If Someone Locks Me Out I Kick My Way Back In»

Once upon a time Donald Rumsfeld wrote a memo (no, not that memo) that asked whether U.S. strategy was “capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us.” His solution to that good question wasn’t to change any aspect of U.S. policy toward the Middle East or South Asia or stanch any contributing factor to terrorist recruitment, but instead to… give Special Operations Command a leading role in the war. (Oh, and he added to that by making SpecOps troops into a G.I. Joe-style cartoon of their core competencies.) No one ever said the man was wise.

Rumsfeld is now a forgotten hangover. According to the Associated Press, Special Operations is trying to expunge his harebrained schemes from its institutional memory:

The military command overseeing the nation’s most elite forces has moved away from a contentious plan that gave it broad control over anti-terrorism operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot spots around the globe.

The expanded authority for U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., was hammered through by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld well before he resigned in November 2006. The shift caused friction among leaders at other warfighting organizations who saw it an intrusion into their geographic domains.

Navy Adm. Eric Olson, the command’s senior officer since July 2007, has steered clear of micromanaging specific missions against al-Qaida or other terrorist groups. The command’s primary focus is to ensure these plans are fused into a broader strategy for defeating extremist ideologies. That reflects Olson’s position that the troops closest to the action know best how to handle it.

It’s not often that a command asks for less responsibility. How come?

“I didn’t awfully care too much for people from somewhere else to come in and tell me what they were going to do,” Fridovich said.