Donald H. Rumsfeld sat in a vault-like room studded with video screens and talked with President Bush as the Pentagon burned. "This is not a criminal action," the secretary of defense told Bush over a secure line. "This is war." The word "war" meant more than going after the al Qaeda terrorist network in Afghanistan, the fault line of terrorism. Bush said he wanted retaliation.

The setting was the Pentagon’s Executive Support Center, where Rumsfeld held secure video teleconferences with the White House across the Potomac or with ground commanders 10,000 miles away. The time was 1:02 p.m., less than four hours after terrorists steered American Flight 77 into the Pentagon’s southwest wall. Rumsfeld at first had dashed to the impact site. In his shirt and tie, he helped transport the wounded. Finally convinced to leave the scene, Rumsfeld entered the closely guarded ESC, where whiffs of burned rubble penetrated the ventilation system. The video monitor in front of him was blank, but there was an audio connection with the president at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.

Rumsfeld’s instant declaration of war, previously unreported, took America from the Clinton administration’s view that terrorism was a criminal matter to the Bush administration’s view that terrorism was a global enemy to be destroyed. "That was really a breakthrough strategically and intellectually," recalls Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy. "Viewing the 9/11 attacks as a war that required a war strategy was a very big thought, and a lot flowed from that." Rumsfeld wanted a war that was fought with ruthless efficiency: special forces, high-tech firepower, a scorecard for killing or capturing terrorists. He had no desire to become the world’s jailer. And he refused to be stymied by bureaucracy. This would be a global war, Rumsfeld said, and he planned to give Special Operations forces — Delta Force, SEALs and Green Berets — unprecedented powers to kill terrorists.