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Rumsfeld's Wars: The Arrogance of Power.

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Rumsfeld's Wars: The Arrogance of Power Dale R. Herspring Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2008, 247 pp.

Donald Rumsfeld will go down in history as one of the worst secretaries of defense since the end of World War II. This is the conclusion reached by Dale Herspring, a political science professor at the University of Kansas, in a new book transparently titled Rumsfeld's Wars: The Arrogance of Power. Without much effort to give the former secretary any benefit of the doubt, Herspring blames him directly for causing our military to become "demoralized" and "broken."

Herspring lays out a damning indictment of Rumsfeld's errors. He greatly harmed civil-military relations by treating our senior military officers with disrespect, by not listening to their advice, and by interfering with the traditional merit-based promotion system in order to surround himself with malleable uniformed officers while pushing out those with strong personalities like former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki. He forced the military to radically adapt to his military transformation agenda with its reliance on high-tech weapon systems at the expense of cuts in personnel, and he involved himself directly in influencing the conduct of the war in Iraq in order to prove his transformational theories--with disastrous results for that mission and consequently for our national security. As if turning military structure, tactics, operations, and weapon systems upside down were not enough, Herspring adds, Rumsfeld...

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