On Rumsfeld

I've always had two minds about Rumsfeld. His gruff approach to flag officers was always counter-productive. (There was the irony of a few generals and admirals getting back what they long gave to their subordinates.) I suspect a lot of that animosity grew from Rumsfeld's frustration at the "in the box" thinking that characterizes the ground forces, especially the army. Although he once told a soldier that you go to war with the army you have, Rumsfeld expected emerging technologies to be bigger combat multipliers than they were.

To truly understand Rumsfeld, one must appreciate how utterly conventional and unimaginative is current military thinking. Only slowly are army leaders grasping the impact of complexity on military art and science. Command posts at all levels still push information up the hierarchy in a cycle of non-stop power point decision briefs to senior leaders who have little technical understanding of the units and processes they're directing. Today's successful businesses, on the other hand, quickly realized that the meaningful action is on the periphery where employees are interacting with customers.

The slavish devotion to doctrine, SOPs and tactics, techniques and procedures, comes at the expense of contextual understanding. Thus, army and Marine commanders have no hesitation in applying the counterintelligence field manual designed for Iraq to their operations in Afghanistan. This linear approach to the non-linear dynamics in the real world creates enormous inefficiencies and friction, usually invisible to outsiders.

This is just speculation about what bugged Rumsfeld based on his expectations and the language he used describing his vision. Could be that his grumpiness was merely that he's a crotchety old man who spent too much time near the Potomac.