by Leon Panetta
Like any large employer, it must confront the myriad problems of its workers. The men and women of the armed services have families, kids in school, doctors’ appointments, and day care; they get into accidents and fall ill; they get married and divorced; they’re involved in lawsuits; and they need time off. The tasks of managing such an immense organization are thus monumental.
At the CIA, I oversaw thousands of employees (the exact number is classified) and a major, international organization, but it was dwarfed by the size and range of the military. At the Pentagon, roughly 23,000 people worked in the main building alone. From the first day, my greatest fear was that the size of the Defense Department would overwhelm me, that I would never be able to truly take command of it. Many a secretary of defense has been swallowed up by the job, and I was determined to fight against that pull. It was a concern that dogged me throughout my tenure at the department.
Moreover, the Department of Defense is unlike most employers in one respect: Its workforce fights wars. A total of 4,476 American servicemen and -women, as well as 13 civilian employees of the Defense Department, died in the Iraq war; as of late 2013, another 2,299 soldiers and 3 civilian Defense employees had died in Afghanistan. More than 50,000 were wounded in those conflicts.3
The military services are intended to operate in unison (thus the “Joint Chiefs”), but they also are distinct organizations, with their own histories, specialties, and priorities. I learned those distinctions in my meetings with the service chiefs, as I asked each of them for their assessment of their services and their needs, especially in light of cuts we knew were coming. The air force was focused on modernizing its fighter fleet and developing a Joint Strike Fighter that was long delayed and horribly over budget; Gates had essentially canceled another high-end fighter, and the air force wanted assurances that I’d keep this program alive. The navy’s primary concern was that we protect shipbuilding and the shipyards that support it; if we cut back too far, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus warned me, the yards would close and we’d lose the infrastructure necessary to keep our navy afloat—an infrastructure far too big and complex to start up in wartime. The Marine Corps, meanwhile, had borne heavy burdens in the Afghanistan war—the Marines were given lead responsibility for Helmand Province, among other things—and General Jim Amos emphasized the personnel and equipment needs of his force. In addition, he was intent on returning the Marines to their amphibious roots, arguing for a “middle-weight maritime force,” using aircraft such as the V-22 Osprey and the Marine version of the Joint Strike Fighter, both of which he argued were integral to that mission.
Of all of them, however, it was the army’s presentation that was the most striking. When we sat down, I asked Army Secretary John McHugh for his thoughts on where the army was today. I’ll never forget the first words out of his mouth. “Mr. Secretary,” he said, “the army is tired.” The army, he explained, had lost more soldiers than any other service during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and it was showing the strain. Yes, the army needed state-of-the-art equipment, but more important, its soldiers also needed health care and mental health services. The main weapon of the army was the soldier, and those soldiers were worn out. Implicit in McHugh’s analysis was another warning: If we tried to balance the budget by making excessively deep cuts to the army’s ranks, we’d make those problems worse, as already tired soldiers would be forced to make more tours and would take on even more strain.
• • •
I arrived at my new post on July 1, unloading my personal things into my office, with its sweeping views of the Potomac and the monuments on the other side. In one corner I set up a few reminders of the bin Laden operation, highlighted by the brick our team had presented to me. A large piece of granite taken from the Pentagon after 9/11 occupied a prominent place in my office as well, giving special poignancy to the bin Laden items. I put a Remington statue of a cowboy on horseback in one window—Remingtons have always appealed to my sense of the West and of an American spirit—and a bust of Lincoln in another. And yes, I put up the requisite mementos of a life in government—photographs of me and various presidents, Democrats and Republicans, and other dignitaries and leaders. No Washington office is complete without them. To remind me of home, I brought over some family pictures and a prized photograph of the Pacific Ocean.
Finally, there were two portraits behind Bob Gates’s desk when he had the job, and I left them: One was of Eisenhower and the other of General George Marshall. I’ve already described my long-standing admiration of Eisenhower, and I regarded Marshall as the model public servant. I was pleased to have the two of them looking over my shoulder.
Jeh Johnson, general counsel of the department (and later the secretary of homeland security), administered me the oath of office at 8:45 a.m. on Friday, July 1. I then received my daily intelligence brief—similar to that which I had been receiving as CIA director—and plunged directly into my first meeting with my senior team. Fortunately for me, Bob Gates had built an exceptionally capable team of military and administrative staff, and I supplemented it with a few people of my own. Jeremy was sworn in as the department’s chief of staff. Marcel Lettre became his deputy. We promoted a talented policy assistant, Bailey Hand, to coordinate all of my briefing materials and prepare me for meetings with the president and national security policy makers. General Kelly ran the office with two military assistants—for the bulk of my tenure, air force colonel Jeff Taliaferro and navy commander Larry Getz. Delonnie Henry, who had served under Don Rumsfeld and Gates, stayed on to run my schedule. Shelly Stoneman, who had joined the Pentagon under Gates, oversaw the personnel process and was a link to the White House.
In discussions with Tom Donilon and Denis McDonough at the White House, we settled on Ash Carter, my first choice, to succeed Bill Lynn as my deputy secretary. Bill was a good man but hadn’t clicked with Gates, and I wanted a fresh start in that important post. Carter was a veteran of the department who had worked for and advised many secretaries, and was the rare leader who understood both the policy and budget sides of the agency. He was a wonk, a nuclear physicist and author, but he’s also a compassionate commander who would slip out on weekends to visit wounded soldiers at Bethesda and Walter Reed.
Bill Danvers, who’d been with me back in the Clinton years, came over with me from CIA to help on special projects, and eventually I brought George Little over from the agency to take over the department’s sprawling public affairs apparatus. George would travel with me all over the world and would become one of my closest advisers.
On that first morning, I gathered together the senior civilian and military leaders—service secretaries, undersecretaries, and chiefs, about twenty people in all. We introduced ourselves, and I laid out for them what seemed to me to be the broad parameters of our mission. Drawing from my recent briefings, I identified nine important priorities: achieving the strategic defeat of Al Qaeda; prevailing in Iraq and Afghanistan; preventing Iran and North Korea from building nuclear weapons capabilities; effectively responding to cyber attacks; continuing to protect American power and values; maintaining our nuclear arsenal; strengthening and reforming security cooperation with our allies; protecting our troops and their families; and making smart decisions about our budget. A full plate. There was broad agreement that those were the right challenges. Before concluding, I added a bit about me: I warned my new colleagues that I’d spent forty years in public life and over that time had developed a pretty sharp bullshit detector. I wanted to know of problems before they showed up in the news, and I valued frankness and directness. I didn’t want to be misled. There were nods around the table, and I felt I’d made my point.
I followed up that meeting with a note to all the department’s personnel so that they too would have some sense of where I hoped to take the organization—as well as an appreciation of my commitment to our work. “As Secretary of Defense, I will do whatever is necessary to protect America and to meet the needs of the men
and women who serve in harm’s way and the families who support them,” I wrote. “Even as the United States addresses fiscal challenges at home, there will be no hollow force on my watch.” That phrase, “hollow force,” was an important one to the military; officers who had lived through the Vietnam War remembered the gutting of budgets that went on in those years to keep troop levels high and expenses down. Units often had inadequate weaponry and support, rendering them ineffective and at risk in battle. It took decades to recover from that period, and I hoped my words would at least assure my new colleagues that I understood that history and was determined to avoid repeating it.
I reminded the troops of my background in Congress, at OMB and the Clinton White House, and at the CIA, and noted that I had wrestled with tough budgets before. Finally, I concluded with a little reminder of my personal history and values, which seemed relevant as the country prepared to enjoy the Fourth of July weekend: “My parents, immigrants from Italy, came to the United States to seek a better life. They taught me that it was important to give something back to the country they adopted. I will never forget my father’s words: ‘To be free, we must also be secure.’ As Americans come together to commemorate what we and those before us have accomplished, and as I take on my new role, my thoughts are with you and your families. You are making personal sacrifices to preserve our liberty, serving on front lines around the world. You are fighting to keep America safe. Rest assured that I will fight with you and for you.”
As the message went out, so did copies of my picture. It is customary for defense installations to display a photograph of the commander in chief and the secretary of defense, so my portrait would now hang beside that of President Obama. On July 1, 2011, thousands of commanders around the world took down Bob Gates’s picture and put up mine.
After lunch, I made my first visit to the Tank. It is on the Pentagon’s first floor, and it’s where the Joint Chiefs meet every week to discuss everything from troop deployments to service pay and benefits. I entered for the first time at 1:30 p.m. on my first day, and the first thing I noticed was a painting of Lincoln meeting with his generals during the Civil War. Called The Peacemakers, it seemed to capture the essence of the Joint Chiefs and their mission.
I knew a few of the men around the table. Mullen and I had worked closely on bin Laden and policy matters involving defense and intelligence. Hoss Cartwright, then still Mullen’s deputy, was someone I also knew well from those same operations. Most of the others were less familiar, so I introduced myself and briefly expanded on the nine priorities I had shared that morning. I tried to strike a tone that was both appreciative and serious, stressing my great respect for each of them and also my insistence that they be candid with me. “I’m not going to pull any punches, and I expect you to do the same,” I ended by saying. “If you’re not honest with me, you’re not going to be in your job for long.”
They seemed to like the straight talk.
In retrospect, that first day was something of a portent of my tenure. It combined serious policy discussions (the challenges before us), ceremony (I visited the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial), congressional interaction (I had a brief phone call with Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee), professional socializing (Sylvia, who was with me for the swearing in, joined me and Admiral Mullen and his wife, Deborah, for lunch), and an overarching preoccupation with moving the U.S. military out of war and into the future.
After wrapping up my first day on the new job, Sylvia and I headed home to celebrate the Fourth of July in Carmel Valley. Although I had warned the White House that I needed to return home frequently in order to stay connected with my family and keep my balance, I was not allowed to fly commercially, both for security reasons and because I needed to be reachable in an emergency. So whenever I traveled as defense secretary, I did so in a military plane.
Under a formula devised by the government long before me, I was required to reimburse the Treasury for my travel. Typically that meant writing a check for about $630 each time I traveled home and back, more if I had family or Bravo with me. That was about what I would have spent flying commercially, which I would have been happy to do if allowed to. I dutifully paid my bills.
The problem was that the military plane that carried me, usually a small air force business jet specially outfitted with secure communications equipment, cost $3,200 an hour to operate. That meant my travel was expensive for taxpayers, and after a year or so I’d paid $17,000 for my trips but the actual cost was about $860,000.4 The press reported that in the spring of 2012, but I explained that I had been making this trip all my life and that I’d reimbursed the government all that I had been asked to pay. That seemed to satisfy everyone, and thank God it did. I’m not sure I could have been CIA director or secretary of defense without being able to go home at regular intervals.
Some of my early moves at Defense may seem minor, but they were intended to emphasize action over inertia and candor over jargon. I gave Ash Carter wide latitude to make change and encouraged him to trust his own instincts; he knew I would back him up. Together, we renamed the “Deputy’s Advisory Working Group,” recasting it as the “Deputy Management Action Group,” in order to emphasize that we wanted action, not just advice. Carter proved to be a masterful deputy, managing such projects as the development of the defense budget and the drawdown in Afghanistan. I had complete confidence in him. As he liked to say: I worked on the bridge, while he manned the engine room.
• • •
Chief among the responsibilities I was assuming was the management of two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I wanted, for both substance and symbolism, to visit those countries as soon as possible. I did so at the end of my first week.
Traveling as secretary of defense was a whole different undertaking than it was as director of the CIA. As I wrote earlier, I traveled extensively during my CIA years, visiting every continent but Antarctica and developing important contacts and friendships. But those trips, by necessity, usually were done in secret. I flew on a specially outfitted airplane with communications gear, but I was accompanied by a small retinue of aides with me, and of course, no reporters. The emphasis was on convenience and maintaining a low profile.
The Department of Defense was another matter. The plane was an E-4B, a windowless, hardened 747, which could sustain the electromagnetic shock from a nuclear blast. It included not only communications equipment but also war-fighting gear. In an emergency, I could advise the president on the launch of a nuclear strike from the cabin of my plane. With proper aerial refueling, this “Doomsday Plane” could stay aloft for days. My cabin had a desk, a couch, an array of phones, a bathroom, and bunk beds. I must admit, my favorite piece of gear was one of the plane’s least grand accoutrements: a small DVD player on which I watched movies between meetings and phone calls. The staff knew to pack my bag with classics—Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman accompanied me on many a mission to far corners of the world.
Once on board, I’d meet with the travel and policy team to review the agenda for the trip and prepare for my meetings with foreign counterparts. We’d review points I needed to make, and try to crystallize pages of briefing books about, say, Afghanistan, onto a four-by-six card that I could use to jot down the key messages for President Karzai.
I usually held a press conference with the reporters on the plane to preview the themes of the trip and to take questions on the issues of the day. Then I’d allow myself a glass of scotch with John Kelly, Jeremy, and the team; we’d eat well, and hit the hay for a few hours before landing.
Traveling with reporters was an important aspect of my new job and a good way to signal our priorities. At the same time, it had its downsides. Even casual comments found their way into news stories, and I learned quickly that I needed to watch my mouth. As I’ve made clear, my language runs to the salty end of the spectrum, and I was hardly alone in that in the councils of government. On that first tri
p, however, I was reminded that it did tend to stand out in other venues.
I joked with our troops at Camp Victory, Iraq, that the country where they were stationed would bounce back, in part because “this damn country has a hell of a lot of resources.” I also vented about the uncertainty that Iraqi officials were expressing with regard to the presence of U.S. troops after 2011. Prime Minister Nuri Maliki was dragging his feet, and my message to the Iraqis was, “Dammit, make a decision.” That quote made the cover of Stars and Stripes. In Afghanistan, I misstated our position on how fast we’d be bringing troops home, and I said what everyone in Washington knew but we couldn’t officially acknowledge: that our goal in Libya was regime change. None of that did much damage, but it was distracting. Elisabeth Bumiller, a reporter for the New York Times, accompanied me on that trip, and put together a lighthearted look back at my foibles, concluding that I was “another species entirely” from my more taciturn predecessor.5 Guilty. As I told the press, I’m Italian, and that’s who I am. George Little had his hands full cleaning up after me, but I wanted to be candid with our troops (many of my quoted remarks came from meetings with soldiers), and on balance I think my ease with reporters and others was helpful in making relationships.
While in Kabul, I stayed at “Bader House,” the Distinguished Visitor Quarters at Camp Eggers—military accommodations about as nice as any in Afghanistan; at least there were carpets and air-conditioning—and held three important meetings. The first was with Petraeus, who updated me on the progress in training Afghan army and police forces. Our goal was to train 352,000 of those forces, and Petraeus told me we were ahead of schedule, but he emphasized the challenge involved. For many of these young soldiers, we weren’t training them on sophisticated weapons or tactics. We were starting at the very beginning. As Petraeus described it, we’d hand them a map and begin to discuss ways of capturing and holding terrain, and the first question would be: What’s a map? Many young recruits were illiterate, so our job began with teaching them to read, moved to teaching them to use maps and fire weapons, and only then on to fighting battles and wars. Basic training was truly basic.