The military services need to rethink their strategies for securing
political support for major weapon systems. The standard “requirements
documents” that typically are used to justify equipment needs
may no longer be enough to convince Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
that a weapon system should be funded. “There’s a couple
of phrases that I have trouble with: One is ‘requirement’
… I think of it as an appetite,” Rumsfeld said at a
Pentagon townhall gathering.
The second phrase he dislikes is “high demand, low density,”
a term the services coined to designate weapon systems that are
in short supply. The notion that a piece of equipment is “high
demand, low density” only means that “we bought the
wrong things,” says Rumsfeld. “It’s a world-class
baloney phrase … It just means we didn’t do our jobs
well.”