by Leon Panetta
Those ideas made me proud of helping to eliminate “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” early in my tenure as secretary. Now, as my time wound down, I hoped to break down impediments for women in our forces as well. Those efforts took two forms.
The first was a matter of simple decency. Too many women in the services for too long had become victims of sexual assaults, many of them refusing to report the incidents for fear of being ignored, mistreated, or retaliated against. The reluctance to report such assaults exists outside the military as well but poses particular challenges in an environment where service members live and work in close quarters, where the nature of that work requires troops to trust one another, where the person adjudicating a complaint is often acquainted with both the accuser and the accused, and where movements are restricted, so victims cannot escape their assailants by leaving town or going home. Moreover, the gap between the number of crimes committed and the number reported made it extremely difficult to gauge the size of the problem and the effectiveness of efforts to combat it: If reports increased, one could argue either that we were doing a better job of encouraging victims to come forward or that the actual number of assaults was increasing.
What was clear, however, was that sexual assaults were common in the military and were vastly underreported. A survey of active-duty servicemen and -women in 2012 found that 6.1 percent of active-duty women—and 1.2 percent of active-duty men—reported having been the victim of unwanted sexual contact in the previous year. That’s roughly 26,000 men and women, and yet only 2,949 victims came forward to report that illegal and destructive conduct. Of those that were reported, some were found to be groundless and some of the alleged perpetrators were not in the military, so those cases were dismissed or handled by civilian authorities. Others were adjudicated and resulted in convictions, but not many. In all, 880 servicemen and -women were convicted of sexual assault over that period. It strained credulity to think that our system was working if 26,000 people were being assaulted annually and only 880 were being found guilty.4 It was not hard to see why victims were reluctant to come forward.
Two events brought this dismaying problem squarely to my attention in 2011. A pair of filmmakers produced a searing documentary about the problem of sexual abuse in the military and sent me a copy. I watched the film, entitled The Invisible War, and was moved and angered by it. At the same time, we were confronting a particularly ugly sexual abuse scandal at the Joint Base San Antonio–Lackland, an air force base in Texas where trainers used their positions of authority over air force trainees to extract sex and commit rape. More than thirty training instructors would come under investigation as part of that scandal.
I brought this matter to each of our service chiefs, and made clear to them that I demanded improvement. I was especially concerned about the air force and pressed the issue in my conversations with air force chief of staff Mark Welsh. I greatly admired Welsh, who had been part of my senior staff at the CIA, and he immediately understood my urgency.
At the end of December 2011, I implemented two measures intended to improve our handling of these cases. First, we created a new policy that allowed any person who filed a sexual assault complaint to quickly transfer out of her unit or base in order to shield that person from retaliation and distance her from the alleged perpetrator. In addition, I ordered that all records of sexual assault reports to law enforcement be retained for at least fifty years so that veterans could later access those documents in connection with later claims.
Soon after, I expanded on those policies, stepping up the certification requirements for investigators of sexual abuse claims, and also making it possible for military spouses and dependents to use our system to file abuse complaints. I ordered new training for investigators and judge advocates who specialized in sexual abuse claims, integrated our various systems for collecting and analyzing data about complaints, and ordered that we develop a new and better system for educating senior department leaders on how to prevent and respond to sexual assault. Finally, in April, I ordered that claims of serious abuse be handled by senior commanders rather than lower-level officers. That last step would, I hoped, remove some of the hesitation that victims felt about approaching their immediate supervisor, often the same person who supervised their assailant.
There is something repugnant about asking men and women to serve their country and then exposing them to assault by their colleagues. As I said at the time, it is “an affront to the basic American values we defend, and it is a stain on the good honor of the great majority of our troops and their—and our—families.”
The changes I attempted to make to our system for encouraging and adjudicating those complaints will not end sexual assault in the military, but I hope and trust that they will make clear that leaders will not tolerate it, and that we fully understand how incompatible it is with the values we are sworn to uphold.
• • •
Sexual assault is a crime of violence, but in the military it also is one of culture—a culture that includes many women but that historically has regarded them as something less than equal to men. Ever since the establishment of the American armed forces, men have held the positions of preeminence. For generations, that was neither surprising nor offensive. Notions of chivalry and social position commanded that men serve as soldiers, while women, to the extent that they served at all, did so in support. But like most vestigial discrimination, the limits on women’s service grew anachronistic over time, and felt more like bars to advancement than chivalric protection. By 2012, we had two hundred thousand women in the armed forces, but they were not fully equal.
It was hardly a secret that we had women in demanding positions around the world. I had greeted the caskets of women who had died in combat, had comforted their families, visited them in hospitals, seen them in the field from South Korea to South America. They were working, fighting, and dying alongside men, but they were still denied access to many positions based solely on their gender. Reflecting over the past four years, first at CIA and now at the Department of Defense, many of those who had played an instrumental role in our national security had been women: the base chief at Khost who died on December 30, 2009; the senior CIA operations officer directing our counterterrorism efforts against Al Qaeda; many members of the security detail who guarded me; a soldier I visited at Brooke Army Medical Center, to whom I awarded a Purple Heart; many of the pilots who transported me around the world; and many of the troops I visited on battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq. All of that made clear that women were very much in the battle.
Early in my tenure, I asked the service chiefs to review the continued bars to women’s service and see what impediments we could remove. They returned with a long list of areas where women were excluded that no longer seemed to serve any purpose. At my order, in early 2012 we opened fourteen thousand positions that previously excluded women. Even after opening those positions, however, the bar on women serving in direct combat roles remained.
So as I prepared to end my service as secretary of defense, I returned to the service chiefs, this time asking each what the rationale was for prohibiting women to serve because of their gender. Yes, some positions required specific physical capabilities, and I agreed with the chiefs and others who argued against making tests less rigorous merely so that women would have an easier time passing them. What I could not understand was why we would bar a woman from serving even if she could pass them. Everyone deserves a chance to succeed.
I tasked my team, including Lieutenant General Waldhauser and Monica Medina, a senior adviser to me, to work with the services on the plan to allow women into combat positions. It was not easy, requiring careful coordination by personnel specialists, lawyers, and the commanders. What made it possible was Chairman Dempsey, who did what he did best—carefully listening to the service chiefs, gathering consensus, and developing a plan for implementing the new policy. Nobody did more to bring about this historic change than Ma
rty Dempsey.
On January 24, 2013, just days after President Obama was inaugurated to his second term in office, General Dempsey and I announced that we were rescinding the prohibition against women in combat. It was to be accompanied by a review of the military’s testing and evaluation procedures—not to lower standards but only to ensure that our standards were appropriate to the jobs that candidates were aspiring to. Once those evaluations were complete, women would never again be barred from any position in the American military because of their gender—just as blacks were no longer denied any spot because of their race or gays any job because of their orientation.
President Obama, whom I had consulted throughout our deliberations, praised the announcement as a “milestone” that “reflects the courageous and patriotic service of women through more than two centuries of American history and the indispensable role of women in today’s military.”5
• • •
What I expected would be my last overseas trip as secretary of defense took me to Europe—Lisbon, Madrid, London, and Rome.* In each capital, my meetings were about winding down. Our allies were withdrawing along with us from Afghanistan, so the substance of our conversations was on concluding that war in a way that secured the future, a topic both serious and reflective.
But there was also my own winding down—these were likely my final visits as a cabinet member, and our talks concluded with wistful farewells. It put me in a pensive mood. When I spoke to students in London, I reflected back on my growing up in Monterey during World War II, with the soldiers streaming through my father’s café on their way to defend their country. I was too young in those days to think of the war in political terms. It was for me a collection of images—scenes recalled from my Nono’s shoulders, feelings absorbed from my parents—but those images had never left me, and seemed especially vivid on that trip.
“I can still remember the feelings of fear and uncertainty and vulnerability that pervaded those years,” I said. “Blackout shades, the air raid drills, the paper drives, the soldiers and sailors who walked the streets of Monterey before they were sent off to battle. Those are all memories.”
Later, I added, I would come to appreciate Churchill and Roosevelt and the great leaders of that era who refused to yield to fascism and marshaled the forces of democracy against it. Today’s battles are against a different set of enemies, but democracy remains strong enough for the fight. The bonds between the United States and its European allies will be tested again, but they have withstood much. Knowing that left me with a profound feeling of security, and I turned toward my retirement with a strong sense of fulfillment.
It was in Rome, however, that I received the most personal affirmation, one that brought together strands of my life that I’d been weaving since I was a boy. It was my second visit to the Vatican in recent years—as CIA director, I’d gotten a behind-the-scenes tour of the Sistine Chapel—but this time I was invited to meet the pope himself. At the appointed hour, I entered an auditorium adjacent to Saint Peter’s Basilica and was seated in the front row. Around me were groups from every imaginable country. One from Portugal was seated nearby. Behind it was a group of children from Guatemala. There was a woman in a wedding dress, kids in native garb from all over the world. Pope Benedict entered and greeted each group in its native language. He spoke to the entire assemblage, briefly discussing the reach of the church and its place in the world. And then my row was ushered up to him.
I kissed his ring, and he placed his hand on mine.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for your service in protecting the world.”
He handed me a rosary. I gave him a military coin. For a Catholic and a son of Italy, few moments could have been more precious. As I turned to leave, I realized what the nuns had always taught me—that faith and duty go hand in hand.
• • •
In the end, the responsibility of the secretary of defense is to protect America from harm. Doing so begins with a duty to the men and women of the armed services. If we as a country are to ask these young people to protect us from a dangerous world, we owe them the full measure of our support—they deserve to be well paid, well armed, and well led. They need to know that if they are injured, we will nurse them back to health, and that if they are killed, we will comfort and assist their families.
I visited hundreds of young men and women in military hospitals, some with injuries that would have killed them a generation ago. I regularly visited Bethesda and Walter Reed hospitals, where I met many young people with missing limbs or grave wounds. To a person, they were positive and forward-looking. Some yearned for the chance to return to service even as they learned how to operate their prosthetic devices. They were strong and resilient, even when the country was not.
That was true even among families who pay the ultimate price for our defense—the loss of a loved one. Every week that I was secretary of defense, I would spend a few quiet hours away from the phones and interruptions to read, consider, and sign letters to the families of those who had died for their country. Each time, one of my assistants would hand me a stack of folders, including a letter of condolence for my signature. Inside each were the documents that told a story—and often that story reminded me of my own. These were young women and men, often of modest backgrounds, who decided early in their lives that they would serve their country. Some came through ROTC, as I did, others through enlistment or military school. Once trained, they shipped out for posts around the world, some to carry out orders that I had specifically approved.
One day in early 2012, I was sitting at my desk and contemplating the file before me. It told the story of Benjamin Wise, a sergeant first class who had been on patrol in Balkh Province, Afghanistan, when his unit came under enemy fire. He was hit and rushed to Germany for medical treatment, only to die of his wounds. Ben left behind a wife, two sons, and a daughter. He was the son of Jean and Mary Wise, who raised him, along with two brothers and a sister, in a small town outside Little Rock, Arkansas. They were a religious family, and a patriotic one.
As I read the material before me, I was suddenly struck by a sense that I knew this family. I called in Jeremy. We leafed through the file and confirmed my worst fear: Ben Wise was the younger brother of Jeremy Wise, one of the security officers we had lost in the Khost bombing two years earlier, on one of the most awful days in the history of the CIA. This was the second letter I was writing to this same mother and father. In two years and fifteen days, Jean and Mary Wise had given their country two of their four children.
I sat alone for a few minutes imagining the depth and pain of that sacrifice. I remembered my anxiety when my son went off to war, and thought of the many Americans who care so deeply for their country that they risk everything—their families, their happiness—for its security. I thought of my own father, shoving off from Italy in search of a country that would give him an opportunity he never thought possible anywhere but here. I thought of my own attempt to return that gift by embarking on a career of public service. And I realized with a sharp pain in my heart that Jeremy and Ben had both been in harm’s way because of orders I had given, issued in the interests of protecting their country, our country. The letter before me expressed the appreciation of a grateful nation, but even that seemed small compared with the magnitude of this family’s contribution. After a few moments, I added a handwritten note:
“I am so very lost in my emotion of losing another son of yours to combat. As the father of three sons, I cannot imagine the pain you must be feeling. And yet, I know that like Jeremy, Ben was doing what he wanted—to fight for all of us. He is a true American hero and patriot. God bless him and you.”
Ben and Jeremy Wise left behind parents and wives and children, and they will be forever missed. There is solace, I hope, in the categorical fact that their fights were worthy, and that service to this nation is service well rendered.
I finished my note, put down my pen, a
nd called home.
Epilogue: Leadership or Crisis
It has been almost fifty years since I put on my army uniform and flew to Washington to find myself a job, luckily landing with Senator Tom Kuchel. It won’t surprise anyone to hear that a lot has changed in those years (starting with the fact that uniformed servicemen no longer get to fly at half-price). It’s easy to be frustrated about that. So much seems broken. Where once government tackled big things with determination, now it often seems overwhelmed by even minor problems.
Some have given up. Many young people I meet seem resigned to a government that bickers and breaks down. They regard politicians as small-minded and self-interested, smug guardians of a system rigged to deliver benefits to special interests while ignoring real people in need. Among those young people who are eager to devote their lives to the betterment of their society, many seek a path outside of public service.
It’s hard to argue with any of that. Certainly there are plenty of examples to support such cynicism. But the answer can’t be to give up on government or to treat division and partisanship as inevitable and insurmountable. It can’t be to accept stalemate. To reconcile ourselves to inaction is more than a loss of will. It is a failure of democratic self-rule itself.
What’s called for today is what we once knew as leadership. Far-sighted, goal-oriented, sustained leadership reconstructed Europe after World War II and built the interstate highway system. Brave leaders, Kuchel included, rolled back racial and gender segregation, reduced hunger and poverty, and produced safer food and drugs. Men and women with vision and patience protected the American wilderness and put men on the moon. All of those took time, compromise, and resolve, and all were the work of the U.S. federal government. I watched some of it myself. If nothing else, my time in government has let me witness the possibilities of effective leadership and the consequences of failure.