Rumsfeld's Style, Goals Strain Ties In Pentagon

Myers said he has heard such complaints but that he finds them voiced by officers who do not understand the closeness of the relationships that exist between him and Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

"I think the relationship between the Joint Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense staff is really very good and very close, and also has matured over time," Myers said. "If I didn't feel like I had my say to my boss and had an opportunity to be influential, I wouldn't be here."

At the moment, Rumsfeld is working to strip the Joint Staff of a series of its offices -- legislative liaison, legal counsel and public affairs. These have given the military leadership a degree of autonomy by providing it direct pipelines to Congress, to other parts of the government and to the media.

Clarke, Rumsfeld's spokeswoman, denied Rumsfeld has singled out the Joint Staff in an attempt to diminish its power. "The secretary thinks the entire department, civilian and military, was lethargic, bureaucratic, not fully addressing the dramatically changed world in which we find ourselves," she said. "And he has appropriately lit fires under everybody and said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, the stakes around here are very high.' And some people respond well to that and some people don't."

The Army in Opposition

The biggest battle facing Rumsfeld is with the Army, the nation's largest military service, which effectively has gone into opposition against the secretary of defense.

The Army, for institutional and historical reasons, is the most skeptical of the services of Rumsfeld's drive to move the military into the information age. Rumsfeld has complained that the Army is too resistant to change, while Army officers claim the defense secretary does not sufficiently appreciate the value of large, armored conventional ground forces.

"Does he really hate the Army?" asked one Army officer, obviously pained by the question. "I don't know."

The relationship, never close, hit the rocks when Rumsfeld let it be known in April that he had decided to name Gen. John M. Keane, the Army's vice chief of staff, as its next chief, 15 months before its current chief, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, was scheduled to retire. This immediately made Shinseki a lame duck and undercut his ambitious "transformation" agenda, which he had set forth in late 1999.

"I do feel that this secretaryship has been very hard on this chief and has undermined his ability to bring about the kind of transformation that Shinseki envisioned," said Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's defense subcommittee. "Clearly there's a need for some repairing of relations between the department and the Army."

Next, Rumsfeld killed the Army's new mobile howitzer system, the Crusader, on grounds that it was too heavy to deploy to distant battlefields and not "transformational" enough to be relevant on the future battlefield.

Army leaders had coveted Crusader for years as a weapon system that would finally make the Army second to none in artillery firepower. They were particularly steamed at how Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz killed the system, keeping the Army in the dark about what was happening until Congress was ready to vote on the fiscal 2003 budget.

In recent weeks, another dispute has arisen, with officials in Rumsfeld's office expressing concerns about the effectiveness of the new Stryker wheeled combat vehicle designed to replace the tank in the latest Army fighting unit called the Interim Brigade Combat Team. Cambone, Rumsfeld's closest aide, has proposed cutting in half the Army's plan to field six of these combat teams, saving $4.5 billion in Stryker procurement.

The Interim Brigade Combat Team is Shinseki's bridge between the heavy Army of the Cold War and the Army of the future. But Cambone is also zeroing in on two programs at the heart of that future Army, or Objective Force, proposing a 50 percent cut in the Army's Comanche helicopter and a two-year delay in fielding its Future Combat System.

But Rumsfeld's office, aided by former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who is close to Rumsfeld and deeply interested in how to reform the Army, is now questioning whether Stryker measures up.

"The mood is so morose these days" in the Army, concluded a retired general.

Already on edge, Army generals were dismayed when some Republican defense experts suggested that invading Iraq would be easy. And on top of everything else, the Army now is trying to figure out how it would supply tens of thousands of troops to keep the peace in Iraq should President Saddam Hussein be ousted in a U.S. invasion.