A Quote by Donald Rumsfeld
The Secretary of Defense is not a super General or Admiral. His task is to exercise civilian control over the Department for the Commander-in-Chief and the country.
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Biden is supposed to be the commander-in-chief, but he forgot the name of the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, and the Secretary of Defense.
We've learned something about President-elect [Donald] Trump's choice for secretary of defense. Lawmakers in Congress intend to proper debate over whether retired General James Mattis meets a requirement for civilian control of the military.
The president of the United States is the commander in chief, and the people who work with him at the National Security Council are his arm in working with the Defense Department. And, quite frankly, they have responsibility for all of the government. We are one component of the government.
When the Defense Department was established after World War II, a law said that any defense secretary with military experience must have been out of the military at least seven years. General [James] Mattis doesn't meet that.
In fact, in 2002, the Secretary of Defense authorized such support on a reimbursable basis to organizations formerly components of the Department of Justice and Department of the Treasury and currently components of the Department of Homeland Security.
After World War II, defending America in the modern world required new intelligence agencies, the unification of the armed services under a massive new Defense Department, and later the creation of new civilian organizations with some defense functions, such as NASA and the Energy Department.
Last year, Congress gave the Department of Defense the authority to design a new civilian personnel system for its employees as part of the defense authorization bill.
I think that the only time we will really know what then-President Trump is going to do about the set of challenges that confront him is after he has sat down with his advisers as the commander in chief, when he's looking at the threats and the intelligence from the standpoint of being the number one decider, when he's hearing from his secretary of defense, his chairman, who was the same chairman President Obama had, Chairman Joe Dunford, who is an outstanding public servant, who has led our anti-ISIL effort, on which we're making great progress.
The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the land and naval forces, as first general and admiral ... while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies - all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature.
You do not export democracy through the Defense Department or the Defense Secretary. You do it through trade agreements, through the Department of Commerce and favorable agreements with our friends and neighbors across the globe.
The Secretary of the State at the time was James Baker, who had also been Secretary of Treasury and White House Chief of Staff: very powerful guy. And I went to see him in his very ornate office at the State Department to say I wasn't going to cover him anymore. It was just a courtesy call.
Your American admiral said that he held me in the highest esteem, and thought that I conducted my defense perfectly. He said through his chief of staff that my conduct was beyond reproach and he had the greatest admiration for me.
The admiral, or commander in chief of a squadron, being frequently invested with a great charge, on which the fate of a kingdom may depend, ought certainly to be possessed of abilities equal to so important a station and so extensive a command.
I trust Hillary Clinton as president and commander in chief, but the thought of Donald Trump as commander in chief scares me to death.
A commander-in-chief cannot take as an excuse for his mistakes in warfare an order given by his sovereign or his minister when the person giving the order is absent from the field of operations and is imperfectly aware or wholly unaware of the latest state of affairs. It follows that any commander-in-chief who undertakes to carry out a plan which he considers defective is at fault; he must put forward his reasons, insist on the plan being changed, and finally tender his resignation rather than be the instrument of his army's downfall.
We saw more evidence that [Doanld Trump] is temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified to be commander-in-chief. He trash-talked American generals, saying they had been, quote, "reduced to rubble," that's how he talks about distinguished men and women who have spent their lives serving our country, sacrificing for us. That's how he would act as commander-in-chief.
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