The votes of several undecided senators were influenced by the results of the Pentagon review, and contrary to most expectations even that fall, on December 18 the Senate voted to repeal DADT, and the president signed it into law on December 22. In a not-so-subtle spike of the football, the stage planners at the White House made sure the Marine Corps flag was prominently displayed behind the president as he signed. The massive bureaucratic wheels of the Pentagon began to move with uncommon speed in conforming Defense policies and regulations to the new law and in preparing training materials for the forces. By late February, training was under way for commanders and leaders and then was extended to all two million men and women in uniform. The service chiefs, after all their concern and skepticism, led this massive effort effectively and positively. The new commandant of the Marine Corps, James Amos, who had been, like his predecessor, the most negative toward repeal among the service chiefs, was hell-bent on the Marines being trained best and first.
The training went smoothly, but the certification process was not complete before I left office. The president signed the third and final certification required to bring repeal into effect—Secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman Mike Mullen had already certified—on July 22, 2011, three weeks and two days after I retired. Under the terms of the repeal law, DADT was abolished in the American armed forces on September 22, 2011. The transition went as smoothly as anyone could have hoped. We had turned a page in history, and there was barely a ripple.
Some might argue the transition went so smoothly that our fears and concerns had been greatly overdrawn and that implementation could have taken place much faster. I will always believe implementation proceeded with so few incidents and issues because of the planning and preparation that preceded it.
THE WAR WITHIN (CONTINUED)
Getting the troops in the fight what they needed continued to be a challenge in 2010. In Afghanistan, the all-terrain MRAPs began flowing in early in the year, providing much better—and much needed—protection for the troops when they were in vehicles. We were making considerable progress in getting more aircraft and drones into the theater for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. But as the strategy changed to emphasize protecting the Afghan people, more troops were moving into hostile terrain on foot. Casualties from IEDs were increasing and the wounds becoming more grievous. When a soldier stepped on an IED, all too often the result was legs and arms blown off, with further blast damage to the groin, pelvis, and abdomen. Dirt and debris was blown into these wounds, further complicating medical treatment. Because of improvements in medevac times and battlefield medicine, most of those so horribly wounded lived and would face years of surgeries and rehabilitation, years of struggle and pain.
I earlier described meeting in the spring of 2009 the wars’ first quadruple amputee, Private Brendan Marrocco, wounded in Iraq by an IED. Nearly a year later at Walter Reed, I met the second quadruple amputee, a Marine injured by an IED in Afghanistan. Marrocco, by then with prosthetic arms and legs, was the Marine’s hero and role model, giving him hope that he, too, could become functional again. I had signed the orders sending them both into combat, and while it broke my heart to see them like this, their courage and determination to move on with their lives left me in awe.
Months later the cost of war came close to home when my great-nephew e-mailed me that a high school friend of his, Jonathan Blank, from the little town of Augusta, Kansas, had lost both legs in Afghanistan. I visited Jonathan at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He, like Marrocco and so many others I saw, was so young, so vulnerable. And so amazingly tough.
Each visit to a hospital steeled my resolve to drive the Pentagon bureaucracy to do more to protect these kids. The MRAP–all terrain vehicles and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets were important but not enough. As we began the Afghan surge, 75 percent of all casualties were due to IEDs, 90 percent of them in the south. And the bombs were getting bigger. In 2008, the average size of an IED was ten kilograms; by early 2010, it was three times that; in 2008, 10 percent had been over seventy-five kilograms, and that number too had nearly tripled by 2010. A growing source of explosives for the IEDs was a common fertilizer, ammonium nitrate, which was trucked in from Pakistan. We had to slow that flow.
There were many technologies and much equipment that could help troops find IEDs before they injured or killed someone, as well as provide more protection for our most exposed outposts. These included handheld mine and explosive detectors, and large tethered airships (aerostats) providing eyes in the sky over outposts and operations. The wide diversity of the equipment meant that multiple organizations and bureaucratic layers were involved in acquisition and fielding, and that cost time. I wanted these additional capabilities deployed fast enough to match the surge of 30,000 more troops going to Afghanistan in the spring of 2010.
In November 2009, I was made aware of the problems we faced: there was no master integrator of all the capabilities being pushed into the theater; our intelligence analysis was sufficiently focused neither on the enemy’s IED tactics and techniques nor on our own approach to disrupting and destroying the IED networks; we had to figure out how better to use the dozens of Liberty surveillance aircraft we had in Afghanistan—especially deciding whether to use them to develop information about the IED networks or to provide coverage for road and troop protection; we needed to get all the Pentagon task forces fused together to focus on the top priorities; we required more analysts and for them to develop targets faster; information about IED detection had to be shared more effectively among the different regional commands in Afghanistan; and we needed to move counter-IED assets faster from Iraq to Afghanistan. The briefing proved, yet again, that the Pentagon was not properly structured to support a constantly changing battlefield or to fight an agile and adaptable enemy.
Once again I went outside the regular bureaucracy to tackle these issues and to do so urgently. On December 4, 2009, I established the Counter-IED Task Force, cochaired by the undersecretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics, Ash Carter, and Marine Lieutenant General Jay Paxton, director of operations for the Joint Staff. Like the MRAP and ISR task forces, this one was to focus on what could be delivered to the theater within weeks and months. Carter and Paxton seized the opportunity with real passion.
Others, however, still needed to have a fire lit under them. I met with the leadership of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO)—the organization formed in 2004 to lead department-wide efforts to deal with IEDs—on January 8, 2010, and told them, “Your agency has lost its sense of urgency. Money is no object. Tell me what you need.” We still had two wars going on, one of them about to get significantly bigger. Three years into the job, I just couldn’t figure out why I still needed to be exhorting people on the urgency of taking care of the troops.
By the end of January, Carter and Paxton had developed plans to disrupt the fertilizer supply chain—now designated HMEs, homemade explosives, including the deployment of nearly 90,000 handheld explosive detectors. They proposed increasing the number of aerostats from thirty to sixty-four by September, growing the number of tower-based sensors at our forward bases from 300 to 420, accelerating the production of MRAP-ATVs, and surging mine detectors and ground penetrating radars; they even had developed plans to fulfill my commitment to our allies that we would provide them with counter-IED training and equipment. Because the kind of detectors needed for a patrol might vary depending on the nature of the mission, instead of every unit getting a standard set of detection equipment, I thought we should have a kind of warehouse at the local level holding every kind of counter-IED kit available so that troops could draw whatever detection or protective devices were most appropriate to that day’s mission or a unit’s operational environment. Carter and Paxton even figured out a way to do that.
By the end of March 2010, arrangements were in place to buy significantly more minirobots, handheld command-wire detection devices, electronic warfare kits
, mine rollers, and explosive trace detectors. No idea for a new technology, technique, or approach was considered out of bounds. But for all the technology, there was common agreement that one sensor worked better at detecting IEDs than anything else: a dog’s nose. And so acquiring and training many more dogs became a high priority. New counter-IED capabilities of all kinds just for the surge troops would cost $3.5 billion, and much more for the entire deployed force in Afghanistan. I thought it was worth every cent. The task force continued its efforts into 2011, developing and deploying whatever capabilities might provide better detection and warning of IEDs but also better personal protection for the troops, including developing protective underwear to diminish IED damage to the groin, genitals, and abdomen.
Despite the achievements of this and the other task forces I established, I was still troubled that it was all so ad hoc. I was not fixing the bureaucratic problem, I was bypassing it in the interest of speeding matériel to the battlefield. Ash Carter and I discussed this repeatedly. I asked him to think about how to institutionalize what we were doing. If my successors were unwilling to breach the bureaucratic wall, how could we ensure that future war fighters could get what they needed in a hurry? We needed an acquisition “express lane” at the departmental level to ensure that urgent needs were met. The biggest challenge with the existing system—the Joint Urgent Operational Needs process—was finding the money for those needs. When approved, any such “need” was sent to the most appropriate military service, which was asked to pay for it. All too often the service lacked the money or decided its own priorities were higher and failed to produce the funding. We needed to have a system whereby unfunded battlefield needs would be brought to the attention of the secretary or deputy secretary, who could then direct that funding be found from any source within the entire department. We had not yet formalized this approach when I retired, but I left confident that Carter, who shared my passion for protecting the troops, would make it happen, especially when he was elevated to deputy secretary a few months later.
In dealing with America’s vulnerability to cyber attacks on the computers so vital to our critical infrastructure, business, and government, we were in uncharted waters both bureaucratically and legally. There was a deep division within the government—in both the executive branch and Congress—over who should be in charge of our domestic cyber defense: government or business, the Defense Department’s National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, or some other entity. There was a split between those whose priority was national security and those whose priority was the protection of privacy and civil liberties. 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.
The Defense Department was not well organized internally to deal with cyber issues. The director of national intelligence under President Bush, Mike McConnell, had urged me in 2008 to create a separate combatant command to deal with cyber threats. We were just then establishing Africa Command, and I thought the president and Congress would balk at yet another major command. But I made some organizational changes in the fall of 2008 and in June 2009 established Cyber Command as a subordinate component of Strategic Command. I recommended that the president nominate Army Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, to run this “subunified” command as well. Its purpose would be to better organize Defense operations in cyberspace, to ensure our freedom of access to cyberspace, and to oversee investments in people, resources, and technology to prevent disruptions of service to the military.
On May 21, 2010, I took the step suggested two years before by McConnell and established an independent Cyber Command with now-General Alexander in command. (Part of my motivation for creating the independent command was to get a fourth star for Alexander, whom I considered one of the smartest, best officers I ever met. Without such a command and promotion, I feared we would lose him to retirement.) I also created a new civilian office to lead policy development and provide oversight to the new command. Overall, thanks to the NSA and other components in Defense devoted to information and cyber security, and with these organizational changes, I felt reasonably comfortable that Defense Department cyber networks were protected, even though they were attacked by hackers many times a day. A major initiative, led by Deputy Secretary Lynn, to get key defense industries to come voluntarily under our cyber umbrella for protection, was also enjoying considerable success. By mid-2010, I thought we had made considerable progress.
Not so in the rest of government. A major issue was the role of the NSA. Specifically, privacy advocates and civil libertarians were loath to use this military intelligence agency to protect cyber networks at home. The real-world implication of their position was creation of some kind of domestic counterpart to the NSA. I thought that was sheer idiocy. Time and again I argued that there wasn’t enough money, time, or human talent to create a domestic clone. When we got warning in the summer of 2010 that a major cyber attack was being planned on the United States in the fall, I saw an opportunity to break the stalemate.
I devised a politically risky but potentially successful way to bypass the entire bureaucracy, including the White House staff, and present the president with a solution. To somewhat oversimplify, as secretary of defense I had responsibility for national-security-related cyber matters outside the United States, and under the law, the secretary of homeland security—Janet Napolitano—had responsibility for network protection inside the United States. I invited Janet to lunch. We met on July 7, and I proposed that we assign several of our top people to work together urgently on a plan for her department to be able to use the NSA to defend U.S. domestic cyber networks. My idea was that I would appoint a senior homeland security person—recommended by Napolitano—as an additional deputy director of the NSA, with the authority to use the agency’s unique capabilities to protect domestic computer networks. This homeland security appointee would have his or her own general counsel inside the NSA, and together we would build firewalls to protect privacy and civil liberties, to ensure that the wide authority that the NSA had for operating abroad was limited at home.
We met again for lunch a week later to review a preliminary draft proposal. We made some adjustments, and the two of us presented the proposal to the president in the Oval Office on July 27 (unheard-of speed in Washington). We had bypassed everyone else in government—but we told the president the two of us were the ones with operational responsibility, and we could make this work. We told him he could have John Brennan quickly run it through the interagency coordination process (especially the Justice Department) to make sure we hadn’t missed something, but that he ought to be able to approve our signing a memorandum of understanding by August 15. Napolitano and I met on August 5 with Brennan in his West Wing basement office, a large but low-ceilinged and cluttered room. With his support in moving the proposal quickly, within three weeks of our meeting with him, the president signed off on the proposal.
Napolitano and I had briefly been able—with the president’s support—to part the bureaucratic Red Sea, but the waters soon came crashing back together. Although we fairly quickly made the organizational and personnel decisions and changes at NSA to implement our plan, months later General Alexander told me that Homeland Security wasn’t much using the new authority. I don’t know why to this day. But because of the failure to make this or something like it work—along with political paralysis in Congress on how to deal with the cyber challenge—the country remains dangerously vulnerable, as my successor starkly pointed out in a speech in 2012.
The process by which the secretary of defense formally conveys presidential authority to use military force to combatant commanders is through the preparation and signature of “execution orders,” and they apply to the use of force ou
tside war theaters such as Iraq and Afghanistan. These orders, called EXORDs, usually are quite specific, but there were some on the books from the Bush administration, particularly in the counterterrorism arena, that provided combatant commanders broad authority to launch operations without further authorization—particularly when the opportunity to hit a target might require a very fast decision. In every case, the president had broadly authorized the use of lethal force, but I was uncomfortable with any arrangement where use of that force would catch the president by surprise. Under President Bush, I made clear that whatever the EXORD said, I wanted to be informed of any action beforehand so I could inform the president.
In 2010, I decided we should review all the EXORDs to bring the language in them into conformity with my practice of informing the president in advance. Neither Obama nor his advisers had reviewed the EXORDs approved by President Bush in detail. What I had envisioned as a largely mechanical effort to ensure that the president was properly informed became a broad, time-consuming interagency effort led by an NSS always eager to micromanage the Pentagon. The effort on our side was led by Michèle Flournoy and the assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict, Mike Vickers. We often had to push back hard to keep the White House and State Department from getting too far into our military knickers, but at the end of a year’s work, we had updated the EXORDs, ensured that except in the most extraordinary circumstances the secretary and president would know about operations prior to launch, and had Obama administration buy-in. When we were finished, there didn’t seem to be too much unhappiness on the part of the combatant commanders about the curtailment of their unilateral authority to launch military operations.
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Page 58