Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush's Secretary of Defense, moved swiftly in the first weeks of the administration to call for a massive increase in Pentagon funding. To buttress his case, he sent a strategic memo to senior officials outlining the dire security threats he believed the United States was facing in the 21st century. Eight months before Sept. 11, Rumsfeld wrote that "the risk to US and alliance security is increasing as the US fails to respond effectively and decisively to asymmetric threats likely to characterize the first quarter of the 21st century." This, and other ideas in this early memo -- including the need "to dissuade other countries from challenging our interests" -- laid foundations for the doctrine that would later be called "pre-emption."

On most mornings, O'Neill received a package of documents from his aides to prepare him for the day's meetings. His papers for February 1, 2001, included an agenda for an NSC meeting to be held in the White House Situation Room that afternoon on U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf. The agenda, which refers to a classified paper on a "Political-Military Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq," is one of several memos that showed how regime change in Iraq and handling the post-war nation dominated discussions of foreign policy in the first days of the administration.