Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

by Gates, Robert M

  At another point in the hearing, I acknowledged that I was preoccupied with “mission creep” in Libya and that, given our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I needed help from Congress to limit our role. The House committee was far more critical than the Senate of the president’s failure to get congressional approval for the Libya action. Members also pressed me on the cost. I said we had nineteen ships and 18,000 troops committed to the operation, and the cost for the first eleven days was about $550 million, and probably $40 million a month going forward. I agreed with several members that “we should not overestimate our ability to influence” what would happen after Qaddafi fell. I acknowledged we knew little about the rebels, but “we know a lot about Qaddafi and that is reason enough to help them.”

  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 U.S. 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.

  I later confided to my staff that I had considered resigning over the Libya issue. I told them I had decided not to leave because I was so close to the end of my tenure anyway; it would just look petulant. Frustrated, I said I had tried to raise all the issues for which the administration was being criticized—an open-ended conflict, an ill-defined mission, Qaddafi’s fate, and what came after him—but the president “had not been interested in getting into any of that.” I was, moreover, at the end of my tether with White House–NSS micromanagement. The same day the military campaign began, I started to get questions at a principals’ meeting from Donilon and Daley about our targeting of Libyan ground forces. I angrily shot back, “You are the biggest micromanagers I have ever worked with. You can’t use a screwdriver reaching from D.C. to Libya on our military operations. The president has given us his strategic direction. For God’s sake, now let us [Defense] run it.” My well of patience had gone dry.

  All twenty-eight NATO allies voted to support the military mission in Libya, but just half provided some kind of contribution, and only eight actually provided aircraft for the strike mission. The United States ultimately had to provide the lion’s share of reconnaissance capability and most of 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.

  Libya’s population of 6.4 million is made up of a mix of ethnic groups and indigenous Berber tribesmen. It has been occupied, dominated, or governed over the past 2,500 years by the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Ottomans, Italians, British, and French. Its three historical regions—Cyrenaica, the eastern coastal area; Tripolitania, the central and western coastal area centered on Tripoli; and Fezzan, the southwestern part of the country—were politically unified only in 1934, and the autonomy of the regions was reduced largely through Qaddafi’s repression (although even at his strongest, he had to pay close attention to tribal politics). In short, Libya as a unified entity is a relatively recent phenomenon, created by foreigners. Problems abound there. Can a weak central government hold the country together in the face of long-standing centrifugal pressures? We shall see.

  I believe we are in the early stages of what is likely to be a very long period of instability and change in the Arab world. Above all, we must stop pretending to ourselves that we can predict (or shape) the outcome. At a White House meeting at the end of March 2011, U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford asserted that “Assad is no Qaddafi. There is little likelihood of mass atrocities. The Syrian regime will answer challenges aggressively but will try to minimize the use of lethal force.” He would be proven horribly wrong.

  Fundamental questions remain 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 (as in Algeria and Egypt)? 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 the 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 United States, 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 United States 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 2007, the challenge of the early twenty-first century is that crises don’t come and go—they all seem to come and stay.

  CHAPTER 14

  At War to the Last Day

  I knew I wouldn’t be able to coast through my last six months as secretary, but as I flew back to Washington, D.C., from Christmas vacation, I had no idea how hard it would be right up to the last days. The Arab revolutions beginning in January and our subsequent military operations against Libya were daunting enough. But there were still big internal fights coming over the next steps in both Iraq and Afghanistan; another budget battle looming; major issues with China, Russia, and the Middle East; getting the president’s agreement on a new chairman of the Joint Chiefs; and, conducting a daring—and dangerous—raid into Pakistan. I had no choice but to sprint to the finish line.

  CHINA, RUSSIA, AND THE MIDDLE EAST

  When Chinese defense minister Liang invited me in October 2010 to return to China, as I said earlier, he explicitly asked me to make the trip before President Hu Jintao’s state visit to the United States in late January. Liang’s restrained behavior at that fall meeting of Asian defense ministers in Hanoi and in our bilateral discussions there indicated that the People’s Liberation Army had been told to help set a positive atmosphere for Hu’s trip. When I arrived in Beijing on January 9 (thirty years after my first visit), it was obvious the Chinese were pulling out all the stops to make my visit a success. From closed-off roads and highways to banquet sites, I was given head-of-state treatment. They had been standoffish for three years because of our arms sales to Taiwan, but now they welcomed me warmly.

  In every meeting, I emphasized the importance of strengthening the military-to-military relationship, including a strategic dialogue covering nuclear weapons, missile defense, space, and cyber affairs. An on-again, off-again relationship served no one’s interests. Sustained and reliable ties insulated from political ups and downs were, I said, essential to reduce miscommunication, misunderstanding, and miscalculation. I also warned that North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs had reached a point where the president had concluded they represen
ted “a direct threat to the United States,” and we would react accordingly if they did not stop. I said that after thirty years of patiently enduring North Korea’s lethal provocations, public opinion in South Korea had changed with the sinking of their warship and shelling of their islands. They intended to react forcefully to such provocations in the future, and that raised the risk of escalating hostilities on the Korean peninsula. The Chinese should weigh in with North Korea to stand down. I also made clear our view that China’s continued aggressive response to operations of U.S. aircraft and ships operating in international airspace and waters in the South China Sea could lead to an incident that neither country wanted. We were within our rights, and they should back off. Of course, I couched all I said in diplomatic terms full of sweetness and light (I could do that when the occasion demanded), but they understood what I was saying.

  All my interlocutors supported strengthening the military-to-military relationship in principle but were hesitant about a sustained, formal, high-level diplomatic-military strategic dialogue, arguing that there were already multiple mechanisms for such discussions. Given the sensitive agenda I had proposed, I think the PLA leaders were reluctant to sign on to a dialogue that would include Chinese civilian officials from the party and the Foreign Ministry. (It reminded me of the Soviet general in the strategic arms talks in the early 1970s who complained to the U.S. delegation head that he should stop talking about the detailed capabilities of Soviet missiles and nuclear weapons because the civilians on the Soviet side weren’t cleared for that information.) They didn’t want to dampen the atmosphere of my visit, so they didn’t reject the strategic dialogue idea; they just said they’d study it.

  While each senior Chinese official was careful to frame his comments on other topics positively, they had some tough messages of their own. Liang said the military relationship had been “on again, off again” for thirty years. There had been “six ons and six offs.” The offs were due to U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and to “harmful discriminating actions against China,” such as our surveillance operations. On these two issues, he said, “there is no space for compromise or discretion when it comes to our core interests.” We should make mutual respect, trust, reciprocity, and benefit the guiding principles of our military relationship, he said, and “mutual respect means accommodating our core interests.” I got the point about core interests.

  I went through all the familiar points about Taiwan. 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. I said the United States did not consider China an enemy or Cold War–style rival, but I warned that since August 2010, PLA aircraft had on several occasions come very close to our planes—I showed him a photograph of a PLA fighter closing to within thirty feet of one of our aircraft—which raised the risk of a serious incident. We then faced the press together, and Liang was exceptionally positive. He said we had reached consensus on a number of issues; the talks had been positive, constructive, and productive; and a healthy military relationship was in both our interests. He announced that the chief of the PLA general staff—Admiral Mullen’s counterpart—would visit the United States that spring. I essentially said ditto.

  The chosen “bad cop” for my visit was the foreign minister, who treated me to a long, condescending, and occasionally threatening diatribe that covered all the bases: Taiwan, surveillance, North Korea, U.S. naval deployments around Korea, and China’s need to build up its military defenses. I responded in kind.

  Vice President Xi Jinping (then President Hu’s likely successor) responded to my concerns about North Korea with some candor by acknowledging that the situation had become a concern for both China and the United States and, further, that the recent escalation of tension and continued enrichment of uranium “had put the six-party talks in a grim and grave situation.” Xi said China had made every effort to mediate and to keep the United States informed of those efforts. He added that a denuclearized and stable Korean peninsula was in everyone’s interest.

  He raised U.S. arms sales to Taiwan almost in a perfunctory way. He, like others, downplayed China’s strength and economic success, saying that while China’s economy was the second largest in the world, GDP per person was one-tenth that of the United States, and that the gap between rural and urban China was even bigger. Liang had commented that China’s military was two to three decades behind “advanced” militaries—meaning the United States and our strongest NATO allies—and was “not a military threat to the world.”

  Despite President Hu’s desire to have my visit be picture-perfect to pave the way for his state visit to Washington just a little over a week later, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, the PLA nearly wrecked both trips. 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 canceling the rest of the visit or part of it, or ignoring the insult. U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, seconded by my senior China policy expert, Michael Schiffer, came up with the best approach: as I had been embarrassed, I should turn the tables and embarrass the PLA.

  I met with President Hu midafternoon on January 11 in the Great Hall of the People, in a reception room roughly the size of Grand Central Station. The two of us sat at the head of a horseshoe-shaped arrangement of overstuffed easy chairs in which we and our colleagues wallowed, a setting that required us both to use microphones. After Hu’s opening pleasantries and recital of standard Chinese talking points, I noted to Hu that everyone had been focused on ensuring as positive an atmosphere as possible for his visit to Washington, but I had noticed in the Chinese media a few hours earlier reports of the rollout of the PLA’s new stealth fighter. I told Hu the U.S. press was trying to figure out the significance of this test in the middle of my visit and just before his trip. I said I was worried that the U.S. press would present the test as a negative development in the relationship and asked the president of China to advise me on how to explain the test to them. Hu laughed nervously as he turned to his military aides and asked, Is this true? A furious discussion broke out on the Chinese side involving Liang, his deputy General Ma, and others. The Chinese civilians in the room had known nothing about the test. A Chinese admiral seated farthest from Hu passed word back up the line that it had been a “scientific research project.” After several minutes of chatter on the Chinese side, Hu adamantly assured me that the rollout had been a “previously scheduled scientific test” having nothing at all to do with my visit—or his. I suspected the PLA would have given me a different explanation. That the PLA would pull such a politically portentous stunt without telling Hu in advance was worrying, to say the least.

  Central Military Commission vice chairman General Xu (earlier my guest at Lincoln’s cottage in Washington) hosted a dinner for me in the same guesthouse where Hu had hosted President Obama, with several of China’s most famous singers as the entertainment. Baijiu, Chinese “white lightning,” flowed as toasts were made. Both Xu’s and Liang’s wives were present, as was Becky, and decorum was largely maintained. Our entire crew visited the Great Wall the next day, the highway shut down by troops the entire distance for my motorcade. One of the traveling press bought a small backpack at a gift shop near the wall with Obama’s picture on it dressed in a Mao jacket and wearing a PLA hat. I persuaded the journalist to sell it to me, and I presented it to the president upon my return. I told him it would validate what a lot of Republicans already thought about him. He laughed.

  Hu’s visit to the United States began a week later and went off without a hitch. But high-level cordiality and professions of cooperation cannot mask the reality that the U.S.-Chinese relationship faces serious challenges. China continues to invest a growing portion
of its budget in new military capabilities and technologies—including highly accurate antiship cruise and ballistic missiles, diesel and nuclear submarines, antisatellite capabilities, and stealth fighters—designed to keep U.S. air and naval assets well east of the South China Sea and Taiwan. They are building a navy that, while far inferior to that of the United States globally, could be a serious problem for us in Northeast and Southeast Asia. Beijing learned from the Soviet experience, I believe, and has no intention of matching us ship for ship, tank for tank, missile for missile, and thereby draining China financially in a no-holds-barred arms race with the United States. They are investing selectively in capabilities that target our vulnerabilities, not our strengths. The Chinese are becoming increasingly aggressive in asserting territorial claims over much of the South China Sea and islands close to Japan. And they continue to challenge U.S. air and naval surveillance missions, even though we operate in international airspace and waters. Their cyber-attack capabilities are advanced and getting better, and they are targeting both our military and our civilian networks every day. All in all, this is a relationship that will require careful and skilled long-term management by leaders on both sides if we are to sustain our partnership in some areas (for example, economic) and keep competition in other areas from becoming adversarial. A robust American air and naval presence in the Pacific, especially in East Asia, will continue to be necessary to reassure our friends and allies but also to ensure peaceful resolution of disputes.