A second critical task was to adapt operations as needed and shift resources quickly. That required us to have forces that were agile and could move rapidly. For these lighter forces to be as capable as more traditional heavy forces, far greater precision was required. And to take advantage of the improved precision of our weapons, our forces needed more accurate targeting intelligence.
We also had a responsibility to capitalize on advances in science and engineering. During many years of involvement with national security issues I had seen impressive technological breakthroughs used to vastly improve our military capabilities. When my father served in World War II, for example, it could take dozens of harrowing combat aircraft sorties to ensure that our forces could knock out a single military target. By 2001, however, technological advances had made it possible for a single aircraft to destroy multiple targets with precision on a single sortie.
Because new military systems would only be as good as the human beings who volunteered to operate them, we also needed to make better use of our most valuable asset: the men and women, military and civilian, who make up the Department. This led to one of my high-profile battles as secretary of defense.
For Defense Department civilian employees—some seven hundred thousand strong—the existing personnel system was a tangle of contradictory rules and regulations and, as a result, was counterproductive. The system did not move people into the positions for which they were best suited, nor did it reward good performance. As I knew well, the ability to hire and reward the most talented and move underperformers into other lines of work was essential to success in the private sector. Yet due to congressional restrictions and the influence of government labor unions, it was nearly impossible for senior DoD officials to recruit, promote, transfer, or replace civilian workers efficiently. As a result, instead of trying to fire underperforming workers and hiring new ones, managers were turning to uniformed military personnel and outside contractors, because they could be brought in rapidly to do a job and then be moved out when the job was done. Billions of tax dollars were supporting antiquated personnel systems that were undermining the important work of the Department of Defense.
We made it a high priority early on to address this by proposing a modern personnel system befitting one of the largest, most technologically advanced workforces in the world. I worked with a team at the Pentagon, led by a tenacious undersecretary for personnel and readiness in Dr. David Chu, and a determined secretary of the Navy in Gordon England, to develop and launch the National Security Personnel System. The new system permitted considerably more mobility among the Pentagon civilian workforce and instituted pay for performance. Bush offered his full support for the plan, yet it barely survived several union-led attempts to roll it back.* The Department and many of its civilian employees benefited from the changes Chu and England proposed, but it was met with vigorous opposition, especially from the employees’ unions.
Those within the Department who felt the new system would not work in their favor tried to stir up fear and uncertainty among the workforce. Nobody likes to have their job performance reviewed or questioned—indeed, the Pentagon had become arranged in such a way that an effective review system was all but impossible. My determination to untangle the system and make it easier for supervisors to oversee their employees left me vulnerable to the charge that I was trying to punish civilians in the Department. These accusations fed the developing misperception that I cared more about weapons systems than I did about people.
My focus on personnel was not limited to civilian manpower alone. I felt it important to review military personnel operations as well. Over the prior decade, the military services—Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines—had been the dominant voices in deciding who would move up to become senior generals and admirals. I was given not too subtle hints from senior uniformed officers that the secretary of defense was expected to steer clear of the senior promotion process. My task, as it was suggested to me, was to give pro forma approval to the candidates presented by the services and to duly forward their recommendations to the President. The President’s approval was expected to be a similar formality.
The results, predictably, tended to reflect each individual service’s interests, which were not always the same as Department-wide interests. The passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 imposed requirements for a more joint perspective as a key element for promotion. I sensed that service parochialism remained in the list of officers submitted from the services. I recognized that officers with stars on their shoulders had generally earned them for good reasons. But I felt that special attention was essential in selecting the three-and four-star generals and admirals. They would become the key leaders of the military services and the combatant commands for the twenty-first century.
One crucial aspect to transforming the Department, in my mind, was aggressively carrying out the intent of the Goldwater-Nichols legislation by reducing the redundancies, divisions, incompatibilities, and rivalries among the services—a process referred to as achieving “jointness.” Goldwater-Nichols had set the stage for developing joint capabilities that would both reduce costs and allow the services to leverage and capitalize on each other’s strengths. I wanted to encourage as much joint planning and as many joint operations among the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps as possible. I was convinced that jointness could not be mandated from the top. It had to be inculcated in layers well below the secretary of defense. This required multiple leadership centers and individuals some layers down who shared that conviction and recognized the need for innovation and flexibility within their own services. They needed to be able to work in Washington with other departments and agencies that were out of their well-established comfort zones. And above all, they had to be candid and forthright, willing to disagree in private with me and with the President if their military advice differed from a course being considered.16 I felt that the only way to ensure that I was recommending those kinds of candidates to the President was to be personally involved in the selection process.
I called on my senior military assistant from my first tour as secretary, Staser Holcomb, a retired vice admiral living on the West Coast. Staser came to Washington and worked with the service chiefs to put together dossiers on their candidates for the key service and joint positions so we could conduct a more than perfunctory review. Knowing that I needed senior input to help with these decisions, I established a four-person committee that included the Department’s top two civilian officials and top two military officers: the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the deputy secretary of defense, and me.
We discussed the tasks that would need to be performed for a specific post and the qualities and experiences that would best qualify an individual. Then we considered the recommendations of the services, secretaries, and chiefs, as well as other candidates. This was not a simple exercise. What may make for an outstanding fighter pilot, for example, is not necessarily the same set of skills needed for success as a combatant commander or service chief. After considering the various candidates, each of the four members of our committee made a point of becoming acquainted with the services’ top candidates, well before we needed to make our recommendation to the President. I did not want the prospects who happened to work in the Pentagon to have an undue advantage just because we were more likely to know them. So as I and the others traveled around the country and the world, we made a point of meeting with the top prospects for the senior posts that would soon be vacant.
In my view it was certainly proper that I be involved in senior promotions. Indeed, it was the secretary of defense who had to make the recommendations to the President, and it is the President who makes the nominations to the U.S. Senate. I saw it as an important responsibility. I had had a good relationship with many of the military leaders I worked closely with as secretary under President Ford. I was the one who came to the defense of then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, George Brown, wh
en many were calling for him to be fired. But because my new system represented a major change in how the Department currently operated, it caused considerable contention. Despite the pushback, however, it resulted in an exemplary bench of officers.
I remembered during my first year at Searle that I had ruffled some feathers as I raised questions about the old way of doing business. That was also the case at the Pentagon. It was clear that there were some in the Department who felt I was brusque or asked more questions than made them comfortable. In a large bureaucratic institution, Newton’s laws of physics apply: A body at rest tends to remain at rest, and a body in motion tends to remain in motion. I was determined that the Department of Defense accelerate forward.
Then, at President Bush’s specific direction, I launched an unprecedented, comprehensive review of America’s global defense posture. This was one of the most fascinating, well conceived, and fruitful projects we implemented at the Pentagon. But it too rankled several groups—some in the military, some in foreign governments, and some in the State Department—stirring up a veritable trifecta of harrumphing, protest, and consternation. Admiral Jim Ellis told me what his Naval Academy physics professor had taught him: “If you want traction, you must first have friction.” We were generating more than our share of heat.
The way our forces were stationed overseas was so outdated, it was as if they had been frozen in time for the decades since Berlin and Tokyo fell in 1945, the armistice halted the Korean War in 1953, and the Cold War ended in 1991. Of the quarter million troops deployed abroad in 2001, more than one hundred thousand were in Europe, the vast majority stationed in Germany to fend off an invasion by a Soviet Union that no longer existed. An additional one hundred thousand were in East Asia and the western Pacific, vestiges of the occupation of Japan in World War II and the Korean War. Those deployments were obviously not taking into account the twenty-first-century reality that Germany was now one of the wealthier nations in Europe and that Japan and South Korea were among the most capable and self-sufficient in Asia.
Yet the status quo persisted in the Department; senior DoD officials were not questioning those deployments. Some combatant commanders seemed to feel they owned the forces and assets under their commands, and were loath to part with them. I started to pepper officials with what seemed to me obvious questions. Was it still wise to have large numbers of our forces in a defensive posture in western Germany to deter a tank invasion from the Soviet Union? Did we still need so many thousands of troops stationed in South Korea when the Korean people were increasingly irritated by the American troop presence, and given that Korea could well afford to do considerably more to defend its own territory? Was the enormous investment the American taxpayers were making in our military really meeting the challenges and realities of the twenty-first century or of the last century?
I also found it unwise to have large numbers of our troops stationed in countries where we needed to get approval from the host government and even in some cases from their parliaments before the president of the United States could move our forces where needed to defend the American people. It was unfair to the American taxpayer to be paying for one set of forces to defend Europe and another to defend East Asia, but then not to be able to use them elsewhere as might be required to defend our country and our interests.
I asked the policy office at the Pentagon to look at the globe afresh and to consider what our posture would be if we reconfigured it ideally, on the basis of what we might need in the future rather than for the past.17 The task involved a number of complex questions. Moving troops and their families away from bases Americans had been using for decades meant disrupting a way of life that had been created around some of these large bases—complete with American schools, shopping villages, hospitals, and restaurants. And though some of our deployments seemed outdated, the presence of our forces in Germany had been providing Europeans with a sense of comfort and security. Our presence in South Korea and Japan was a sign of American resolve to defend northeast Asia—an important sector of the globe that lived in the shadow of a burgeoning China and a reckless North Korean dictator.
I believed our troops had to do more than serve as symbols or security blankets for wealthy allied countries. We needed capable, if independent-minded, allies willing to invest in their own defenses. In large part because America was taking on much of the job for them, European defense expenditures were disturbingly low and declining as a percentage of their GDPs. In prosperous South Korea, the government had taken the unfortunate step of shrinking their own army on the assumption that we would maintain our presence and be prepared to bring in additional divisions if North Korea provoked a war.
Keeping in mind our new national security strategy, with its emphasis on the unanticipated, I knew we could no longer assume that we could predict where we might have to conduct military operations. Whether it would be for humanitarian work—earthquake or tsunami relief, for example—or combat operations, our forces needed the flexibility to move rapidly and without requiring the approval of a host country. Further, I wanted our military to be not only where they were needed but also where they were wanted, appreciated, and where we could move them rapidly to deal with whatever contingencies might arise. I questioned the desirability of tying our forces to massive, permanent bases, especially when it created opposition among local populations. Tensions between our military and Okinawan politicians, for example, had been growing for some time.18 In the country that governed Islam’s holiest shrines, Saudi Arabia, the presence of our troops spawned resentments against both the American and Saudi governments. Osama bin Laden propagandized on this point to recruit terrorists and raise money.19
No previous U.S. administration had attempted such a major global defense posture review; we aimed to rationalize our facilities, activities, relationships, legal arrangements, and surge capabilities worldwide to fit a strategy intended to look into the future, not reflect the past.* Our work, not surprisingly, stimulated interest and concern. President Bush’s political opponents who wanted to come across as more hawkish on defense issues made ridiculous accusations that we were “[pulling] back our forces.”20 This ignored the fact that our posture review increased our capability to project forces rapidly anywhere in the world. The more suspicious wondered why we were in such a rush to get this done. My view was, why wait? We had wasted billions of dollars, and we had been sitting in place across the globe for close to sixty years.
Senior State Department officials initially raised no objections to our review. Secretary of State Powell received periodic updates and seemed content with our analysis. But whatever Powell thought about the defense posture review, others in his department anonymously voiced reservations in the press that echoed the concerns and questions of some of our allies that opposed changing the status quo. From Bosnia to Kosovo to the Sinai peninsula, it seemed that the U.S. military was engaging in new peacekeeping efforts every few years. Those efforts were stretching DoD resources. We either had to increase our capabilities or find ways to pare down our peacekeeping efforts sooner.21
When I pushed to reduce the numbers of American military forces supposedly monitoring a two-decade-old truce between Israel and Egypt in the Sinai peninsula, “[s]ome State Department officials [began] to argue that a withdrawal would underscore what is already seen by some in the region as an American retreat from the Middle East.”22 When I learned, for example, that the Pentagon had been spending $225 million every year to maintain our forces in Iceland, I sent a memo to Powell recommending we make a change.23 I pointed out that our aircraft originally had been stationed in Iceland to track Soviet subs in the North Atlantic. Now that there was no Soviet Union, they were spending their time helping Icelandic fishermen in distress. More than $2 billion had been spent since the end of the Cold War in 1989 to keep our aircraft in Iceland. I believed the $4 billion we would be spending over the next twenty years could be better invested elsewhere. Even so, it took me three years of pressing and
prodding—and the resulting loss of another $700 to $800 million to taxpayers—before I could get our military presence in Iceland renegotiated. This was accomplished over the continued opposition of the State Department.24 Iceland was a wake-up call for me. If it was that hard to change our posture there, changes elsewhere in the world would be even more difficult.
CHAPTER 23
Bears in the Woods
“There’s a bear in the woods. For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it’s vicious and dangerous.
Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear? If there is a bear?”
—Reagan presidential campaign ad, 1984
Upon arriving at the Pentagon, I made a list of what I saw as the areas of the world that would need to be near the top of our national security priorities. Each needed to be managed deftly. I was particularly focused on our relations with two of America’s former rivals—a resurgent Russia and a strengthening China.
Russia, in particular, was an early priority, and I worked hard to establish a productive relationship with my Russian counterpart, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov. Fortunately, Ivanov was one of the most enjoyable foreign officials I encountered. He was intelligent, quick, well connected in Moscow, and had a sense of humor. Ivanov was a fine conversationalist and spoke excellent English. Unlike some former Soviet diplomats, he didn’t engage in long lectures. “I see you get right to the point,” I said to him in our first meeting, as we discussed U.S.-Russian relations. “I will try my best to do so as well.”1 Ivanov was an avid basketball player and fan, so I took him to a Washington Wizards game when he was in town for a meeting. Our friendship was genuine, and I think it proved helpful.
Known and Unknown Page 35