Rumsfeld's Revolution at Defense

Transcript

PAUL LIGHT: There are things that you can pick at in the reforms of Homeland Security, but in general it is an ambitious effort to get that agency restarted and refocused now that Chertoff is there, and one can only hope that he's there long enough to make the reforms stick. One of the problems with reorganization in the federal government is that many of the people who come in to do it only stay for 18 to 24 months, and it's just not long enough to make the reforms stick. We have the reorganization involved in the Negroponte shop as Director of National Intelligence with the same goals. Perhaps Representative Hamilton will talk a little bit about that.

This little paper that I've written is about the Department of Defense, and I have to say from the beginning that whatever you think of Donald Rumsfeld as one of the architects of the war in Iraq, whatever you think of his policies and his advocacy regarding Iraq, he deserves credit as a bureaucratic reformer. He has been quite serious about reform. He has been involved in the fine points of reform. He is more interested in the intricacies of the operation of the Department of Defense down to the financial system reform, the personnel reforms and so forth than most Secretaries of Defense over the past half-century.

I give him credit here for being an ambitious bureaucratic reformer and I think he deserves credit for having stayed with it. Secretaries come and go, he is clearly committed to following this through, and it's a back-channel story that gets lost in the conversation about the war in Iraq, and, in fact, the two are intimately related. The real challenge facing Rumsfeld is that the war in Iraq exacts concessions in terms of Rumsfeld's revolution and transformation of military affairs.

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