Free Republic

The U.S. military is the toughest and most professional in the world, but one force it usually can't beat is the bureaucracy back in Washington. The Defense Department has 200,000 acquisition personnel, whose insistence on doing everything "by the numbers" slows to a crawl efforts to get vital equipment such as armor into the field. But the bureaucracy can be defeated, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld demonstrated last week when he invoked his new "Rapid Acquisition Authority," allowing him to cut through the red tape to meet urgent battlefield needs. By invoking this power, Mr. Rumsfeld has given the Secretary...