"Like Rumsfeld, Only Smaller" (the greatest change agent of all time)

Tech Central Station ^ | 09 Nov 2006 | Josh Manchester

[FreeKeys]

After returning from Iraq in 2003, I found myself preparing to leave active-duty in 2004. For some reason, I encountered several interesting articles about Donald Rumsfeld and came to be pretty impressed with the guy. I don't mean his leadership style, or his decisions or anything like that. I mean personality-wise. He's got a great bio: elected to the House of Representatives at age 29, worked his way through Washington for nearly two decades before departing for the private sector. There he turned around two companies that were failing, and by all accounts, he did so with panache.

My boss became interested in Rummy too. We started to trade bits and pieces of information we encountered here and there. I told him I had read somewhere that Rumsfeld kept a an old tape deck in his office and when working late, would throw in a cassette of patriotic marches and pick up some dumbbells and do a few sets, just to get the blood flowing. My boss saw an interview on TV conducted at Rumsfeld's ranch in New Mexico. A lifelong friend, who was a successful businessman himself, said that Rummy has the energy of "five successful men." Another article I read noted that Rumsfeld doesn't sit at a desk, choosing instead to stand all day between two tall tables. Another noted his habit of frequently walking long distances to appointments in the capital, instead of hopping in his security vehicle - to the chagrin of his security detail. The man, while in his early 70s, would work 16 hour days, then routinely beat his subordinates at a squash game, then go home and spend his free time . . . writing a book for his wife about what a great person she is. I'm not making any of this up.

When I finally left active duty, at a small gathering of officers, my boss presented me with a nice plaque which read, "1st Lt Joshua Manchester: Like Rumsfeld, only smaller." I thought this was hilarious (I am only 5' 7") and a great compliment. He meant it in the manner of the hard-working, energetic, successful individual we had come to follow a little.

Since then, as the plaque has sat on my bookshelves here at home, I've often wondered how people would interpret it now that Rumsfeld's stock has fallen. If people ever ask me about it, wondering why I'd like to be identified with such a devil, as Rumsfeld has now been demonized, I'll have the privilege of telling some of those stories above.

Last week, a reader of Glenn Reynolds' blog Instapundit wrote him this email:

"The Military cannot change itself, no organization can do that. Imagine your company or organization suddenly saying that it needs to change to meet business challenges because that's what the CEO read in a magazine over the weekend. How's that work? You spend months on 'Mission statements' and going on useless employee retreats and in the end, the same lame-o fatass managers run the same asininely redundant departments only with different titles and cost centers. How do you get a company to change? You don't change because you want to, you change because the competition forces you to change. You get creamed in a quarterly result, or you get merged with the competition. So what happens to us if our Military gets creamed in combat or 'Merged'? In that respect, Rumsfelds transformation doest seem so bad now does it?

"The Military cannot change itself. Air Force screams at the Navy, Navy screams at the Army, and everyone screams at the Marines, and the Coast Guard continues to go on unfunded. Congress just sits squirms in its seat every time someone wants to do something simple like close an air force base, Private Industry? Oh sure that will work out fine, no self interest there, right?

"So what do you do? You get a man just exactly like Rumsfeld, who's been around forever, knows exactly what works and what doesn't work, knows where all the bodies are buried at every level of the chain of command and you let him loose by putting him at the top.

"Rumsfeld is uniquely and highly qualified to do exactly what he is doing. He is an institutional nightmare to the lifetime bureaucrat. Think of Rumsfeld as one of those CEO's that gets hired to turn around a company in bankruptcy court, or like Tom Peters without the PR team. This is not to say that the Military is 'bankrupt', but it has lost its way in some places. Do we really need a dozen more Seawolf submarines or should we have 50 more C-17s and C-5s? F-22's or MV-22's?, Airborne Laser Missile Defense or another 10 brigades of Marines and Special Forces? I don't know the answer to those questions, but I know better than to ask Admiral Chuck 'Seawolf' Hardmore if we need more Seawolf submarines.

"That's why we are lucky to have him, and that's why everyone hates him, because in the end Rumsfeld will be remembered as the greatest change agent of all time."

There seems to be a lot of truth in that. And there seems to be a lot of truth in the idea that an individual such as this would make everyone upset. Six years is a long time to be Secretary of Defense. It will take a while to see the true impact of Rumsfeld's changes and to judge them.

For the moment though, perhaps it's best just to be glad we had someone who was willing to shake things up so much, in a government that is all too often too moribund to escape its own inertia.

"Like Rumsfeld, only smaller." Before the war is over, we might find ourselves wishing we had another Secretary of Defense more like him than less.

Josh Manchester is a TCSDaily contributing writer and a veteran of the march to Baghdad. His blog is The Adventures of Chester (www.theadventuresofchester.com).

[charbookguy]

Every great reformer in history suffered persecution. But it is they whom history remembers and much less so the persecuters.

[traviskicks]

'The best of Donald Rumsfled'
http://www.neoperspectives.com/rumsfeld.htm

[Zhang Fei]

LOL...that HAS to be a typo there...no way we lost 800 jet aircraft in 1954 alone, though it was dangerous to fly some of those...

This is from a Naval War College Review paper:

In 1954 alone, in working to master jet aviation off carriers, the U.S. Navy lost nearly eight hundred aircraft.

Kind of puts the Marine Corps' travails with the V-22 into perspective, doesn't it? Like I said, Rumsfeld and his cohort of naval aviators were the pioneers of jet age naval aviation, and they had balls of steel.

[PGalt]

Great article. Thanks for posting. Great FReeper comments. BTTT!

[pinz-n-needlez]

Ping :-)

[SBprone]

The great ones always go out under a cloud. Reagan did and Bush will too. Give it a decade or two and you will see how wrong you were about GW.

[em2vn]

".....800 jet aircraft were lost in 54 alone." Are you sure about that. I think they would have run out of pilots long before they ran out of airplanes.

[em2vn]

I would say the error is in the article you read from. Do you think the Navy had 800 jets in 1954 that it could lose?

[em2vn]

Didn't the U.S. Navy do a pretty good job of launching and recovering jet aircraft during the Korean war?

[dbehsman]

I would say the error is in the article you read from. Do you think the Navy had 800 jets in 1954 that it could lose?

I think it is certainly possible. The cold war was in absolute full swing. America was still employing the mass production practices that we learned during the second world war. Jet technology was born during the second world war. The early jets were dangerous (it was still a relatively new technology, and it wouldn't surprise me that there would have been many bugs to work out). In other words, I think America had the capability to mass produce an imperfect weapon that America felt was going to be needed in world war three. Better to have a fleet of mediocre jets than perfect prop planes I think was the mentality. Also, jet technology was recognized as the wave of the future. Both the Soviets and the United States had to know that whoever mastered the dangerous technology first would have the upper hand in a potential conflict.

From the article:
If the experience of other navies is any measure, the Chinese also need to realize that getting carrier operations right will involve the loss of expensive aircraft and hard-to-replace pilots. In 1954 alone, in working to master jet aviation off carriers, the U.S. Navy lost nearly eight hundred aircraft. In 1999 the Navy lost only twenty-two, but these were the most advanced aircraft flown by the world’s most experienced aviators.54

From the note:
54. Sandra I. Erwin, “Navy Aims to Curtail Aviation Mishaps Caused by Crew Error,” National Defense (October 2000), www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/issues/2000/Oct/Navy_Aims.htm.

I don't know a lot about early jet aviation, but it would appear to me like this poster has done the homework. Also, the numbers don't really seem to be out of the realm of possibility.

[Diana in Wisconsin]

Excellent article. What a wonderful man! I agree that his "friend" George Bush took off his President Hat and got his friend out of the line of fire.

[wordsofearnest]

776 to be exact.

[Txsleuth]

Thank you SO much for pinging me. That is a great article.

I love Rummy.

[em2vn]

I read the article but I still question the loss of 800 planes. It seem greatly over stated.

[BlueDragon]

Thanks for the "rules" post. Have seen it before, I think, but replying to you here for

threadmarker

purposes.

[FreeKeys]

Thanks for posting Rumsfeld's Rules

[FreeKeys]

Thanks for posting that!

[higgmeister]

I have no doubt that aspartame can become poisonous in some circumstances, such as heated in solution.

I never knew Sec. Rumsfeld was connected to its FDA approval. Don't let that get out or the rats will use that against him.

[defenderSD]

The only effective way to combat that insidious condition is to get indisputable factual results that contradict the deceptive dishonest statements of the liberal MSM. We almost did that in this election, but we only got four out of five of the major results we needed. The ones Bush got done:

1) Federal Reserve stopped raising interest rates and inflation has probably already peaked while the economy remains strong.
2) Oil prices and gasoline prices declined dramatically.
3) We started sealing the Mexican border with National Guard troops and a border fence.
4) Bush & Rice have built a solid coalition with Europe and other allies that will stop Iran from building nuclear weapons.

The one big result that we needed but couldn't get done was substantial troop withdrawls from Iraq. The stubborn Iraqi Baathists and the meddling Iranians and Syrians have made it difficult to reduce troop levels without destabilizing the new Iraqi government. If we could have gone five for five on these big issues we would have held the house and the senate. Now watch the Dems make fools of themselves for two years and set us up to retake Congress in 2008.

I think we will have a strong coalition in place with Europe and Japan (and Western leaning Arab nations in the background) on the Iranian nuclear weapons issue and that will give enough political cover to Democrats so that they vote to authorize the use of force against Iran if necessary. I think we will probably end up having no choice but to attack Iranian nuclear facilities late next year or early in 2008.

[defenderSD]

That's a great post about Rumsfeld's Rules, but it takes up way too much space on our screens and it takes too long to page through it all. You don't need to use multiple page break tags between lines--one paragraph tag is enough and it will save you some typing and save us some paging time. Thanks in advance for your attention to this issue in the future. :-)