What obstacles was Rumsfeld facing as secretary of defense?
Well, this ponderous bureaucracy. There have been people trying to make changes in the Department of Defense for as long as I can remember, and it’s very hard to turn that ship around. … I think everybody pretty much learned their lesson that Mr. Rumsfeld was in charge, and you’d better listen to what he has to say and give him what he wants. The trouble is that there was all of a sudden an epiphany in Afghanistan, in Iraq: The world isn’t the same that we thought it was a couple of years ago. We need a lot of folks to fight this war, and we’re probably going to be at it for a long time. And we don’t have the right kinds of people, necessarily, but we can’t scrap all the old guys, the old formations, the old units either. And so when the president described the “axis of evil” a few years ago, he opened up the possibility that we had three serious adversaries to deal with. At the time, we found that we’re not capable of dealing with all three. We can’t deal with one very well. …
