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“You and the NSC staff need to understand that you are not in the chain of command,” Rumsfeld wrote. “Since you cannot seem to accept that fact, my only choices are to go to the President and ask him to tell you to stop or to tell anyone in DoD not to respond to you or the NSC staff. I have decided to take the latter course. If it fails, I’ll have to go to the President. One way or the other, it will stop, while I am Secretary of Defense. Thanks.”

This was not a matter of preference; it was a matter of law — a law that has come into renewed focus in light of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s failure to inform the White House, Congress or his own deputy that he was hospitalized and incapacitated at a time when the U.S. military was carrying out a strike against an Iran-backed militia while under ongoing attack in Iraq, Syria and the Red Sea.

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In 1986, Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols Act, a sweeping reorganization of the military structure which states, “Unless otherwise directed by the President, the chain of command to a unified or specified combatant command runs — (1) from the President to the Secretary of Defense; and (2) from the Secretary of Defense to the commander of the combatant command.”

Former national security adviser Stephen Hadley provided some context for the Rumsfeld memo in a 2011 interview for the University of Virginia’s oral history project. Bush “would have a tendency to say, ‘I’ve decided that you should call Gates,’ or ‘Call Rumsfeld,’ and I would say, ‘Mr. President, I’m not in the chain of command,” Hadley said. “You’ve got a phone there. Pick up and hit that third line and you’ll have Don Rumsfeld. You ought to give that order to him directly.’” If someone else tried to pass on an order from the president, Rumsfeld would remind them they were not in the chain of command. And I vividly recall that he directed his staff to make certain that he and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz “will not be out of the city of Washington, DC at the same time. One of us will always be in the city” to preserve the chain of command.

Austin should know all about the chain of command. As Rumsfeld wrote in his book “Rumsfeld’s Rules,” “in every case those in the senior ranks of leadership have worked their way up from the lower positions. Every three- or four-star officer once was a junior officer........

© Washington Post