Rumsfeld certainly needed to go. His tenure as secretary of defense has been marked by some pretty major blunders and displayed an inflexibility and resistance to input that made the situation in Iraq that much worse. Admittedly I don’t know how much of this was Rumsfeld’s fault as opposed to Bush’s but it seems clear he was a significant contributor to the mistakes in Iraq if not the primary source.

Still I feel a certain amount of regret at Rumsfeld’s resignation. He is dead on about the need to modernize and reform the military for the information age. Though many people think the Iraq conflict demonstrates the importance of traditional military and the failure of the Rumsfeldian vision I think just the opposite is true. Sure the occupation requires many grunts and benefits much less from technological superiority but occupying third world countries is not what our military should be preparing for. It is special forces operations in Afghanistan before we invaded and the amazingly successful shock and awe campaign during the invasion which illustrate the conflicts our military needs to prepare for and those are resounding successes for something like the Rumsfeldian vision. If anything what we need is more emphasis on computer and information warfare.

I suspect the opposition of traditional military men to these changes was a major factor that lead to the tension between Rumsfeld and the generals as well as the inflexible micromanaging style he was known for. I just hope that the new secretary of defense doesn’t give up on the reform program in the name of listening to the generals. Also I hope that the fear of being seen as soft on defense won’t stop our next democratic president from continuing this change.

In short I view Rumsfeld as a tragic figure much like McNamara. Both were smart men whose modernization programs were deeply needed and both could have made exceptional defense secretaries during peacetime. Unfortunately both ended up as defense secretaries during wars and managed to royally fuck things up and approved questionable practices.