Despite talking about topics ranging from Osama bin Laden to Sadaam Hussein, Paul Wolfowitz was most worried about dessert.

The Deputy Secretary of Defense, who was late in arriving to his speaking engagement at the Sheraton Syracuse University Hotel and Conference Center on Monday, assured the waiting audience of about 100, who were served dinner before he spoke, that he would not delay their cake for very long.

‘I am standing between you and your dessert,’ Wolfowitz said. ‘So that is reason enough to be brief.’

Wolfowitz, who is the second highest-ranking official in the Department of Defense next to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is no stranger to the Pentagon. From 1989 to 1993, he served under current Vice President Dick Cheney while Cheney was defense secretary. Wolfowitz has also played integral roles in both the Persian Gulf War and the current offensives in Afghanistan. He said that because both wars began with enemy offensives, he is well-versed in surprise developments.

‘If in June we would have asked Congress for $10 million to deploy troops to Jalalabad, after we clarified where that was,’ Wolfowitz said, ‘they would have said ‘There is no limit; you guys will go to get a bigger budget.”

Wolfowitz came to speak as a guest of the National Security Management Course, a six-week training session designed to integrate officials from all sections of the armed forces along with high-ranking civilian government officials. The program is run by the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at SU in conjunction with the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, where Wolfowitz also served as dean.

The majority of his speech revolved around the ever-changing role that the military has to fill in the midst of increasingly different combat situations. He read a dispatch from a Special Forces officer who participated in the liberating of Mazar-e Sharif from Taliban control along with local fighters. He described fighting enemy soldiers on horseback while designating air strike targets to outdated B-52 bombers as an example of using old weaponry in new ways.

‘We literally see how 19th-century horse cavalry along with 50-year-old bombers coupled with modern communication can be a 21st-century weapon,’ Wolfowitz said.

He also outlined a list of objectives that Rumsfeld made before the war began. The list touches on several points, including never retreating in the face of conflict, keeping up humanitarian aid to the regions the United States is at war with and determining a coalition by the mission –

not the other way around – even when there are press reports of ‘unraveling’ ties.

Rumsfeld is quick to point out that no coalition in history has ever ‘raveled’ so it is impossible for one to ever unravel, Wolfowitz said.

Another item on Rumsfeld’s list was not losing sight of why the United States is fighting. That includes not personalizing the war to a hunt for one man, something Wolfowitz stressed.

‘It has been said that the search for Osama bin Laden is like ‘Where’s Waldo’ and there have been more sightings of Osama then Elvis,’ he said. ‘It is not just about one man, it is not just about Al Qaeda, it is not just about Afghanistan, it is about the entire intelligence network.

‘Richard Ried and the shoes that he clumsily lit are examples that there are people out there who still want to kill Americans,’ he said.

Eric Waldo, a junior information studies and technology major who attended the speech as a guest, said that Wolfowitz’s focus on readiness was something that needed to be brought up, although he was somewhat disappointed that Wolfowitz did not go more into the United States’ current dealings in Afghanistan.

‘He was touching on a great thing, the way we need to prepare for the future’ said Waldo, an Air Force cadet in SU’s Reserve Officer Training Core.

In the future, Wolfowitz said that the United States needs to be on guard not for the attacks that it can see coming, but for the ones that cannot be seen. He told a story about then-President George Herbert Walker Bush after the Berlin Wall had fallen and some journalists called in to question the existence of the North American Treaty Organization, which was originally designed to defend against offensives by communist nations.

When Bush was asked about what NATO would defend against in the future, he replied, ‘Uncertainty and instability.’

‘That to this day remains our biggest threat,’ Wolfowitz said. ‘Uncertainty and instability.’

Published on April 1, 2002 at 12:00 pm