Not gonna miss him

Phil Carter of the blog Intel Dump is not, I repeat not, going to miss Rumsfeld.

In battling these foes and others, Rumsfeld didn't just lose the fight, he also did a great deal of damage to the military and to the country. Thanks to Bob Woodward, we now know a few more salacious details about his spats with senior military leaders—such as the way he emasculated former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers. We also know how he handpicked officers for key positions in order to ensure that every senior general or admiral was a Rumsfeld company man, a policy that had a tremendously deleterious and narrowing effect on the kind of military advice and dissent flowing into the office of the secretary of defense. His office famously undercut and eventually sacked Gen. Eric Shinseki after his testimony to Congress stating that Iraq would take a "few hundred thousand" troops to secure, although to this day the Rumsfeld press machine vigorously insists that Shinseki simply left when his term expired. This move, more than any other, crystallized the tension between Rumsfeld and the generals and telegraphed quite clearly that loyalty was more prized than intellectual honesty. That so few generals have spoken out since then is proof of how effective this message was....

But far more amusing is a article from the Weekly Standard that Carter links to, where we get this commentary from Michael Barone, circa 2002:

Cohen challenges the long-held view that military strategy should be a sphere wholly apart from civilian leadership. The model, set out by Samuel Huntington among others, is that military strategy is a matter of technical expertise, which must inevitably be degraded by civilian influence; the commander in chief is to set the goal, and the military is to decide how to get there. Civilian non-interference in things military is thus, in this view, the corollary of military non-interference in things civilian (and hence political).

Things seldom work this way. Certainly the military in none of the societies Cohen studies threatened the principle of civilian control; there were no coups, no mutinies, no serious threats of either. But the great civilian war statesmen did interfere in things military. And this was unavoidable...

Bush does not appear, from what we know, to be Eliot Cohen's kind of supreme commander. He is known for delegating detail work to better informed subordinates. He reportedly speaks to General Tommy Franks, the theater commander, only a couple of times a week. He is not known to have immersed himself in the arcana of military technology as Lincoln and Churchill did, and he does not appear to have the close acquaintance with his military commanders of a Clemenceau or a Ben Gurion....

Bush has also installed--against the reported advice of Colin Powell and others--a secretary of defense who seems to operate very much like Cohen's supreme commanders. Donald Rumsfeld reportedly talks to General Franks and to Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers several times a day; he reportedly peppers them and other subordinates with questions, requests for more information, and suggestions. Rumsfeld's management has been described by Pentagon officials as "hands on," "brutally honest," "abusive"--words that sound very much like Alanbrooke's descriptions of Churchill's. There were stories before September 11 that Rumsfeld was in danger of losing his job because Pentagon military officers and civilians were enraged by his demands for military transformation, and an anti-Republican Washington press corps was licking its chops at the prospect of the first casualty of the Bush cabinet. My own view was that Rumsfeld was never in any danger of losing his job. The anger at him was evidence that he was doing his job as it should be done.

I love the smell of stale talking points in the morning...