THE NEW WAR MACHINE.(Donald Rumsfeld, et al)

The first shots fired by American forces in the global war on terrorism came on October 7, 2001, in a barrage of Tomahawk missiles and bomber strikes that hit Kabul, Kandahar, and other cities in Afghanistan. The American public heard that day from President Bush and shortly thereafter from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard B. Myers. But the general who was commanding the war did not address the public through the press that day, or that week, or the next. The war was more than a month old before Tommy Franks, accompanied by Rumsfeld, was coaxed into the briefing room at the Pentagon to meet the press.

If Rumsfeld needed an Eisenhower for what some were already calling the Third World War, what the press wanted was a Norman Schwarzkopf, the orotund commander of Desert Storm, whose televised briefings in early 1991 entertained journalists and the public alike. What they got this time was a soldier who, but for the four stars on his shoulders, might have passed for an old gunnery sergeant. A tall, lank Texan with prominent ears and drooping bags under his eyes, Franks bore a weary and slightly sorrowful look. Standing next to Rumsfeld, who was quickened by such encounters with the press, Franks, fifty-six and looking every minute of it, seemed like someone who had just been taken captive.

A reporter suggested that Franks had a duty to keep the American public informed and to help make the case for the war. "And with all due respect, sir," the reporter continued, "what you hear is, Tommy Franks is no Norman Schwarzkopf."

"Well," Franks answered, "I suppose I'd begin sort of at the end, by acknowledging that Tommy Franks is no Norman Schwarzkopf."

That answer wasn't likely to arouse public confidence in an undertaking that was already seen as floundering, which is perhaps why Rumsfeld leapt to the microphone to amend it ("Nor vice versa!"). But in military circles Franks's remark was telling. If Schwarzkopf had defined the public's idea of a winning general, in the insular world of the Army he was seen as an egotist and a bit of a blowhard, qualities deeply offensive to the institutional culture. Franks was a soldier keenly attuned to that culture. Retired General Crosbie Saint, Franks's friend and former boss, says of the two men, "They are not the same at all. Franks is not a whiner. He is not a pontificator. He is not seeking self-glory. He's a good ol' boy." As it happened, an Army "good ol' boy" was precisely what Donald Rumsfeld needed, a figure who might validate, in the eyes of a deeply skeptical military establishment, the war on terror that Rumsfeld was shaping.

Rumsfeld's second tenure at the Pentagon (the first was during the Ford Administration) has been marked by an agenda for change so insistent and sweeping that it has been likened to a hostile takeover. Rumsfeld believed that the American military was too set in its thinking, too attached to the weapons systems and fighting doctrines of the past--particularly the Army, which is by its nature a heavy and deliberate force, and thus least suited to Rumsfeld's vision of a fighting force that is potent, lithe, and quick. Senior Army leaders who didn't embrace Rumsfeld's ideas (and even some who did) felt discounted or ignored, or, in the case of the Army Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, publicly humiliated. They were characterized as "Clinton generals"--a reference to the President who had promoted them--or, more broadly, as "Old Army." Most of them were men of a certain age--men like Colin Powell, who had served in Vietnam and taken lessons from that vexed experience, and who had then shaped a force that seemed more comfortable with peacekeeping than with waging war. The military should be used, Powell posited, only when the national interest is clearly at stake, when there is public support, a clearly defined mission, and the political will to apply decisive, overwhelming force. Many of the senior leaders bitterly resented Rumsfeld, and saw his revolution as a repudiation of their doctrines, their values, the great institution of the Army itself. "They hate him. I mean it, they hate him," one of Powell's senior deputies told me earlier this year. "He's lucky he hasn't gotten fragged."

The first time I heard the term "Clinton general" used pejoratively was during a conversation with Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, in the early autumn of 2001. Gingrich was in a sour mood. The war in Afghanistan, under Franks's direction, was just starting, and progress against the Taliban was slow. Gingrich worried that American military planners were flummoxed by this new kind of war. "I think the underlying fact is that you have Bill Clinton's generals designing a campaign that is not very creative, and it's not very clever, and it's very worrisome," he said.