How It's Used

“Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has run a very tight ship at the Pentagon until now, concentrating power among his few trusted mates in the E-Ring, quashing all outside dissent, and unfurling his mast across the river to Foggy Bottom. Last May, a 'veteran foreign service officer,' troubled by Rummy's usurpation of duties usually assumed by the State Department, told the Los Angeles Times, 'I just wake up in the morning and tell myself, "There's been a military coup," and then it all makes sense.’”

—Fred Kaplan, “General Agreement: Does the U.N. U-turn signal a comeback for Colin Powell?” Slate, September 4, 2003.

“Among NBC's other new shows are the comedy My Name Is Earl, about a sad-sack guy who wins the lottery and uses the money to help people. On the drama front, there is E-Ring, a thriller series about tough guys who work in some part of the Pentagon. The show is produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, the CSI guy, and stars Dennis Hopper and Benjamin Bratt.”

—John Doyle, “NBC looks more desperate than those Housewives,” The Globe and Mail, May 17, 2005, p. R2.

“This summer Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty of Alexandria got a glimpse of secrecy where he least expected it—not at the Pentagon but on a baseball diamond where his 8-year-old son, Sam, played Little League….

“It seems that some years ago parents of players who were injured in non-league games where league rules were used had taken to suing Little League. So the league decided to restrict the circulation of its rules on a need-to-know basis, a concept with which Hilferty was intimately familiar. ‘I have a secret clearance,’ he mused, ‘I work in the E-ring of the Pentagon, but I don't have clearance for the Little League rules.’”

—Ted Gup, “Who's on First? Who Wants to Know, and Why?” The Washington Post, July 29, 2007, p. D01.

“Another quandary, given that the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan have lasted far longer than the American involvement in World War II, is how to prepare for conflicts that could tie up American forces for decades. ‘One of the things we've learned over the past eight years is that some of the greatest demands, the most difficult challenges, are sustaining operations over time,’ Ms. [Michele A.] Flournoy, 48, said in a recent conversation in an unused office at the Pentagon. (For security reasons, Ms. Flournoy's real office, in the Pentagon's E Ring of top officials, is off limits to audio recorders and therefore taped interviews.)”

—Elisabeth Bumiller, “A Pentagon Trailblazer, Rethinking How the U.S. Fights Wars,” The New York Times, July 4, 2009.

“Napoleon, it is said, preferred a lucky general to a good one. Sitting in the E-ring of the cavernous Pentagon is a man who has shown himself to be both fortunate and skilful. These days the gossip among Washington’s national-security savants is whether the unassuming Robert Gates is, in fact, the best secretary of defence that America has ever had.

“Perhaps so. Fate has been kind. Mr Gates is already unusual for being kept on as defence secretary by a new president entering the White House. Hired by George Bush in 2006 to salvage the war in Iraq, Mr Gates is trying to do the same in Afghanistan for Barack Obama.”

—no listed author, “Lexington: A lucky hawk so far,” The Economist, August 8, 2009.

Links

Related on eAlmanac
The Pentagon

Beyond eAlmanac
Wikipedia article on the Layout of the Pentagon
United States Department of Defense Web site on Navigating the Pentagon