Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld spoke to a military audience at the National Defense University on January 31, 2002. ” ‘The notion that we could transform while cutting the defense budget over the past decade, Rumsfeld confessed, ‘was seductive but false.’…The events of 9/11 produced a level of fear and paranoia that made the canceling of outdated defense systems and a wholesale rethinking of Pentagon priorities politically infeasible.”
– Eugene Jarecki, The American Way of War, Pages 185-186