Former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld stopped by Battleland‘s suite Monday for a super-secret project we can’t talk about just yet. Although he’s walking with a cane due to recent back surgery, he says that’s just a temporary setback for the one-time college wrester who turned 79 Saturday. (“Joyce got me this tie,” he said of his wife’s handsome magenta cravat.) His wit remains X-Acto sharp, even if he seems a tad less combative than we recall from Pentagon interviews and the endless series of one-night ‘Stans, as we called his daily hop-scotching across central Asia — Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan — in the days after 9/11.
He’s bound to get a kick out of this piece from Foreign Policy posted on Slate this morning by Robert Haddick. managing editor of Small Wars Journal and a former Marine officer. It’s called Rumsfeld’s Revenge –Robert Gates was certainly more popular, but his predecessor was far more influential:
But Gates’s departure, the wide-ranging overhaul of Barack Obama’s national security team, and, most importantly, the president’s decision to withdraw 33,000 soldiers from Afghanistan by next summer shows that the “Rumsfeld Doctrine” is now the accepted standard operating procedure for current and future policymakers. In the end, Rumsfeld won the Doctrine War.
We’ll leave that debate to the historians. But we note only that doctrines are less like cast-in-stone military orders and more like spring, summer, winter and fall.
