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Rumsfeld livid memo leak { October 23 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,100935,00.htmlhttp://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,100935,00.html
Official: Rumsfeld 'Livid' Over Memo Leak
Thursday, October 23, 2003
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld (search) was "livid" when he discovered a memo written to top aides made it onto the front page of the nation's largest circulated newspaper, a senior defense official told Fox News.
Rumsfeld appeared calm later on Wednesday when he and a top Pentagon official described the memo as an internal discussion paper, not an insight into the defense secretary's opinion about U.S. success in the global war on terror.
But speaking to reporters Wednesday evening, Rumsfeld was clearly annoyed by the leak.
"If I wanted it published, I would have written it as a press release, which I didn't," Rumsfeld said after a closed-door meeting with senators on Capitol Hill.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers (search) said the memo, which poses more questions than answers, was written to generate ideas on how to begin the secretary's long-term goal of transforming the Defense Department to meet new threats.
"The experts will tell you that if you talk to somebody about change or transformation of anything, they will tell you that the larger an organization and the older an organization, the more difficult it is to change it, and it's not going to happen unles you have a CEO bought into the need for change. So, what you're seeing in this memo, the way we do business, is that our boss is challenging us with a lot of questions on are we changing ourselves to deal with this 21st century threat environment we find ourselves in," Myers said.
The Oct. 16 memo, written to four top aides — Myers, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Gen. Peter Pace and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith — was splashed across the front page of Wednesday's USA Today.
"It boggles my mind how a memo to four people ends up on the front page of a newspaper," a senior defense official said.
The memo raised eyebrows not because it appears to contradict the defense secretary's publicly optimistic statements about successes in the war on terror, but because it reveals some of Rumsfeld's concerns about whether the Defense Department has the capacity or will to fight the war.
"Is the U.S. winning or losing the global war on terrorism?" Rumsfeld asked his deputies in the first sentence of the memo.
"Is our current situation such that 'the harder we work, the behinder we get?' It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog," he later stated.
Rumsfeld also posed some of his own discussion topics, including, "It is not possible to change [the Department of Defense] fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror, an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem."
Rumsfeld wrote that in terms of cost and benefit, the "ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
In the memo, the defense secretary asked his lieutenants to come up with thoughts for a future meeting.
Senior officials described the memo as part of Rumsfeld's standard operating procedure, in which he dictates his thoughts throughout the week, puts them for paper, tosses them around and then sends out "snowflakes," memos meant to lay out a host of discussion questions.
Acting Defense Department spokesman Larry DiRita told reporters Wednesday that the memo is an informal writing that merely reflects the secretary's management style, his concerns about the pace and manner of the Pentagon's reorganization and his worry that senior defense officials are not adapting strategy and tactics in the war on terror equal to the adaptations made by the enemy when pressure is exerted on it by the United States.
"It's a constant sense of urgency. It's what he does. He injects urgency, he asks questions and he gets people thinking about things and that's what this memo hopefully will do," said DiRita, describing the memo's tone and content.
Asked to express his opinion on the content and spirit of the memo, another senior defense official said it represents "how things get done around here.
"That's how work is tasked from the [Office of the Secretary of Defense]," the official said. "This is how these memos look. They represent how he thinks. Some ask rhetorical questions, some seek information, some prompt people here to change their focus."
Rumsfeld too described his thought processes and methods.
"I asked questions, I didn't answer questions. I am a question asker, I should be sitting where you're sitting," Rumsfeld joked to reporters.
Privately, defense officials said one of the four officials' staff made photocopies for internal distribution in an attempt to prompt some office-wide thinking.
Officials said they believe the memo may have slipped out from someone on that staff, and the assumption for now is that the leak was "not malicious."
Democrats, however, immediately pounced on the memo as a concession by administration officials that its policies are failing. Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., said Thursday that Rumsfeld is finally having an epiphany and self-doubt is setting in.
"I think Secretary Rumsfeld's comments are an illustration of the concern that they have about the failures of their policy in Iraq so far," added Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D. "They acknowledge they have not succeeded to date."
Rumsfeld said that, in fact, the United States has many yardsticks and metrics that have measured U.S. successes, but he is more concerned now with the "macro" picture, particularly the education of young people abroad to become terrorists. In his memo, he asked his aides whether the United States was "capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas (search) [Islamic schools] and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"
"How many young people are being taught to go out as suicide bombers and to kill people, that's the question," Rumsfeld told reporters. "How many are there, and how does that inflow of terrorists in the world get reduced so that the number of people getting captured or killed is greater than the ones being produced? There isn't anyone who knows a metric to that ... but elevating that issue I think forces people to think about it in the broadest possible context, which is why I did so."
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