Aha. I figured you'd comment, sir.
Of course you'd know more about this, being closer to the action, but as a professional civilian, I've been impressed with Donald Rumsfeld since when I was a kid, and he was congressman from Illinois; even met him a couple of times (no lying tits primitive tale here; we just shook hands, a fifteen-second deal).
I always liked his philosophy about when given a choice between doing the right thing and doing the popular thing, to do the right thing.
Unfortunately he was not always bounded in those judgments by what was the intelligent thing or even the legal thing, and woe betide any who failed to nod rythmically when he decided he was right, no matter whether 'Right' looked more like capricious or even illegal to someone with less ego involvement in the judgment.
He also had a reputation for never having met an aerospace system he didn't like (His famous 'Shock and awe' is an instance of that technological fascination), but with anything as mundane as ground forces firmly in the back seat. This ulitmately was his downfall, since nearly three years after the invasion of Iraq got into motion (and thus, two more years yet after Afghanistan operations commenced) he was taken to task by troop families and the military press over why arriving units were still being asked to scrounge junkyards for scrap metal to armor their Hummers against IEDs. His answer was "You go to war with the Army you have" which, while true as far as it went and a relevant answer had he given it to troops shipping out in 2003, when given to troops arriving in Iraq in 2006, was perceived correctly as him being appallingly out of touch with the protection needs of ground combat forces and an unfavorable indicator of the relative value he placed on Soldiers' lives.
He was basically a pilot, at home with things like ships, air squadrons, missile wings, etc. -- things. Ground combat is entirely different than sea or air combat, it deals with people much more than things. He was out of his element dealing with people. Some leaders are inspiring, he was more like threatening or exasperating.
