How important are right assumptions

Right assumptions are very important as basing on them, policies and plans are made. In one of the famous Rumsfeld’s Rule, Donald Rumsfeld states: “If you get the assumptions right, a trained ape can do the rest.” Right assumptions are not precise predictions as future can never be predicted but assuming correctly can mean the difference between victory and loss. What wrong assumptions were made by Rumsfeld as US defense secretary and basing on that history what wrong assumptions can the current US defense secretary can still make? Did those wrong assumptions lead us into a better world to live? And will we still be driven to live average lives because US policymakers happen to make wrong assumptions?

In June 2021, Rumsfeld, aged 88 and the most powerful US secretary of defense after McNamara, died. He was not only the most powerful but also the most controversial. He is the only American defense secretary who had two tenures: the first, a short tenure of 14 moths came to an end with President Ford’s defeat in 1976; and his second tenure as defense secretary which came after almost a quarter of a century after the end of his first was the more happening and dramatic tenure which lasted from 2001 to 2006 during President Bush’s time. A leader in his own right and famous for his ‘Rumsfeld Rules’, he became the US defense secretary when some of the most dramatic global events took place, including 9/11 and the American response to it. Few of his most important assumptions went wrong and it is interesting to note how they resulted in dire consequences not only for the US but for the entire globe.

The 9/11 attack occurred during his watch as defense secretary and he was instrumental in conceptualising the American response to it. Rumsfeld had a good account of how the Vietnam War was fought by Americans and at what cost. In his first tenure as defense secretary, he presented his annual report to the Congress in 1976 and called for an increase of $8.9 billion in defense spending, arguing that if the new generation of strategic weapons was not developed than a military imbalance would result. His report criticised the Congress for cutting $40 billion from the defense budget of the previous six years but he never made a mention of the $160 billion spent on fighting war in Vietnam. Was this a sign of things to come as America would pump in billions of dollars in his second tenure to fight the unnecessary wars?

From 2001 to 2006, being the principal adviser to President Bush on matters of defense, his right or wrong assumptions mattered a lot. And in the post-9/11 context, his first assumption ‘to take the fight to the enemy’ when seen in the hindsight proved wrong and disastrous for the entire world. Despite having witnessed the end of the Vietnam War in his first tenure as defense secretary and its adverse fallout, Rumsfeld kept enlarging the aperture through which President Bush and other key advisers to the President kept looking at the possibility of increased military actions. Rumsfeld emphasised that the war on terrorism must extend far beyond Afghanistan and supported visible military action that demonstrated the breadth of the war. In those planning years if such wrong assumptions were not made and trillions of dollars not spent on fighting unnecessary wars, the world that we live in today might have been altogether a different world.

Rumsfeld’s second wrong assumption relates to how the phrase ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’ was smartly used to reach a US judgement of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. This one wrong assumption about Iraq had a domino effect and one wrong assumption led to another so much so that the entire Iraqi military campaign stalemated and no more remained in American control. Rumsfeld also considered that both the Afghan and Iraqi forces could be trained and rushed into service to take over counter-insurgency fight which would lead the way for early return of the US troops to home. This also proved wrong.

The third important Rumsfeld assumption that occupied much of his time was internal and related to the civil-military relations. He assumed that the US military had grown too assertive and he needed to do something to control the Pentagon generals and admirals. His critics believe that more than worrying about why Pentagon was being dominated by the military’s top brass, as defense secretary he should have worried more about Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea and Iran. His inability to get along with the military and trying to dominate it cracked the very possibility of developing consensus with all the essential key players such as military, Congress and other agencies. At a time when the US was externalising and engaging in fighting outside wars, Rumsfeld was internalising and looking to execute ‘military transformation’. He set up a series of review panels staffed from outside the military, including retired officers, industry executives and think-tank experts. They were given the task to challenge the conventional military wisdom and come forward with bold new ideas of reform. His idea about Pentagon was that it should stop reviewing and start reforming. In one of the exchange of dialogues with his own staff, Rumsfeld boasted that in whichever civil setup or organisation he served, he managed to reduce the extra expenditures by 15 per cent. He was cleverly reminded that he was the defense secretary heading a defense budget of $350 billion; and since the 15 per cent of $350 billion is $45 billion, from where he would cut down the defense budget, especially when the US was fighting wars abroad.

The military was clearly not happy and was in no mood to indulge in a critical self-examination. The defense secretary was seeking outside assessment which he considered was free of service centric biases. And it was not stopping here — there was this Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and Collin Powell’s State Department. One propagated the light footprint doctrine while the other emphasised on putting the whole weight of the American power at the enemy’s centre of gravity to achieve the quick results. In the end, neither the light footprint nor the troops surge helped the US achieve its goals in the Afghan and Iraq wars. It is hoped that the US makes all the right assumptions and not labour us through a long stalemated war in Ukraine.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 5^th, 2023.

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