But this book is also about my political war with Congress every day I was in office and the dramatic contrast between my public respect, bipartisanship, and calm, and my private frustration, disgust, and anger. There were also political wars with the White House, often with the White House staff, occasionally with the presidents themselves — more with President Obama than with President Bush. And finally, there was my bureaucratic war with the DoD and the military services, aimed at transforming a department organized to plan for war into one that could wage war, changing the military forces we had into the military forces we needed to succeed.
I was to call Card at Camp David with my final answer the following Monday. Over the weekend I wrestled with the decision. On Saturday night, lying awake in bed, I told Becky she could make this decision really easy for me; I knew how much she loved being at Texas A&M, and all she had to say was that she didn’t want to return to Washington, D.C. Instead, she said, “We have to do what you have to do.” I said, “Thanks a lot.”
I look back with amusement that my job interview with both President Bush and President-elect Obama involved more cloak-and-dagger clandestinity than most of my decades-long career in the CIA.
While I had known Rice, Hadley, Cheney, and others for years, I was joining a group of people who had been fighting two wars, and who had six years of being on the same team. I would be the outsider.
Fourth, I suggested we had pulled a bait and switch on the National Guard and Reserves — most men and women had joined the Guard in particular expecting to go to monthly training sessions and summer training camp, and to be called up for natural disasters or a national crisis; instead, they had become an operational force, deploying for a year or more to join an active and dangerous fight and potentially deploying more than one. I told the president that I thought all these things had negative implications for their families and their employers that needed to be addressed.
Press coverage and public statements in the ensuring days were very positive, but I had been around long enough to know that this was less a show of enthusiasm for me than a desire for change.
She congratulated me on my nomination and then said to me with tears in her eyes, “I have two sons in Iraq. For God’s sake, please bring them home alive. We’ll be praying for you.” I was overwhelmed. I nodded, maybe mumbled something like, I’ll try. I couldn’t finish my dinner, and I couldn’t sleep that night. Our wars had just become very real to me, along with the responsibility I was taking on for all those in the fight. For the first time, I was frightened that I might not be able to meet that mother’s and the country’s expectations.
During the car ride from my hotel to the Capitol for my confirmation to be secretary of defense, I thought in wonder about my path to such a moment. I grew up in a middle-class family of modest means in Wichita, Kansas. My older brother and I were the first in the history of our family to graduate from college. My father was a salesman for a wholesale automotive parts company. He was a rock-ribbed Republican who idolized Eisenhower; FDR was “that damn dictator,” and I was about ten before I learned that Harry Truman’s first name wasn’t “goddamn.”
My father was a man of unshakable integrity, with a big heart and, when it came to people (versus politics), an open mind. He taught me early in life to take people one at a time, based on their individual qualities and never as a member of a group. That led, he said, to hatred and bias; that was what the Nazis had done. He had no patience for lying, hypocrisy, people who put on airs, or unethical behavior. In church, he occasionally would point out to me important men who fell short of his standards of character. My parents told me repeatedly when I was a boy that there were no limits to what I might achieve if I worked hard, but they also routinely cautioned me never to think I was superior to anyone else.
I remember sitting at the witness table listening to this litany of woe and thinking, What the hell am I doing here? I have walked right into the middle of a category-five shitstorm. It was the first of many, many times I would sit at the witness table thinking something very different from what I was saying.
But the Pentagon was a whole other thing. Beyond the sheer monstrousness of the bureaucracy, I would have to deal with the troubled relationship between the civilian leadership of the department and many in the military leadership, and the fact that we were engaged in two major wars, neither of which was going well.
There were a large number of people eager to help me — some days too many. It seemed everyone in the Pentagon wanted to see me or send me briefing papers. I was seriously at risk of drowning in all this. The number of those outside the Pentagon reaching out to offer me advice without wanting anything for themselves reflected the fact that many Washington insiders believed the department was in real trouble and that I had to be successful for the country’s sake.
Among other things, he observed that decision making in the Pentagon is “like the old Roman arena — gladiators come before the emperor to battle and you decide who is the winner. Someone needs to make sure the process within the arena is fair, transparent, and objective.”
Instead, I used the interregnum period to make a critical decision about leading the department that would turn out to be one of the best decisions I would make: I decided to walk into the Pentagon alone, without bringing a single assistant or even a secretary. I had often seen the immensely negative impact on organizations and morale when a new boss showed up with his own retinue. It always had the earmarks of a hostile takeover and created resentment. And of course the new folks didn’t have a clue how their new place of employment worked.
I participated in the development of our strategies both within the Pentagon and in the White House, and then had primary responsibility for implementing them: for selecting, promoting — and when necessary, firing — field commanders and other military leaders; for getting the commanders and troops the equipment they needed to be successful; for taking care of our troops and their families; and for sustaining sufficient political support in Congress to provide time for success. I had to navigate the minefields of politics, policy, and operational warfare, both in the field and in Washington.
Serious consequences were threatened for noncompliance. Saddam nonetheless continued to play games with the inspectors and the international community. As Condi Rice would write years later, “The fact is, we invaded Iraq because we believed we had run out of other options. The sanctions were not working, the inspections were unsatisfactory, and we could not get Saddam to leave by other means.” Particularly later, as the war dragged on, fewer and fewer people accepted that logic.
We asked a lot of questions. Justice O’Connor had no experience in foreign affairs or national security issues, but she was probably the best questioner. It was extraordinary to listen to her. From her years as a Supreme Court justice, she had an amazing ear for faulty logic, questionable evidence, inconsistency, and flawed analysis. In a kindly but firm way, she punctured a number of expert balloons.
We also met with the Baghdad bureau chiefs of the major US news organizations. Their evaluation of the Iraqi scene was stark and very pessimistic. We heard from them that the situation was deteriorating, not only because of conflict between Shia and Sunni but because of internal Shia divisions as well; that the US military and the State Department were “in denial”; that there were not enough troops to provide security; that there had been a big exodus of the Iraqi middle class and intellectuals the previous summer; and that a “de facto” partitioning of the country was taking place.
Iran wanted a weak Iraq and a quagmire for the US, he said, with our 140,000 troops as “hostages.” The Shia had to realize they could not control all the levers of power, and the Sunnis had to realize they would not return to power. He expressed concern that the Shia were trying to sideline the Sunnis. “It is politics at the heart of our problems; all other problems derive from that.”
Our visit was critically important because you just have to see and hear some things in person to understand them fully. No number of briefings in Washington could take the place of sitting in the same room with the Iraqis, or some of our own people on the scene, for that matter.
We had simply had no idea how broken Iraq was before the war — economically, socially, culturally, politically, in its infrastructure, the education system, you name it. Decades of rule by Saddam; the eight-yearlong war with Iran; the destruction we wreaked during the Gulf War; twelve years of harsh sanctions — all these meant we had virtually no foundation to build upon in trying to restart the economy, much less create a democratic Iraqi government responsive to the needs of its people. We were going to insist that our partner, the first democratically elected government in Iraq’s four-thousand-year history, resolve in a year or so the enormous and fundamental problems facing the country? That was a fantasy.
One thing I had to learn, and quickly, was the history that senior officers in the military services had among themselves — their relationships often went back decades or even to their West Point or Annapolis days — which affected their judgments of one another and of one another’s proposals and ideas. I also needed to figure out quickly how to read between the lines in listening to military commanders and their subordinates, particularly to identify code words or “tells” that would let me know whether these men were putting on a show of agreement for me when, in fact, they strongly disagreed.
In a span of 45 years, serving 8 presidents, I can recall only 3 instances in which, in my opinion, a president risked reputation, public esteem, credibility, political ruin, and the judgment of history on a single decision he believed was the right thing for our country: Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon, George H. W. Bush’s assent to the 1992 budget deal, and George W. Bush’s decision to surge in Iraq. In the first two cases, I think one can credibly suggest the decisions were good for the country but cost those two presidents reelection; in the latter case, the decision averted a potentially disastrous military defeat for the US.
In making the decision to surge, Bush listened closely to his military commander in the field, his boss at Central Command, and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, giving them ample opportunities to express their views. Then he rejected their advice. He changed his secretary of defense and the field commanders and threw all his weight behind the new team and his new strategy. Like some of his most esteemed predecessors, at least in this instance, he trusted his own judgment more than that of his most senior professional military advisers.
But I do know that once Bush made his decision, I never saw him look back or have second thoughts.
A fourth was that in matters of national security, Congress absolutely hates to challenge the president directly in a way that would saddle them with clean and full responsibility if things went to hell.
Remember, they had no experience with compromise in thousands of years of history. Indeed, politics in Iraq from immemorial had been a kill-or-be-killed activity. I would listen with glowing outrage as hypocritical and obtuse American senators made all these demands of Iraqi legislators and yet themselves could not even pass budgets or appropriations bills, not to mention deal with touch challenges like the budget deficit, Social Security, and entitlement reform. So many times I wanted to come right out of my chair at the witness table and scream, You guys have been in business for over two hundred years and can’t pass routine legislation. How can you be so impatient with a bunch of parliamentarian who’ve been at it a year after four thousand years of dictatorship?
When he concluded, I was seething. I told him that “the clock is ticking” and that our patience with their lack of political progress was running out. I angrily told him that every day that we bought them for reconciliation was being paid for with American blood and that we had to see some real progress soon. After the meeting, I stewed over the fact that I had been arguing the case for this guy for months in Congress, trying to avoid mandatory benchmarks and deadlines, trying to buy him and his colleagues some time to work out at least some of their political issues.
That day in the Tank, the president was very candid and reflective. He told the group assembled, “Many people have a horizon of an inch; my job is to have one that is a mile.”
For some reason, he felt compelled to tell me with half a chuckle, “You know, I could make your life miserable.” I have a pretty good poker so I don’t think Dave knew how taken aback I was by what I interpreted as a threat. At the same time, I understood he had been given an enormous task, the pressures on him for success were huge, and like any great general, he wanted all the troops he felt he needed for as long as he needed them. Fortunately for all of us, Dave was also politically realistic enough to know he needed to show some flexibility in the fall or potentially lose everything to an impatient Congress. But he didn’t have to like it. He had just told me as much.
I had organized the meeting to “prepare the ground” for the president’s meetings with Petraeus, Fallon, and others the next day. I wanted him to know beforehand what he would hear so he wouldn’t have to react on the spur of the moment; particularly on a subject as important as this, no president should ever have to do that, except in a dire emergency. I also wanted the president to be able to ask questions, including political ones, that might be less convenient (or inappropriate) to ask in the larger forum the next day.
This is winnable, but it will take US commitment and a long time. If we walk away there will be a humanitarian disaster on the scale of Rwanda, it will open the way to al Qaeda to return to ungoverned spaces, and it will oopen the way for Iran consequences for all Arab states.
All those dealt just with routine business. If there was a crisis, more meetings were added. It was frustrating how often we would cover the same ground on the same issue, huge quantities of time consumed in striving to establish a consensus view. Some of the sessions were a waste of time; moreover, they often failed to highlight for the president that under a veneer of agreement, there were significant differences of view. As I would often say, sometimes we chewed the cud so long that it lost any taste whatsoever. I drank a huge amount of coffee, and the only saving grace of late-afternoon meetings at the White House was homemade tortilla chips with cheese and salsa dips. Still, all too often I found myself bored and impatient.
My meeting “problem” was even worse at the Pentagon. My days there began with a “day brief” in my office to acquaint me with what had happened overnight and the bureaucratic challenges ahead that day; the day ended with a “wrap up” at the same round table, where we surveyed the bureaucratic battle damage of the day.
Rangel had the best poker face of anyone I’ve ever known, so when he started in, I had no idea whether he was going to give me good news or set my hair on fire with some disaster.
PowerPoint slides were the bane of my existence in Pentagon meetings; it was as though no one could talk without them. As CIA director, I had been able to ban slides from briefings except for maps or charts; as secretary, I was an abject failure at even reducing the number of slides in a briefing. At the CIA, I was able on most days to protect an hour or so a day to work in solitude on my strategies for change and moving forward. No such luck at Defense. One tacit of bureaucracies is to fill the boss’s time with meetings that he or she has no time to meddle in their affairs or create problems for them. I am tempted to say that the Pentagon crew did this successfully, except that many of my meetings were those I had insisted upon in order to monitor progress on matters important to me or to put pressure on senior leaders to intensify their efforts in accomplishing my priorities.
In truth, nothing can prepare you for being secretary of defense, especially during wartime. The size of the place and its budget dwarf everything else in government. As I quickly learned from 535 members of Congress, its programs and spending reach deeply into every state and nearly every community. Vast industries and many local economies are dependent on decisions made in the Pentagon every day. The secretary of defense is second only to the president in the military chain of command, and any order to American forces worldwide goes from the president to the secretary directly to the combatant commanders (although as a practical matter and a courtesy, I routinely asked the chairman to convey such orders.) More important than any of the meetings, the secretary makes life-and-death decisions every day — and not just for American military forces. Since 9/11, the president has delegated to the secretary the authority to shoot down any commercial airliner he, the secretary, deems to be a threat to the US. The secretary can also order missiles fired to shoot down an incoming missile. He can move bombers and aircraft carriers and troops. And every week he makes the decisions on which units will deploy to the war front and around the world. It is an unimaginably powerful position.
At the same time, no secretary of defense who wants to remain in the job can ever forget that he works for the president and serves only at the pleasure of the president. To be successful, the secretary must build a strong relationship of mutual trust with him and also with the White House chief of staff and other senior executive staff members — and, most certainly, with the director of the Office of Management and Budget.
The secretary of defense is also part of a broader national security team, and the part he chooses to play on that team can have a big impact on the nation’s and the president’s, success. Further, money fuels the Defense machine, and because every dime must be approved by Congress, the secretary needs to have the savvy and political skill to win the support of members and to overcome their parochial interests for the greater good of the country.
In short, despite the tremendous power inherent in the job, the secretary of defense must deal with multiple competing interests both within and outside the Pentagon and work with many constituencies, without whose support he cannot be successful. He is constantly fighting on multiple fronts, and much of every day is spent developing strategies to win fights large and small — and deciding which fights to avoid or concede. The challenge was winning the fights that mattered while sustaining and even strengthening relationships, while reducing the number of enemies and maximizing the number of allies.
Fifth, we will succeed or fail depending on whether we operate as a unified team or separate fiefdoms. I will work in an open, transparent manner. I will make no decision affecting your area of responsibility without you having ample opportunity to weigh in. But once decisions are made, we must speak with one voice to the Congress, the media, and the outside world.
I never fooled myself into believing that I was the smartest person in the room. As I had told Colin Powell, I am a very good listener and only through the candor and honesty of both my civilian and military advisers could I work my way through complex issues and try to make the best possible decision. In everything I did as secretary, I sought the advice of others — though I did not always heed it — and depended upon others for effective implementation of my decisions.
It is the tone that makes the music. You bring things and people together with your tone. Your principal contribution will be setting a new tone in respecting different views on the Hill and throughout the country.
I came to believe that virtually all members of Congress carried what I called a “wallet list,” a list they carried with them at all times so that if, by chance, they might run into me or talk with me on the phone, they had a handy list of local projects and programs to push forward.
In the privacy of their offices, members of Congress could be calm, thoughtful, and sometimes insightful and intelligent in discussing issues. But when they went into an open hearing, and the little red light went on atop a television camera, it had the effect of a full moon on a werewolf. Many would posture and preach, with long lectures and harshly critical language; some become raving lunatics. It was difficult for me to sit there with a straight face. But I knew from reading a lot of history that such behavior dated back to the beginning of the republic. And as amusing or infuriating as members sometimes were, I never forgot the importance of their roles. And all but a handful would treat me quite well the entire time I was secretary.
It was an arduous process — more than it should have been — because of so much scar tissue and enmity in the various bureaucracies. This was one of those rare instances where a unique set of personal relationships stretching back decades allowed us significantly to mitigate otherwise intractable bureaucratic hostility. And it is still another reminder that when it comes to government, whether it works or not often depends on personal relationships.
I joined the Bush administration at the end of its 6th year. Neither the president nor the vice president would ever again run for public office. That fact had a dramatic impact on the atmosphere and the nature of the White House. The sharp-elbowed political advisers and hard-core ideologues who are so powerful in a first term were pretty much gone. All eyes were now on legacy, history, and unfinished business, above all, on Iraq.
Beyond the traumatic effect of the attack itself, I think there was a huge sense among senior members of the administration of having let the country down, of having allowed a devastating attack on America take place on their watch. They also had no idea after 9/11 whether further attacks were imminent, though they expected the worst. In the days and weeks after 9/11, the White House was flooded with countless reports of imminent attacks, among them the planned use of nuclear weapons by terrorists in New York and Washington. All that fed the fear and urgency. That, in turn, was fed by the paucity of information on, or understanding of, al Qaeda and other extremist groups in terms of numbers, capabilities, leadership, or anything else. Quickly filling those information gaps and protecting the country from another attack became the sole preoccupation of the president and his senior team. Any obstacle — legal, bureaucratic, financial, or international — to accomplish those objectives had to be overcome.
Those who years later would criticize some of those actions, including the detention center at Guantanamo and interrogation techniques, could have benefited from greater perspective on both the fear and the urgency to protect the country — the same kind of fear for national survival that had led Lincoln to suspend habeas corpus and FDR to intern Japanese Americans.
I believe that when it comes to the media, often less is more, in the sense that if one appears infrequently, then people pay more attention when you do appear.
In my opinion, one cannot understand Cheney without having been in the White House during the Ford years. It was the nadir of the modern American presidency, the president reaping the whirlwind of both Vietnam and Watergate. The War Powers Act, the denial of promised weapons to South Vietnam, cutting off help to the anti-Soviet, anti-Cuban resistance in Angola — Congress took one action after another to whittle down the power of the presidency. Cheney saw it all from the Oval Office. I believe his broad assertion of the powers of the presidency after 9/11 was attributable, in no small part, to his experience during the Ford years and a determination to recapture from Congress powers lost fifteen years before and more.
Because Dick is a calm, fairly quiet-spoken man, I think a lot of people never fully appreciated how conservative he always was. In 1990, in the run-up to the Gulf War, the question arose as to whether to seek both congressional and UNSC approval for going to war with Saddam Hussein. Cheney, then secretary of defense, argued that neither was necessary but went along with the president’s contrary decisions. And when the Soviet Union was collapsing in late 1991, Dick wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.
Steve Hadley and I first started working together on the NSC staff in 1974. He worked amazingly hard and, I thought, ran an interagency process that well served the president but that also was regarded as fair and even-handed by the rest of us. He was deeply loyal to Bush 43. As befit a good lawyer, he was meticulous in every respect. When I joined the government in late 2006, I thought Steve was exhausted, spent. But he kept on trucking, fueled by green tea. As secretary, I had a lot of respect for him, even if he did convene all those damn meetings.
There were no shortcuts to what I wanted to achieve. Young people are inherently skeptical, if not cynical, about the rhetoric of older people and those in authority, because too often their actions do not correspond. In the military, that is compounded many times over. The only way I could make any impact on the troops and dent in their indifference to who might be secretary of defense would be through actions that demonstrated how much I cared about them.
The hardest part of being secretary for me was visiting the wounded in hospitals, which I did regularly, and it got harder each time. At the outset, I wasn’t sure I could handle it.
Yes, they do, but there is one difference between all of you — members of Congress, military officers, whomever — and me: I’m the one who sent them in harm’s way. It tore me apart to see fit young men who’d had limbs blown off, suffered devastating gunshot wounds, and experienced every sort of trauma to their bodies and their brains — wounds both visible and invisible.
And his father tole me, “We have been to the valley of despair and the mountain of hope.”
Your men have to follow your orders; they don’t have to go to your funeral.
As of January 2007, I had a new commander headed to Iraq, a new strategy, and 30,000 additional troops. Their success would require a sense of total commitment in the DoD that I was staggered to learn did not exist. It was one thing for the country and much of the executive branch of government not to feel involved in the war, but for the DoD — the “department of war” — that was unacceptable.
Even though the nation was waging two wars, neither of which we were winning, life at the Pentagon was largely business as usual when I arrived. I found little sense of urgency, concern, or passion about a very grim situation.
It is characteristic of all conflicts that until enemies begin to shoot, ships to sink and loved ones — or at least comrade — begin to die, even professional warriors often lack urgency and ruthlessness.
The DoD is structured to plan and prepare for war but not to fight one. The secretaries and senior military leaders of the Army, Navy, and Air Force departments are charged with organizing, training, and equipping their respective forces. The last of these chores is all about acquiring the weapon systems, ships, trucks, planes, and other materiel that the services likely will need in the future, a far cry from a current combat commander’s need for “make do” or “good enough” solutions in weeks or months. The military departments develop their budgets on a five-year basis, and most procurement programs take many years — if not decades — from decision to delivery. As a result, budgets and programs are locked in for years at a time, and all the bureaucratic wiles of each military department are dedicated to keep those programs intact and funded. They are joined in those efforts by the companies that build the equipment, the Washington lobbyists that those companies hire, and the members of Congress in whose states or districts those factories are located. Any threats to those long-term programs are not welcome. Even if we are at war.
For the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the needs of the field commanders and their troops were forwarded as requests to the regional (Centcom) combatant commander, who reviewed them and, if he was in agreement, pushed them to the Pentagon. Each request then had to pass through a Joint Chiefs of Staff filter, a military department filter, a department comptroller (the money person) filter, multiple procurement bureaucracy filters, and often other filters, any of which could delay or stop fulfillment of the requested equipment. These current, urgent requests were weighed against the existing long-term plans, programs, and available budgets and all too often were found to be lower in priority than nearly everything else — which meant they disappeared into a Pentagon black hole.
According to the newspaper, Hejlik’s request was shelved; 15 months later, a second request won Pentagon approval. The first vehicles arrived in Anbar in Feb 2007, two years after the original request.
As usual in a huge bureaucracy, the villains were the largely nameless and faceless people — and their leaders — who were wed to their old plans, programs, and thinking and refused to change their ways regardless of circumstances. The hidebound and unresponsive bureaucratic structure that the DoD uses to acquire equipment performs poorly in peacetime. It did so horribly in wartime.
The military’s approach seemed to be that if you train and equip to defeat big countries, you can defeat any lesser threat.
As mandated by law in 1986, the president must produce a National Security Strategy, a document that describes the world as the president sees it and his goals and priorities in the conduct of foreign affairs and national security. The secretary of defense then prepares the National Defense Strategy, describing how Defense will support the president’s objectives through its programs. The NDS provides a framework for campaign and contingency planning, force development, and intelligence. Given finite resources, the NDS also addresses how Defense would assess, mitigate, and respond to risk, risk defined in terms of “the potential for damage to national security combined with the probability of occurrence and a measurement of the consequences should the underlying risk remain unaddressed.” Finally, drawing on the NDS, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff prepares his own document, the National Military, providing even more specific guidance to the military services and combatant commands in terms of achieving the president’s goals.
Each of these three documents take many months to write, in part to ensure that every relevant component of the government and the Defense Department can weigh in with its own views on the drafts. There is a high premium on achieving consensus, and countless hours are spent wrangling over the texts. The disputes are occasionally genuinely substantive, but more often they reflect efforts by each bureaucratic entity to ensure that its priorities and programs are protected. Ironically, and not atypically, the practical effect of the content of these documents is limited at the most senior levels of government. Personally, I don’t recall ever reading the president’s National Security Strategy when preparing to become secretary of defense. Nor did I read any of the previous National Defense Strategy documents when I became secretary. I never felt disadvantaged by not having read these scriptures.
There never was intentional neglect of the troops and their well-being. There was, however, a toxic mix of flawed assumptions about the wars themselves; a risk-averse bureaucracy; budgetary decisions made in isolation from the battlefield; Army, Navy and Air Force focus in Washington on the routine budget process and protecting dollars for future programs; a White House unaware of the needs of the troops and disinclined to pay much attention to the handful of members of Congress who pointed to these needs; and a Congress by and large so focused on the politics of the war in Iraq that it was asleep at the switch or simply too pusillanimous when it came to the needs of the troops. A “gotcha” climate in Washington created by investigate committees, multiple inspector general and auditing organizations, and a general thirst for scandal collectively reinforced bureaucratic timidity and leadership caution.
Meanwhile other nations increasingly resented our singular dominance and our growing penchant for telling others how to behave, at home and abroad. The end of the Soviet threat also ended the compelling reason for many countries to automatically align with the US or do our bidding for their own protection. Other nations looked for opportunities to inhibit our seeming complete freedom and determination to shape the world as we saw fit. In short, our moment alone in the sun, and the arrogance with which we conduct ourselves in the 1990s and beyond as the sole surviving superpower, caused widespread resentment. And so when the World Trade Center came down on September 11, many governments and peoples — some publicly, many more privately — welcomed the calamity that had befallen the US. In their eyes, an arrogant, all-powerful giant had been deservedly humbled.
The table had hidden electronic connections down the center for laptops and other devices. I never saw anyone use them. We mostly worried about spilling our coffee into the electronics and frying everything — any maybe everybody — at the table. I came to dread the long hours sitting in there — endless meetings, repetitious debates, the stress of spending so much time trying to find the least bad solution to a problem. (There were almost never “good” options available.)
The Situation Room remains a spartan place, perhaps fitting given the life-and-death, war-and-peace decisions that are taken there.
I also spent a great deal of time on airplanes. The plane I used for nearly all of my international travel is a several-decades-old Boeing 747, designed the E-4B and modified as the National Airborne Operation Center — a flying war room. There are no windows, as the elite plane is shielded against all manner of electronic interference. The airplane can be fueled in midair so, barring a maintenance problem, I would always fly nonstop whenever I was going. I had a spacious office / bedroom (bunk beds) at the front of the plane, quite utilitarian, and, of course, secure telephone connections to anywhere in the world. Being on the plane was like being in the office in most respects - I was always reachable by telephone, and through the magic of modern electronics, my office in-box at the Pentagon managed to find it way to the plane. My most junior military assistant on board usually brought another load of paperwork to me just as I was settling down to read a book or take a nap. The generals and admirals wanted no part of my impatience with the endless stream of work.
The Russians had long historical ties to Serbia, which we largely ignored. Trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching. The roots of the Russian Empire trace back to Kiev in the ninth century, so that was an especially monumental provocation. Were the Europeans, much less the Americans, willing to send their sons and daughters to defend Ukraine or Georgia? Hardly. So NATO expansion was a political act, not a carefully considered military commitment, thus undermining the purpose of the alliance and recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests. Similarly, Putin’s hatred of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe was understandable. It had been negotiated when Russia was weak, and the provisions limited Russia’s freedom to move troops from place to place in its own territory. As I later told Putin directly, I would not stand for restrictions on my ability to redeploy troops from Texas to California.
We take it as reality that you will build the third site [in Poland and the Czech Republic; the first site was in California, the second in Alaska], but want to make sure it will not be turned and targeted against Russia. I would not call it a positive development that we cannot stop your third site even as we see it as destabilizing. Our position is pragmatic, not positive.
I was asked by a reporter if I trusted Putin “anymore”? I responded, “‘Anymore’ is an interesting word. I have never believed that one should make national security policy on the basis of trust. I think you make national security policy based on interests and on realities.”
Syria for years had been a high-priority intelligence target for the US, as was anything having to do with possible development of WMD, nuclear weapons in particular. Early detection of a large nuclear reactor under construction in a place like Syria is supposedly the kind of intelligence collection that the US does superbly well. Yet by the time the Israelis informed us about the site, the reactor construction was already well advanced. This was a significant failure on the part of the US intelligence agencies, and I asked the president, “How can we have any confidence at all in the estimates of the scope of the North Korean, Iranian, or other possible programs” given this failure? Surprisingly, neither the president nor Congress made much of it. Given the stakes, they should have.
Israeli credibility is equally suspect, if not more so, in the Middle East, Europe, and maybe significant elements of the US public. An act of war based principally on information provided by a third party is risky in the extreme. US and Israeli interests are not always the same.
The only thing they all agreed on was that the use of force should be a last resort after all other measures have failed.
All the president’s national security team met the next morning, and the focus was on the Israelis. I was furious. I said that Olmert was asking for our help on the reactor but giving us only one option: to destroy it. If we didn’t do exactly what he wanted, Israel would act and we could do nothing about it. The US was being held hostage to Israeli decision making. If there was a secret attack, all the focus would be on what the Israelis did, not what Syria and North Korea had done. I warned that if a wider war occurred after the attack, the US would be blamed for not restraining the Israelis.
On September 6, the Israelis attacked the reactor and destroyed it. They insisted on keeping the existence of the reactor secret, believing — correctly, as it turned out — that the lack of public exposure of the reactor and embarrassment over its destruction might persuade Assad not to retaliate militarily. But Condi and I were frustrated that Syria and North Korea had undertaken a bold and risky venture in violation of multiple Security Council resolutions and international treaties to create a covert nuclear capability in Syria, probably including other sites and labs, and had paid no political price for it. Nor could we use their gambit to our advantage in detaching Syria from Iran or in seeking harsher sanctions on Iran.
On our side, a very sensitive and difficult security challenge had been debated openly with no pulled punches. The president heard directly from his senior advisers on a number of occasions and had made a tough decision based on what he heard and on his own instincts. And there had been no leaks. Although I was unhappy with the path we had taken, I told Hadley the episode had been a model of national security decision making. In the end, a big problem was solved and none of my fears were realized. It is hard to criticize success. But we had condoned reaching for a gun before diplomacy could be brought to bear, and we had condoned another preventive act of war. This made me all the more nervous about an even bigger looming national security problem.
I accompanied him as his special assistant. He received word that the Iranian delegation — the PM, defense minister, and foreign minister — wanted to meet with him. Brzezinski received approval from Washington and met in a hotel suite with the Iranians. I was the notetaker. He offered recognition of the revolutionary regime, offered to work with them, and even offered to sell them weapons we had contracted to sell to the shah; we had a common enemy to the north of Iran, the Soviet Union. The Iranians brushed all that aside and demanded that the US return the shah, who was then receiving medical treatment here, to Tehran. Both sides went back and forth with the same talking points until Brzezinski stood up and told the Iranians that to return the shah to them would be “incompatible with our national honor.” That ended the meeting. Three days later our embassy in Tehran was overrun and more than 50 Americans taken hostage. Within a few weeks, the three Iranian officials with whom we had met had been purged from their jobs.
During the last two years of the Reagan administration, the US would actually confront the Iranians military in the Persian Gulf, when we provided naval protection to Kuwaiti oil tankers. Several of our ships struck Iranian mines, we responded with retaliatory strikes, and in one tragic incident, a US Navy ship accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger airplane.
Between Iraq and Afghanistan, I thought the US was in a pretty deep hole. Were we faced with a serious military threat to American vital interests, I would be the first to insist upon an overwhelming military response. In the absence of such a threat, I saw no need to go looking for another war. I kept a 1942 quote from Winston Churchill in my desk drawer to remind me every day of certain realities: “Never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricane he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that, once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”
When I asked one of the Saudis how they prevented the sharks from eating the other fish, he replied that it was important to feed the sharks on a careful schedule.
The king’s usual practice was to begin a meeting with a large delegation on both sides in attendance, and then for the guest(s) to ask to meet privately. Condi and I did so and had a long meeting with the king, with only an interpreter present. It was one of the most memorable meeting during my tenure as secretary. It was also the only encounter with a foreign leader in which I lost my cool. Abdullah, a heavy-set man in his eighties with a history of health problems, was very sharp and did not mince words as he smoked one cigarette after another. He wanted a full-scale military attack on Iranian military targets, not just the nuclear sites. He warned if we did not attack, the Saudis “most go our own way to protect our interests.” As far as I was concerned, he was asking the US to send its sons and daughters into a war with Iran in order to protect the Saudi position in the Gulf and the region, as if we were mercenaries. He was asking us to shed American blood, but at no time did he suggest that any Saudi blood might be spilled. He went on and on about how the US was seen as weak by governments in the region. The longer he talked, the angrier I got, and I responded quite undiplomatically. I told him that absent of an Iranian military attack on US forces or our allies, if the president launched another preventive war in the Middle East, he would likely be impeached; that we had our hands full in Iraq; and that the president would use military force only to protect vital American interests. I also told him that what he considered America’s greatest weakness — showing restraint — was actually great strength because we could crush any adversary. I told him that neither he nor anyone else should ever underestimate the strength and power of the US: those who had — Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union — were all now in the ashcan of history. I was pretty wound up. And then we were done.
Because I believed the estimate would be leaked and quoted out of context, I recommended, and the president approved, that we issue an unclassified version of the key judgments. In my entire career in intelligence, I believe no single estimate ever did more to US security interests and diplomatic efforts. Because in virtually all other countries of the world intelligence services work for the government in power and are expected to toe the official line, the independence of our intelligence community in preparing assessments is hardly understood at all. Accordingly, most governments wondered what in hell the Bush administration was up to in releasing an intelligence report that was directly at odds with the positions it had been taking diplomatically. My French counterpart, Defense Minster Morin, characterized the situation best when he told me that the intelligence estimate was “like a hair in the soup.”
A few weeks later Fallon called late in the afternoon to warn me that Esquire was going to publish an article about him in the next few days that likely would cause some heartburn. The press characterization of the article — usually more important in Washington than any article itself — was essentially that only Fox Fallon was keeping Bush from attacking Iran. It indeed caused heartburn and then some — mainly because it was untrue. It was clear, though, that the president had lost confidence in Fallon, the cumulative effect of a number of press statements that together seemed to portray a commander seriously at odds with his commander in chief on both Iraq and Iran.
Three days later, on March 6, Mullen and I met with the president, who asked, “Do we have a MacArthur problem? Is he challenging the commander in chief?” To me, he said, “I known what you’d do if he challenged you.” I told Bush that he did not have a “MacArthur problem,” that Fallon wanted to come in and apologize to him. The president responded, “No, I don’t want to humiliate the guy, but he kind of boxed me in.”
Presidents and Congress expect senior military leaders to provide their personal and professional military opinions candidly and honestly. There is no requirement for them to do so through the media. Admiral William Fallon would not be the last senior officer on my watch to lose his job through a self-inflicted wound with the press.
We needed a new Centcom commander, and Mullen and I quickly agreed it should be David Petraeus. The problem with making unanticipated changes in senior military leadership is that there is always a daisy-chain effect, affecting other positions; for instance, who should replace Petraeus in Iraq?
I observed that while most revolutions tend to lose their radical edge over time and degenerate into old-fashioned dictatorships, with the election of Ahmadinejad as president and with the radical students associated with seizing our embassy in 1979 assuming leadership roles, Iran was regaining its revolutionary edge.
I recommended saying no to all the Israelis’ requests. Giving them any of the items on their list would signal US support for them to attack Iran unilaterally: “At that point, we lose our ability to control our own fate in the entire region.” I said we would be handing over the initiative regarding US vital national interests to a foreign power, a government that, when we asked them not to attack Syria, did so anyway.
Cheney spoke next, and I knew what was coming. Matter-of-factly, he said he disagreed with everything I had said. The US should give Israel everything it wanted. We could not allow Iran to get nuclear weapons. If we weren’t going to act, he said, then we should enable the Israelis. Twenty years on, he argued, if there was a nuclear-armed Iran, people would say the Bush administration could have stopped it. I interjected that twenty years on, people might also say that we not only didn’t stop them from getting nuclear weapons but made it inevitable. At the end, the president was noncommittal, clearly frustrated by the lack of good options for dealing with Iran. He had a lot of company in the room on that score.
We must not make our vital interests in the entire Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and Southwest Asia hostage to another nation’s decisions — no matter how close an ally. Above all, we ought not risk what we have gained in Iraq or the lives of our soldiers there on an Israeli military gamble in Iran. Olmert has his own agenda, and he will pursue it irrespective of our interests. We will be bystanders to actions that affect us directly and dramatically.
Iran would get at least one more senior military officer in trouble with President Bush. In early July, Admiral Mullen apparently told reporters that, in essence, the US military was too stressed to take on Iran. This mightily displeased the president, as Hadley told me. I called Mullen and advised him to “cool it” on Iran. I did not tell him that the president had said it “looked like Mullen was auditioning for a job with the next commander in chief while he still works for this one!” I just couldn’t understand the lack of political awareness by senior officers of the impact at the White House of their remarks to the press.
I found the NATO meetings excruciatingly boring. On every topic, representatives of each of 28 countries could speak their piece, reading from a prepared script. My secret to staying awake was revealed publicly at one meeting by the French defense minister, who was in a rant about how boring the meetings were — he confessed to doodling to pass the time and then outed me for doing crossword puzzles.
The Kyrgyz were once again making noises about closing Manas to us, and we had to have it open, so I had to see Bakiyev and let him pick our pockets again. He, his officials, and his generals looked and acted just like the old Soviets, whose vassals they had been. Bakiyev reeled off a list of areas where we were ignoring Krgyz sovereignty and Kyrgyz people, and how we were “cheating” them of revenues. In the crassest kind of insult in that part of the world, the big crook didn’t even offer me a cup of tea. He was, without question, the most unpleasant foreign leader I had to deal with in my years as secretary, and I celebrated when he was overthrown in April 2010.
When we landed, I couldn’t help but reflect that a little over 20 years before, as deputy director of the CIA, I had been on the Pakistani side of the border looking into Afghanistan and doing business with some of the very people we were fighting now. It was a stark reminder to me of our limited ability to look into the future or to foresee the unintended consequences of our actions. That was what made me very cautious about committing military forces in new places.
No less confusing was determining whether we were making progress in Afghanistan. I was enormously frustrated by the divergent views of intelligence analysts in Washington, who were pretty consistently pessimistic, and the civilians and military on the ground in Afghanistan, who were both much more positive. In my years at CIA and the NSC, I had seen this movie a number of times — in Vietnam, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and during the Gulf War, to mention only a few examples. It’s hard to say whether the field or the Washington analysts were more accurate, but I gave a slight edge to the experts in Washington (probably reflecting my bias in having been a Washington-based analyst). However, my experience made me wary because, contrary to conventional wisdom, intelligence analysts far prefer showing that the decision makers don’t know what they’re doing rather than supporting them — especially when they can testify to that effect before Congress.
You guys [in Kabul] sound pretty goo, but then I get intelligence reports that indicate it is going to hell. I don’t have a feel for how the fight is going! I don’t think the president has a clear idea either of exactly where we are in Afghanistan.
Up to that point, all indications — polling and the like — suggested that most Afghans still saw us as allies. But more than anyone else at senior levels in Bush 43’s administration, I had been involved with Afghanistan and Pakistan during the 1980s and had watched the Soviets fail despite having nearly 120,000 troops there: their large presence (and brutal tactics) turned Afghans against them.
For those on the front line who ate with me, I realized it might well be the occasion for the first hot meal or shower in days if not weeks.
As the contractor presence developed in Iraq after the original invasion, the was no plan, no structure, no oversight, and no coordination. The contractors’ role grew willy-nilly as each US department or agency contracted with them independently, their number eventually climbing to some 150,000. Out of some 7,300 security contractors Defense hired, nearly 6,000 did some kind of stationary guard duty.
The State Department, however, hired a large number to provide convoy security for diplomats, other government officials, special visitors, and some other civilians, and it was those hires who caused most of our headaches.
In fact, it was impossible to have a sensible discussion with Democrats in Congress on anything to do with Iraq in the presence of TV cameras.
The worst thing for morale is if you have a president who is apologetic for the action and not confident that it was the right thing to do.
Defense was represented on the team, and there was close coordination with both the department and Petraeus and his staff, but the military was more than happy to let State and the civilians do the heavy lifting in the negotiations. And it was heavy lifting. The obstacles to success were daunting, in substantial part because of the Iraqi political environment and strong opposition to any continuing US presence in several quarters.
In September, jurisdiction over Americans in uniform who broke Iraqi laws became an issue, as we tried to find the balance between assuring our troops that they would never end up at the mercy of Iraqi courts and assuring Iraqis that if someone committed a horrible crime, he could be tried in Iraq.
I asked him whether the standards of accountability had become lax over time. I recalled for him, and he heard me out patiently, that however briefly, I had been in the Strategic Air Command in the 1960s — General Curtis LeMay’s SAC — when discipline and accountability standards were very high. At any SAC bomber or missile base at any time in those days, a planeload of inspectors from SAC headquarters in Omaha might arrive without prior notice and take the unit apart piece by piece. Failure to pass one of these Operational Readiness Inspections almost always led to the unit commander being fired. It seemed to me that those standards were no longer maintained in the Air Force nuclear mission.
Each company bought full-page ads to try to persuade the department and Congress that it should be awarded the contract — ads I suspected we would end up paying for as part of the overhead charges in the competition.
At one hearing, one of my staff was walking behind Senator Patty Murray of Washington and noticed that no one had bothered to remove the Boing letterhead from her talking points.
In the winter of 2007-8, I was dealing with hot spots all around the world: Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea, Russia, China, Venezuela, and Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My days were filled with problems of mind-boggling variety. For example, sandwiched between my visit to Russia and meetings with the Israeli and Afghan defense minsters, a Patriot missile at the US base in Qatar was accidentally fired during a training exercise and landed several miles away, in the backyard of the Qatari chief of defense, a general who had been incredibly kind to US soldiers, opening his estate for recreational purposes.
In a meeting, I said, “So you want me to be the poster boy for cluster munitions?” Cheney, with a bit of a smile, said, “Yes, just like I was with torture and Hadley with land mines!”
A nasty confirmation fight can get even a brave man down, and so I called Stan in early June to let him know that, based on personal experience, this was all about politics and that every senior officer who had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan was likely to face the same kind of challenge — a disgraceful reality.
Of the estimated 40M men and women who have served in the armed forces since the Civil War, fewer than 3,500 have received the Medal of Honor, the highest honor the US can bestow, some 60 percent posthumously.
President Bush was, I think, always disappointed that he was unable to present the Medal of Honor to a single living recipient. Because medals had been passed out so freely in Vietnam, succeeding officers were determined to raise the bar. They had raised it too high, he thought.
Every day, for four and a half years, issues like these came to me for decision, adjudication, or resolution. Nearly all, one way or another, affected the lives and careers of men and women who had rendered significant service to our country. Some decisions brought pain, others pleasure — for those affected and for me. In the evenings, when my wife would sometimes ask me how my day had gone, I’d just have to reply, “One damn thing after another.”
After my initial months in the job, Gordon England gave me a small countdown clock, ticking off the days, hours, and seconds until noon on January 20, 2009, when I could set aside my duties and return home for good — as the label on the clock said, “Back to the real Washington.”
Sometimes there was a temptation by an outgoing administration to try to solve all problems before Inauguration Day, but this would by my seventh presidential transition, and I had yet to see a new administration that did not inherit problems.
My strategy was to be so adamant about not wanting to stay on that no one would ask. Because I knew that, if asked, I would give the same answer I had given President Bush: With kids doing their duty fighting and dying in two wars, how could I not also do mine?
Washington DC is always an ugly, jittery place in the months before, and weeks after, a presidential election. People outside government who want inside are jockeying for jobs in a new administration, and people on the inside are maneuvering to stay there — or beginning to look for new jobs outside. Sharp elbows and sharp tongues are everywhere. Gossip and rumors flow around town as freely as liquor at a lobbyist’s reception. Even senior career officials and civil servants are tense, knowing they will soon be working for new faces with new agendas and will be forced to prove themselves anew to people who will be suspicious of them because they served with the preceding administration.
I reminded them that in preceding transitions, the incumbent presidents’ practice had been to funnel all contact with the campaigns through either the national security adviser or the White House chief of staff, and that the only organization allowed to brief the candidates before the election had been CIA. This presidential campaign would be more complicated for us, though, because both candidates would be sitting US senators with security clearances and Senate staff authorized to ask for briefings. McCain sat on the Armed Services Committee, both Obama and Clinton on the Foreign Relations Committee. I said we had to be very careful about responding to their offices’ requests lest we cross the line between their legitimate needs as senators and their desires as candidates.
Obama ultimately decided not to visit the hospital because he didn’t want there to be any perception that he was using troops — especially wounded ones — for political purposes.
I believe it would be a serious mistake to issue this kind of document in the last weeks of a presidential election campaign. The NMS is already some seven months past due, and with such timing, I think you run a high risk of being accused of trying to influence the outcome of the election. Issuing a major pronouncement on the perils the nation faces and the military power required to deal with them in the closing weeks of the campaign could be seen as an effort by the military to shift the debate back to national security issues [versus the economy] and thus help Senator McCain.
I have seen all too often how paranoid campaigns get as election day approaches, and any surprise, any unexpected development, makes them crazy — and they think the worst case.
I thought Bush’s freedom agenda as publicly presented by the administration was too simplistic in that real, enduring freedom and democracy must be based on democratic institutions, the rule of law, and civil society — all of which are the work of decades. As with Jimmy Carter’s human rights campaign, the only countries we could meaningfully pressure to reform were our friends and allies; the worst offenders, including Iran, Syria, and China, ignored our rhetoric.
We now had the most combat-hardened, experienced, and expeditionary force in our history, and if we could keep the young leaders, we would be ready for the future. The biggest danger to the military in the next administration would be pressures from Congress to reduce the number of soldiers in order to buy equipment.
The Army had gone from 8 UAVs in 2003 to 1,700 in Iraq in 2008.
In 2001, the Navy could put only one-quarter of our carriers to sea at once, but now we could put half of them out.
He said special operators woke up that morning in 61 countries doing their jobs. The president and Olson both observed that these elite unit had suffered a high casualty rate. (Delta Force had suffered 50 percent casualties — wounded and killed.)
Before Bush concluded the meeting, he said he didn’t think the current strategy of being able to fight two major regional conflicts at once was useful any longer because we “likely won’t have to do that.” He went on: “If that is the standard for readiness, we will never be ready.”
No matter how well organized, well intentioned, and cordial a transition team is, its arrival in a cabinet department after an election always has the aura of a hostile takeover. We’re in, you’re out. We’ll now fix everything you screwed up over the past four or eight years. Often smug arrogance is plainly visible behind the smiles.
She asked that we proceed with staff discussions at the “secret” level, which would allow for informed discussion of most issues but nothing too sensitive.
The following week Mullen and I went to school on Barrack Obama. I wanted to know how he approached decision making, how he dealt with advisers, and how he looked at the world. We spent time with several people who at least claimed to have some insights into the new president.
I thought carefully about how to approach this and subsequent meetings. I had observed enough presidential transitions to know that, for a holdover at any level, the worst thing to do in the early days is to talk too much and especially to voice skepticism about new ideas or initiatives. (That won’t work — that’s been tried before and failed.) An experienced “know-it-all” is truly a skunk at the garden party. So I spoke infrequently, usually only on questions of fact, and when asked.
I would have to ignore the many jibes aimed at Bush and his team, which hardly diminished over time, and comments about how miserable shape US national security and international relationships were in. I knew that in four or eight years, another new team would be saying the same things about these folks. I also knew from experience that, when all was said and done, there would be far more continuity than the new team realized in its first, heady days.
I told Biden I would recommend the Bush model because it more befitted the dignity of the vice president as the second-highest elected official in the country; and more practically in Washington, if no one knew what he was advising the president, no one could ever know whether he was winning or losing arguments. If he were to participate in all meetings below those chaired by the president, then he was just another player whose scorecard was public knowledge. He listened closely, thanked me, and then did precisely the opposite of what I recommended, following Cheney model to a T.
The Secret Service had overall responsibility for security, coordinating the efforts of the Washington DC, metropolitan police, the US Park Service police, and the National Guard. As the inauguration neared, and speculation grew that upward of 4 million people could end up on the Mall, it seemed to me that the number of police and national guardsmen being assembled — about 15,000 in total — would be woefully short if anything went wrong. Any number of events apart from a terrorist attack could spark a panic, and with only two or three bridges across the Potomac River, there could be a disaster. The bridges would be jammed with people trying to escape, making it impossible for military reinforcements to get into the city.
For all events where the entire government will be present, one cabinet officer is selected to be absent to ensure continuity of government in the event of a catastrophe.
In addition to being the outsider, I was also a geezer in this new administration. While I had been just three years older than Bush, Obama was nearly 20 years younger than me. Many influential appointees below the top level in the new administration, especially in the White House, had been undergraduates — or even high school — when I had been CIA director. No wonder my nickname in the White House soon was Yoda. Those appointees, drawn mostly from the ranks of former congressional staffers, were all smart, endlessly hardworking, and passionately loyal to the president. What they lacked was firsthand knowledge of real-world governing.
Because of the difference in our ages and careers, we had very different frames of reference. My formative experience had been the Vietnam War, the potentially apocalyptic rivalry with the Soviet Union, and the global Cold War. Theirs had been America’s unrivaled supremacy in the 1990s, the attacks on September 11, 2001, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bipartisanship in national security was central to my experience but not to theirs.
A number of new appointees, both senior and junior, seemed to lack an awareness of the world they had just entered. Symbolic of that, I noticed at our first meeting in the Situation Room that fully half the participants had their cell phones turned on during the meeting, potentially broadcasting everything that was said to foreign intelligence electronic eavesdroppers.
Joe is simply impossible not to like. He’s down to earth, funny, profane, and humorously self-aware of his motormouth. Not too many meetings had occurred in the Situation Room before the president started impatiently cutting Biden off. Joe is a man of integrity, incapable of hiding what he really thinks, and one of those rare people you know you could turn to for help in a personal crisis. Still, I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades. While Biden had been in Congress a lot longer than Cheney, both were very experienced politicians, and I found it odd that they both so often misread what Congress would or would not do.
Having been a deputy twice myself, I suspect Jim did not want to return to government as a deputy anything. (My deputy secretary at Defense under Bush, Gordon England, had before that been secretary of the Navy. He once told me that “being secretary of anything is better than being deputy secretary of everything.”) In order to persuade Steinberg to accept the offer, Obama agreed to his request that he be made a member of the Principals Committee and have a seat in NSC meetings as well as one of the Deputies Committee. As far as I know, no deputy had ever been given an independent chair at the principals’ table.
Steinberg’s presence on the Principals Committee gave State two voices at the table — two voices that often disagreed. Steinberg would often stake out a position in the Deputies Committee that was at odds with what Hilary believed, then express that position in meetings of the principals and even with the president. Let’s just say that having two State Department positions on an issue was an unnecessary complication in the decision-making process. And I suspect the arrangement caused Hilary more than a little frustration, especially since Steinberg, despite having been in her husband’s administration, had not been her choice to be her deputy. Hilary had been promised she would have freedom to choose her own subordinates at State, but that promise was not fully kept, and that would be an ongoing source of tension between her and the White House staff, especially the politicos.
He actually believed that he was the boss of the US intelligence community, with authority over most, if not all, its constituent elements, including CIA. In reality, despite the understandings and accommodations, the DNI still did not have the statutory basis or political clout to assert complete authority over others in the intelligence community. If the free-wheeling White House national security staff was a headache for Jim Jones, the national intelligence apparatus was a nightmare for someone who had been a four-star admiral and combatant commander. As I would often comment, the job of DNI is less akin to a CEO than to the powerful chairman of a congressional committee — there are some inherent authorities, but mostly you have to persuade people to go along with you. Denny wasn’t much into persuasion.
I found the president quite pragmatic on national security and open to compromise on most issues — or, to put it more crassly, to cutting a deal. So on some major contentious issues, I would hold my cards close and then try to pick the right moment to weigh in with an alternative to proposals on the table that would provide him with a solution we both could support. Usually, as I had done with Bush, I would preview my thinking with the president in private; most of the time I had confidence that he would ultimately agree to my proposal. I would later read that some on the NSS were annoyed with my hanging back from stating my views in meetings, but I knew that my recommendations would carry more weight at the table if I was selective about when I expressed them, though there were occasions when I remained silent because I was undecided on an issue and simply wanted to listen to help me make up my mind. I usually went into meeting having spoken to Clinton, Jones, and others, so I had a pretty good idea what they were going to say. A meeting in the Situation Room was never just another gathering for me: outcomes were important, and I always had a strategy going in. More often than I liked, there were two or three such meetings a day, and that all that strategizing required a lot of energy.
One quality I missed in Obama was passion, especially when it came to the two wars. In my presence, Bush — very unlike his father — was pretty unsentimental. But he was passionate about the war in Iraq; on occasion, at a Medal of Honor ceremony or the like, I would see his eyes well up with tears. I worked for Obama longer than Bush, and I never saw his eyes well up. Obama could, and did, express anger (I rarely heard him swear; it was very effective when he did).
Where this lack of passion mattered the most for me was Afghanistan. When soldiers put their lives on the line, they need to know that the commander in chief who sent them in harm’s way believes in their mission. They need him to talk often to them and to the country, not just to express gratitude for their service and sacrifice but also to explain and affirm why that sacrifice is necessary, why their fight is noble, why their cause is just, and why they must prevail. President Obama never did that. He rarely spoke about the war in Afghanistan except when he was making an announcement about troop increases or troop drawdowns or announcing a change in strategy.
Obama was the most deliberative president I worked for. His approach to problem solving reminded me of Lincoln’s comment on his approach to decision making: “I am never easy when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it north, and bounded it south, and bounded it east, and bounded it west.” As Obama would tell me on more than one occasion, “I can’t defend it unless I understand it.” I rarely saw him rush to a decision when circumstances allowed him time to gather information, analyze, and reflect. He would sometimes be criticized for his “dilatory” decision making, but I found it refreshing and reassuring, especially since so many pundits and critics seem to think a problem discovered in the morning should be solved by evening. As a participant in that decision-making process, I always felt more confident about the outcome after thorough deliberation. When the occasion demanded it, though, Obama could make a big decision — a life-and-death decision — very fast. He once told me that one reason he ran for president was because he was so bored in the Senate. I never saw anyone who had not previously been an executive — and especially someone who had been a legislator — take so quickly and easily to making decisions and so relish exercising authority. And like Bush, once Obama made a tough decision, I never knew him to have a second thought or look back.
I always thought Obama was “presidential.” He treated the office of the presidency with respect. I rarely saw him in the Oval Office without a coat and tie, and he always conducted himself with dignity. He was a man of personal integrity, and in his personal behavior, he was an excellent role model.
His broad smile is well known, and I saw it often; what is less known is how fast it can disappear, giving way to a glacial look. It dawned on me one day that the only other person I had worked with who changed expressions so dramatically and quickly had been Margaret Thatcher. It was no fun to be on the receiving end of such a change from either of them. I often wished both Bush and Obama would be less partisan, but clearly the political world has changed since I retired the first time in 1993. I thought Obama was first-rate in both intellect and temperament. You didn’t have to agree with all his policies to acknowledge that.
He concluded with what I thought was a very insightful observation 12 days into his presidency: “What I know concerns me. What I don’t know concerns me even more. What people aren’t telling me worries me the most.” It takes many officials in Washington years to figure that out; some never do.
I could already see a president and White House staff, as so many before them, seeking total control and trying to centralize all power — and credit for all achievements — in the White House. I decided to address this bluntly and to have a little fun. I told the cabinet secretaries and senior White House staff there were two realities to keep in mind. First, no one in the White House other than the president could execute any policy or action; only the cabinet departments or agencies can do that. Howe well the White House staff understood this would determine whether things got done at all, and without or without enthusiasm and speed. If the president’s staff didn’t respect the role of the cabinet secretaries and make them partners in policy making, implementation would suffer. Second, outside the OMB, no one in the White House had to testify before Congress on policy or budgets. The cabinet secretaries and agency heads had to “own” the president’s policies when it came to dealing with Congress, and the White House staff ignored this at its peril. Would a secretary’s testimony be enthusiastic or tepid? “You can get very insulated against reality in this building.”
I referred to such people as “sniffing at the hems of power.” I told the assembled cabinet and White House staff that when my office told me the White House was calling and wanted something, I ignored it. A building didn’t make telephone calls. I said that, as a cabinet officer, I expected to be contacted only by a very senior White House person.
Finally, I had two warnings for my cabinet colleagues. First, there are too many staff assistants who think the way upward in their careers is to set their boss’s hair on fire with lurid stories about the depredations or encroachments by other cabinet departments or the White House staff. The only way to defuse this kind of internecine feuding is for top officials to get to know and trust one another. Cabinet secretaries and senior White House staff working on the same issues need to have regular personal contact to build relationships, and if that is the case, staffs will soon realize that it is not career-enhancing to try to get their bosses into bureaucratic battles. My second warning was that at that very moment, one or more people in each of my colleagues’ departments or agencies were doing something that was illegal or improper or engaging in behavior that they, as the boss, would hate. The key, I said, was to have mechanisms in place to find such people before they did too much harm. This warning, a couple of cabinet secretaries told me later, was one that really made them sit up and take notice.
As I looked out on all the new appointees at the White House in mid-2009, I was struck by how diverse they — like their predecessors — were in the motives for joining the government. Some were acolytes who idolized the new president, had worked unbelievably hard for his election, and were totally devoted to him on a personal level. They were prepared to sacrifice years of their lives to try to make him successful. Others were “cause” people, individuals who had worked for him and were willing to serve under hm now because of one or another specific issue — or the entire agenda — and saw him and their service as a way to advance policies they believed in. Still others had been successful in their careers and saw an opportunity to give back to the country by working for a man they supported, or simply to do something different for a while. Still another group were just political “junkies” — they loved the political life, and working in the executive branch after 8 years on the Hill or “in the wilderness” (outside government) was like a fresh tank of oxygen. And then there were a small number whose arms had to be twisted personally by the president to get them to abandon the comfort of private life in exchange for grueling hours and the opportunity to be all too often flayed personally and politically on the Hill and in the media.
The history of cutting defense programs, especially the big ones, is not pretty. The A-12 matter was still in litigation 20 years later, and Congress overruled Cheney to keep the Osprey flying. When other secretaries had tried to kill programs, the services would work behind the scenes with sympathetic members of Congress to keep the programs going and preserve the jobs they provided. When the services wanted to kill a program, Congress would usually just override them and fund the procurement over their objections. For most members of Congress, the defense budget is a huge cash cow providing jobs in their districts and states. Thus, even in those rare instances when the Pentagon tried to show some acquisition discipline, Congress made it tough, if not impossible, to succeed. To beat the system, I needed the radically different political strategy that I had described to the president.
As I had told the president, previous efforts to cut programs had been leaked to Congress and the press early in the process, usually from the military service whose program was at risk. So at sensitive points in the debates, I prohibited circulation of briefing books and instead created limited access reading rooms where senior Defense officials had to go to prepare for the meetings. The huge staffs previously involved in the process were cut out. At the suggestion of Mike Mullen, I made everyone sign a NDA statement. In other organizations, those agreements might not have meant much. But Mike and I knew what an oath and honor meant to military men and women — there was not a single leak during the entire process. I told non one except a small core group any of my final decisions until the day I announce them publicly. All of this drove the media and Congress nuts. Member of Congress would later complain about the use of “gag orders” and the lack of “transparency,” and I shot back that previous “transparency” had been the result of a flood of leaks, not official briefings.
As grandiose as it sounds, the magnitude of what I intended to do was unprecedented. Other secretaries had tried to cut or cap a handful of defense programs. We were looking at more than 60 possibilities.
The manufacturers fo the plane were very clever — the plane had suppliers in 44 states, which made it important for 88 senators. That made capping the number a battle royal.
Apart from cost, I had other problems with the F-22. It was an exquisite aircraft designed primarily to take on other 5th-generation aircraft (presumably Chinese) in air-to-air combat and penetrate and suppress sophisticated air defenses. But we had been at war for 10 years, and the plane had not flown a single combat mission. I would ask the F-22’s defenders, even in the event of a conflict with China, where we were going to base a short-range aircraft like the F-22. Did its defenders think the Chinese wouldn’t destroy bases in Japan and elsewhere launching US warplanes against them? All that said, one couldn’t quarrel when pilots said it was the best fighter in the world.
No president has the luxury of focusing on just a few issues, but it is hard to think of a president who entered office facing more challenges of historic magnitude than Obama. The nation’s economic meltdown and the possibility of another great depression while we were engulfed in two wars certainly were at the top of the list. But there were myriad other pressing problems as well, among them the Iranian nuclear program and the related growing possibility of a new Middle East war; a nuclear-armed North Korea; a European economic crisis; increasingly nationalistic policies in both Russia and China; and Pakistan in possession of dozens of nuclear weapons and growing more dysfunctional by the day. Then there were Obama’s own initiatives, such as reshaping the federal budget and far-reaching health care reform.
His references to the sacrifice and bravery of the troops drew warm applause, but he got his biggest round of cheers when he told the Marines he was going to raise military pay.
Their tone, particularly on Biden’s part, was that the Neanderthals were no longer in charge in Washington and the “good guys” were back.
I reminded the president and principals that every president since Carter had tried to engage with the Iranians, that every outstretched American hand had been slapped away, and that two presidents, Carter and Reagan, had paid a significant political price for it.
As long as I had been in Washington, I could not for the life of me understand why someone would leak information about programs that were an alternative to war. But the leaks would continue. I didn’t know whether they were coming from the administration, from the Israelis, or from both.
The North Korean government said it would release the two women only if a former US president came to get them. When Clinton told Carter he could not go without a prior guarantee of the women’s release by the North, the former president responded, “You can’t dictate terms — they’re a sovereign state!” I was against either Carter or former president Clinton going. I was very much against giving the North a chance to humiliate a former US president or allowing Pyongyang to dictate terms to one.
I thought he threaded the needle well in terms of advocating for human and political rights while not losing sight of the importance in the region of the American relationship with Mubarak’s Egypt. His talk was welcomed in most Muslim countries and raised our standing among the Arabs. His words were not well received in Israel, and he was criticized by more hawkish neoconservatives in the US, who accused the president of apologizing for his country. For me, the real downsize of the speech was not that it was an acknowledgement of mistakes — free and confident nations do that — but that it raised expectations very high on the part of many Arabs that, for example, the US would force Israel to stop building settlements and accept an independent Palestinian state. It wasn’t long before perceptions of us reverted to the by-then normal distrust and suspicion.
Prior to Obama’s inauguration, Joe Biden visited Afghanistan and Iraq, as I said. Talking to US diplomats, commanders, and soldiers in Kabul, Biden found confusion at all levels about our strategy and objectives. His previous encounter with Afghan president Karzai, at a dinner in Feb 2008, had gone badly and ended with the then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee throwing down his napkin and walking out on the Afghan president.
The president directed Holbrooke to tell Karzai that he, Obama, was aware of the constitutional problem of going beyond May and that we would work with him to help to find a “bridge” to August elections. No one, including me, was indelicate enough to mention that the new administration, dedicated to building “the rule of law” in Afghanistan, had just decided to violate the Afghan constitution and to connive with Karzai on keeping him in power illegally for several months. In its most favorable light, the decision was intended to provide time for other presidential candidates to get organized so there would be a credible election in Afghanistan. For Holbrooke and others at the table, it provided the time necessary to identify a viable alternative to Karzai, who they thought had to go. If the Afghan constitution was an impediment to achieving this goal, the hell with it.
Biden argued throughout the process, and would continue to argue, that the war was politically unsustainable at home. I thought he was wrong and that if the president remained steadfast and played his cards carefully, he could sustain even an unpopular war. Bush had done that with a far more unpopular war in Iraq with both houses of Congress in the hands of the Democrats. The key was showing that we were being successful militarily, at some point announcing a drawdown of forces, and being able to show that an end was in sight.
I was also concerned that we were not moving fast enough or decisively enough to deal with the problem of civilian casualties. As I said before, I don’t believe any military force eve worked harder to avoid innocent victims, but it seemed like every incident was a strategic defeat, and we need to take dramatic action.
I would learn only later that this was the first time a wartime commander had ben relieved since Truman fired Douglas MacArthur in 1951. During WW2, Generals George Marshall and Eisenhower routinely fired commanders, many of them perfectly capable officers, including several personal friends. General Matthew Ridgway did much the same in Korea before and after taking over from MacArthur. The act was common enough not to be a career-ender or blight on the reputation of the affected general or the Army itself. But by the time of the Vietnam War, it was practically unheard of in the Army. I hope that the McKiernan episode will contribute to reestablishing accountability for senior officers for wartime performance, including the precedent that personal misconduct or serious mistakes need not be required for relief.
I left the meeting discouraged less about the skepticism regarding more troops than about the total focus on the politics. Biden was especially emphatic about the reaction of the Democratic base. (His remarks reminded me of Cheney’s focus on the Republican base when discussing detainee interrogations and Guantanamo.) Not a word was mentioned about doing whatever it took to achieve the goals the president had so recently set or to protect the troops. The president and his advisers all emphasized that before any more troops could be considered, we would have to show success and a change of momentum with the troops we had. I was stunned. The Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, and the White House was running scared. The skepticism I could understand; the politics I couldn’t.
I was concerned that any such conversation and arrangement would leak, rendering Mike a lame duck for more than two years — unless, of course, the president’s intention was to hasten his departure. I knew that nearly everyone at the White House preferred Cartwright’s briefing style, which was much crisper than Mullen’s. Cartwright could also explain highly technical matters clearly, and his analytical style meshed better with the president’s own. I pleaded with the president not to meet with Cartwright before September or October, until after he and Mullen had both been reconfirmed by the Senate in their position for another term.
I said he should submit the assessment and troop recommendations separately because I expected the former to leak and we had to hold the latter very closely. I wanted people to focus first on the assessment, how things were going, and on strategy. Having troop options on the table at the same time would totally divert the debate to numbers, and the substance of the assessment would be ignored.
Karzai might not be a great president, but he sure as hell knew what was going on in his own capital and was well aware of the American efforts to unseat him. Indeed, as the senior intelligence officer briefing the NSC later told us, Karzai saw the US — the Obama administration — walking away from him and turned to the warlords and made deals to get reelected.
For two and a half years, I had warned about the risks of a significant increase in the US troop presence in Afghanistan, and during that period we had increased from bout 21,000 to 68,000 troops. I was torn between my historical perspective, which screamed for caution, and what my commanders insisted was needed for accomplishing the mission they had been given by the president and by me. Three very different commanders — McNeill, McKiernan, and McChrystal — had all asked for more troops. I believed, with Mike Mullen, that the war in Afghanistan had been neglected and under-resourced in the Bust administration. But how many troops were too many before reaching the tipping point in terms of Afghan attitudes and support?
I told the president I understood his concerns about an open-ended commitment and mission creep but that “war is dynamic, not static. At the end of the year, whatever the troop numbers, we’ll reevaluate and change our strategy if it’s not working.”
I was in a quandary. I shared Obama’s concerns about an open-ended conflict, and while I wanted to fulfill the troop requests of the commanders, I knew they always would want more — just like all their predecessors throughout history. How did you scale the size of the commitment to the goal? How did you measure risk? But I was deeply uneasy with the Obama White House’s lack of appreciation — from the top down — of the uncertainties and inherent unpredictability of war. “They all seem to think it’s a science,” I wrote in a note to myself. I came closer to resigning that day than at any other time in my tenure, though no one knew it.
At that point, McChrystal was almost certainly the most lethal and successful counterterrorism practitioner in the world. The successes of the US forces under his command in both Iraq and Afghanistan were legion and legendary. The paper I gave to the president was a distillation of years’ experience in hunting bad guys. McChrystal wrote that while CT (counterterrorism) operations are highly effective at disrupting terrorists, they are not endgame to defeat a terrorist group. “CT operations are necessary to mitigate a sanctuary, but to defeat a terrorist group, host nation capacity must grow to ensure a sustainable level of security… Without close-in access, fix and find methods become nearly impossible… Predator strikes are effective where they complement, not replace, the capabilities of the state security apparatus, but they are not scalable in the absence of underlying infrastructure, intelligence, and physical presence.”
It did not dawn on me at this time that my practice of having the president hear directly from each level in the chain of command, because of the unanimity of the senior military in support of McChrystal’s recommendations, in this instance probably reinforce Obama’s and Biden’s suspicion of a “military bloc” determined to force the commander in chief’s hand.
- We owe you answers to questions about our current troop deployments: what percentage are actually working daily through our Afghan counterparts, what percentage are defending terrain without leaving their forward bases, and what percentage is now focused on internal support such as construction and force protection?
- If you agree to more troops, how do we prevent troop levels from inexorably growing, making for the same kind of open-ended increases we saw in Vietnam? How do we reassure the American people we can keep control of this commitment both in troops and time? How does this government impose the discipline on itself to acknowledge when something isn’t working and change course? And how do we persuade the Congress and the American people we can and will do this?
But, I believe our troops are committed to this mission and want to be successful. Above all, they don’t want to retreat, or to lose, or for their sacrifices — and those of their buddies — to be in vain. What we owe them is not only our support, but a clear strategy and achievable goals. I think your March decisions do that, but we need to explain it better — to them and to the American people. How to do this is one of our principal challenges. I still bear fresh scars from the domestic battle associated with Iraq in my first two years in this job; I am loath to take on another for Afghanistan. But I am more loath to contemplate a Taliban/al Qaeda victory or the implications for us around the world if we are seen to retreat.
He dismissed the “counterterrorism plus” strategy as insufficient, saying it had been tried before and that the way to target terrorists was with “on-the-ground intelligence,” which “takes enormous infrastructure.”
An infuriated president, Mullen, and I repeatedly discussed what he regarded as military pressure on him. Obama asked us why all this was being discussed in public. “Is it a lack of respect for me? Are they trying to box me in? I’ve tried to create an environment where all points of view can be expressed and have a robust debate. I’m prepared to devote any amount of time to it — however many hours or days. What is wrong? Is it the process? Are they suspicious of my politics? Do they resent that I never served in the military? Do they think because I’m young that I don’t see what they’re doing?”
The president kept returning also to the matter of cost. He observed that the cost of the additional troops McChrystal was requesting would be about $30B; yet if he froze all domestic discretionary spending, he would save only $5B, and if he cut the same by 5 percent, that would save only $10B. He said that if the war continued “another 8 to 10 years, it would cost $800B,” and the nation could not afford afford that given needs at hom. His argument was hard to disagree with. The costs of the war were staggering.
I wrote that all three of the mission options we had been discussing were “doomed to fail, or already have.” Counterterrorism focused solely on al Qaeda could not work without a significant US ground presence in Afghanistan and the opportunity to collect intelligence that this would afford us. “We tried remote-control counterterrorism in the 1990s, and it brought us 9/11.” “Counterterrorism plus,” or “counterterrorism minus,” was what we had been doing since 2004, and “everyone seems to acknowledge that too is not working.” Fully resourced counterinsurgency “sounds a lot like nation-building at its most ambitious” and would require troop levels, time, and money that few in the US or in the West were prepared to provide.
I wrote that the core goals and priorities Obama had decided the previous March remained valid and should be reaffirmed. However, we had to narrow the mission and better communicate what we were trying to do. We could not realistically expect to eliminate the Taliban; they were not a part of the political fabric of Afghanistan. But we could realistically work to reverse their military momentum, deny them the ability to hold or control major population centers, and pressure them along the Pakistani border. We ought to be able to reduce their level of activity and violence to that which existed in 2004 or thereabouts. Our military efforts should be intended to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan and buy time to expand and train the Afghan security forces, who, despite their many deficiencies, were courageous fighters; many of them were prepared to die — and had died — fighting the Taliban. We should “quietly shelve trying to develop a strong, effective central government in Afghanistan.” What we needed, I wrote, was some central government capacity in a few key ministries — defense, interior, finance, education, rural development. We should help broker some kind of “national unity” government or other means to give the Karzai government at least a modicum of legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan people.
All this would give us a mission that the public and the politicians could easily understand: “Deny the Taliban momentum and control, facilitate reintegration, build government capacity selectively, grow the Afghan security forces, transfer security responsibilities, and defeat al Qaeda.”
I also wrote that while the deliberative process “has served you well, we cannot wait a month or two for a decision. Uncertainty about the future is beginning to impact Afghans, the Pakistanis, our allies, and our troops.”
In conclusion, Mr. President, this is a seminal moment in your presidency. From Afghanistan to Pakistan, from the Muslim world to North Korea, China, and Russia, other governments are watching very carefully. If you elect not to agree with General McChrystal’s recommendations, I urge you to make a tough-minded, dramatic change in mission in the other direction. Standing pat, middling options, muddling through, are not the right path forward and put our kids at risk for no good purpose.
The exchange that followed was remarkable. In strongly supporting a surge in Afghanistan, Hilary told the president that her opposition to the surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. She went on to say, “The Iraq surge worked.” The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.
This episode serves as a reminder that those at the highest levels of government, tough and experienced people accustomed to the hard knocks of political life at the top in Washington, are still human beings. All of us, in varying degrees, have vulnerabilities, insecurities, and sensitivities. All hate critical press stories that question our motives, integrity, or competence. All, including the hardened senior military officers and secretaries of defense, need the occasional pat on the back or gesture of support. And however independent and powerful, we need to know we have the confidence of our boss, especially when he is the president of the United States.
I received word that same afternoon that the Sunday meeting with the president had ben changed to 9:30am, thus requiring me to fly all night from the West Coast to make it. I saw the handiwork of the NSS in this and told my staff, “Tell them to go fuck themselves. The president and I agreed on 5 and that’s when I’ll be there. If they go at 9:30, they’ll do it without the secretary of defense.” The meeting was changed back to 5.
Emanuel — no surprise — stressed the political lift on the Hill and the danger of any daylight between the president and the military.
Then there was an exchange that’s been seared into my memory. Joe Biden said he had argued for a different approach and I was ready to move forward, but the military “should consider the president’s decision as an order.” “I am giving an order,” Obama quickly said. I was shocked. I had never heard a president explicitly frame a decision as a direct order. With the American military, it is completely unnecessary. As secretary of defense, I had never issued an “order” to get something done; nor had I heard any commander do so. Obama’s “order,” at Biden’s urging, demonstrated, in my view, the complete unfamiliarity of both men with the American military culture. That order was unnecessary and insulting, proof positive of the depth of the Obama White House’s distrust of the nation’s military leadership.
As strange as it may sound, Afghanistan was not an all-consuming issue for the president and his administration in the latter part of 2009; it just seemed so for those of us in the national security arena. Preoccupied at home with a politically troubled health care initiative and the continuing economic crisis, Obama also faced challenges with China, Russia, North Korea, the Arab Middle East and Israel, terrorism — and especially Iran. Unlike Afghanistan, there were generally no serious divisions within the administration on these issues during 2009 and 2010.
I had hoped for UN action in January or February; the resolution passed in June 2010. The resolution was better than nothing, but it demonstrated that Russia and China remained ambivalent about how hard to push Tehran. China was leery of losing the significant amount of oil it bought from Iran and, in any event, was in no mood to do anything remotely helpful to the US after we announced the sale of $6.5B in arms to Taiwan. Russia, I think, still harbored hopes of future economic and political influence in Iran.
Bush and Obama had said publicly that the military option to stop Iran’s nuclear program remained on the table, and it was our job at the Pentagon to do the planning and preparation to ensure that it was not an idle threat.
I wanted to discuss actions we ought to take to strengthen our military posture in the Gulf for Iran-related contingencies, as well as military actions we ought to consider — short of the use of force — to keep the pressure on. I asked in the memo, if Israel attacked Iran, would we help Israel, hinder it, take no action, or conduct follow-up operations (especially if Israel failed to destroy the nuclear sites)? If Iran retaliated against Israel, would we come to Israel’s defense? If Iran were to hit US troops, facilities, or interests in retaliation after an Israeli strike, how would we respond? What measures should we take to deter Iranian military actions, to maintain “escalation dominance” (to overmatch any Iranian military action and try to keep the situation from spinning out of control)? Should we emplace forces in advance? How would we respond to closure of the Gulf, terrorism, manipulation of oil prices, and other Iranian responses?
I told Obama he needed to consider the ramifications of a no-warning Israeli attack or Iranian provocation, either of which likely would require a US military response within minutes or hours. I said that the principals had not “chewed” on these issues, as they should. I asked the policy issues and added deployments I recommended be addressed urgently, in particular because the military moves required significant lead time. Obama said we should look at options, but he would make no concrete decisions now.
I was put off by the way the president closed the meeting. To his very closest advisers, he said, “For the record, and for those of you writing your memoirs, I am not making any decisions about Israel or Iran. Joe, you be my witness.”
Sarkozy reminded me of Rahm Emanuel, lithe and short and full of energy — they both sort of explode into a room. Sarkozy went straight to the point: “The Iranians are liars and have been lying from the start.” The extended US hand, he said, had been seen in Iran as a sign of weakness. It had led to “a great deal of wasted time.” He regretted that new sanctions had not been put in place the preceding fall and asserted, “We are weak. This will all end badly.”
As part of our relationship with Israel, the US had loong pledged that no arms sales to Arab states would undermine Israel’s “qualitative military edge.”
How ironic that US critics of the new approach had portrayed it as a big concession to the Russians. It would have been nice to hear a critic in Washington — just once in my career — say, Well, I got that wrong.
I spent most of my professional life dealing with the role of nuclear weapons in national defense — beginning with my assignment as an Air Force second lieutenant to the SAC. Over the decades, the arguments over the circumstances in which they might be used and how many weapons were needed became highly charged and highly esoteric. The debates sometimes reminded me of medieval theologians arguing over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. I never believed that nuclear weapons could be used on a limited basis in a war between the US and the USSR.
I also believe reducing to very low levels of nuclear weapons — below 1,000 to 1,500 — offers the temptation to other powers to exceed those numbers and place us at a disadvantage, at a minimum in terms of perceptions. It is a matter of both global politics and military deterrence.
Illegals, also known as sleepers, are trained spies sent to another country, where they spend years building a life and well-placed careers so that eventually they can be activated as agents with good access to gather information or influence decisions.
All through 2010, at the bottom of the huge funnel pouring problems from Pandora’s global trove into Washington, sat just eight of us who, even though served by vast bureaucracies, had to deal with every one of the problems. The challenge for historians and journalists — and memoirists — is how to convey the crushing effect of dealing daily with multiple problems, pivoting on a dime every few minutes from one issue to another, having to quickly absorb reporting from many sources on each problem, and then making decisions, always with too little time and too much ambiguous information. Ideally, I suppose there should be a way to structure our national security apparatus so that day-to-day matters can be delegated to lower levels of responsibility while the president and his senior advisers focus on the big picture and thoughtfully make grand strategy. But that’s not how it works in the real world of politics and policy. And as the world becomes more complex and more turbulent, that is a problem in its own right: exhausted people do not make the best decisions.
I was convinced that the prolonged dialogue between Washington and Moscow during our many years of arms control negotiation had led to a greater understanding of each other’s intentions and thinking about nuclear matters; I believed that dialogue had helped prevent misunderstanding and miscalculations that might have led to confrontation. In my 2007 visit to China, I tried to lay the groundwork for such a relationship. It was clear, though, that Chinese military leaders were leery of a real dialogue.
The general’s response was as direct as it was revealing. China had lived with the Taiwan arms sale in 1979, he said, “because we were weak. But now we are strong.”
In its disputes with neighbors, China always prefers to deal with each country individually. They are easier to intimidate that way. Thus the US looks for opportunities to encourage countries in the region to meet together, including with China, to address these disputes.
My reception in Hanoi was quite extraordinary. I knew that the only way I would ever get such a rock star’s reception would be at the order of a dictatorship.
There was deep suspicion of us in Haiti, for good reason. In 1915, President Wilson sent in 330 Marines to safeguard US interests. The US, for all intent and purposes, ran Haiti until the Marines departed in 1934. In September 1994, President Clinton sent 20,000 troops to Haiti to oust a military junta and restore the elected president, Jean Aristide, to office.
Secretary Clinton had a lot of explaining to do in capitals around the world for a problem caused by the Defense Department. Both she and I noticed that once open and candid interlocutors around the world now turned silent the second they saw an American official take out pen and paper for notes.
I also recalled that when serious congressional oversight of CIA began in the mid-1970s, many thought foreign services would stop sharing information with us, but it never happened. I said I thought terms being bandied about such as “meltdown,” “game-changer,” and so on were overstated and overwrought.
Governments deal with the US because it is in their interest, not because they like us or trust us or because of our ability to keep secrets. Some respect us, some fear us, many need us. We have by far the largest economy and the most powerful military. As has been said, in global affairs, we are the indispensable nation. So, other countries will continue to deal with us. Is this embarrassing? Yes. Awkward? Somewhat. But the long-term impact? Very modest.
I hated going to this political theater. The President tells Congress and the American people that everything in the country is going — or will go — swimmingly with him as president (or at worst, “unprecedented” challenges will be tackled “boldly”) and lays out his agenda for the coming year.His supporters in Congress rise — over and over — to applaud and cheer while the opposition sits on its hands except in the rare moments when the president mentions something they like, or makes the obligatory references to the US military.
Being part of a political cheering squad was embarrassing for me, especially standing to applaud highly controversial domestic initiatives and views.
When it was clear there was no give in my position, the president vented: “I won’t ask you to sign up to something you’re not comfortable with. I’m the leader of the free world, but I can’t seem to make anything happen.”
I can’t think of a single precedent in American history of doing a referendum of the American armed forces on a policy issue. Are you going to ask them if they want 15-month tours? Are you going to ask them if they want to be a part of the surge in Iraq? That’s not the way our civilian-led military has ever worked in our entire history.”
The result was paralysis. Soon after my arrival in office, I asked the department’s deputy general counsel for a memo on what kind of cyber attack — by us or on us — would constitute an act of war justifying a response in kind or conventional military retaliation. I was still waiting for a good answer to that question three years later.
Even eliminating wasteful or obsolete programs was almost always a monumental political lift on the Hill, as I learned in 2009. And each year we would get a defense authorization bill from the Armed Services Committees that contained about a thousand pages of nearly paralyzing direction, micromanagement, restrictions, and demands for reports. You can imagine why congressional complaints about inefficient management at the Pentagon rang very hollow to with me. The legislature played its own significant part in making it so.
Throughout my tenure, before every hearing I held meetings with my staff ostensibly to work through answers to likely questions from members of Congress. Actually, the meetings were more an opportunity for me to cathartically vent, to answer the anticipated questions the way I really wanted to, barking and cursing and getting the anger and frustration out of my system so that my public testimony could be dispassionate and respectful.
As for the F-35 alternative engine, early on Pratt & Whitney had won the competition to build the engines. Needless to say, members who had a General Electric presence in their districts and states weren’t happy about that and put money in the budget to fund development of an alternative — produced, of course, by GE, partnering with Rolls-Royce. In no time, Defense was spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to support a program that, again, we didn’t want, didn’t need, and couldn’t afford. Facts and logic play no part in debates on the Hill when jobs at home are at stake, and so members and I would go around and around on the extra engine.
The history of Defense Department acquisition and development of new programs is rich in over-cost, overdue, and flawed programs. There have been enough studies on how to fix the problem to fill a room, and repeated attempts at legislative remedies have been made, including as recently as 2009. Ash Carter and I spent a lot of time talking about the problem, and I concluded that the principal fixes were pretty straightforward: make sure there is competition for contracts, but real competition, not the kind Congress likes and everybody wins; have experienced and tough government contract negotiators, people with really sharp pencils; in big, long-term programs — excluding current wartime needs — wherever possible, build prototypes of new equipment, and don’t start production until testing is complete and problems have been solved; freeze requirements early in the process (if you change the plans after construction begins, it will cost you an arm and a leg); demand accountability — be willing to fire government project managers or contractor managers if programs go off the rails; finally, the SecDef has to get his hands dirty overseeing all this, getting knowledgeable enough about the big programs, and keeping up to speed on progress to be able to know when to blow the whistle if things go awry.
This is not about micromanagement, it’s about accountability in leadership. Too many top executives in business and government think the details are beneath them, often with calamitous results.
Three and a half years into the job, I had again declared war on the Pentagon — on the 40 percent of its spending that went to overhead, on layers of bureaucracy that put as many as thirty layers of staff between me and action officer, on unnecessary programs, on too many generals and admirals for the size of our forces, on too many senior civilians in the department, and on too many contractors.
Most of my predecessors railed about the same problems. But most were trying to cut budgets, and some, including Robert McNamara, had come up with dramatic reform and restructuring initiatives that were imposed by fiat on the military services. These efforts, not surprisingly, met with significant resistance from the military. My strategy was different. I told the services that the money they saved through changing their way of doing business and cutting overhead would return to them to invest in military capabilities. As with the program cuts and caps in 2009, the services would be deeply involved in the process. Critically important was getting agreement in advance from the president and the new director of OMB that we could keep all the savings from these efforts to reinvest in military capabilities.
As difficult as I found the House Armed Services Committee, its members were model statesmen compared to those of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a number of whose members from both parties I again found extraordinarily rude and nasty; as a committee, I thought, it had more than its fair of crackpots on both the left and the right.
Karzai was not puppet, but the US probably hadn’t had a more troublesome ally in the war since Charles de Gaulle, perhaps because both were nearly totally dependent on the US and both deeply resented it.
I am convinced the Rolling Stone article gave the president, egged on by those around him in the White House, and himself distrustful of the senior military, an opportunity he welcomed to demonstrated vividly — to the public and to the Pentagon — that he was commander in chief and fully in control of the military. Absent any effort by McChrystal to explain or to offer mitigating circumstances, I believe the president had no choice but to relieve him. The article simply was the last of several public missteps by the general in the political minefield, a risky battlespace where he had little combat experience.
State had been requested to prepare a paper on corruption in Afghanistan, and I was told that Hilary had personally redrafted major elements. The analysis was the best I had ever seen on the topic. The paper said there were three levels of corruption that needed to be addressed: (1) corruption that was predatory on the people — for example, shakedowns by the national police and bribes for settlement of land disputes; (2) high-level, senior leadership corruption; and (3) “functional” corruption — common bribes and deal making. The paper set forth exactly the right way to look at the problem and that, given an overall and deeply ingrained culture of corruption that was highly unlikely to end anytime soon, we needed to focus on those aspects that mattered most to our success — low-level corruption that alienated the Afghan people and high-level corruption that undermined the confidence in the entire government. Hilary and I both again raised the contradiction between (not to mention the hypocrisy of) US payments to Afghan officials and our public stance on corruption. We ran into a stone wall named Panetta. The CIA had its own reasons not to change our approach.
The history of revolutions is not a happy one. Most often repressive authoritarian governments are swept out, and power ends up in the hands not of moderate reformers but of better-organized and far more ruthless extremists — as in France in 1793, Russia in 1917, China in 1949, Cuba in 1959, and Iran in 1979. In fact, it is hard to think of a major exception to this fate apart from the American Revolution, for which we can largely thank George Washington, who rejected a proffered crown, refused to march the army against Congress (however tempting on occasion that must have been for him), and voluntarily gave up command of the army and then the presidency. Revolutions and their outcomes are usually a surprise (especially to those overthrown) and damnably hard to predict. Experts can write bout economic hardship, demographic problems such as a “youth bulge,” pent-up rage, and “prerevolutionary” conditions, but repressive governments often manage such conditions for decades. Thus was the Obama administration — and everyone else in the world (including every Arab government) — surprised by the “Arab Spring,” a revolution that shifted the political tectonic plate of the Middle East.
I reminded him that I had been sitting in the office he now occupied with Zbigniew Brzezinsky when the shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979, and I spoke about the role of the US had played in that revolution. I expressed my great concern that we were entering uncharted waters and that the president couldn’t erase the Egyptians’ memory of our decades-long alliance with Mubarak with a few public statements. Our course, I said, should be to call for an orderly transition. We had to prevent any void in power because it likely would be filled by radical groups. I said we should be realistically modest “about what we know and about what we can do.” All of us were very concerned that the president and the White House and NSS staffs were learning hard on the need for regime change in Egypt. White House staffers worried about Obama being “on the wrong side of history.” But how can anyone know which is the “right” or “wrong” side of history when nearly all revolutions, begun with hope and idealism, culminate in repression and bloodshed? After Mubarak, what?
We had to consider the impact of such a statement throughout the region. What would come next?
I asked what would happen if Mubarak didn’t leave. The president would have scored a few public relations points that would, at the same time, have registered with every Arab friend and ally we had in the entire region, all of whom were authoritarian to one degree or another. Thirty years of American cooperation with the authoritarian government of Egypt, I said, could not be wiped out by a few days of rhetoric. Besides, people in the region didn’t pay any attention to our — I wanted to say “your” — rhetoric anymore. If we humiliated Mubarak, I warned, it would send a message to every other ruler to shoot first and talk later. What if he did go? I asked. Who then? A military dictatorship? Would we have promoted a coup d’etat? If you wanted to be won the right side of history, I argued, let Mubarak depart from office with some dignity, turning over power to elected civilians in “an orderly transition.” That would send the message to others in the region that we wouldn’t just “throw them to the wolves.” I repeated, “We have to be modest about what we know and what we can do.”
All the meeting participants finally agreed that the president should call Mubarak and congratulate him on the steps he had announced and urge his early departure. I argued that Obama should not use the world “now” in asking for a change but rather the more vague phrase “sooner rather than later.”
Biden later told me Suleiman had complained that it was hard to negotiate with the young people in Tahir Square because they had no leaders.
Again I asked whether the leaders of the revolution would have the time and space to organize themselves into competitive political parties for the elections. He replied, “We will give them reasonable time for political organization” but added that the longer the government waited to hold elections, the worse it would be for the economy. He told me that tourism, Egypt’s main source of hard currency, had fallen since January by 75 percent. I told him the US government thought they would be better off electing a president before electing a parliament as a way of providing secular leadership of the country, which, in turn, could help buy time for alternatives to the Muslim Brotherhood to emerge.
The best organized and most ruthless have the advantage in revolutions.
Power was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, an expert on genocide and repression, and a strong advocate of the “responsibility to protect,” that is, the responsibility of civilized government to intervene — militarily, if necessary — to prevent the large-scale killing of innocent civilians by their own repressive governments. In the final phase of the internal debate, Hillary threw her considerable clout behind Rice, Rhodes, and Power.
I believed that what was happening in Libya was not a vital national interest of the US. I opposed the US attacking a third Muslim country within a decade to bring about regime change, no matter how odious the regime. I worried about how overstretched and tired our military was, and the possibility of a protracted conflict in Libya. I reminded my colleagues that when you start a war, you never know how it will go. The advocates of military action expected a short, easy fight. How many time in history had that naive assumption been proven wrong? In meetings, I would ask, “Can I just finish the two wars we’re already in before you go looking for new ones?”
I had four months left to serve, and I was running out of patience on multiple fronts, but most of all with people blithely talking about the use of military force as though it were some kind of video game.
The White House has no idea how many resources will be required. This administration has jumped to military options before it even knows what it wants to do. What in the hell is a “humanitarian corridor”? A no-fly zone is of limited value and never prevented Saddam from slaughtering his people.
“Don’t give the White House staff and NSS too much information on the military options. They don’t understand it, and “experts” like Samantha Power will decide when we should move militarily.” At the same time, I authorized moving significant Air Force and assets in Germany to bases in Italy and several additional Navy ships into the Mediterranean. I was adamantly opposed to intervening in Libya, but if the president so ordered, it was my responsibility to make sure we were ready. I was blunt and stubborn, but I wasn’t insubordinate.
More than any other previous event, a hearing before the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee on March 2 confirmed for me that my decision to leave my post in June was the right one. I had simply run out of patience and discipline and a willingness to “play the game,” as illustrated by two exchanges during that hearing. The first was in response to several members pressing me about why we wouldn’t just declare a no-fly zone in Libya. I responded with uncharacteristic force and borderline disrespectful tone: “There is a lot of, frankly, loose talk about some of these military options in Libya. It’s more than just signing a piece of paper. Let’s call a spade a spade. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya to destroy its air defenses. A no-fly zone begins with an act of war. It’s a big operation in a big country and it’s impossible to say how long it would take or how long it would have to be sustained.” I said the US military could do it if ordered by the president, but I warned it would require more planes than were found on a single aircraft carrier.
I disliked going after Young like that. He was an old-school gentleman, was always gracious toward me, and had long been a strong supporter of the military and especially the troops; he and his wife often visited our wounded in the hospitals. But after more than four years as secretary, I was fed up with the usual forelock-tugging deference to special interests and pet projects among members of Congress, especially when they got in the way of providing urgently needed help to our commanders and troops. Within a couple of days, Young and I talked on the telephone, and then our staffs worked out a deal — the usual course of action in getting something done with Congress.
Pointing out these challenges once again made Mullen and me the skunks at the garden party. At a principals’ meeting on Libya the evening of March 2, Donilon told me the president wanted me to provide an air bridge from Tunisia to Egypt to move the Egyptian refugees. Biden then jumped in and said, “No, the president orders you to do the bridge.” I’d had enough of Biden’s “orders.” “The last time I checked, neither of you are in the chain of command,” I said. If the president wanted to deploy US military assets, I made clear, I needed to hear it from him directly, not through the two of them. At the Pentagon, I went further, telling Mullen and Rangel that no military options were to be provided to White House or NSS staff without my approval.
Admiral Jim Stavridis, supreme allied commander Europe, told me that a no-fly zone had to be limited to the coastal area of Libya, but that would cover 80 percent of the population. He said it would require a couple of days of bombing to destroy the air defense system and then, to sustain a no-fly zone, at least forty fighters, twenty tanker aircraft, and other support aircraft. (In the event, we needed a lot more.)
On the 17th, the government launched a crackdown at the Pearl Roundabout in Manama, a big traffic circle somewhat akin to Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Six protesters were killed. I called the crown prince, Salman, who told me that Arab rulers in the Gulf saw Bahrain as a proxy in the struggle with Iran and that the lesson they took from events in Tunisia and Egypt was that those governments had erred by showing weakness.
In a private side conversation with me after the meeting, the president said the Libyan military operation had been a 51-49 call for him.
When considering military intervention, presidents virtually never consider the cost — Obama included, when it came to Libya. I received estimates that the Libyan operation as we planned it would cost between $800M and a billion dollars through September. Even the DoD didn’t have that kind of cash lying around.
As is usual when the president makes a momentous decision, the White House wanted key cabinet members blanketing the Sunday talk shows.
President Obama’s position on his authority to launch military action was rather different from candidate Obama’s in 2008, when he had stated unequivocally that “the president does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
Conrnyn of Texas said he wished the president had gone to Congress before he went to the UN; he added that the mission in Libya was unclear, that NATO wouldn’t be able to finish the job on its own, and that there was no plant post-Qaddafi. When he asked me about the “ill-defined endgame,” I responded that the last thing America needed was another enterprise in nation-building, other countries ought to take responsibility for Libya, and “I don’t think we ought to take on another war.”
The hearings were awkward for me because many of the members were raising precisely the concerns I had raised during the internal administration debates. Asked if the situation in Libya involved our “vital national interests,” I honestly said I did not think so — but our closest allies felt that it affected their vital interests and therefore we had an obligation to help them. When asked whether there would be US forces on the ground in Libya, I impetuously and arrogantly answered, “Not as long as I’m in this job.” The response was a further reflection of my diminishing discipline in testifying. I simply should have said that the president had been quite firm in prohibiting the use of American ground forces.
All 28 NATO allies voted to support the military mission in Libya, but just half provided some kind of contribution, and only 8 actually provided aircraft for the strike mission. The US ultimately had to provide the lion’s share of reconnaissance capability and most fo the midair refueling of planes, just three months into the campaign, we had to resupply even our strongest allies with precision-guided bombs and missiles — they had exhausted their meager supply. Toward the final stages we had to reenter the fray with our own fighters and drones. All this was the result of years of underinvestment in defense by even our closest allies.
Fundamental questions remained unanswered. Will free elections in the Arab countries inevitably lead to Islamist-dominated governments? Will those governments, in time, revert to authoritarianism? Will the military reverse the outcome of elections that bring Islamists to power? The absence of democratic institutions, the rule of law, and civil society in virtually all Arab states — and the challenges facing secular reformers — do not provide much reason for optimism. Will freely elected governments be able to make hard decisions necessary to bring economic growth and alleviate the grim existence of most Arabs? If not, will they turn to extreme nationalism, blame Israel and the US, or ignite sectarian violence as a diversion from their domestic failures? Can states whose boundaries were artificially drawn by foreigners and that are composed of historically adversarial tribal, ethnic, and religious groups — above all, Iraq, Syria, and Libya — remain unified absent repression? Will the monarchies and emirates strive to preserve the internal status quo, undertake gradual but real reform, or face their own violent challenges to stability and survival? I believe the only way the US will find itself “on the right side of history”, as these revolutions and their aftermath unfold, is to continue to articulate our belief in political freedom and human rights, and to affirm that government exists to serve the people and not the other way around, as well as our belief in the superiority of a regulated market economy. Beyond that, we will have to deal with each country individually, taking into account its specific circumstances and our own strategic interests.
As I had told President Bush and Condi Rice early in 2017, the challenge of the early 21st century is that crises don’t come and go — they all seem to come and stay.
On surveillance, I told him we did it near many countries worldwide, including Russia, and that the Russians did it to us, and neither country considered these activities as hostile acts.
Just hours before my meeting with Hu, the PLA rolled out for the first time publicly its new J-20 stealth fighter. Photos of the plane hit the Chinese press about two hours before my session with Hu. As one of my China policy experts insightfully expressed it, “This is about as big a ‘fuck you’ as you can get.” There was some talk among my team about cancelling the rest of the visit or part of it, or ignoring the insult. US ambassador to China Jon Hunstman, came up with the best approach: as I had been embarrassed, I should turn the tables and embarrassed the PLA.
On the unrest across the Middle East, he said that nothing like what was going on had been seen since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and it was a moving and inspiring phenomenon. He added, though, that “a pessimist in the Middle East is an optimist with experience.”
McRaven’s special operators had been carrying out similar raids virtually every night for years inside Afghanistan to capture or kill Taliban commanders, and had the requisite skills and experience to carry out the strike successfully.
The president and his senior-most national security team met multiple times in March and April to debate whether to strike the compound. Joe Biden and I were the two primary skeptics, although everyone was asking tough questions. Biden’s primary concern was the political consequences of failure. My highest priority was the war in Afghanistan, and so my greatest worry was that no matter what happened during the raid, as a result the Pakistanis might well shut down our vital supply line from Karachi to Afghanistan (carrying 50 percent of our fuel and 55 percent of our cargo), withdrawing permission for us to overfly Pakistan, and take other steps that would have a dramatically negative impact on the war effort. A successful raid would be a humiliation of the worst kind for the Pakistani military. Abbottabad compound was 35 miles from the Parkistani capital of Islamabad, 6 miles from a nuclear missile facility, and within a couple of miles of the Pakistan Military Academy (their West Point), the boot camps and training centers for two storied Pakistani regiments, a Pakistani intelligence office, and a police station.
I was also concerned that the case for Bin Laden being at the compound was entirely circumstantial. We did not have a single piece of hard evidence he was there. As we probed the analysts about how confident they were Bin Laden was in the house, the estimates ranged from 40 to 80 percent. As a former CIA analyst, I knew those numbers were based on nothing but gut instinct. As the president said at one point, “Look, it’s a fifty-fifty proposition no matter how you look at it.” From my vantage point, we were risking the war in Afghanistan on a crapshoot.
“It is a compelling case,” I said, “for what we want to do. I worry that it is compelling because we want to do it.” I worried that Pakistani ISI was aware of where Bin Laden was and that there might be rings of security around the compound that we knew nothing about or, at minimum, that ISI might have more eyes on the compound that we could know.
The worst-case scenario was that the Pakistanis could get a number of troops to the compound quickly, prevent extraction of our team, and take them prisoner. When I asked Vice Admiral McRaven what he planned to do if the Pakistani military showed up during the operation, he said the team would just hunker down and wait for a “diplomatic extraction.” They would wait inside the compound and not shoot any Pakistanis. I then asked what they would do if the Pakistanis breached the walls: “Do you shoot or surrender?” I said that after the Davis episode, and given the high level of anti-Americanism in Pakistan, negotiating the release of the team could take months or much longer, and meanwhile we’d have the spectacle of US special operators in Pakistani custody and perhaps even show trials. Our team couldn’t surrender, I said. If the Pakistani military showed up, our team needed to be prepared to do whatever was necessary to escape. After considerable discussion, there was broad agreement to this, and as a result, additional MH-47 helicopters and forces were assigned to the mission. McRaven later expressed his appreciation to me for raising the issue.
In each case, a great plan, even when well executed, had led to national embarrassment, and in the case of Eagle Claw, a crushing humiliation that took years for our military to overcome.
Before we broke up and the president headed upstairs to tell the American people what had just happened, I reminded everyone that the techniques, tactics, and procedures the SEALs had used in the Bin Laden operation were used every night in Afghanistan and elsewhere in hunting down terrorists and other enemies. It was therefore essential that we agree not to release any operational details of the raid. That we killed him, I said, is all we needed to say. Everybody in that room agreed to keep mum on details. That commitment lasted about five hours. The initial leaks came from the White House and CIA. They just couldn’t wait to brag and to claim credit. The facts were often wrong, including details in the first press briefing. Nonetheless the information just kept pouring out. I was outraged and, at one point told Donilon, “Why doesn’t everybody just shut the fuck up?” To no avail.
I quickly realized that while the Photoshop of us was amusing, others could Photoshop the pictures of Bin Laden in disrespectful ways certain to outrage Muslims everywhere and place Americans throughout the Middle East and our troops in Afghanistan at greater risk.
I concluded by saying that the SEALs in that room truly gave meaning to George Orwell’s observation that “people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
A final observation on the raid: its success was the result of decisions and investments made over the preceding 30 years. Lessons learned from the disaster in Iran in 1980 led to the creation of the Joint Special Operations Command and development of the training and equipment that undergirded the success at Abbottabad.
I added that I thought we would not be doing our job right if we obscured the consequences of big reductions by quietly making thousands of small cuts — “salami-slicing” — across the whole department. Significant choices and decisions needed to be made. We had to force the politicians, I said, to face up to the strategic military consequences of their budget math. For once, we had to abandon the military’s traditional “can do” culture and make clear what we “can’t do.”
The best politics, he said, would be for him to lie back and stay out of the budget fight. There was no gain in it politically for him. (How many times over the years had I heard presidents, beginning with Nixon, say they were doing the politically hard thing for the good of the country, when in reality it was obvious they were doing the politically easy thing?)
We must not diminish our ability or our determination to deal with the threats and challenges on the horizon because ultimately they must be confronted. If history — and religion — teach us anything, it is that there will always be evil in the world, people bent on aggression, oppression, satisfying their greed for wealth and power and territory, or determined to impose an ideology based on the subjugation of others and the denial of liberty to men and women. I noted my strong support of “soft” power, of diplomacy and development, but reminded the audience that “the ultimate guarantee against the success of aggressors, dictators, and terrorists in the 21st century, as in the 20th, is hard power — the size, strength, and global reach of the US military.”
The problem with the defense budget, as I saw it, it not its size but how it gets spent. It’s not that we have too many planes, warships, submarines, tanks, and troops; rather, we load up every possible piece of equipment with every possible technology, and then they are so expensive, we can buy only a small number.
At the principals’ meeting later that day, I said “Whoa” when we quickly dived into the details. Basic questions had to be answered first, including whether we all agreed we wanted a US military presence in Iraq after December 31? As so often, the NSS was already in the weeds micromanaging before basic questions had been addressed.
Let me just say you will get paid. All smart governments throughout history always pay the guys with guns first.
Virtually every military commander in history has wanted more troops to enhance the prospect for victory — and to reduce his forces’ casualties through overwhelming power.
Contrary to popular belief, the Afghan government and army held together pretty well for nearly two years after the Soviet withdrew, but civil war began when Russian aid ended with the collapse of the USSR.
Generals and admirals speaking out and angering a president is nothing new. I believe the country and public support for the military and its missions are well served by hearing firsthand from our senior military leaders. But I think the frequency and number of officers speaking out has been steadily increasing, and unwise decisions about content, timing, and specific forums have unnecessarily aggravated their always-delicate relationships with the president.
For some reason, more and more senior officers seem compelled to seek a high public profile and to speak out, often on politically sensitive issues or even on matters beyond their area of responsibility (not to mention expertise). Some in the military establishment appear to have embraced the notion that modern military leaders should also be “strategic communicators.”
On the other end of the spectrum, I never understood why top admirals and generals felt compelled to go on Facebook, to tweet and blog, usually about their daily schedule and activities, typically a mundane chronology of meetings, travel, and generic pronouncements. To me, that diminishes their aura of rank and authority. It is par for the course now for politicians, university administrators, and corporate executives. But I think the military is different, or at least should be.
When it comes to civl-military tensions, politicians and policy makers are equally culpable. Because the military is held in such high regard, political leaders and civilian appointees all too often succumb to the temptation to “put a uniform out there” to sell their decisions to the public, know that a military officer is far less likely to be criticized and questioned skeptically. Politicians, even in the White House, can’t have it both ways.
The challenge for any secretary, especially in wartime, is to strike the right balance between building team spirit and maintaining an open, close working relationship with the senior military while not getting too “buddy-buddy.” He must instill a culture of accountability. An effective secretary is not a congenial chairman of the board but rather a demanding, tough chief executive whose daily life is often filled with life-and-death decisions.
I saw firsthand the age-old reality that the qualities important for military leadership and success in war are not the same as those required in peacetime. In war, boldness, adaptability, creativity, sometimes ignoring the rules, risk taking, and ruthlessness are essential for success. These are not characteristics that will get an officer very far in peacetime. Over the ten years of the Iraq and Afghan wars, too many officers were assigned to command positions because the stateside personnel system identified them as “next in line” rather than because they were selected as best qualified for the combat mission.
Above, if a secretary actually intends to run the Pentagon — and make real changes — as opposed to presiding over it, he must be selective in identifying his agenda, and both realistic and single-minded in developing strategies for achieving each specific goal. Exhortations to be more efficient or to achieve some broad goal are akin to shouting down a well.
The secretary has to master the details and fully understand the issues and problems. The challenge is to maintain a high-level, broad perspective, understand enough details to make sensible and executable decisions, and then delegate responsibility for implementation. “Microknowlege” must not become micromanagement, but it sure helps keep people on their toes when they know that the secretary knows what the hell he’s talking about. If the secretary doesn’t do all of this, he becomes a “kept” man at the Pentagon, enjoying all the accouterments of position and authority — the big plane, massive entourages, lots of ceremonies and speeches — but held hostage by the military services, the Pentagon bureaucracy, and his own staff, without the knowledge or influence to effectively lead the department in new directions, much less put the place on a war footing.
I also knew that the Founding Fathers had created a system of government designed primarily for the preservation of liberty, not for efficiency or agile government.
On a day-to-day basis, I believe, in that last regard, that the Founders succeeded beyond their wildest aspirations. Congress is best viewed from a distance — the farther the better — because up close it is truly ugly.
I was exceptionally offended by the constant adversarial, inquisitionlike treatment of executive branch officials by too many members of Congress across the political spectrum — a kangaroo-court environment in hearings, especially when the press and television cameras were present. Sharp questioning of witnesses should be expected and entirely appropriate. But rude, insulting, belittling, bullying, and all to often highly personal attacks by member of Congress violated nearly every norm of civil behavior as they postured and acted as judge, jury, and executioner. It was as though most members were in a permanent state of outrage or suffered from some sort of mental duress that warranted confinement or at least treatment for anger management.
A SecDef faces a steep uphill battle to be successful if he or she does not have a strong, nonpartisan relationship with Congress and respect among the members. From slow-rolling (or opposing) confirmation of Defense nominees, to conducting intrusive and time-consuming investigations, imposing legislative restrictions, opposing budget proposals, holding protracted hearings, and much more, Congress can truly make a secretary’s life miserable. I behaved myself in hearings, letting my respectful demeanor implicitly draw the contrast with the boorishness of the members.
Today, with hundreds of cable channels, blogs, and other electronic media, too often the professional integrity and long-established standards and practices of journalists are diluted or ignored. Every point of view — including the most extreme — has a ready vehicle for rapid dissemination. And it seems the more vitriolic the opinion, the more attention it gets. This system is clearly more democratic and open, but I believe it has also fueled the coarsening and dumbing down of our national political dialogue.
Presidents and members of Congress are not helpless in confronting either the polarization or paralysis. They could start by restoring civility and mutual respect; by listening to and learning from one another; by curbing the purposeful distortion of facts; and by not pretending to have all the answers and demonizing those who differ.
We have a long tradition in America of electing a president, celebrating him for a few days, and then spending four or eight years demonizing him, reviling him, or blindly defending him. From Washington on, there has scarcely been a president of any consequence — including those we consider our greatest — who has not faced the most scurrilous attacks on his policies, patriotism, morals, character, and conduct in office. So it has been with both Bush and Obama.
I had served in the White House in the NSS under 4 presidents and had strong views as to its proper role. I had to come to learn that White House / NSS involvement in operations or operational details is usually counterproductive (LBJ picking bombing targets in Vietnam) and sometimes dangerous (Iran-Contra). For an NSC staff member to call a four-star combatant commander or field commander would have been unthinkable when I worked at the White House and probably cause for dismissal. It became routine under Obama.
They both had the worst of both worlds on the Hill: they were neither particularly liked nor feared. Accordingly, neither had many allies in Congress who were willing to go beyond party loyalty, self-interest, or policy agreement in supporting them. In this, they had more in common with Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon than with LBJ, Ford, Reagan, and Bush 41. Nor did either work much at establishing close personal relationships with other world leaders. Bush did somewhat more of this than Obama, but neither had anything like the number of friendships cultivated by Ford, Reagan, and Bus 41. Both presidents, in short, seemed to me to be very aloof with respect to two constituencies important to their success in foreign affairs.
Their relationship with me was friendly and relaxed but businesslike. President Obama had much more occasion than Bush to be angry with me, but by the standards of Johnson and Nixon — whose wrath could be semiterrifying even to the most senior officials — Obama was civil in his impatience, never nasty, cutting, or personal. And the squall always passed quickly. At times, I’m sure he treated me better than I deserved.
I witnessed both of those presidents make decisions they believed to be in the best interest of the country regardless of the domestic political consequences, both thereby earning my highest respect and praise. I liked and respected both men.
Several lessons, none new to me, were hammered home during my four and a half years as SecDef. Above all, the unpredictability of war — that once the first shots are fired or first bombs fall, the political leader loses control. Events are in the saddle. It seems that every war is begun with the assumption it will be short. In nearly every instance, going back far into history, that assumption has been wrong.
I was reminded, too, that nearly always, we begin military engagements — wars — profoundly ignorant about our adversaries and about the situation on the ground.
I was also reminded that no country is fully prepared for the next war. Secretary Rumsfeld said you go to war with the army you have.
Our enemies always have a vote, as do future presidents. In the 40 years since Vietnam, our record in predicting whether we will be military engaged next, even six months out, is perfect: we have never once gotten it right. When it comes to predicting future conflicts, what kinds of fights they will be, and what will be needed, we need a lot more humility.
Wars are a lot easier to get into than out of, a point I hope I have made clear. Those who ask about exit strategies or what happens if assumptions prove wrong are rarely welcome at the conference table when the fire-breathers argue we must act militarily. The argument against military action is almost never about capabilities but whether it is wise. As Petraeus said early on in Iraq, “Tell me how this ends.” Too often the question is not even asked, much less answered.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the biggest doves in Washington wear uniforms. This is because our military leaders have seen the cost of war and its unpredictability, and they have too often sent their troops in harm’s way to execute ill-defined or unrealistic presidential objectives, with thin political support that evaporated when the going got tough or the fight became prolonged. Just as it did in “the necessary war” in Afghanistan.
Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.
No matter how a war starts, it ends in mud. It has to be slugged out — there are no trick solutions or cheap shortcuts.
I came to believe that no one who actually been in combat could walk away without scars, some measure of post-traumatic stress. And while those I visited in the hospitals put on a brave front for me, in my mind’s eye I could see them lying awake, alone, in the hours before dawn, confronting the pain and their broken dreams and shattered lives.
During WW2, General George Marshall once told his wife, “I cannot afford the luxury of sentiment, mine must be cold logic. Sentiment is for others.”