About the same time the medevac issue emerged, the need for an MRAP-like vehicle designed for the unique conditions of Afghanistan became clear. With a casualty rate less than half that of the M1A1 tank and about one-fourth that of the Humvee, the MRAPs had proven their value on the flat terrain and relatively decent roads in Iraq. But these same vehicles were too heavy, hard to maneuver in a rugged landscape—they had virtually no off-road capability—and too wide for the narrow and usually primitive roads of Afghanistan. So again, under constant pressure from my office (and me), the MRAP task force—and industry—quickly designed a lighter, more maneuverable vehicle, the MRAP-ATV (all-terrain vehicle). We signed the initial production contract at the end of June 2009. The first MRAP-ATVs were delivered to the troops in Afghanistan in early November. The speed with which all this took place—less than a year—as with the original MRAPs, simply could not have been achieved through the regular bureaucratic process. And once again Congress had come through with the money.
A controversial issue affecting troops and their families arose early in the Obama administration. Since the Gulf War in 1991, the press had been prohibited from being present and photographing the flag-draped caskets of service members killed abroad when they arrived at the military mortuary facility at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The military services felt very strongly that these “dignified transfers” should be private, and they even discouraged families from traveling to Dover to witness the rite. Some of the media, on the other hand, argued that this policy was a politically inspired effort to prevent the American people from seeing the “real cost” of our wars abroad. Others contended that these returning heroes should be publicly recognized and honored. I disagreed with the no-media policy, but when I looked into changing it in early 2008, the resistance inside the Pentagon from both military and civilians was so strong, I dropped the idea.
Then on February 9, 2009, at a press conference, the new president said he wanted the matter to be reviewed. The next day, based solely on reading what he had said, I again directed a review of media access to the transfer of fallen service members at Dover and told a press conference of my own that I had done so. I said I thought a change made sense if the needs of the families could be met and privacy concerns satisfied. I imposed a two-week deadline for the review.
The review evoked a wide range of responses. Several groups representing military families and families of the fallen were opposed to any change in policy, I think fearing a media circus. The Marine Corps adamantly opposed any change. The Air Force and the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness—the civilian component of the department responsible for such matters—thought no action should be taken until data on family and service members’ views was gathered. The Army and the Navy supported a change but with complete deference to the wishes of the families: if a family wanted no press coverage, that was final; if they were agreeable to media coverage, then it would be allowed at a respectful distance. Those opposed to a change were, I believed, sincere in their concern that asking the families about media coverage only added another tough decision at an incredibly difficult moment in their lives. The formal recommendation that came to me on February 19, reflecting a “universal consensus,” was to delay any decision until service members, family members, support groups, and other interested parties had been heard from. I gave them a week to do so.
Political scientists, historians, and reporters are often completely unaware of events or experiences unseen by the public eye that influence important decisions. I often reminded colleagues that presidents and other senior officials listen to a wide array of voices other than those in official government channels. In the case of my decision on Dover, an HBO movie, Taking Chance, released that February, had an important impact. The story follows a Marine lieutenant colonel (played by Kevin Bacon) as he escorts the remains of Marine Lance Corporal Chance Phelps from Dover to his hometown in Wyoming, ordinary Americans making gestures of respect all along the way. After seeing the film, I was resolved that we should publicly honor as many of our fallen warriors as possible, beginning at Dover.
On February 24, Mullen and I briefed the president on the results of the review and outreach, and with his strong support, two days later I announced at a press conference that, having heard from the services and organizations representing military families, I had directed that “the decision regarding media coverage of the transfer process at Dover should be made by those most directly affected—on an individual basis by the families of the fallen. We ought not presume to make that decision in their place.” For families wanting media coverage, it would be allowed at a respectful distance. For other families, the transfer would be private. The person designated by the fallen service member as the primary next of kin would speak for the family, although our long-term plan was to offer service members the opportunity to choose for themselves whether they would want media present for their return should they be killed. The transfer of Air Force Staff Sergeant Phillip Myers of Hopewell, Virginia, on April 6 was the first to be photographed by the media under the new policy. I attended Myers’s funeral at Arlington on April 27.
It seemed to me that some families would want to greet their fallen child or spouse when he or she first returned to American soil at Dover. Defense Department policy was to discourage families from doing so, although some families made their way to Dover anyway, paying for their own plane reservations and hotel accommodations. I decided we should make the arrangements and assume the cost for the families who wanted to go. The Air Force outdid itself in implementing this decision. In January 2010, a new Center for the Families of the Fallen, a six-thousand-square-foot space with a comforting, serene environment, opened at Dover. That spring construction began on a small hotel as well as a meditation center and adjoining garden for the families. By 2010, some 75 percent of the families of returning fallen service members were going to Dover to be present when their hero returned to America, and about 55 percent allowed media coverage.
I made my first visit to Dover on March 16, in the middle of the decision process. As was often the case, the chartered Boeing 747 carrying the remains arrived at night. As we were waiting for the transfer to take place, I asked my staff how the four service members had been killed. I was emotional that night, and when I was told that the soldiers had been in a Humvee that was hit by an IED, I turned on my staff and through clenched teeth angrily demanded, “Find out why they didn’t have their goddamned MRAPs yet.”
Uniformed in fatigues and white gloves, the Air Force honor guard that would carry out the transfer marched by us, and we fell into line and cadence with them to move planeside. The night was cold, with wind and rain. The plane was bathed in floodlights, and the side cargo door was open high above the ground, allowing us to glimpse the first two plain aluminum flag-draped transfer cases. I had told my staff to arrange for me to be alone with the four, so I climbed the front steps of the plane and was escorted to the rear cargo area and the four fallen. They were Army Sergeant Christopher Abeyta, Specialist Robert Weiner, Private First Class Norman Cain, all from the 178th Infantry Regiment, and Air Force Staff Sergeant Timothy Bowles from Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska. Alone with them, I was overwhelmed. I knelt beside each for a moment, placing my hand on the flag covering each case. Tears flooded my eyes. I did not want to leave them, but I finally sensed the chaplain move close behind me, and so I rose, returned to the tarmac, and saluted as, one by one, with extraordinary precision, respect, and care—even tenderness—the honor guard transferred each case to a waiting vehicle. There was complete silence on the plane back to Washington.
A month later I was visiting wounded at Walter Reed. I walked into one room where a young soldier was sitting on his bed holding a copy of that day’s Washington Post with a story about my March visit to Dover, including my intemperate question about why those four service members had not been in an MRAP. He read aloud from the story what I had demanded of my staff, and then he began to cr
y as he told me, “Your MRAP saved my life.” I managed to keep my composure—barely. I didn’t fully appreciate at the time the emotional toll my duties were taking on me.
Another issue I had tried to resolve early in my tenure was stop-loss, the practice of keeping soldiers on active duty after their scheduled service was completed. I knew that the practice was allowed by the contracts soldiers signed, but I considered it a breach of faith. Stop-loss was obviously unpopular among the troops, but it was also unpopular in Congress. Jack Murtha, chairman of the Defense Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, pushed through legislation providing special compensation of $500 a month for the time any soldier was stop-lossed, retroactive to September 11, 2001. Ultimately we estimated there were some 174,000 eligible claimants, and Congress appropriated over $500 million for the retroactive pay.
A significant number of those stop-lossed were sergeants. Senior Army officers argued that their mustering out would deprive units of their experienced enlisted leadership. More than 14,000 soldiers were stop-lossed at one point. The surge in Iraq made ending the practice impossible in 2007 and 2008, but it remained on my to-do list. I returned to the issue early in the Obama administration. Thanks to the drawdowns in Iraq, Army chief of staff General George Casey and Pete Chiarelli came up with a plan to end stop-loss, which I announced on March 18, 2009, two days after my visit to Dover. Units of the Army Reserve would begin mobilizing and deploying without using stop-loss in August, the National Guard in September, and active duty units in January 2010. The goal was to reduce the number of those in stop-loss by 40 percent by March 2010, 50 percent by June, and to end the practice altogether by March 2011. The Army met these goals, and I was very proud of that.
There were a number of other matters affecting men and women in uniform and their families that remained high on my priority list. We still had to do better in getting needed equipment to the field faster; more intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) was always on the list. We needed to keep improving the special units on active duty posts and bases—warrior transition units—created to provide a home for wounded troops while they recovered before returning to active duty or leaving the service. Ever more focus needed to be placed on post-traumatic stress and the shocking rise in suicides. We needed to expand and sustain programs for child care, family counseling, and others helping families. And we needed a much greater effort to eliminate sexual assault, a criminal act that destroyed trust, morale, unit cohesion—and lives.
Occasionally, amid so many issues and problems affecting our troops that wore me down, there would be an incident or moment that made me laugh or raised my spirits. Two such occurred in the first few months of the Obama administration. One morning in May, on the front page of The New York Times, there was a photograph of a soldier firing his rifle at Taliban attackers from the ramparts of Firebase Restrepo in Afghanistan. An Associated Press photographer had captured Specialist Zachary Boyd defending his firebase dressed in helmet, body armor, flip-flops, and pink boxer shorts with little red hearts in which were printed “I love New York.” I burst out laughing. “Any soldier who goes into battle against the Taliban in pink boxers and flip-flops has a special kind of courage,” I said publicly. “What an incredible innovation in psychological warfare!” I loved that picture so much that an enlargement hung on the wall outside my office for the next two years.
For inspiration, I would turn again and again to Lieutenant Jason “Jay” Redman, a Navy SEAL who had been shot seven times and had undergone nearly two dozen surgeries. He had placed a hand-drawn sign on the door to his room at Bethesda Naval Hospital. It read:
ATTENTION. To all who enter here. If you are coming into this room with sorrow or to feel sorry for my wounds, go elsewhere. The wounds I received I got in a job I love, doing it for people I love, supporting the freedom of a country I deeply love. I am incredibly tough and will make a full recovery. What is full? That is the absolute utmost physically my body has the ability to recover. Then I will push that about 20% further through sheer mental tenacity. This room you are about to enter is a room of fun, optimism, and intense rapid regrowth. If you are not prepared for that, go elsewhere. From: The Management.
I met with Jay and his family in early February 2009, when he returned to Washington to donate his sign to the hospital. I drew great strength from young Jay Redman and from so many like him I encountered. Their example kept me going.
I mentioned earlier our need to prepare for future potential large-scale conflicts against other modern military powers while preparing for and fighting the conflicts we were already in or most likely to face in the years ahead—combating insurgents, terrorists, smaller rogue states, or groups taking advantage of chaos in failed states and humanitarian disasters. This had been at the heart of my disagreement with the Joint Chiefs over the National Defense Strategy.
I resumed the dialogue on these issues with the senior military and civilian leadership of the department in early January 2009, before Obama was inaugurated. It was the last gathering of the Bush Defense team, and the night before we began, the president and Mrs. Bush invited the chiefs and combatant commanders and their wives, along with several wounded warriors, to the White House for a wonderful, if poignant, farewell dinner. The next morning we got down to business. The assigned reading was my speech at the National Defense University—which had subsequently been adapted and published in the journal Foreign Affairs—where I had laid out my views. I led off our meeting by saying that I was “determined … to ‘operationalize’ the strategic themes I have been talking about for the past two years.” I warned that the strategic environment facing us had altered dramatically with a change in administrations, domestic and global financial crises, waning public support for increased defense spending, a strategic shift from Iraq to Afghanistan, seven years of constant combat operations and the resulting stress on the force, and resolve by Congress and the new administration to “fix” defense acquisition.
Circumstances had presented us with an immensely difficult bureaucratic challenge. In 2009, we had to carry out four complex, difficult periodic assessments required by Congress (the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Nuclear Posture Review, the Space Review, and the Ballistic Missile Review), all intended to shape Defense planning and budgets. We also had to execute the FY2009 budget, get approval of the FY2009 war supplemental, build the FY2010 budget and supplemental within a few weeks, and by fall develop the FY2011 budget. For a bureaucracy as ponderous as ours and the long lead times to complete each of these endeavors, this was a staggering agenda. I told the senior military and civilian leadership of the department we did not have the time to do all these things sequentially, and so even as the congressionally mandated reviews were being drafted, we needed to use them to help shape the budgets. I made clear this presented us with an opportunity to use these parallel processes to accelerate the strategic and programmatic changes that needed to be made. I asked for their opinions and ideas on how to proceed. I posed some tough questions:
• Did I get it wrong at NDU? “You should know me well enough by now to know that I welcome real debate on these fundamental issues.”
• What were the implications of our inability to anticipate where we would use military force next?
• How would we achieve the rebalancing I called for to deal with hybrid conflicts covering a spectrum of capabilities from the primitive to high tech—and, at the same time, be prepared to respond to future threats from “near peers” (e.g., China)? How much did these capabilities overlap?
• How should we assess real risk, and how would that drive investment?
• How should we look across the services in assessing risk? For example, could we mitigate risk caused by reducing one or another program in one service by doing more in a complementary capability in another service?
My first opportunity to translate some of these ideas into action actually had occurred in the fall of 2008 while preparing the FY2010 budget. Members o
f Congress from both parties had complained repeatedly about the wars being funded through “supplemental” appropriations, outside the regular “base” budget of the Defense Department. It took me a while to realize this was political bullshit. Most members of Congress loved supplementals because they could irresponsibly hang all manner of parochial, often stupid, and militarily unnecessary expenditures onto those bills—earmarks for their districts and states—with no regard for fiscal discipline. Even worse, members would often eliminate items we had requested in the supplementals to fight the wars and substitute their pet projects. The Pentagon was not innocent in this regard either, as a good deal of defense spending that would normally be in the base budget—from Army reorganization to an additional F-35 fighter—got shoveled into the war funding request, which would make weaning the military off supplemental funding all the more painful in the future.
In any event, given bipartisan criticism of the supplementals, I decided we should begin to move certain war-related costs that we knew should continue beyond the wars themselves—including, for example, the expansion of the Special Forces and programs to help military families—into the regular defense budget. Anticipating that we would be deploying the equivalent of several brigades to various hot spots around the world for years to come, for everything from small-scale conflicts to training and assistance missions, as an experiment we added $25 billion to the regular budget to pay for such operations, thereby reducing the need for future supplemental appropriations. In their last meeting with President Bush, the Joint Chiefs pressed their budget concerns, and the president encouraged them to make his last defense budget very forward-leaning in terms of modernization, reequipping our forces after the two wars, and funding “unplanned contingencies.” His encouragement only abetted the traditional practice of a departing administration leaving behind a budget that would immediately be ripped apart by the new team. Only this time, of course, I was “the new team.”
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Page 40