Inheriting a Shambles at Defense (Jason Vest)

   For Gates, Fixing Iraq is just the start

   By Jason Vest -- Texas Observer

  Dec. 1, 2006 -- Few in Washington thought it would actually happen, but on Nov. 8, there it was: a vaguely humbled-looking Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, finally being shown the door. As his increasingly McNamara-esque visage withdraws from the scene, all eyes turn to his nominated successor, Robert M. Gates, Texas A&M president and former George H.W. Bush CIA chief.

  Everyone seems acutely focused on one matter: how Gates will handle Iraq. But as critical and obvious as that issue is, it obscures an even more important reality: Iraq is really only a reflection of a larger institutional problem. On Rumsfeld’s watch the Pentagon’s perennial management and budget woes have gone from a mess to an utter shambles. 

   “Rumsfeld will have two legacies. One is the war -- it’ll go down in history as much as Rumsfeld’s war as Bush’s war,” says Winslow Wheeler, a veteran former Senate staffer and investigator who now runs the Straus Military Reform Project at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank, the Center for Defense Information. “But initially, people will probably miss the other legacy, which is the total mismanagement of the Pentagon. He inherited gigantic problems -- ones that had nothing to do with Iraq -- and made them worse. Iraq is only one part of Gates’ job. He’s going to have to undo a disastrous legacy on budget, program, and management issues.

  ”Despite all the at-odds-with-reality praise once lavished on Rumsfeld for his supposedly brilliant management style (2002’s The Rumsfeld Way: The Leadership Wisdom of a Battle-Hardened Maverick probably won’t be meeting the test of time), nonpartisan studies and government audits have long shown Rumsfeld to be a less-than-able Pentagon steward. In 2002, for example, Bush’s own White House Office of Management and Budget initiated the President’s Management Scorecard, a sort of quarterly report card assessing the top management of 25 major federal agencies and departments.

  It uses a “Stoplight Scoring System,” with green for success, yellow for mixed results, and red for unsatisfactory. Wheeler notes that the DOD’s columns are more often defined by red and yellow than green. “The last time I checked, DOD ranked 24 out of 25 -- hardly a ringing endorsement,” Wheeler says. 

Read More: The Texas Observer 

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