Rumsfeld's Ghost: Defense Reform in War and Peace

"It has been said that the first casualty of war is truth, but a close second might be the reform of the American defense bureaucracy. While total war can overwhelm bureaucratic inertia through sheer scale and pressure, such crises are historical anomalies. Protracted limited wars, which have been recurrent since 1945, create the worst of both worlds. They consume the political capital and attention needed to drive reform and streamline innovation without creating the critical mass of crisis needed to overcome entrenched bureaucratic resistance."

"In a recent speech to defense industry executives at the National War College in Washington, DC, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth employed a clever rhetorical device to underscore the enduring challenge of defense reform. His speech opened with a call to action against "an adversary that poses a serious threat to the security of the United States" and constitutes "one of the world's last bastions of central planning"; an adversary that attempts to impose its will across continents and oceans and stifles free thought."

"This adversary is not a foreign empire or rogue regime, but rather a domestic institution closer to home: the Pentagon bureaucracy. These words, however, were not his own, but rather an almost verbatim quote from a speech Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld delivered at the turn of the century. Their salience in 2025 is a testament to the enduring challenge of lasting reform. Rumsfeld delivered his largely forgotten exhortation to reform the Department of Defense on Monday, September 10, 2001."

Protracted limited wars since 1945 repeatedly consume political capital and attention necessary to drive defense-bureaucracy reform, while failing to produce crisis magnitude required to overcome entrenched resistance. These conflicts generate inefficiencies and waste that prompt more regulation and bureaucratic expansion. Expansive overseas contingencies drain strategic resources, prioritize supplemental appropriations over base budgets, and create incentives counterproductive to structural change. Strategic distractions from such contingencies impede preparation for potential great-power war. Recent rhetorical reuse of a near-verbatim Rumsfeld passage underscores the persistence of the reform challenge and the difficulty of achieving lasting institutional change.

Read at The American Conservative