Secretary of Defense Interview with Bob Woodward - 23 Oct, 2003

[maddezmom]

Rumsfeld: In any event, I said look we've got to do two things: We owe the country and the President war plans, contingency plans with thinking that is current. The only way we're going to get that is if we can compress that process dramatically and shorten it from years, down to some cycle that can be refreshed with current assumptions. And so I got started. What I did was, I came in here on a Saturday.

Q: And this was in 2001?

Rumsfeld: Yes, when I first arrived here.

Q: When the President said this?

Rumsfeld: No, wait a second. I don't know when the President said that to me. It's a full stop after that; I don't have that date. This is now generally on contingency planning. Then, I asked to be briefed on a plan, and I was stunned on the one I looked at it. It happened not to be Iraq and that part of the world. It was a different part of the world. I was stunned. Then I looked at the process and said we've simply got to cut the process at least in half. And I said, what I would like to do is next Saturday, I want the war planners, the contingency planners, to come in and brief me on all of the major contingency plans' assumptions, not the plans. I wanted to see the assumptions. I sat in that room down there. I sat there (and these people couldn't believe it) most of the day. One Colonel would pop up and go through the assumptions, and I'd discuss them and talk about them. Then the next guy would come up and he went through one after another after another.

Q: And they didn't in some cases didn't know what the assumptions were. Isn't that true?

Rumsfeld: Well no, because they'd go through these things. They'd change people and new people would come in. They were just briefing what was on the shelf. Well, that reaffirmed my concern. There's been a lot of discussion about the Iraq war plan as though it was something distinctively different, and, in fact, it was not. My concern about it was roughly my concern about most of them, if not all. It was a concern that ran to a process that needed to be fixed.
Q: That's consistent with what General Franks said. And he said you - it was November 27th - you went down to Tampa, now 2001, so this is just 2 1/2 months after 9/11. You said to him, I want you to look at your war plan.

Rumsfeld: I did that to every combatant commander in the world.
Q: But start with Iraq, you told him. Get that out first. That's what he said.

Rumsfeld: Maybe I did.


http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20040419-secdef1361.html
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20040419-secdef1362.html

Lots of interesting tidbits throughout the interview.

[unblock]

1. is he trying to make like he invented weekend work?

as if clinton never did that?