backgrounds. In addition to Rumsfeld, who was a former defense secretary and White House chief of staff, there was a former CIA director and two retired four-star generals. The remaining five all had Ph.D.'s and experience in handling state secrets in sensitive government jobs they had once held. Among the Republican picks was Paul Wolfowitz, then a university dean, and years earlier, an adviser to the Team B study.

Serving as staff director was Steve Cambone, a tall, lanky specialist in strategic studies, who, since earning a doctorate in political science in the early 1980s, had held various positions in government and in Washington think tanks. Cambone had been recommended for the job by a congressional staff member, and Rumsfeld was quickly impressed by Cambone's appetite for hard work,of review panels staffed with outsiders—mainly retired officers, industry executives, and think-tank experts. The panels, which grew in number to more than twenty, were given broad charters to challenge the conventional wisdom and come forward with bold new ideas. They covered a wide range of topics—strategy and force planning, military structure, capabilities and systems, personnel and readiness, information and intelligence, infrastructure and space.

"Rumsfeld was sort of casting around, trying to grab some ideas," said Paul Gebhard, who had been an assistant chief of staff to former defense secretary Bill Cohen and who stayed on for several months to assist Rumsfeld. "He was just trying to get something going."

But the panels troubled the military service leaders, who felt shut out of the process and worried that they would have