The New Yorker: PRINTABLES:
"And so, that January of 2001, when Donald Rumsfeld was officially welcomed back to the Pentagon, “There was just great relief in the military,” recalled Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan arms-control official, who was among the invited guests that day. “There was the feeling that now somebody was going to be on their side.”
Bush had inherited a pressing problem. The American military continued through the nineteen-nineties to train, plan, and equip itself to fight an enemy—the Soviet Union—that no longer existed. It was hardly a secret that the military was badly in need of reform; everyone in uniform knew it, and those analysts and scholars who populated the think tanks of Washington had been fixated on the subject for most of a decade.
As a pro-defense Republican, Bush would have the political capital to bring about genuine, even historic, change. During the campaign, he had vowed to give his Secretary of Defense “a broad mandate to challenge the status quo and envision a new architecture of American defense for decades to come,” and he had chosen Rumsfeld because he believed that he would be more willing and better able than the other candidates to pursue his agenda. The contents and scope of that agenda were not yet known, but Rumsfeld made it clear that his approach to the military was very much hands-on.
Among those gathered at the River Parade Field for the Rumsfeld ceremony was an elderly man with a pleasant, grandfatherly aspect, who, amid the political celebrities and military brass, might have been taken for someone who had strayed from a Pentagon tour group. But within the national-security priesthood Andrew Marshall was something of a legend. He headed a unit called the Office of Net Assessment (he was its first and only director), which had evolved over the years into a sort of in-house Pentagon think tank. That made him the resident deep thinker, and what Marshall, who was in his late seventies, had been thinking about"
"And so, that January of 2001, when Donald Rumsfeld was officially welcomed back to the Pentagon, “There was just great relief in the military,” recalled Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan arms-control official, who was among the invited guests that day. “There was the feeling that now somebody was going to be on their side.”
Bush had inherited a pressing problem. The American military continued through the nineteen-nineties to train, plan, and equip itself to fight an enemy—the Soviet Union—that no longer existed. It was hardly a secret that the military was badly in need of reform; everyone in uniform knew it, and those analysts and scholars who populated the think tanks of Washington had been fixated on the subject for most of a decade.
As a pro-defense Republican, Bush would have the political capital to bring about genuine, even historic, change. During the campaign, he had vowed to give his Secretary of Defense “a broad mandate to challenge the status quo and envision a new architecture of American defense for decades to come,” and he had chosen Rumsfeld because he believed that he would be more willing and better able than the other candidates to pursue his agenda. The contents and scope of that agenda were not yet known, but Rumsfeld made it clear that his approach to the military was very much hands-on.
Among those gathered at the River Parade Field for the Rumsfeld ceremony was an elderly man with a pleasant, grandfatherly aspect, who, amid the political celebrities and military brass, might have been taken for someone who had strayed from a Pentagon tour group. But within the national-security priesthood Andrew Marshall was something of a legend. He headed a unit called the Office of Net Assessment (he was its first and only director), which had evolved over the years into a sort of in-house Pentagon think tank. That made him the resident deep thinker, and what Marshall, who was in his late seventies, had been thinking about"
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