My Share of the Task(50)

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                The VDJ3 position offered me a good vantage point to see how the Pentagon worked. Senior enough to be included in many key meetings but junior enough not to be consumed or constrained by them, I developed a feel for the general mood and trends in the place. I watched how guidance or questions from key leaders in the building were digested and acted on in the “engine rooms” where action officers worked.

                Overall, morale at the Pentagon was not great, but I did not see nonstop internecine warfare. When I arrived in August, Secretary Rumsfeld and his team of appointees had been in place for about eighteen months. But many of his anticipated reforms had been postponed due to the tumultuous post-9/11 environment. Still, among the officers, some of the proposals produced angst, exacerbated by the secretary’s famously abrasive style. I’d best describe the atmosphere as often tentative and sometimes anxious.

                Early on, my duties involved working actions through the bureaucratic process. Many of those decisions could have been made in short conversations or video teleconferences. But many Pentagon decision makers liked the safety of process. There was little recognition that slavish adherence to rigid processes could create inflexible mind-sets across the organization.

                Working with Donald Rumsfeld was an adventure, but also instructive. Law required the secretary of defense to authorize the overseas deployment of any forces, and his written approval was called a deployment order (DEPORD). Weekly, we would consolidate all the proposed DEPORDs and conduct a session with the secretary to seek his approval and signature. But the process began much earlier, when staff officers fielded requests from combatant commands—during this period they were mostly from Central Command—for forces. In the days, weeks, and occasionally months that followed, action officers would work long hours with the military services to identify potential sources for the forces, time lines for deployment, and other details. The proposed DEPORDs and supporting documentation were then compiled into a set of about twelve identical three-ring notebooks used to coordinate the actions with key Pentagon leaders in the days before the brief to the secretary of defense.

                “DEPORD brief day” was often painful, although occasionally humorous. Secretary Rumsfeld would sit at one end of a conference table in his office, flanked by a briefing officer who was armed with encyclopedic knowledge of every DEPORD. Typically at the table were also the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a couple members of Rumsfeld’s staff, and the J3 or VDJ3, the position I then held.

                The notebooks were exquisitely organized, with a summary of each proposed deployment, a map showing where it would go, its purpose, and size. Page by page the secretary scrutinized each DEPORD, often asking pointed questions on its importance to the mission and the timing of deployment. In several cases I watched him dig into more detail on a two- or three-person detachment than he did on a fifteen-thousand-soldier combat division. I can’t say it was fun, but the rigor of the process forced diligence and scrutiny on the critical decision to deploy service members.

                As we postured for war in Iraq, the military’s deployment process became an issue. Major military deployments were traditionally designed in support of existing war plans and involved force packages—combinations of forces with all the necessary capabilities for the mission. They were easiest to deploy when a single decision was made for the entire package and military logisticians and transportation planners could flow the force as efficiently as possible.

                But Rumsfeld wasn’t buying the traditional mindset. He believed military planning was unnecessarily inflexible in what forces would deploy and when they would flow. He felt that a scrub of both would produce a more tailored force and would avoid having to posture it before it was needed. His approach provided him and the president valuable flexibility and ambiguity in their intentions toward Iraq. But operational commanders were left concerned they might not have what they needed if and when fighting began. Logisticians became terrified they’d not be able to make such an ad hoc approach work.