WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President-elect George W. Bush on Thursday called on former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who led the Pentagon during the Ford administration, to serve as defense secretary when his administration assumes power in January.
"This is a man who has great judgment," Bush said. "He has strong vision, and he's going to be a great secretary of defense -- again."
Rumsfeld, a veteran of the Ford and Nixon administrations, served as defense secretary from 1975 to 1977. He said he would look forward to returning to his old office at the Pentagon.
"I have been doing a number of things with respect to national security and foreign policy issues in the intervening years, and I look forward to it," Rumsfeld said. "I really do. It's a fine institution, and there are wonderful people there."
In making the announcement, Bush gave Rumsfeld a three-pronged mission at the Pentagon, asking him to improve morale and living conditions for U.S. troops; modernize the armed forces for the threats of 21st Century; and sell Congress and U.S. allies on the idea of ballistic missile defense.
Bush said Rumsfeld's leadership of a 1998 congressional panel endorsing the development of a missile defense was a factor in his favor, but conceded that his administration would "have a selling job to do" to build support for a ballistic missile defense.
After several failed tests, President Clinton administration left a decision on whether to build a missile defense system to the next administration. Such a system is also unpopular with the nation's European allies.
Bush called Rumsfeld "a strong leader who is willing to listen to others, but is also a decisive leader." He said Rumsfeld would be able to hold his own in debates among Bush's other Cabinet appointees, including former Gen. Colin Powell at the State Department and Vice President-elect Dick Cheney, himself a former defense secretary.
"I've assembled a team of very strong, smart people, and I look forward to hearing their advice. One of the things the American people need to understand is that I'll be getting the best counsel possible."
Rumsfeld, 68, had been considered as a potential CIA director in the Bush administration, while other three other candidates were publicly mentioned as candidates for the Defense Department: former Indiana Sen. Dan Coats and Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Armitage, both top Pentagon deputies in the administration of Bush's father.
Members of Congress have supported Coats, a conservative Republican. Wolfowitz served as undersecretary of defense for policy while Vice President-elect Dick Cheney led the Pentagon in the first Bush administration, while Armitage was a major troubleshooter in the administrations of Presidents Reagan and Bush.
The president-elect has named eight people to his Cabinet so far; another six offices remain to be filled. Bush is scheduled to spend two days in Washington before returning to Texas, where aides said he will stay into mid-January.
"I feel like we're making pretty good progress, and I hope to have the Cabinet completed at the end of the first week of January," Bush said Thursday. "Don't hold me to it, though."
Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson is said to be Bush's pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, and sources close to the transition team said his selection would be announced Friday in Washington.
Other posts remaining to be filled include the departments of Education, Labor, Transportation, Energy and Interior. Alaska's governor, Democratic Tony Knowles, is under consideration for the Energy and Interior positions as Bush looks to include at least one Democrat in his Cabinet.
Bush also planned to name campaign strategist Karl Rove and economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey to White House posts, Republican sources told CNN.
His picks so far have been an ethnically diverse group: Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, both black, as secretary of state and national security adviser; Mel Martinez, a Cuban-born Florida official, as head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development; and two women -- Ann Veneman, as secretary of agriculture, and New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman as director of the Environmental Protection Agency. Though not nominally a Cabinet post, Bush has said the EPA chief will hold Cabinet rank in his administration.
So far, only one of Bush's nominees has proven controversial: Liberals and civil rights activists are unhappy with his selection of Missouri Sen. John Ashcroft as attorney general. Ashcroft lost his Senate seat in November in a sympathy vote for his late opponent, Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan, who died in a plane crash about a month before the election.
Ashcroft is a vocal opponent of abortion rights, and civil rights groups criticized him for opposing the nomination of a black Missouri Supreme Court justice to the federal bench. He also has come under fire for comments he made to the Southern Partisan, a magazine defending the historical reputation of the Civil War-era Confederacy.
Ashcroft's supporters note that as Missouri's governor, he signed into law a state holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr., the slain civil rights leader; established musician Scott Joplin's house as Missouri's only historic site honoring a black person; and named a black woman to a state judgeship.
CNN Senior White House Correspondent John King, CNN.com Writer Matt Smith and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Donald Rumsfeld, who headed the Pentagon (news - web sites) in the traumatic post-Vietnam War years, was poised on Thursday to confront new post-Cold War challenges that play to his strength as an expert on national missile defense and protecting U.S. satellites.
A four-time Republican U.S. congressman from Illinois and one-time American ambassador to NATO (news - web sites), Rumsfeld, 68, served from 1975 to 1977 as President Gerald Ford's defense secretary. Since then, Rumsfeld has acquired expertise in high-technology, 21st-century issues by heading a bipartisan commission that concluded in 1998 that U.S. intelligence had underestimated missile threats to the United States.
The findings of the congressionally chartered, nine-member Rumsfeld Commission led President Clinton (news - web sites), in his final two years in office, to take the idea of a missile shield more seriously, bowing to long-standing Republican pressure.
Rumsfeld -- who was nominated by President-elect George W. Bush (news - web sites) on Thursday to serve again as defense secretary a quarter century after his first stint in the job -- would bring top-level managerial experience from inside and outside the government to the Pentagon, which already has spent more than $50 billion on development of an anti-missile shield.
If confirmed to the post by the U.S. Senate as expected, one of his first tasks would be to modernize U.S. forces by making them more mobile and swifter within existing budget constraints.
``We´ve got a great opportunity in America to redefine how wars are fought and won, and therefore how the peace is kept,´´ Bush said in nominating Rumsfeld. New Threats
Rumsfeld said the United States must prepare itself to cope with new threats, including ``information warfare´´ or computer-generated attacks on vital systems, defense of space assets such as satellites and the spread of weapons of mass destruction throughout the world. Rumsfeld also currently heads a congressionally mandated commission that is studying the use of space for national security purposes, including employing space assets to support military operations and protecting U.S. satellites from possible attack.
Clinton deferred to his successor the question of whether to start breaking ground in Alaska to field a limited, land-based anti-missile system by 2005 or 2006. Bush campaigned for the presidency on promises of early deployment of a shield to protect U.S. forces and allies from the threat of missile attack or accidental launch.
Russia steadfastly has refused to amend the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a cornerstone of Cold War strategic stability, which bans such systems. China also strongly rejects any such system.
Rumsfeld served as White House chief of staff for Ford in 1974 and 1975 before becoming the 13th U.S. secretary of defense from 1975 to 1977, the youngest in history, following the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.
In 1962, at the age of 30, he was elected to the first of his four terms in the House of Representatives as a Republican from the 13th Congressional District of Illinois. Earlier, he attended Princeton University on a scholarship, served in the Navy as an aviator and became an all-Navy wrestling champion, according to his official biography.
In 1969, he resigned from Congress to serve as a top aide to President Richard Nixon and director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. In January 1973, Nixon sent him to Brussels as U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
After stepping down as defense secretary, Rumsfeld became chief executive of G.D. Searle & Co., a pharmaceutical giant, from 1977 to 1985. For the next five years, he worked as an adviser to William Blair & Co., an investment banking firm.
From October 1990 to August 1993, he served as chairman and chief executive of General Instrument Corp., a leader in broadband and digital high-definition television technology.
Since January 1997, Rumsfeld has been board chairman of Gilead Sciences Inc., a Foster City, California-based bio-pharmaceutical company.
He was born on July 9, 1932 and graduated from Princeton in 1954. The Chicago native is married to the former Joyce Pierson of Wilmette, Illinois, and is the father of three.
In 1977, Ford awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
Ballistic Missile Threat
Rumsfeld made a major impact as head of the blue-ribbon Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, which found a vulnerability to attack sooner than had been suggested by the CIA.
An unclassified, 27-page summary of the panel's report, made public on July 15, 1998, contradicted a 1995 CIA national intelligence estimate that predicted no nation outside of declared nuclear powers would be capable of hitting the contiguous 48 U.S. states and Canada before 2011. Instead, the Rumsfeld panel of defense and intelligence experts unanimously found that countries such as Iran, North Korea (news - web sites) and, eventually, Iraq could field ballistic missiles with ''little or no warning.''
The CIA at first stood by its 1995 conclusions. In a July 15, 1998, letter to Congress, CIA Director George Tenet said the intelligence community's predictions were ``supported by the available evidence and were well tested´´ in an internal review. Since then, the CIA has said it agrees that a missile threat could emerge sooner than it originally had predicted.
Rumsfeld said his panel reached a different conclusion because Tenet had granted it unrestricted access to a range of classified material that was unavailable in its entirety for security reasons to all but the most senior analysts.
The Rumsfeld panel also called into question the ability of U.S. intelligence agencies to detect emerging threats, saying this was ``eroding.´´
``Deception and denial efforts are intense and often successful, and U.S. collection and analysis assets are limited,´´ the panel´s report said. ``Together they create a high risk of continued surprise.´´
If confirmed, Rumsfeld also would preside over possible shake-ups in billions of dollars in weapons programs, including the largest -- the proposed Joint Strike Fighter warplane.
Donald Rumsfeld, named by President-elect George W. Bush yesterday as his choice for secretary of defense, is an experienced manager who successfully led the Pentagon once before, under the very different international circumstances of the cold war. But Mr. Rumsfeld's recent close identification with the campaign for early construction of a national missile defense system raises concern that Mr. Bush may try to move too hastily on this front. The emphasis Mr. Bush placed on the issue yesterday only intensifies the impression that he intends to make missile defense the centerpiece of his national security policy. On other defense matters, Mr. Rumsfeld's approach is likely to be pragmatic and non-ideological, making him a good fit with the other leading figures in the seasoned Bush national security team — Vice President-elect Dick Cheney, Secretary of State- designate Colin Powell and Mr. Bush's choice for national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. If anything, the group is overly weighted with people with Pentagon backgrounds. Mr. Cheney was secretary of defense in the presidency of Mr. Bush's father, and General Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not every national security crisis the new administration is likely to face will be military in nature.
Apart from his exhortations on missile defense, Mr. Bush struck two useful themes in introducing his candidate. He called on Mr. Rumsfeld to raise military pay and morale and to challenge the military services on weapons procurement to create faster, more mobile American military forces. That is particularly important for the Army, which has lagged behind in equipping itself for the likely combat needs of the post-cold-war world.
The two themes are related, as wiser procurement decisions can free the funding necessary for bigger pay increases and other personnel benefits. Mr. Rumsfeld should carefully evaluate expensive and duplicative weapons programs like the F-22 fighter plane. Further savings can also be found by closing unneeded military bases. The savings should be used to improve military pay and housing and to finance new programs to protect American forces against terrorist attacks.
Mr. Rumsfeld's government experience dates to the Nixon administration, where he headed federal anti-poverty programs. Steering clear of Watergate, he went on to serve President Ford, first as White House chief of staff and then as defense secretary. He was President Reagan's special envoy in the Middle East during the early 1980's, dealing with the Israeli and Arab leaders of that era, including Saddam Hussein.
Mr. Rumsfeld has remained involved in defense issues. Two years ago he led a bipartisan commission that concluded that American intelligence agencies had underestimated the threat of future missile attack from North Korea, Iran and Iraq. That commission was not asked to recommend a specific military response to this danger. But as secretary of defense, Mr. Rumsfeld will have primary responsibility for carrying out Mr. Bush's campaign promise to design and build an effective national missile defense.
No proven technology yet exists for achieving this ambitious and expensive goal. Mr. Rumsfeld owes the country a rigorous research and testing program to establish whether any of the proposed approaches can reliably evade decoys and destroy an incoming warhead. Rushing forward with construction before such testing is complete will not make America any safer and could provoke needless dissension with key allies and a risky breakdown of international arms control agreements.