For Rumsfeld, the idea of applying “market logic” to the U.S. military was a project that dated back four decades. It began in the early sixties, when he used to attend seminars at the University of Chicago’s Economics Department. He had developed a particularly close connection with Milton Friedman, who, after Rumsfeld was elected to Congress at the age of thirty, took the precocious Republican under his wing, helping him to develop a bold free-market policy platform and tutoring him in economic theory.
