Donald Rumsfeld - Right Man, Wrong Time
Richard Buchanan
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Any and all Presidential wannabe's can and have taken repeated potshots at the Former Secretary of Defense - Donald H Rumsfeld. He is fair game after 
all. His tenure in office, as the Secretary of the largest and perhaps most important government departments, was precarious from the very start.
Rumsfeld was hired by President Bush to shape the insanely inefficient and criminally wasteful Department of Defense into a leane and agile fighting force for a post Cold War world with a new set challenges and largely unknown threats.
The media predicted Rumsfeld's demise [from a task too great] as early as August 2001. Time Magazine rang an article entitled "Defense: Rumsfeld's Lonely, Losing Battle."
The scale of Rumsfeld's task: the restructuring of an organization with a 2007 annual budget of over $500 billion - almost 1.5 million active duty forces and over 700 thousand civilian employees based working in more than 600,000 individual buildings across 6,000 locations around the world!
On September 10, 2001 - one jovial day before the life-altering 9/11 - Rumsfeld stood before senior Pentagon officials - including the Joint Chiefs of Staff General [Dick] Myers - and declared war on the waste and inefficiency of the DoD.
In a meeting with a rather tedius title, "DOD Acquisition and Logistics Excellence Week Kickoff-Bureaucracy to Battlefield", Rumsfeld confirmed a staggering statistic that had otherwise been bantered around [the internet] as an unsubstantiated rumor or bastard truth without a home.
"The technology revolution has transformed organizations across the private sector, but not ours, not fully, not yet. We are, as they say, tangled in our anchor chain. Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building because it's stored on dozens of technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible."
Rumsfeld was hired by President Bush to shape the insanely inefficient and criminally wasteful Department of Defense into a leane and agile fighting force for a post Cold War world with a new set challenges and largely unknown threats.
The media predicted Rumsfeld's demise [from a task too great] as early as August 2001. Time Magazine rang an article entitled "Defense: Rumsfeld's Lonely, Losing Battle."
The scale of Rumsfeld's task: the restructuring of an organization with a 2007 annual budget of over $500 billion - almost 1.5 million active duty forces and over 700 thousand civilian employees based working in more than 600,000 individual buildings across 6,000 locations around the world!
On September 10, 2001 - one jovial day before the life-altering 9/11 - Rumsfeld stood before senior Pentagon officials - including the Joint Chiefs of Staff General [Dick] Myers - and declared war on the waste and inefficiency of the DoD.
In a meeting with a rather tedius title, "DOD Acquisition and Logistics Excellence Week Kickoff-Bureaucracy to Battlefield", Rumsfeld confirmed a staggering statistic that had otherwise been bantered around [the internet] as an unsubstantiated rumor or bastard truth without a home.
"The technology revolution has transformed organizations across the private sector, but not ours, not fully, not yet. We are, as they say, tangled in our anchor chain. Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building because it's stored on dozens of technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible."