Pentagon Warlord

By Mark Thompson and Michael Duffy/Washington

Nearly every day now, working from the stand-up desk in his spacious Pentagon E-Ring office, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pores over a secret document known only to a tight circle of U.S. officials: Deployment Order No. 177. Although it might sound like a one-pager that needs only a quick review, No. 177 is a series of documents, each 10 to 20 pages long, detailing exactly when, how and where Army and Marine battalions, Navy carrier groups and Air Force fighter wings are to be shipped overseas or redeployed for war in Iraq.

Pentagon officials say orders such as No. 177 are normally reviewed thoroughly in advance and fly across a Defense chief's desk. But with every step America takes toward war with Iraq, which could be as little as a month off, Rumsfeld is doing things his own meticulous way. Over the past few weeks, he has been holding up deployment papers at the last minute, demanding answers and explanations about which units are going where, why. He has been running similar drills for months on the generals and admirals, reworking the plans to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. General Tommy Franks, the Army four-star who would run the war as head of U.S. Central Command, actually prepared the plan. But as a Pentagon officer points out, "That misses the point. Franks may be the draftsman, but Rumsfeld's the architect."

As America prepares for a war that would require 25 times the number of troops deployed to fight the Taliban, Rumsfeld, 70, is on the line as never before in a long and storied career. Afghanistan was a highly unconventional war that relied in part on CIA agents carrying bags of cash to buy the loyalty of anti-Taliban fighters. But taking out Saddam would mean an old-fashioned kind of conflict, with thousands of Marines and G.I.s carrying rifles and grenades. A war, if it comes, would be Rumsfeld's legacy. Win or lose, this would be Rumsfeld's war.

Ever since Rumsfeld became something of a matinee idol with his daily war briefings, his relationship with the military he leads has become more complicated. Between his easy smile and his shiny little eyeglasses, he is vaguely reminiscent of F.D.R. and is brimming with the same sort of spooky confidence. His clipped, no-nonsense manner--leavened with plenty of "good gollies" and "dadburnits" (and a helping of time-honored doubletalk)--cut the press down to size during the Afghan war, scored high in the polls and turned the man who has the distinction of being both the youngest and the oldest person ever to hold the title of Secretary of Defense into a celebrity who is featured in the pages of Vanity Fair and skits on Saturday Night Live.

In the foxholes, Rumsfeld's take-no-prisoners bravura plays well with the soldiers who would be doing the fighting in Iraq. "We do what we're told to do," says a Marine commander, "but confidence is important to us." As you move up the ranks to the men who are supposed to be scripting this fight, however, not everyone is convinced that Rumsfeld should be managing it down to the last dog tag. Retired Army General Norman Schwarzkopf, who led the first Gulf War, says he is "nervous" about the control Rumsfeld is exercising over the buildup. "It looks like Rumsfeld is totally, 100%, in charge," says Schwarzkopf. "He seems to be deeply immersed in the operational planning--to the chagrin of most of the armed forces."

It is worth noting that before the shooting starts, another battle, fought behind the scenes, has already been lost and won. This one was waged via endless meetings and telephone calls during the past eight months between Rumsfeld and Franks over exactly how to run this war. As with any battle plan, the military has raised some doubts; one officer estimates that as many as 1 in 3 senior officers questions the wisdom of a pre-emptive war with Iraq. The reasons aren't surprising: the U.S. military is already stretched across the globe, the war against Osama bin Laden is unfinished, and even if the march to Baghdad goes quickly, a long postwar occupation looks inevitable. The military's assessment of the chances of success are less optimistic than those of the Administration's theologians. So the sessions produced an inevitable compromise between soldier and politician. And if it's hard to tell who won, that's partly because, as Franks told TIME, "It's not a matter of winning and losing; winning and losing occurs on a battlefield."

When Franks' rough draft first arrived at the Pentagon nearly a year ago, the plan was to invade Iraq from Kuwait in the south, from Turkey in the north and from Jordan in the west. Rumsfeld couldn't shake the notion that it seemed too familiar. He felt that the U.S. would face a far weaker Iraqi army than the one it crushed 12 years ago--and has bombed incessantly for the past five years. "Despite being told not to do it, [Franks] basically sent up a revised Gulf War I plan. Rumsfeld couldn't believe it," says a senior Pentagon official. Says a Central Command officer: "As soon as they started talking numbers, real disagreements broke out."

While Franks said he needed at least 250,000 troops, Rumsfeld wanted no more than 100,000, fearing that larger numbers gathered on Saddam's doorstep would present a tempting target. Rumsfeld was also enamored of the dubious idea, backed by a few gung-ho Pentagon civilians, that a small force could hook up with tribesmen in the north and south and get the job done quickly. That might have worked against ragtag warlords in Afghanistan, but it would be dangerous in Iraq, where Saddam has a 400,000-man army. As the plan bounced between Washington and Franks' Tampa, Fla., headquarters, Franks' troop count fell and then rose again as war planners became convinced that they might have to engage in door-to-door fighting in Baghdad. The final number split the difference: war with Iraq could begin with as few as 150,000 U.S. troops in the region--ready to strike by mid-February--with 100,000 or more standing by in Europe and elsewhere. "Rumsfeld is all about challenging your assumptions," says a senior Navy officer who works with him. "He wants proof of everything. His basic message is, Show me the data, and I'll show you the troops or the money."

But while Rumsfeld eventually accepted more forces than he had planned, he has retained a big say over how they would be deployed. And he demanded many more special-forces soldiers, never popular with the regular Army, be added to the mix. The commandos' primary mission: disable Saddam's biological, chemical and nuclear-weapons capabilities. "He wants them to go after weapons of mass destruction," says a Central Command officer. "They were ancillary in Franks' plan, but they've become critical in Rumsfeld's." Rumsfeld also assigned some special forces to hunt for Scud missiles.

Rummy, as he's known, also prevailed on the timetable. Franks wanted Air Force bombers to pound Iraqi positions for 10 to 14 days before starting a ground war--far shorter than the 39-day air campaign in 1991 but long enough, Franks said, to pulverize any Iraqi defenses before the infantry begins to move. Rumsfeld balked at that request, cutting the air-war plan to seven days--or less, since he believes a combined campaign will shorten the battle and save lives. And Rumsfeld pushed his foot to the floor on a ground war too, insisting that once the real shooting starts, U.S. tanks and other armored vehicles should race ahead of their supply lines toward Baghdad in days, if not hours, instead of maintaining a moderate pace to allow slower fuel trucks to keep up.

The ambitious plan is classic Rumsfeld. Brookings Institution military analyst Michael O'Hanlon praises the approach, which relies heavily on special forces, unmanned drones and possibly a new high-powered microwave weapon (see related story). "Rumsfeld wanted to do something more innovative than have a quarter-million armor-centric troops marching up the Tigris-Euphrates valley," says O'Hanlon. Rumsfeld clearly decided that his civilian advisers who were pushing for the Afghan model--sending in 75,000 U.S. troops to back the Shi'ites and Kurds as they fight to overthrow Saddam--were wrong. "Franks was basically right on how many troops we need," O'Hanlon says, "and Rumsfeld listened to him."

Some former Pentagon officials are worried about the Secretary's unusually heavy hand in the planning game. "Rumsfeld is running this on a very short string," says Merrill McPeak, a retired general who was the Air Force Chief of Staff during the Gulf War. "I'm sure that's a source of frustration for Tommy Franks, but this is a Rumsfeld show. He's really running this buildup, hands on the throttle and steering wheel. If I were there, I'd be contemplating resignation daily." Franks dismisses McPeak's concerns. "Everyone who ever wore the uniform--and no longer wears the uniform--is automatically out of date," he says. "[Rumsfeld] challenges, he probes, he manages, he asks questions, and there never, ever has been a point--at least on my side of the equation--where I have felt like I needed to argue with him about an issue. There has never been an occasion where the Secretary has thrown me or one of my plans or ideas out of the room. That is not his style."

Adds Franks: "I have no desire to suck up to the Secretary, but I'll tell you he is a terrific manager. And I have been a combat soldier for a long time. The nexus of the two is very powerful for this country." Another Pentagon official puts it this way: "There are hundreds of one-star generals and action officers who complain that Rumsfeld's not listening to the military. But the truth is that he is. He just isn't listening to them."

Rumsfeld continues to shift troops around as nations fall in and out of the coalition against Saddam. U.S. diplomats worked overtime last week trying to win basing rights for 15,000 troops in Turkey, and they remain optimistic that Saudi Arabia will join Kuwait in allowing U.S. troops to stage from its soil. Rumsfeld also is making an ever growing list of things that could go wrong in a war with Iraq--and peppering his officers to anticipate them. "He has an unsettling tendency to do that," an associate says. As Rumsfeld put it recently, "I'm never satisfied. It's genetic with me."

Don Rumsfeld was 9, living in a Chicago suburb, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The days and nights that followed molded Rumsfeld as he came of age, especially after his father put his real-estate career on hold to join the Navy and fight in the Pacific. "In World War II there were suicide pilots flying their aircraft into our ships," the Secretary told guests at an awards dinner last year. "Today a new enemy is seeking global power and has flown our own airliners into our buildings on suicide missions."

During World War II, Rumsfeld attended school in five cities in four different regions of the U.S. By age 14, he had held 16 part-time jobs, delivering newspapers and selling magazines in Illinois; raising chickens, watermelons and cantaloupes in North Carolina; chopping wood, delivering ice and digging razor clams in the Pacific Northwest; gardening and doing odd jobs in California. After high school he wrestled at Princeton and pinned down a degree in political science. And after a three-year stint as a Navy pilot, he became an investment banker in Chicago.

He was a young man in a hurry. Rumsfeld ran for Congress in 1962 and arrived in Washington at the age of 30, during President Kennedy's last year in office. He was marqueed from the start, one of several Young Turks in the House that included Bob Dole, Gerald Ford and George Herbert Walker Bush. Rumsfeld organized his pals into an informal club and served four terms before leaping to the Nixon White House. There he rose through various mid-level posts and became, within four years, NATO ambassador. He was always unconventional; even in the depths of that partisan era, he maintained a close friendship with Allard Lowenstein, the famed liberal organizer. Rumsfeld took Lowenstein to Republican conventions; Lowenstein returned the favor.

From the beginning, Rumsfeld's peers noticed that he was, as one puts it, "tough, competitive and transparently political." He was also better organized than anyone else. That's one reason that, after Nixon resigned in 1974, Ford brought Rumsfeld back from NATO to be his top White House aide and bring order to a West Wing in chaos. Rumsfeld proved himself handy with the knives: he maneuvered constantly against rivals while keeping his agenda a secret. "You'll never know what he is really thinking," says a colleague from the Ford years. Rumsfeld was not afraid of anyone, not even the greatest infighter of them all, then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. "Your wife was measuring my office the other day, Don," Kissinger once said to Rumsfeld, just to get a rise.

Many in Ford's inner circle believed that by 1975, Rumsfeld had designs on the presidency. Other top Republicans were poised to plunge in after Nixon exited the stage, but few moved as fearlessly as Rumsfeld. He began seeking ways to gain quick foreign policy experience. At his urging, Ford installed a fast-rising Rumsfeld protege named Dick Cheney in the chief of staff's job. Rumsfeld sent his rival for the Veepstakes, George Bush, to a politically toxic job at the CIA. And at age 43, Rumsfeld became the youngest Pentagon chief in history.

When Ford (teamed with Dole, as it turned out) lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976, Rumsfeld did something most Washington comers would rather die than try: he disappeared. For much of the next 25 years, he stayed out of the limelight, serving as CEO of GD Searle, the maker of NutraSweet, and then as chief of General Instrument Corp., a maker of cable-TV boxes that is now owned by Motorola. He was a huge success at business, though he missed politics--he once said he never should have left--but his attempts to stage a comeback always ran aground. He made a stab at the No. 2 spot on the Reagan ticket in 1980 (losing out to his old rival George H.W. Bush) and launched a brief run at the G.O.P. nomination in 1988 (losing out--once again--to Bush). By then the Rumsfeld-Bush rivalry was openly acidic: when Rumsfeld withdrew from the '88 race, he sent Bush a check for $100 or so, noting in an accompanying letter that he had sent the same amount to all Bush's rivals, thus hedging his bets.

Self-employed for most of the 1990s, Rumsfeld made a cameo appearance in the 1996 race when his old friend Dole took him on as a campaign chairman and even briefly considered him for the vice presidency. But Rumsfeld's political stars failed to align. Newt Gingrich asked him to run a commission on the missile threat in the final years of the Clinton era, a pulpit Rumsfeld used to warn Republican hopefuls of looming threats from Iraq, North Korea and China. Over the years, he became rich, bought a gigantic spread in Taos, N.M., and was living quietly with Joyce, his high school sweetheart and wife of 48 years, when his old charge Cheney asked him to come back and work for Bush's son.

Ask a general officer to name the No. 1 theme of Rumsfeld's latest Pentagon tour, and the answer probably won't be war. At the heart of Rumsfeld's activism is a desire to re-establish civilian control over a military that ran circles around the Clinton Administration. Not long after arriving in 2001, Rumsfeld announced plans to "transform" the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines into lighter, faster, stealthier fighting units. To the guys in uniform, "transform" meant not only cuts but also civilian oversight, so the military did what it does best: it prepared for a long siege. Rumsfeld ran into a wall of generals, Congressmen, lobbyists and weapons makers, who worked quietly together behind Rumsfeld's back to foil his plans.

Rumsfeld was among the first to grasp what others would take months to understand: that threats to America overseas were no longer deterred by tanks, bombers and aircraft carriers. However clean his logic, getting the generals to give up their gadgets was turning out to be much dirtier work. "This is a very large organization," says General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, "and as with any ship, there's a lot of inertia that won't allow you to turn it 10 degrees. You need energetic people to make that happen." But one man was no match for the nation's four military services. Rumsfeld found he could not make a move without its being leaked to the newspapers, and pretty soon he knew he was beaten. Right after Labor Day in 2001, Rumsfeld declared "the Pentagon bureaucracy" a mortal enemy of the U.S. The next day, the Pentagon was attacked by terrorists.

Rumsfeld and the services put aside their feud for a real war, and over time the need to transform things seemed to disappear, partly because the terrorist attacks opened the cash spigot and hard choices didn't seem necessary. Instead of having to choose either weapons of the future or those of the past, the Pentagon last year bought both. Rumsfeld has canceled only a single major weapons program in two years, the $11 billion Army Crusader artillery gun, while allowing such dubious programs as the Air Force's $200 million F22 Raptor fighter and the Navy's $2 billion Virginia-class submarines to move forward. Everyone knows there isn't enough money to pay for all these weapons (and others on the drafting board) unless defense budgets continue to rise dramatically--and almost no one thinks that will happen. "We have not totally left behind the cold war legacy," Myers told TIME. "We need to do a lot of work to make ourselves agile and flexible to address the new security environment."

So perhaps it is fortunate that work is what Rumsfeld does best. He arrives at his office each day at 6:30 a.m. and typically stays at his post for 12 hours before heading home and working several more hours. He often speaks first to Franks and then joins a conference call with Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. Focused as he has been on Iraq, the Secretary isn't preoccupied: his influence is felt across the board, on arms control, China policy, the North Korean crisis and the still fruitless hunt for bin Laden. He has backed the creation of the Homeland Security Department and jump-started a military command to support its work. But he drew the line when Congress pressed the President to place all U.S. intelligence assets, including military intelligence, under CIA control. Among those in the Bush inner circle, Rumsfeld is closest to Cheney philosophically and personally. Friends for 35 years, the two men talk about everything, including the state of the economy.

Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, describes his boss as "a constant, active source of energy." Where Rumsfeld goes, Wolfowitz says, "he kind of generates a mini-storm." Republican Senators complained to White House chief of staff Andrew Card that Rumsfeld was keeping them in the dark about war plans and other military issues. So last week Rumsfeld reported to Capitol Hill for a 2 1/2-hour kiss-and-make-up session with Senators. Asked later if he had been ignoring his minders, Rumsfeld said, "I don't think there is a problem."

It is that truculent attitude that most irritates many military men. Some who have worked with Rumsfeld say his interpersonal skills are shabby, however charming he is on camera. "Rumsfeld's a bully; he's arrogant, and he has a huge ego," says a senior Army officer with more than 30 years' experience in uniform. The loudest cries come from the Army, where Rumsfeld and his troops have kneecapped the two men in charge. Rumsfeld let it be known last April that the Army's top general, Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, was a lame duck 15 months before his term was slated to end. "It was condescending and a little bit cruel," says Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general. A month later, Rumsfeld loyalists made it clear that Army Secretary Thomas White, a former Enron executive who vainly tried to thwart Rumsfeld's decision to kill the Crusader, was one more mistake away from losing his job. "It's pretty clear that the Army is going to be the big loser," says Lawrence Korb, a top Reagan-era Pentagon aide. "If it were not for the war in Afghanistan and the looming war in Iraq, I'm sure they would already be cutting two Army divisions."

Perhaps Rumsfeld is counting on the first war of the 21st century to shake the brass out of its cold war mentality. But it may be that he has already accomplished most of what he came to do: reassert civilian control of a military that had grown used to getting its way. As photocopiers cranked out the deployment orders last week for Rumsfeld to consider at his own unpredictable pace, top military officers admitted they are scrambling to think ahead, no longer waiting for him to O.K. their every move. Any delay, they said, would be risky with a man like Rumsfeld prowling the halls. "We're sending troops forward without deployment orders," a top Navy officer conceded last week. "We don't want to get caught flat-footed when Rumsfeld asks, 'How come you guys haven't left yet?'"