Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

by Gates, Robert M

  Donald’s final conclusions confirmed that the safety, security, and reliability of our nuclear arsenal were solid. But as I said in a news conference shortly thereafter, his report made clear that there had been an “overall decline in Air Force nuclear weapons stewardship, a problem … not effectively addressed for over a decade. Both the Minot-Barksdale nuclear weapons transfer incident and the Taiwan misshipment … have a common origin: the gradual erosion of nuclear standards and a lack of effective oversight by the Air Force leadership.”

  The Defense Department and the Air Force and Navy must ensure the absolute safety and secure stewardship of the nation’s nuclear arsenal. There is no room for error. For the American people, allies, potential adversaries—the whole efficacy of deterrence depends upon the perfect performance of that stewardship. The Donald report and its sobering conclusions required immediate and dramatic action to make clear that the deficiencies he identified would not be tolerated and that correcting them would become the top priority of the Air Force leadership and that of the Department of Defense. Donald already had identified nine generals (seven Air Force, two Army) and eight colonels who he thought should be held accountable.

  For a problem of this magnitude, I decided I had to go higher, dismissing both Secretary Wynne and General Moseley. I consulted with Admiral Mullen, Gordon England, and General Cartwright. Mullen sent me an e-mail on June 2 in which he observed that “the decline in the nuclear mission in the Air Force is representative and symptomatic of a greater decline, for which I can tie responsibility directly to the two most senior leaders.… I believe our Air Force leadership has to be held accountable.” Cartwright, who had special expertise on this issue because of his past leadership of Strategic Command, agreed. So did the president.

  I have always believed that firing someone or asking for a resignation should be carried out face-to-face by the one making the decision. (The only two presidents I had worked for who were willing to do this were Ford and Carter.) I had to violate this principle for the first—and only—time in the case of Wynne and Moseley because of a leak. They were both at an Air Force conference at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, and I asked Gordon England, who was traveling west that day, to stop and talk to Wynne. I asked Mike Mullen to talk to Moseley. I took no pleasure from the dismissals. I enjoyed working with both men, but I didn’t believe they really understood the magnitude of the problem or how dangerous it could be.

  The simultaneous firing of both the service secretary and the service chief predictably stunned the Air Force, the rest of the department, and Washington. But there were no dire repercussions. There would later be allegations that I fired the two of them because of their foot-dragging on ISR, or more commonly, because we disagreed on whether to build more F-22 combat aircraft, or on other modernization issues. But it was the Donald report alone that sealed their fate.

  At a press conference, I announced that I had asked former secretary of defense and energy and former CIA director Jim Schlesinger to lead a senior-level task force to recommend improvements to ensure that “the highest levels of accountability and control are maintained in the stewardship and operation of nuclear weapons and related materials and systems across the entire Department of Defense.” The Schlesinger panel identified further problems, including neglect in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. I believe the Air Force gave nuclear issues too low a priority. It had been at war in the skies over Iraq for seventeen years and over Afghanistan for seven. After the end of the Cold War, I believe the nuclear mission became a second-class citizen in the Air Force, a backwater starved of proper resources and the best people. The later focus on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan compounded the problem. It would be vital for the new secretary and chief of staff to correct that.

  After I announced recommended replacements for those jobs, I left Washington to visit three Air Force bases, where I wanted to explain my decisions to airmen and give them a chance to ask questions or just vent. I have always felt it important, after making a tough, or especially, a controversial decision, to be willing to meet face-to-face with those most affected. At Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, headquarters of Air Combat Command, the airmen, fighter pilots, and those who support them were respectful but cool. Their questions were thoughtful: What is the balance between current and future threats? How much drone capability do you intend to buy? A fighter wing commander asked about procuring more F-22s and whether the focus was too much on “the here and now versus future threats.” Why wasn’t it more widely known how much the Air Force was doing in the current wars? What other priorities should the new Air Force leadership have to make sure they were “playing as well with others as you would like”? Above all, the session with hundreds of airmen gave me a chance to explain the firings firsthand. Woody Allen has said that 90 percent of life is just showing up. I felt that just showing up at Langley demonstrated my respect for those who probably most vigorously disagreed with my decision on Wynne and Moseley.

  The reception at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs and at headquarters of Air Force Space Command was better, but the warmest reception was at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, headquarters of Air Mobility Command and Transportation Command, the latter led by General Norton Schwartz, who I had announced would be nominated to be the new Air Force chief of staff. These were the airmen who flew troops and equipment all over the world, and Schwartz was one of them. When I mentioned his name, there was a huge burst of applause. At all three bases, though, most of the questions were about current and future priorities. As was not the case in Washington, their eyes were on the mission, not on personalities.

  The firing of Moseley and Wynne led to one of the most awkward moments of my life. I received an invitation from Wynne to attend his farewell ceremony at the Air Force Memorial on June 20. I sought assurances that Mike genuinely wanted me to attend; he wasn’t just following protocol. Even though I knew it would be an uncomfortable situation, I agreed to attend and speak. When I arrived, Moseley and Wynne and their wives greeted me. My experience has always been that spouses take actions like mine much harder than do their husbands, and that certainly proved to be the case here. Everyone was respectful, but if looks could kill, I’d have been a goner. Wynne, Moseley, and I marched out to three big leather chairs in front of bleachers filled with Wynne’s family and friends. There was a lot of quiet murmuring about what the hell I was doing there, and I could feel the daggers pointed in my direction. As the ceremony went on, I kept waiting for a child to come up to me and give me a good kick in the shin and ask if I was the jerk who had fired his grandpa. I swore I would never put myself in that position again.

  To my surprise, Schwartz’s nomination proved difficult with Congress. Congressman Mike Rogers of Michigan called Schwartz to say he believed the general had misled him in 2003–4 as then-director of the Joint Staff when Rogers complained about unprotected arms caches in Iraq. He said he intended to so inform the White House and his congressional colleagues. A few weeks later Senator Levin told me we needed to meet early the following week to discuss the Schwartz nomination. I immediately agreed.

  The meeting took place in my office on July 28 and included Senators Levin and Warner, Mike Mullen, and me. Senators coming to the Pentagon to discuss a nomination was highly unusual, if not unprecedented, at least in my experience, and the stuff of high Washington drama. They said there were concerns about Schwartz’s forthrightness. Specifically, at a hearing on February 25, 2003, General Eric Shinseki, Army chief of staff, had famously testified that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed after the invasion of Iraq. Schwartz, then a three-star general assigned to the Joint Staff, testified the next day that the number of troops would depend upon the circumstances—for example, whether the post-Saddam Iraqi army was helpful. He did not reveal that Rumsfeld had specifically given instructions that no one testifying should speculate on troop numbers.

  Levin told me he thought Schwartz’s answer had been evasive.
He went on to say that Senator Bill Nelson of Florida was concerned about Schwartz’s candor on several occasions between February and October 2003. He added that Senator Saxby Chambliss thought Schwartz wasn’t strong enough for the job, a view shared by others. He said Schwartz needed to come up and testify again the next day and that Mullen and I needed to meet in executive session with the committee later the same day. No such meeting had taken place within the memory of anyone involved. On the twenty-ninth, prior to that session, Levin and Warner met with Shinseki to discuss the numbers debate in 2003, which the general said had been “all over the place.” He also quietly told both senators that Schwartz would make a good chief of staff of the Air Force. Warner called to tell me about the meeting.

  The executive session began at about five-thirty p.m. in a large conference room with the same configuration as the usual hearing room, the senators at a large U-shaped table, Mike and I at a small table some distance away. There were fifteen or sixteen senators, limited staff, and no press. Levin began by reading a long excerpt of Schwartz’s testimony in 2003 and raising the issue of candor. Warner described the meeting with Shinseki, leaving out the retired general’s endorsement of Schwartz. Levin then asked us to comment.

  I was inwardly steaming. I did not believe for a second that Schwartz had tried to mislead anyone in 2003 and felt that the senators, especially Levin, at that time had placed him in an impossible position, in essence demanding that a staff officer offer an opinion on a matter over which he had no decision-making authority and had specifically been instructed not to speculate—all to score political points against Rumsfeld and the president. For Schwartz’s sake, I curbed my anger and matter-of-factly came to his defense. I gave the senators my personal assurance that no one would be more forthcoming and candid with them than Schwartz. I told them I had led several very large institutions and had hired and fired a lot of people, had confidence in my judgment of people, and was confident Schwartz was the best man for the job. I added that not to confirm him would be a disaster for the Air Force, that the bench was thin and there was no obvious alternative. On the question of evasiveness in 2003, I said they needed to consider the context of the time, the fact that the troop numbers were changing constantly and that there had been no final decision by either the secretary or the president. Admiral Mullen was also strong in his defense of Schwartz’s integrity, reinforcing my comments. After the two-hour session ended, Levin told me that Schwartz’s nomination would have failed without the meeting.

  Schwartz, Mike Donley as secretary, and General Duncan McNabb as the new commander of Transportation Command were confirmed on August 1. A few days later I received a note from Senator Warner praising Mullen’s and my efforts on behalf of Schwartz. The whole affair left a very bad taste in my mouth nonetheless. Schwartz, a good man, had unnecessarily been put through a wringer. Politically motivated senators should have been put in the dock, not Schwartz.

  There were two other episodes involving the Air Force that took a lot of my time during 2008. The most difficult was the effort to select the contractor to build a new tanker aircraft for the Air Force. The two competitors were Boeing and a partnership of Northrop Grumman and Europe’s EADS/Airbus, and each had a support team in Congress from the states where the planes would be built. The Boeing team was comprised of members of the congressional delegations from Washington, Kansas, and, to a lesser extent, Missouri; the Airbus team was principally from Alabama. The contract was to build 179 tanker aircraft valued at $35 billion. It was the service’s highest acquisition priority. Originally the contract had been awarded to Boeing in an unusual leasing arrangement, but irregularities mooted the decision. The Boeing CEO and CFO resigned and at least one senior civilian Air Force official went to jail for handling the contract bid while simultaneously seeking employment with Boeing. The egregious problems were exposed by a corruption investigation pushed by Senator McCain, who went on the warpath against the Air Force. On December 1, 2006, even before my confirmation hearing, McCain asked me to explain to him how I would ensure that the tanker competition would be conducted “fully, fairly, and transparently.” When the contract was finally awarded to the Northrop/Airbus team in February 2008, it was protested by Boeing. The General Accounting Office issued a report in mid-June identifying 111 minor and major problems with the contracting process—half a dozen or so of real significance. Six days later I received a handwritten note from Jack Murtha, chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, with a straightforward statement: “You need to get rid of the AF acquisition team.”

  On July 9, I announced a limited rebid of the tanker contract that would be overseen not by the Air Force but by the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, logistics, and technology, John Young. Two months later, on September 10, I told Congress that I was terminating the tanker rebid because it had “become clear that the solicitation and award cannot be accomplished by January. Thus, I believe that rather than hand the next administration an incomplete and possibly contested process, we should cleanly defer this procurement to the next team.”

  I didn’t think it appropriate or wise to try to award a contract of this size and sensitivity in the final days of an outgoing administration, especially because the contract had become the most politically explosive and emotional procurement I had ever seen. 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. Members of Congress were outrageous in their claims and pressures, with Boeing supporters pushing “buy American” legislation—even though most of the Airbus planes eventually would have been built in Alabama by American workers—and pointing to Airbus’s unfair advantage because of subsidies from European governments. Airbus accused Boeing of unfair practices in the failure of the first two contract awards. 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 Boeing letterhead from her talking points. Both companies, and supporters of both in Congress, were all, in my view, reprehensible in the tactics and distortions they employed to drive the Defense Department to a decision in their favor. There was so much heat and so little light in the debate that I thought a cooling-off period would be beneficial. And so I punted the contract decision to my successor. To my great dismay, I would end up receiving my own punt.

  A very different kind of Air Force–related issue came up in the spring of 2008, a time when I was preoccupied with drawdowns in Iraq, conflict with the chiefs over the National Military Strategy and “next-war-itis,” growing concern over Afghanistan, and the Air Force’s reluctance to expand its ISR efforts aggressively.

  When it comes to the treatment of the remains of American servicemen and women killed in combat, no two places are more sensitive or more sacred than the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base and Arlington National Cemetery. Perfection in performance is expected at both, and both have been involved in recent years in inexcusable errors and lapses in judgment. The first of these lapses to come to my attention was at Dover. The remains of uniformed Americans who die overseas are flown to Dover AFB in Delaware, where the Air Force conducts autopsies for all the services and prepares the remains for onward transportation for burial. It is a solemn responsibility.

  The morning of May 9 my senior military assistant, Pete Chiarelli, received an e-mail from an Army lieutenant colonel who, at the request of a fallen soldier’s wife, had met his transfer case (casket) when it arrived at Dover. He wrote Chiarelli that the transfer from the plane had not been particularly dignified and that he had then followed the transfer vehicle carrying the remains of the soldier to an off-base crematorium that was marked as a pet crematorium. While he said there were separate facilities for pet and human remains, there was no indication of that on the exterior of the building. Chiarelli soon learned that the mortuary staff at Dover had contracted with a company that ran a local pet
crematorium to cremate the remains of some seventy-five servicemen. There had never been any mixing of human and pet remains.

  We had to act fast to fix this problem to prevent a huge public outcry. Beyond the facilities issue, when a number of the remains had been delivered to the crematorium, no U.S. military personnel stood vigil and ensured their dignified handling, which was contrary to policy. Cremations were stopped at this facility immediately, and new contracts signed with civilian mortuaries in the area. In each case, a uniformed military escort would stand vigil during the cremation. And the Air Force decided to build its own crematorium at the base. We informed the press of what had happened the evening of the same day we learned about it, along with the remedial measures, and our transparency was favorably reported. Unfortunately, this would not be the last problem at Dover.

  OTHER CHALLENGES

  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 the 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 ministers, on October 15, 2007, a Patriot missile at the U.S. base in Qatar was accidently 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 U.S. soldiers, opening his estate for recreational purposes. Fortunately, no one was hurt. How the hell does a Patriot missile just go off? I asked my staff rather rudely. I said all questions should be directed to Central Command.

  Mike Mullen brought me a more serious challenge on January 10, 2008, when he informed me that a U.S. satellite was falling. While there was a 10 percent or less chance of it landing in a populated area, it carried a toxic propellant, hydrazine, that was a threat to humans. Over the next several weeks, Strategic Command, under the leadership of General Kevin Chilton, developed options for shooting down the satellite because of the hydrazine. Chilton briefed President Bush on the plans. If we used one SM-3 missile launched from an Aegis destroyer, the odds of success were estimated at 79 percent; using two missiles, the odds were 91 percent. The president approved shooting down the satellite (the operation was dubbed Burnt Frost) and delegated the decision and timing to me. The optimal window for the launch was February 20, when I was aboard the E-4B on my way to Asia. I had a final conversation with Generals Cartwright and Chilton from the plane about 1:40 p.m. my time, and after discussing weather issues and deciding to say nothing publicly until after the shot, I gave the go-ahead. The missile was launched about two and a half hours later and destroyed the tumbling satellite. General Cartwright gave the press the details; there was no debris larger than a football, and the likelihood that the propellant tank was destroyed was “very good.” It was an impressive display of the capability of the SM-3 missile, a key component of our missile defense system. When I landed in Canberra, my Australian counterpart said, “Nice shot, Bob.”