was a Secretary of Defense who could produce a specific, tangible result. And that result was quickly and decisively winning a war with a minimum loss of life — specifically the lives of our brave soldiers, but also the lives of innocent civilians.

In achieving this specific, tangible objective, Rumsfeld failed decisively. And now he’s gone, but I can’t help thinking about all the people who took responsibility for Rumsfeld’s actions in his stead, in the most personal and costly way imaginable — with their lives.