By March 1976, the word détente had disappeared from Gerald Ford's vocabulary. Meanwhile, a group of like-minded gentlemen continued to meet at Washington's exclusive Metropolitan Club for a series of discussions on what to do about the menace of détente and, in their view, the insatiable Soviet Union.
Out of these meetings came the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), whose existence revolved around the die-hard belief that the United States was failing to keep pace with the Soviet war machine. Though originally seen as an extremist organization, the group--which included a number of Rumsfeld's adepts and comrades-in-arms--managed to prevail upon the Ford administration to let its members have access to CIA data in the service of providing an "alternative" assessment of the Soviet threat.
In CPD's view, the agency chronically minimized the Soviet military threat, thus creating a false basis for what CPD saw as insufficient U.S. defense expenditures. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld was pushing hard for new strategic endeavors, such as the MX missile and the B-1 bomber. Though William Colby had successfully fought against outside analysis, new CIA Director George Bush was much more receptive to the suggestion from the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board--which included CPD members--that the agency's analysts hadn't been on the ball. It was no surprise, then, that when Bush asked the White House for permission to bring in the CPD, he obtained an enthusiastic response.
The CPD experts, who by this point had come to be known as "Team B," crafted an assessment that, as American University national security expert Anne Hessing Cahn put it, "everywhere saw the worst case," was rife with what we now know was rampant overestimation of Soviet military capability, and led to dire predictions. It's hard to know which is more surprising: that Team B's exaggerated findings were accepted then, or that reporters still accept them today.
The findings were submitted to the White House too late to be of any use to the floundering Gerald Ford, but CPD mounted an incredibly effective media campaign of leaking and spinning to create something approaching public hysteria. Despite Kissinger's condemnation of Team B's assessment, Rumsfeld was effusive in promoting it as a credible study--and thereby undermining arms control efforts for the next four years. Two days before Jimmy Carter's inauguration, Rumsfeld fired parting shots at Kissinger and other disarmament advocates, saying that "no doubt exists about the capabilities of the Soviet armed forces" and that those capabilities "indicate a tendency toward war fighting ... rather than the more modish Western models of deterrence through mutual vulnerability."
Team B's efforts not only were effective in undermining the incoming Carter administration's disarmament efforts but also laid the foundation for the unnecessary explosion of the defense budget in the Reagan years. And it was during those years that virtually all of Rumsfeld's compatriots were elevated to positions of power in the executive branch. From there they defended programs Rumsfeld had pushed, like the MX and the B-1. Though he did a brief turn as special envoy to the Middle East in 1983 and 1984, Rummy also had another quiet and influential role: adviser to Eugene V. Rostow, veteran Cold Warrior and head of the ACDA. When Reagan fired Rostow in 1983, the president replaced him with another of Rumsfeld's protégés: Kenneth Adelman, whose entire defense experience had consisted of one year spent as a Rumsfeld special assistant at the Pentagon. Not surprisingly, Rumsfeld continued on as a member of ACDA's advisory board. http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/V12/4/vest-j.html