Donald Rumsfeld's point man for military modernization is stepping down, Inside Defense reports.

Since 2001, retired Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski has headed the Pentagon's 25-man Office of Force Transformation, which pushed the armed services to become quicker, lighter, and better able to share data.

He's retiring "on doctor's orders," Inside Defense says. Cebrowski has been "fighting pneumonia for months."

Long before he joined the transformation office, Cebrowski, the former head of the Naval War College, was one of the main advocates of "network-centric warfare" -- the idea that every soldier, every drone, and every general should be linked together into a giant Internet for combat. “He was advocating that we need to get off the focus on the big war and the big enemy," Thomas Barnett, a former Office of Force Transformation researcher, told Inside Defense.

The office also championed some of the Pentagon's wilder ideas: Humvees that combined pain rays with regular guns, battleship blimps for hauling military cargo.

"It’s frequently said that you cannot predict the future. But, in fact, we know a great deal about the future," he told an industry forum last fall. There are "perfectly predictable surprises, so also are [there] opportunities for leaders to make change. And the great burden for leaders in this time is to recognize the inevitable and turn it into a virtue."