In the hoopla about Donald Rumsfeld's emergence as the most powerful defence secretary ever, one small detail was left out - the one that ought now lead to his downfall. It is the problem of substance, or lack thereof: The question of to what ends the organisational skills at which he so excels are to be used.

Rumsfeld is like Hannibal, who knew how to win but not what to do with the victory. This was apparent to me as a young assistant in the Pentagon Eisenhower corridor where the boss presides - when Rumsfeld arrived at the Pentagon for the first time, in 1975.

All of us holdovers marveled at the skill with which he found the keys to power in the maze of commands, services and enigmatic 'office of the secretary'. He did it by way of an artful device - a wiring diagram exercise.

Defence had never been his long suit, but a White House massacre that he had helped engineer forced the helm of the Pentagon into his hands. Therefore he put the nabobs of the realm to justifying the existing organisational scheme, knowing this would send each of them scurrying in disorder to protect his particular turf. At the Wednesday morning Armed Forces Policy Council with the heads of the services, he could play devil's advocate as each startled magnant justified his existing power and responsibility. But we were not there to discuss what all this was for.

Evil empire

As it happened, the talk of the land was whether detente was being used by the Soviet Union to sneak to military ascendancy. A nascent organisation, destined to be perhaps the most influential in American foreign policy lobbying history, the committee on the Present Danger, had formulated an agenda, which it handed to a grateful secretary who had up to then enjoyed power without purpose. True, Rumsfeld had always favored a strong defence; but that was rote, and the notion that Moscow could become the world number one power, not over generations but it almost seemed overnight, was something new and substantive.

Startled into mission, Rumsfeld developed the highest regard for the strategists of Present Danger. Having an agenda handed over on a platter solved the problem we had all been trying to help him with. Soon we were herding congressmen to secret briefings on the threat. The great rush to increase the Pentagon budget was on. Traveling with Rummy, one saw a grand design for rebuilding America's defences, not just pap about a strong defence for its own sake. Despite all his efforts, Jimmy Carter could not stop the inexorable rise in defense spending during his four years; Ronald Reagan in his first term fulfilled the Committee mission, even transcending it in his second as the evil empire crumbled.

But Rumsfeld had been merely the messenger not one of the architects. Over the ensuing decades he attempted a run for the presidency, served with distinction on presidential and Pentagon missions, and made the personal fortune that crowned his career. George W Bush's election, and with it that of Rumsfeld protege Dick Cheney, assured him high office anew.

Before Sept 11 a consummate manager would have seen no clear and present danger, there no longer being a Soviet Union. But Rumsfeld's prior knowledge equipped him to seize the instruments of power through personnel and organisational channels ever those of policy - and could be felt throughout the building and the services, not to everyone's delight. Motion, but no mission. One was waiting. The neo-conservatives, having drafted new mission statements during the first Bush presidency, came into top positions at Defence and began to circle the secretary with plans for aggressive action in the Middle East.

I doubt that Rumsfeld would have in fact picked up such a basket of policies, particularly when they so aggressively embraced so many of the specifics of Israel's agenda, had he had to come up with his own. He had too much experience as a Middle East envoy under his belt not to know that American interests cannot be served by a one-sided policy. But he went along with deputy secretary Paul Wolfowitz and under secretary Douglas Feith, because he had no programme of his own, and he liked and admired the sweep and comprehensiveness, indeed the chutzpah, of the neo-con plan.

And since he had no plan of his own, the neo-cons and Cheney's obsession with Iraq had to become part of his agenda and here again he excelled by default winning the war with the least force possible. Why we were fighting didn't seem to be in question. Once we had, the next right questions weren't asked either. Now it was simply an organisational question of solving first about the occupation and then about the insurgency.

Blind support

If you don't think about substance, it won't occur to you that the act of occupation is bound to stir up insurgency, even terrorism from outside. Your brilliant organisational skills will merely reinforce weakness. If you had bought the neo-con line that our forces would be welcomed with flowers, you didn't utilise your organisational skills to protect Baghdad first from looting and then from terrorists. An administrative philosophy honed on conciliating congressional patrons of bureaucracy and reenergizing pharmaceutical corporations had not been shaped to discover why we kept planting seedbeds for more terrorism, particularly as we continued the neo-cons policy of blind support for Ariel Sharon.

Whether torture should be used in the prisons we had hastily rehabbed in Baghdad was simply another issue of process, the quickest way to get information. Rumsfeld was better than anyone at organising a quick and efficient war. But never having asked himself where our war fitted into a larger scheme of world order, never having imagined that it would beget a whole counter-war with consequences across the globe, of course he couldn't imagine what pictures of torture would do to our battered image.

So he was the last to see them and then at the instance of his enraged critics, not in the light of the vast resource of Pentagon talent that always lay to his hand. The ultimate organisation man had defeated himself, and possibly, what is rather more important, his country.

W SCOTT THOMPSON, an adjunct professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Boston, is a former assistant secretary of state for the Ronald Reagan administration. He also served as Donald Rumsfeld's assistant at the Pentagon in 1975-76. He lives in Bali and Washington DC.