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Strategic Forum, July, 2006 by Christopher J. Lamb, Irving Lachow

Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made it clear from the beginning of his tenure that he would challenge these bureaucratic tendencies. In a speech on September 10, 2001, he called the Pentagon bureaucracy the enemy, arguing it "disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk." (13) The next day, however, the Secretary had to go to war with the bureaucracy he had, not the one he wanted. Therefore, he uses workarounds to tame the bureaucracy, some similar and some dissimilar to those of his predecessors. Some of these workarounds may contribute to criticism of the Secretary's leadership style. Critics note that although Secretary Rumsfeld emphasizes the need for flat organization, maximum delegation, collaboration, new ideas and innovation, some of the methods he employs to control the bureaucracy undermine these objectives.

For instance, the Secretary relies heavily on a few trusted aides who are able to offer alternatives to the bland or contradictory decision support provided by the bureaucracy. Unfortunately, doing so helps convince lower-level officials that having access to senior leaders and controlling information flow are keys to success, which further discourages information-sharing and collaboration. The fact that senior leaders often do not provide feedback to subordinates compounds the problem. If the recommendations of subordinates are not accepted and they do not understand why, many will conclude that senior leaders made the wrong choice for the wrong reasons, further deepening their cynicism. In this way, the bureaucracy and senior leader decision styles reinforce one another and undermine the quality of the Pentagon's rational decision support processes. Thus, strategic decisionmaking remains more personalized, centralized, and idiosyncratic than it should be, devoid of the ability to test hypotheses and see all reasonable alternatives.

Another example of the Secretary's informal war on the bureaucracy is his use of short inquiries to stimulate creative, holistic thinking at all levels of the Pentagon. The Secretary bombards Pentagon staff with short missives (called "snowflakes" by those they descend upon). One characteristic of the Secretary's thousands of snowflakes is that they ask questions that can reasonably be answered only with information from multiple organizations. Snowflakes irritate the staff because they are difficult to answer, but from the Secretary's point of view they serve as a frequent reminder of his broad field of vision and the scope of his requirements for effective decision support. While they generally have that effect, they do little to change the bureaucratic incentives that drive behavior in the Pentagon.

The Secretary also has tried to invert Pentagon processes so that top-down, integrated strategic decisionmaking is more the norm. Toward this end, he often summons top leadership (an assembly of four-star equivalents) in a body known as the Senior Leader Review Group to make collective decisions about the strategic agenda. This group helps set priorities and provide direction, but it still serves more as an information-sharing and consensus-building forum than a decision body. This is the case partly because there is no crosscutting, high-quality decision support to the Senior Leader Review Group. Without sharp, transparent, and collaborative decisionmaking support, individual senior leaders tend to fall back on what they know best--their own organizational equities--and not to support strategic trades that would serve the larger military enterprise well.