by Leon Panetta
I took these conditions to Daley on Tuesday, and he didn’t flinch. Instead, he launched the vetting process that same day. Not much had changed over the past two years, so examining my background this time was relatively routine. Jeremy organized my tax returns and some other basic information for the White House lawyers. I was brought down to the White House counsel for the ritual interview: Did I have any skeletons in my closet, old or new, that would embarrass the president? I said no, and that was that.
On April 27, just four days before the raid on Abbottabad, the White House leaked the news, and we assembled the next afternoon in the East Room for the presidential announcement. Joining Bob and me were: Petraeus, who would be leaving Afghanistan to run the CIA; General John Allen, who would replace Petraeus as commander in Afghanistan; and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, whom Hillary Clinton had convinced to come out of retirement and take over as our ambassador in Kabul. Clinton and Tom Donilon joined us onstage with the president and vice president.
The president was gracious as always, thanking Gates for his long service under eight presidents, and praising my patriotism, management skills, leadership, and knowledge of budgets—all of which, he noted, would be required in my new position.
Despite the success that came later that week in killing bin Laden, I knew better than to take my confirmation for granted, so I spent much of May and June meeting with senior people from the Department of Defense to better understand that enormous operation and with senators to field their questions about my qualifications and plans for the department.
Gates asked Robert Rangel to oversee transition briefings for me, and Robert directed that the Pentagon’s legislative affairs chief, Liz King, guide my nomination through the Senate Armed Services Committee. Marcel Lettre, a former national security aide to Senate majority leader Harry Reid, was deputized by Rangel to organize my introduction to the department and handle all aspects of the transition. Marcel worked hand in glove with Jeremy, as well as with Gates’s senior military assistant, Lieutenant General John Kelly.
John would prove an especially valuable friend and assistant during my Pentagon years, as he more than anyone helped guide me through the intricacies of military leadership and command. A marine’s marine, affable and bluff, John understood how the Pentagon worked. More important, he grasped the true nature of service and sacrifice: He was the seniormost general officer to have lost a child in the wars since 9/11. His son, Robert Michael Kelly, was a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, and was leading a patrol of forty marines and a navy corpsman in Afghanistan in November 2010 when he was killed by a roadside bomb. His family was of course devastated by their loss, but John stayed with his duties and helped Bob Gates and then me throughout my tenure at Defense.
First things first, I had to decide where to live. Gates had occupied a large home on Navy Hill, near the Department of State, and all of the four-stars lived in palatial houses at Fort Meyer, the Marine Barracks, or the Navy Yard. Bob urged me to take over his place, which he had set up so that the department wouldn’t have to incur the expense every few years of installing secure communications and security in the new secretary’s house. But while the homes were smart and economical for the uniformed leadership, which received a housing subsidy, that didn’t apply to the civilian secretary, so I’d be stuck with paying full market rate. I didn’t need a four-bedroom house, so after mulling it over briefly, I elected to stay put in my Capitol Hill walk-up.
We held the initial briefings at my office at CIA. First up were Undersecretary for Policy Michèle Flournoy and Director for Operations of the Joint Staff Lieutenant General Bob Neller, who briefed me on where our forces were deployed, the current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some of the key policy issues, including NATO, missile defense, our force posture in Germany, Japan, and South Korea, and our major war plans. Flournoy’s role was at the core of the Pentagon’s mission, working with the White House and foreign leaders to ensure that our military power was being deployed in support of our foreign policy objectives. She helped me supervise the deployment and assignments of our troops around the world. Those briefings were my first look into the enormity of my new job. Flournoy and her deputy, Jim Miller, who would later succeed Michèle as undersecretary for policy, were two of the most critical advisers I had during my time as secretary.
Next came Ash Carter, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer and acquisition guru—someone I wanted to consider to be my new deputy. Ash had been a protégé of former secretary Bill Perry, whom I always admired, and Ash had made strong gains over the past two years—helping Bob Gates rapidly field mine-resistant vehicles in Afghanistan and Iraq and smashing some old bureaucratic totems. That’s no small feat, for one early lesson of those briefings was that the Department of Defense not only operates around the world, it also spends money like crazy. One example: At the height of the Afghanistan war, the department was spending $2 billion a day.
Mike Vickers, the highly capable undersecretary for intelligence, was someone who had been integrally involved in the Abbottabad planning, so I knew him well when he came to update me on defense intelligence issues. Mike was a former Green Beret and CIA officer who had overseen covert actions in Afghanistan; his previous job at the Pentagon had been to oversee special operations and counterterrorism, and he brought me up to speed on the areas of the world where the Pentagon was playing the lead role in the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. I immediately asked him to stay on, and he agreed.
I did not know Jeh Johnson, the department’s general counsel, but he also impressed me from our first conversation. He walked me through a range of issues, including the legal basis for using military force, the chain of command, and the major legal questions the department was facing. Chief among those were the pending repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and the military trials being planned for the Al Qaeda leaders held at Guantánamo.
On the military side, I spent considerable time with Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, with whom I had worked closely the previous two years. I admired him immensely, and had been especially impressed with his management of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship in the aftermath of the bin Laden raid. Our conversations focused on the pace of the drawdown in Afghanistan—which the president was about to sign off on—but more generally about how to take care of the troops in an era of declining budgets and changing priorities. Like any good chairman, Mike kept his finger on the pulse of the rank and file, regularly consulting with the senior enlisted advisers from the various military departments.
Gates, meanwhile, took one big issue off my hands by concluding a critical piece of business before he left: pushing for the nomination of General Martin Dempsey to succeed Mullen, and for Admiral James “Sandy” Winnefeld to succeed the vice chairman, Hoss Cartwright. Though Hoss had many friends at the White House, he and Mullen did not work well together—barely speaking even—and Gates rightly worried about whether Hoss would be a team player if he became chairman. I liked Hoss, but I trusted Bob’s instincts, as did the president. He elevated Dempsey and Winnefeld, effectively ending Hoss’s distinguished career.
When Marty and I met, I already felt a kinship. Marty was as New Jersey Irish as I was California Italian, and we shared a common religious faith as well as immigrant pride in our country. He carried no party affiliation, only a lifetime devotion to the army and the United States. He had led troops in the fight in Iraq, but utterly lacked bravado—referring to himself occasionally as a “poet”—and believed that military force was not to be used casually. I trusted his uncanny ability to size up situations that called for military force and relied on his guidance. He became a trusted partner in addressing defense questions at the National Security Council.
Those briefings left me with a profound sense of the range and depth of the responsibilities that awaited me—assuming, of course, that I was confirmed by the Senate.
Even as my nomin
ation was pending, Bob Gates was grappling with the White House and OMB on how to fulfill the president’s promise to cut $400 billion from defense over the next decade, a concession to growing pressure from the Republican right, especially the Tea Party, to find reductions throughout the federal budget. I was okay with a large cut, and so was Bob. What we worried about was the pace and nature of the reductions and their impact on the readiness of the force. If we were to absorb such large cuts without damaging our military readiness, DoD needed flexibility about where and when to make them—neither of which would be the case under sequestration.
In order to manage those cuts responsibly, Gates had launched a “strategic review” of the department’s missions and capabilities in order to determine what types of activities the department would have to keep doing and what we could scrap. Gates and his team—he called his closest civilian and military advisers the “small group”—walked me through some initial thoughts about where to get savings, which included such difficult areas as military pay and benefits, never an easy sell on the Hill. Still, it was doable, I thought, if we could control the pace and type of cuts. In my view, the way to do that was to get ahead of the debate, offering our own proposals and not letting Congress assert itself early.
After one of my sessions with Gates and the budget team, I walked down the outer hall of the Pentagon to a secure conference room. Joined by Kelly and a few others, I met Sandy Winnefeld for the first time; he was then serving as commander of U.S. Northern Command, making him the military officer responsible for the defense of North America. A gifted presenter, Winnefeld had a knack—unusual in high government and military circles—for speaking in English and making complex matters simple. Good thing, because he was charged with briefing me on my so-called crisis authorities. As secretary of defense, I had specific responsibilities under certain crisis conditions. What to do if a terrorist hijacked a plane and flew it toward the Capitol, or a ballistic missile was shot from North Korea, or, heaven forbid, a nuclear-armed enemy launched a full-scale attack on the United States?
In the least likely but most consequential scenario—nuclear war—there was a decades-old protocol with well-established lines of authority. Down deep inside the National Military Command Center, under the Pentagon, the watch team ran through a nuclear drill three times a day, at the turn of every eight-hour shift. My role as secretary was not to launch a nuclear weapon—only the president can authorize that—but rather to join a secure conference call of the president’s senior advisers during a crisis, receive advice about attack options from the military leaders, and provide the president with my personal views. From the day I was sworn in, I would never be far from a proverbial “football”—in my case, essentially a notebook of various nuclear attack options. The air force assigned me a “strike adviser,” a colonel whose sole job was to stand by and be prepared to walk me through the book in the event of a catastrophe. The multitude of options was dizzying, but I took comfort in knowing that the likelihood that I would have to recommend a nuclear strike was infinitesimally small.
A more likely but still exacting challenge involved how to respond if an enemy such as North Korea launched a ballistic missile or two at the United States. It would be up to me to decide whether—and how—to shoot it down. By the time the watch officers at North American Aerospace Defense Command (better known as NORAD) at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado got me on the phone, I might only have seconds to decide. Russia, China, and North Korea were all potential attackers in these scenarios, but North Korea was by far the most worrisome: Under reckless leadership, that country had repeatedly tested its TaePoDong II missile, and now reportedly had a mobile missile launcher that could fire a weapon at the United States with little to no warning. The North Koreans had not yet mated a nuclear warhead to the ICBMs they were developing—as far as we knew—but the prospect of an intercontinental missile streaking toward an American city and exploding its warhead, even a conventional warhead, was awful to contemplate. In one sense, the decision to shoot down an enemy missile is simple: If anyone fired a ballistic missile at the United States, we would of course attempt to defend ourselves. The problem arises with the fact that the decision would have to be made so quickly. If the object hurtling through space turned out to be not a missile but rather, say, a just-launched satellite, we would have committed an act of aggression against a hostile and unpredictable foe. For that reason, our 28,500 troops on the Korean Peninsula kept a watchful eye on North Korea’s missile launch program, and also for that reason, I listened carefully to Winnefeld’s description of our system and my place within it.
Closer to home, the department was responsible for a program to keep civilian aircraft out of restricted zones—around Washington and wherever the president traveled. We dubbed this program Operation Noble Eagle, or ONE. This operation bothered me no end, and overseeing it was one of my most unhappy jobs. Every week or so we’d get a report of a small plane violating flight restrictions in the National Capital Region. The watch center would call my office on a secure line to make sure they knew where I was in case I needed to make a decision about the fate of the plane. Sometimes we would scramble fighter jets to fly alongside the plane, tip wings, shoot flares, or in some cases “head bump” the offending pilot by flying right up next to him—anything to get his attention and alert him that if he failed to turn around, he would be shot out of the sky.
These mishaps occurred so frequently that I was petrified we would eventually shoot down some clueless amateur pilot out for an afternoon in his Cessna. Our fighter jets were too fast for these small planes, and our system for warning pilots about airspace closures was no more sophisticated than a dog-eared “Notice to Airmen” pinned up over the coffee machine at private airports every few days. One of my first acts was to direct General Kelly and Paul Stockton, who ran homeland security affairs for me, to come up with recommendations for a better system. As a result, we did make some improvements, working with trade journals and pilot organizations to better inform pilots about the closure rules.
The close calls continued, however, with one particularly dicey situation arising during the presidential campaign. Because the airspace near the president is always closed, it’s hardest to control it when he’s moving around, as is the case during a campaign. One day while Obama was out west, a pilot innocently strayed into the airspace and somehow missed attempt after attempt to turn him around. The call was placed to my office for me to authorize shooting him down, but just as my aides prepared to interrupt my meeting so that I could give the fatal order, he got the message. I’ve long wondered whether he realizes that he came within seconds of our shooting down his plane.
• • •
During my courtesy calls on Capitol Hill, the senators weren’t much trouble, though a few did press me on the budget cuts that the Pentagon would be absorbing, and some used our conversations to lobby for their ideas or issues. Jon Kyl of Arizona, for instance, pulled out some old comments I’d made expressing skepticism about missile defense; I assured him I would do everything I could to pursue those programs.
On June 9, I made the now-familiar trip up Capitol Hill to face members of the Senate. The questioning focused mostly on Afghanistan. The surge had ended and the total number of American forces was scheduled to begin decreasing the following month. John McCain and I tussled a bit as he tried to debate me over the difference between “significant” reductions, as the president had promised, and “modest” reductions, as outgoing secretary Gates preferred. I wouldn’t give him the answer he wanted, so we went back and forth before he eventually moved on.
The matter came to the full Senate on June 21, and the discussion there was, as the New York Times described it, more of a “celebration” of my career and bin Laden’s death—that operation’s success clearly put a shine on my nomination—than a hard-hitting challenge to my credentials or plans. South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, who could be rough on the Obama admini
stration, went so far as to call my selection a “home-run choice.”1 New York Democrat Chuck Schumer, one of my housemates during my time in Congress, joined Graham to “add my accolades,” and Graham remarked that it wasn’t every day that the two of them voted together: “Graham and Schumer,” he joked. “That shows you the depth and breadth of Leon Panetta—the way people view him here.”2 McCain, after venting at me for a bit, came around too. The final vote was 100–0. I was at the CIA when the roll was called, and Jeremy brought me the news of the tally. “You gotta be kidding,” I said. Republican senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, kindly thought to save the original roll sheet and had it delivered to me. It’s one of my proudest possessions.
• • •
Moving from the CIA to the Pentagon was just a few miles—both sit on the Virginia bank of the Potomac River, looking back across it toward Washington—but the scale of the two operations was incomparable. It was, I said at the time, like moving from the local hardware store to Home Depot.
The U.S. Department of Defense in 2011 employed more than 2 million servicemen and -women and another 800,000 civilians. It included an additional 1.1 million men and women in the National Guard and Reserves. Yet another 2 million retirees received benefits through the Department of Veterans Affairs. The Department of Defense is the largest employer in the United States, and it owns more real estate than any organization on earth. It maintains hundreds of bases around the globe, and employs thousands of people to staff them.