September 10, 2001: Rumsfeld Excoriates Pentagon Bureaucracy

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld blasts the Pentagon bureaucracy. In a speech to kick off the Pentagon’s “Acquisition and Logistics Excellence Week,” Rumsfeld tells his audience: “The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning.… With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.… The adversary [is] Pentagon bureaucracy. Not the people, but the processes.… In this building, despite the era of scarce resources taxed by mounting threats, money disappears into duplicate duties and bloated bureaucracy—not because of greed, but gridlock. Innovation is stifled—not by ill intent, but by institutional inertia.” [US Department of Defense, 9/10/2001; Roberts, 2008, pp. 140] He also announces that the US military is missing over $2 trillion (see September 10, 2001).