Bush announces Rumsfeld resignation

Declaring that a "fresh perspective" is needed on the controversial war in Iraq, President Bush announced Wednesday the departure of the war's chief architect, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and that former CIA Director Robert Gates would be nominated to replace him.

The move came a day after Democrats won control of the House in the midterm elections, and were close to winning the Senate as well. A week ago, President Bush said he wanted Rumsfeld to stay until the end of his term, saying both he and Vice President Dick Cheney were doing "fantastic jobs."

But on Wednesday, Bush said he had planned to replace Rumsfeld with Gates regardless of the outcome of the voting on Tuesday. "Win or lose, Bob Gates was going to become the nominee," he said at a White House press conference.

After six years at the helm of the military bureaucracy, Rumsfeld had become a lightning rod for public dissatisfaction with the Iraq war, and a political liability for the Bush administration. A growing chorus of retired generals and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle had called for his dismissal as a prelude to a fresh approach to the Iraq quagmire.

Rumsfeld came into the Pentagon determined to transform what he saw as a lumbering and bureaucratically hobbled military, still configured along Cold War lines, into a more agile and rapidly deployable force that leveraged technology to become better suited to 21st century warfare.

In that effort, some say he was at least partially successful. "Rumsfeld presided over the most significant changes in the department since its creation," said Dan Goure, a vice president at the Lexington Institute, a defense think tank in Washington. He said the secretary's transformation ideas worked by forcing the military services to think in terms of joint capabilities, instead of what works best for the individual services.

One military source said Rumsfeld became far too enamored with the idea that small groups of commandos could use precision guided munitions dropped from loitering aircraft to defeat potential opponents. In speeches, the Defense secretary would often refer to the image of special forces troopers on horseback in Afghanistan, calling in air strikes on Taliban fighters. Iraq was the testing ground for Rumsfeld's theories on future warfare, which led to his trimming the size of the force that invaded in 2003, the source said.

In his first year as the head of the Pentagon, Rumsfeld tried, and failed, to cut two divisions out of the active Army. He targeted a range of costly weapons systems for cancellation, despite often stiff opposition from the service chiefs, who in some cases have been Rumsfeld's most virulent opponents, Goure said: "He tried to break the iron control of the services with his ideas on transformation, and he drove them in a direction they never would have gone because it vitiates their traditional power."

But Rumsfeld's management style, notoriously dismissive of opposing viewpoints, grated many in uniform, who said he was overbearing and abusive. He became known for his "snowflake" memos -- ideas for management reform and organizational changes he would occasionally jot down on paper and distribute to top aides in the Pentagon. His ideas ranged from how the military could conserve energy to coming up with an effective method to measure success or failure in the war on terror.

Rumsfeld would often express frustration with the slow pace of transformation within the Pentagon and the reluctance of the military services to embrace a faster rate of change. In one memorandum made public in October 2003, he concluded, "It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere."

With Democrats in control of the House, Rumsfeld would have faced the daunting prospect of trying to work with hostile congressional committees, particularly the House Armed Services Committee, the leadership of which is likely to go to Ike Skelton, the Missouri Democrat who had publicly called for the secretary's dismissal. Skelton said Wednesday that Pentagon oversight and greater scrutiny of the administration's military policies would be his top priority, and he would reconvene an investigations subcommittee abolished by Republicans in 1994. "Rumsfeld got out of town one step ahead of the subpoena," Goure said.

Ultimately, what doomed Rumsfeld was his slow response to the changing realities on the ground in Iraq, Goure said, particularly his failure to recognize the growing insurgency in 2003. For far too long, Rumsfeld seemed out of touch with the reality of the situation in Iraq, from his casual dismissal of the chaos and looting that erupted following Baghdad's fall to his reluctance to acknowledge that an insurgency had taken hold.

One uniformed official said Rumsfeld's voice was one of seeming detachment that became symbolic of the Bush administration's failures to see the widespread death and destruction in Iraq.