Rumsfeld is a Princeton man. That may help to explain why he is the man of the hour as secretary of defense. Princeton is the most military of the great Ivy League colleges. It was, before 1861, the school to which rich southerners sent their sons—only to take them back to fight in the Civil War. It was, before 1917, the school from which young Americans went as volunteers to fight in the Great War.

When war came officially, their numbers increased. On the window frames of the older Princeton dormitory buildings, bronze stars are affixed. They mark the rooms of Princetonians who served in the American Expeditionary Force. There are a great number of them. Princeton seems never to have had any trouble with the military idea. Woodrow Wilson, its pre-1914 president, may have been “too proud to fight.” Princetonians, by and large, are not too proud to fight at all. They do their duty as if it comes naturally.

That is Donald Rumsfeld’s style. Duty seems to come to him quite naturally, and he bears its burdens lightly. He is the sort of American whom Europeans of my age—at 69, I am one year his junior—recognize and understand. Rummy, as he is called, might have been one of the Rhodes scholars I knew so well at Oxford in the 1950s. He is unmistakably American, in both appearance and manner. But he is also internationalist, in the way that Eisenhower was, and the Americans of the Eisenhower generation so often were. English-speaking Oxonians of my generation had a lot in common. Those only a little older than we are had fought and won the Second World War. We were embroiled in the Cold War. Toward that war, most of us—Americans, Europeans, and those from the Commonwealth alike—had the same attitude. We were anti-Communist, proud of our countries, but fond of one another. As a result, we all got on like blood brothers. American friends I made then remain friends to this day.

Rummy wasn’t one of us. But he could have been. I know the type. When I met him in his office in the Pentagon, he was dressed undergraduate-style (“Don’t photograph my old cords,” he begged our photographer)—it was a Saturday—and he fell automatically into the American-European Commonwealth mode so familiar to me from my youth. He took it for granted that the U.S. secretary of defense and this collection of Brits from a London newspaper were on the same side. He didn’t bother to flatter us with compliments about the S.A.S. or the Royal Marine commandos, well though both units had done against the Taliban. His approach was “What do you want to know? Ask me some straight questions and I’ll give you straight answers—unless I don’t think the world ought to know.”

It was an extraordinarily refreshing experience to meet a senior officer of government—as it happens, the most powerful government in the world—who behaves like a human being, and an immediately likable and open one. Rummy has been many things: politician, businessman, government official, naval officer. But, at least at first acquaintance on his Pentagon territory, he comes across as none of those beings. In his Saturday tweeds and trademark rimless spectacles, he most resembles an unusually sharp and realistic college professor. He conducts an interview with probing journalists not like a confrontation, where the object is to disclose as little as decently possible, but like a seminar, the point of which is to establish a version of the truth both teacher and students can accept. “What do you mean by that? … Is that meant to help us or them? … Do you think I should tell you that? … Let’s agree to let that question lie…. I’ve read what you’ve written [to me, a prolific author], but I don’t think it applies in the present context_Look, there’s a war going on. You don’t expect me to say anything that would help the other side to win, do you?”

I paraphrase. Rummy, by the written record of the interview, was less abrupt. The mood I attempt to catch is nevertheless authentic. The secretary of defense is a most unusual politician. He does not seek the emollient phrase or those words that obscure meaning rather than clarify it. On the contrary, he seems positively to want to get to the point. But then, Donald Rumsfeld, though a political appointee and a former congressman, perhaps isn’t a politician at all. He is much more in the mold of the public servant of the New Deal era or the war years: a technocrat serving at a substantial pay cut to get a difficult job done, as presidential adviser Harry Hopkins was to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Like Hopkins, Rumsfeld has a close personal relationship with the president, though there the resemblance stops. Hopkins was physically frail and in character quite diffident. Rumsfeld, even at 70, is physically very strong—he was a wrestling champion at Princeton—and almost visibly trembles with barely suppressed energy.

It is Rumsfeld’s energy that has led him into conflict with the Pentagon’s professional staff, a conflict that is the continuing story of his secretaryship. It began before September 11, but it persists. Rumsfeld came to the Pentagon after a successful career in business, where he made several fortunes, first in pharmaceuticals, then in a communications company. As a chief executive and chairman, he learned how to make large corporations move and adapt, matters of crucial importance in the high-technology and science-based sector of business.

Returning to the Pentagon with the incoming George W. Bush administration—he had briefly been defense secretary during the Ford presidency—Rumsfeld did not like what he found. Although the Cold War was over, the nation’s military leaders were still committed to maintaining the vast tank fleets of the U.S. Army in Germany that had confronted the nations of the Warsaw Pact, and the brass expected the funding to pay for them. Rumsfeld believed that, with the disappearance of the Soviet Army and the emergence of the United States as the world’s only superpower, more of the defense budget should be allocated to lighter, more flexible forces, better adapted to combat in the post-Cold War environment of terrorist danger and imprecise threats.

Rumsfeld’s chief point of difference with the uniformed establishment was over the issue of risk-taking. The generals and admirals of the Vietnam era had stumbled into war and had been forced to design a strategy as they went along. Their successors did not want to repeat the experience. Having grown cautious and politically sensitive, they showed themselves anxious to secure congressional support for any operations undertaken and, if possible, the support of allies, the United Nations, and other international organizations as well. They were particularly concerned about arranging an “exit strategy” from any war.

The military outlook had also been altered by the rise of the human-rights policy. Originally adopted as a means of limiting the Soviet Union’s freedom to use force against its minorities or weaker neighbors, the policy proved double-edged. Because human rights had deliberately been given a legal basis, U.S. military actions had increasingly come under the scrutiny of the federal government’s own lawyers. When American involvement in the Balkans began in the 1990s, commanders found themselves restricted by “rules of engagement” which threatened the lives of their troops. The problem was compounded by the postVietnam imperative to avoid casualties.

Although Rumsfeld has been reticent on the issue, it seems that this legalism and risk aversion were not at all to his taste. The new Pentagon he joined was a monolith, dedicated to the winning of large-scale wars, against two enemies at the same time if that was the threat presented. What he doubted was that such a threat was likely to present itself. He had lost belief in the likelihood of conventional wars against enemies with a strength and capability equivalent to those of the United States. Instead, he expected more varied dangers which required not an automatic and programmed response but a variety of defense capabilities.

As he explained in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, “We must transform not only our armed forces but also the Defense Department that serves them—by encouraging a culture of creativity and intelligent risk-taking. We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists; one that does not wait for threats to emerge and be ‘validated’ but rather anticipates them before they appear and develops new capabilities to dissuade and deter them.”

Like Lincoln… he is forever on the lookout for fresh talent, and ready to discard those found wanting. Like Churchill, he fizzes with ideas.

That is a counsel of perfection. No defense establishment in history has ever developed the capability to anticipate and respond to all the threats with which an enemy, or collection of enemies, can challenge it. Nevertheless, Rumsfeld is moving along the right lines. He has perceived that the certainties of the Cold War, terrifying though they were, are a thing of the past and that the future strategic world threatens a multitude of smaller dangers rather than one overwhelmingly large one. Taken together, smaller dangers can be as destructive as a massive blow; the need is to respond flexibly rather than in monolithic fashion.

It is significant that Rumsfeld was a navy pilot. The old ethos of naval aviation was quite distinct from that of conventional air forces during the century past. Air-force pilots flew by the rules, which, over the years, had become strict, procedural, and bureaucratic. Naval pilots, perhaps because they depart from and return to platforms which are mobile, erratic, and unpredictable, were much more flexible in performance. It was a byword in operations that ground troops always preferred to be supported by naval pilots. They generally took risks air-force pilots did not.

Rumsfeld the naval aviator has embarked on a reordering of the Pentagon that promises to break many of the rules evolved over the years. The breach with the past is necessary. The war against terror demands a remaking of strategy more radical than anything envisaged before September 11. The question is not whether the Rumsfeld reforms can be carried through against the entrenched bureaucracy of the post-Cold War Pentagon but whether they go far enough.

Traditional strategy, strongly endorsed by the American military establishment, from the Pentagon downward, saw the use of force as a political process, designed to achieve the aims of state policy by military act. Suddenly, after September 11, the Western world, the United States foremost, has been confronted by a new philosophy of the use of force. It has no rational political purpose, in that it is not designed to achieve a political aim, but is simply intended to inflict hurt on the hated non-Islamic world. How to combat this virulent brand of terrorism is now the principal issue confronting the Pentagon and the secretary of defense.

Counterterrorism demands an entirely new way of thinking. Donald Rumsfeld seems to have the right cast of mind. He is a fighter and understands that the terrorist must be fought because he deals exclusively in violence. He does not bargain, he does not negotiate, and his mental processes are devoted entirely to calculating how he can successfully inflict violence on those he hates. The professional soldier does not think in that way. His business is war, of which the use of violence is only one feature. Professional soldiers think in terms of the application of force, which can take many forms—pressure, threat, even firm persuasion, all as preliminaries or alternatives to the unleashing of firepower. The schools in which the American military is trained lay heavy emphasis on the alternatives to violence. Strategy and tactics are important elements of the syllabus, but so are political science and the theory of foreign relations. The syllabus is deeply rooted in the thought of General Carl von Clausewitz, the 19th-century Prussian military theorist, who taught that “war is the continuation of politics [and policy] by other means” and that strategy must jointly serve three constituencies: army, people, and state.

Clausewitz has always had his opponents. They have argued, in their different ways, that his analysis was too rigid, that the violence of war was so intense that it spilled out of categories as neat as his. Wars, like the First and Second World Wars, grew to overwhelm armies and states and people and left politics behind. “Doctrine” denied those objections. Its hold on military thinking survived even Vietnam, which almost destroyed the United States Army and distorted American domestic politics for two generations.

The emergence of fundamentalist terrorism promises to undermine Clausewitz for good. The terrorists are not an army, nor a people, nor a state. They present none of the targets which a traditional military establishment is trained to place under attack. They have no apparent geographical base (though al-Qaeda means “the base” in Arabic), they are not an arm of any government, they do not belong to any identifiable ethnic group. Most baffling of all, they do not fear death, indeed seem to welcome it. Conventional armed forces exert their power by threatening to kill those who oppose them and by carrying out the threat if necessary. These new terrorists, who have introduced the world to the concept of martyrdom, have thereby achieved an important military advantage. How do you defeat an enemy who does not mind dying?

Yet there is no such thing as an enemy without a weakness. The difficulty, in current circumstances, is to find it. The threatened war against Iraq is a simple problem. Saddam is not a potential Islamic martyr. On the contrary, he is an Arab secularist who hopes to hang on to power, as he has done successfully for over 20 years. He is extremely vulnerable and can be toppled without difficulty, if an invading U.S. force pushes its offensive to the limit, as was not done in 1991.

The parallel war on terror is an altogether more troubling challenge. It is not one that the United States military establishment is organized to overcome. Although America is the only remaining superpower, and invincible on superpower terms, much of its military force is superfluous to the terror war. The carrier groups supplied aerial firepower during the campaign in Afghanistan, but nuclear carriers are of no use against suicide bombers. Nor are the army’s heavy armored divisions or the air force’s stealth fighters.

How do you deter a suicide bomber? How do you hurt him—or her? That is the question the modern Pentagon—scarred by the attack of suicide bombers—must face. Terrorists are not invincible, nor immune to fear. The problem is to find their weak points. Donald Rumsfeld is committed to the search. No one, and certainly not he, suggests that he has found the way. Those in the Pentagon who resist his campaign to liberate conventional military thinking must, nevertheless, expect his hostility. Terrorism in the name of Islam is, fundamentally, an idea. Only a cleverer and more flexible idea will defeat it.

To run this shadow war will require an adaptable strategist, someone accustomed to seat-of-the-pants decision-making and swift action. Rumsfeld, by constitution, seems suited to the role. He retains the stealth of his days on the wrestling mat. He is a product of the no-nonsense, can-do, plainspoken Midwest, preferring to do it his way, on his own terms. He has been known to ride motorcycles, play a vicious squash game, and jump out of planes for sport. But Rumsfeld’s bearing in this war, obviously, will require more than gamesmanship. He’s a man of mettle (his Ford administration peer Henry Kissinger is reported to have remarked, “Of all the despots that I’ve had to deal with, none was more ruthless than Donald Rumsfeld”). He’s a Washington veteran who knows how to keep “on point”: as a four-term representative in Congress, he posted a voting record that was about as hard right as has ever been measured. Yet he seems to have a knack for fresh thinking, nimble execution, and tailoring men and machines for the mission at hand. In this regard, he resembles some of his warrior predecessors in conflicts past. Like Lincoln as war leader in America’s greatest conflict, he is forever on the lookout for fresh talent, and ready to discard those found wanting. Like Churchill, he fizzes with ideas—some bad, some indifferent, but some very good—and demands “Action This Day.”

And then there’s resolve. No one should question Donald Rumsfeld’s fortitude. He seems a man completely dedicated to winning this war, whatever it takes. Indeed, he’s the only leading member of the Bush team who was actually in one of the 9/11 targets the moment it was attacked. Being forced onto the front line, even while wearing pinstripes, has a tendency to re-double one’s resolve.

In the battle against al-Qaeda—and the campaign against Saddam—Donald Rumsfeld seems the right man at the right time for the messy, thankless job.

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