He smiled warmly and replied, “Pleasure meeting you, too, Suzie.” It’s not surprising that such a diplomat would go on to become U.S. Ambassador to China.
My dance card was full over the next sixteen months as I commanded Navy SEALS, Army Special Forces, and Air Force special operators in volatile hotspots throughout the Pacific theater. This was another one of those situations where due to the nature of how special operations assignments are set up, I was technically responsible to two bosses. Being attached to the Pacific Command, from day to day I’d be responsible to Prueher. In the big picture, being a representative of special operations, my second boss was General Hugh Shelton, commander in chief of USSOCOM at the time. Shelton is another one with ties to the community from early on. He was a member of the Project Delta team back in Vietnam, a Special Forces detachment that became the most decorated single unit in the Vietnam War—one that was integral in setting the standards for the operators who came after them.
Before I flew to Hawaii, I paid an office visit to General Shelton back in Tampa. The six-foot five-inch commander leaned in toward me and looked me squarely in the eyes. “Norty, if you only remember one thing, it’s this,” he began, about to share insight gleaned from over three decades in uniform. “Get into the back pocket of the J-3 [operations officer]. Show him what you’re made of and how you can make his life easier. Earn his trust.”
That one piece of advice made it well worth the trip, and it was something that I’ve never forgotten. His logic was that you want to have that officer’s full confidence so that if something went down, he’d instantly turn to you to apply your capability to the problem. These things played out so fast, if you hadn’t already earned that confidence before the execute order came in, chances were you’d missed the boat. Serendipitously, this played out within the first few weeks of my arrival.
Instability in Cambodia caused real concern about the safety of Americans, prompting President Clinton to authorize the 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group’s deployment from Okinawa to Thailand for a potential evacuation. Orchestrating JTF BEVEL EDGE was a big deal—the proposed rescue of a thousand American citizens trapped in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, by a possible civil war.
Deploying forces included three MC-130Hs, three MC-130Ps, three MH-53Js, and 340 personnel, plus a support fleet of C-5, C-17, C-141, and KC-135 aircraft. This earned me the respect of Admiral Prueher and, just as General Shelton had predicted, it also set up a valuable relationship with Joe Mobley, the J-3—one that served us well for the rest of my command. We acted expeditiously, we reported and stayed connected in a professional way that demonstrated a level of competence. From then on Joe had confidence that we could do what we said we could do.
Joe Mobley was quite a guy—an exemplary officer and an excellent operations officer. Just to give you an idea of his strength of will, for 1,724 days, Joe was a prisoner of war in Hanoi. He’d been flying as a bombardier-navigator when his A6A Intruder was hit at low altitude by AAA over North Vietnam. He bailed out, but suffered a severe broken leg in the shoot down. He was captured, tied—standing—to a pillar in spite of the fracture, then beaten, interrogated, displayed for public humiliation, and forced to dodge bricks and bamboo sticks hurled at him for over eight hours. When he was finally thrown into a cell, he had to set his own leg. He spent months in solitary confinement, then endured intermittent torture for the duration of his five years of imprisonment. Earning the respect of a man like this meant a great deal to me.
* * *
This was a period of engagement, and much of my time was spent reaching out to other countries, including Thailand (where I parachuted with the Thais during Exercise Cobra Gold), Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Korea, and Japan. I even traveled to Beijing to improve relations between our countries. Typically, I met with my special operations counterpart, and almost always the ambassador and country team. In addition to receiving written advance briefs, we would almost always have face-to-face intelligence briefings in which they would review pertinent American policy, especially objectives that the command leadership hoped that I would achieve.
Another role that I played was the deputy of the Combined Unconventional Warfare Task Force in Korea under Korean Lieutenant General Oh Chang Hwan. General Oh was quite unpredictable, and that scared the hell out of my real boss, U.S. Army General John Tilelli, who had me “unofficially monitoring” General Oh just to make sure he didn’t get overly anxious and initiate some precipitous actions of which Tilelli would not approve.
OCTOBER 1998–JANUARY 2000
In 1970, Chuck Wald was a wide receiver at North Dakota State University—a pretty good one, in fact, so good that he got drafted by the Atlanta Falcons. But instead of playing football, he chose ROTC and went to Vietnam as a forward air controller—then went on to direct the aerial raid on Qaddafi’s compound in Tripoli in 1986. He then flew bombing runs in F-16s over Bosnia. Chuck is the one whom I had just replaced in what turned out to be an important job in the strategic planning directorate for the Air Staff. The official title was director of strategic planning.
My boss was Lieutenant General Roger Dekok, a good man and an exceptional boss. Roger, who has since passed away, was the XP—deputy chief of staff for plans and programs. Very smart and kept me on my toes. Almost all of his career was spent somehow connected to the space program—aerospace surveillance, space systems planning, special White House assignments on security, and defense issues relating to the space program. The way he approached things gave me a fresh perspective. I liked that. We were located on the fifth floor of the Pentagon. It was one of those offices where the instant you walked in, you felt a kind of vibrant energy. Roger had a lot to do with that.
There were two major accomplishments during that period. The first was developing a new Air Force tagline. Sounds easy, right? Well, guess again. I gained a healthy respect for the challenges that ad agency execs must face every day. But in our case, there was no agency. Besides some outside help for focus groups and such, it was all done in-house. Our task was to create a line that generated an instant vision of who we were and what we did, while at the same time inspiring, exciting, and, in an ideal world, instilling a sense of fear (or at the very least, healthy respect) in the minds of our enemies. What we ended up with was Global Vigilance, Reach, and Power.
Coming up with the line was the first step. Getting buy-in from the highest levels of the Air Force was every bit as important, and it was no walk in the park. We presented the slogan, argued its merits, then engaged in healthy debate, over and over, with various decision makers—all leading up to our final presentation to the Corona group, the four-stars and senior civilians of the Air Force. At the time, General Ryan was the Chief of Staff, and Whit Peters was the secretary. They ultimately agreed to the slogan. That was almost twenty years ago, and it’s still used today—it’s one of the first things you’re exposed to on the Air Force website, recruiting posters, command briefs, you name it.
The second major project was the creation of a document we called America’s Air Force Vision 2020. It defined our Air Force vision—showing where we were headed and where we expected to be by the year 2020. What a challenge, but what great fun! On the one hand I felt a little like some sci-fi writer—lots of emphasis on space, comprehensive intelligence capabilities, and surveillance capabilities. Not too much cyber at that point, but even at that early stage, it was starting to creep into the dialogue. But unlike a science fiction writer, these predictions had to be grounded in reality and extrapolated from then current data—what we believed to be a realistic depiction of where we would be twenty years out.
We broke it down into six areas:
The Foundation: Our people and our values
The Domain: Aerospace
The Method: Expeditionary Aerospace Force
The Building Blocks: Our Core Competencies
The Approach: Innovation and Adaptation
The Commitment: Keeping the Trust
The entire doc
ument is available online at www.nortyschwartz.com/vision2020.
Here are a few pages:
* * *
A goal of many flag officers is to someday get that fourth star and be assigned to command one of the nine Unified Combatant Commands. These are joint commands that include forces from every service branch. SOCOM (Special Operations Command) is one of them, and it shouldn’t be a surprise to hear that my ultimate goal was to lead that organization—down the road, of course, if it were to happen at all.
From early on I’d been interacting with the Special Ops community, and I earned a solid reputation as someone who would get the job done and someone who could be trusted. From Dick Scholtes, Carl Stiner, and Gary Luck in the early days, through Wayne Downing, Pete Schoomaker, Charlie Holland, Doug Brown, Eric Olson, Dell Dailey, Stan McChrystal, and others, I got to know the various commanders very well. I worked well with them and I became a part of the network. From the time I was a captain through my wing command, either I was a direct participant or I had people in my direct line of supervision who were part of their teams.
This was particularly true in the case of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command), due to the nature of its structure. The logic was that the folks of the U.S.-based force weren’t necessarily quite as knowledgeable about theater matters as would be the theater command. And so the arrangement of having the JSOC two-star (now three-star) serve as a PACOM (United States Pacific Command) joint task force commander with a theater representative (SOCPAC) as his deputy was a perfect mix. It was something that made the theater commander—in the case of PACOM, Admiral Prueher—comfortable. It was a good way to promote cohesion and cooperation. And it’s a good example of how Pete Schoomaker and I intersected and stayed close with one another.
It had barely been a year since I pinned on my two stars, and almost all of that time had been spent on developing our new Air Force slogan and the Air Force Vision 2020 document. In fact, I had just presented General DeKok with the final draft when I got the call.
“Norty, Pete Schoomaker here. Am I really going to have to look at that ugly face of yours again?” I smiled and wondered what he had in mind.
“I don’t know about that, sir. Why don’t you tell me?”
“Just saw the new promotion announcement and under ‘three-stars’ there’s a ‘Norton A. Schwartz.’ Know anything about that?”
“You have got to be kidding me,” I sputtered, completely flummoxed and caught off guard—not something I was expecting.
“Who jumps from two stars to three in under two years?” he asked.
Then it occurred to me: why is Pete the one making this call? He answered that question before I had the chance to ask: “Time to call Suzie and have her start packing those bags. You’re coming to Tampa to be my deputy!”
* * *
Deputy Commander of Special Operations Command—a perfect fit on so many levels. It placed me in prime position to take over SOCOM when Pete retired. But beyond that, the assignment itself was a dream come true; I’d be working hand in hand with the legends of U.S. special operations—many of whom had been captains in the Desert One era. Pete was commander, Doug Brown was commanding JSOC, and Eric Olson led Naval Special Warfare Command.
By this point I had attended my share of promotion ceremonies, both as promotee and as the one doing the pinning. While the size of the audience and hoopla may grow in proportion to the level of rank, the basic protocol surrounding the event had always been consistent. Nobody was more on top of this than Suzie, who was—and still is—an event planner extraordinaire. She was well into the planning long before we left Washington, as I found out one evening in the fall of 1999.
I walked in from work to find Suzie at the dinner table, deeply enmeshed in calculations of some kind. The table was littered with index cards, directories, and lists she had consolidated from past events. Everything except for the steaks she had promised.
“Dinner looks delicious,” I said with a smirk, wondering which of her many projects had so captured her focus this time.
“Thank you, I’ve been cooking all day,” she quipped while still scribbling onto her yellow legal pad. “And don’t bother taking off your coat, we’re going out.” How could she have seen that I’d already begun to do so? “So I’ve been going over the guest list for your pinning ceremony. Invitations should really go out by next week. Have you given any thought to who you’d like to do the pinning?”
“You know, having an Air Force special operator get his third star is not insignificant. Obviously it’s a very big deal for us, but I’m talking about for the whole AFSOC family we’ve grown up with. I thought it would be fitting to have them enjoy the moment right along with us. Why don’t we have it at Hurlburt? And there’s nobody I’d be more honored to have officiate than …”
“General Hobson,” Suzie interrupted. “I wish I’d thought of that,” she said with a devilish smirk. Then she tossed me a prototype invitation that she’d drafted earlier that day. It read:
The Commander of the Twenty-third Air Force
requests the pleasure of your company at a
Promotion Ceremony
In honor of
Lieutenant General Norton A. Schwartz
on January 12, 2000,
at 9 o’clock
Hurlburt Field, Florida
General Hobson could not have been more appreciative when he accepted our invitation to conduct the pinning. Suzie worked her butt off to lock in all the arrangements. She coordinated the date with General Hobson’s office as well as that of AFSOC commander Lt Gen Maxwell C. “Clay” Bailey, then ordered and subsequently sent out all the invitations. It promised to be a memorable event. Her taking care of everything so superbly allowed me to concentrate on wrapping things up at the Pentagon, which at this level meant a personal exit interview with the Chief, Mike Ryan.
It was a rather informal meeting in General Ryan’s office, with the two of us sitting at the round table where he conducted many of his meetings. Like most of these exit interviews, this one was rather straightforward … until he began to wrap it up.
“So, who’s going to do the pinning?” he asked.
“Well, General Ryan, I had asked Jim Hobson to do it. And we were thinking about doing it at Hurlburt.”
He looked at me and he said, “Norty, the chief of staff has first dibs on three-star pinnings.” I must have blanched because I should have been smart enough to know that, but I wasn’t. It created rather an awkward moment. “No, I’m going to do the pinning,” he stated calmly, as if that had been the case all along. “When did you say it’s going to be?” he asked as he stood and walked over to the appointment book he kept next to the phone atop his immense desk. I told him the date and he scrawled it into the book.
“You know, I’m already locked in to fly to Europe that day—and there’s no way that I can push that trip …”
Phew, dodged that bullet, I thought.
“Here’s what I’m going to do … We are going to stop at Hurlburt en route to Europe and I’m going to do the pinning. Got it?”
“Got it, sir,” I assured him.
I could not get home fast enough to give Suzie the news or to let Clay Bailey know what had occurred. “Holy crap, did I screw this up!” I blurted out to her.
I called Hobson to explain what had happened, then Clay Bailey, since this was playing out on his station. And Suzie, bless her, took care of everything else—as usual.
* * *
Suzie and I finished packing and were fully prepared to bid farewell to DC’s frigid sub-zero January mornings. I looked around and gave the place one final survey.
“Looks good to me, let’s hit the road,” Suzie declared, anxious to be welcomed by the ninety-degree heat wave that had just hit Tampa.
“Hang on just a sec, I think we missed something.”
Sticking out from behind the stairwell was a long, well-worn rod of some kind. I picked it up and smiled. Not much use for a snow shovel where
we were headed.
“Give it to me,” Suzie demanded, grabbing it and ferrying it out to a substantial stack of overstuffed boxes beside the driveway. “Might as well let someone get good use out of it.” She tossed it on top, just beside a handwritten sign that read TO BE PICKED UP BY GOODWILL.
* * *
Once the big day arrived, all had been forgotten and it was a glorious moment inside the big hanger at Hurlburt. The crowd was even larger than we had expected, and General Ryan did a wonderful job. Mrs. Ryan was there, too. Sharing the moment with our family in the community was one of the smartest decisions we ever made. By the time the last piece of cake was finished and the cleanup crew stepped in, General Ryan was well on his way to Europe and we were headed to Tampa to get to work.
We passed through the Bayshore gate at MacDill and were escorted to what we expected to be our home for the next two years—perhaps five if I were to be promoted and take over as commander after Pete retired in two years. It was a gorgeous house near the water at 2132 Staff Circle, surrounded by palm trees in a picture-perfect postcard setting. CENTCOM Commander in Chief General Tony Zinni’s house was directly across the driveway, and General Schoomaker’s was on the Bayshore end of the block, directly facing the bay.
Working with Pete did not disappoint. While he enjoyed staying actively involved in operations, his guidance was for me to focus on the budget side (resources and acquisition) as well as issues of staff performance. At this time Doug Brown was JSOC commander, so remarkably, you had this group of captains from the Desert One era now positioned as the senior leadership of the special operations community. As it turned out, I had a natural proclivity for budgeting issues, so it all worked out quite nicely.
The SEALS had long been expressing the need for a self-contained, stealthy submersible with which they could conduct long-range insertions of special operations forces on sensitive missions—an entirely enclosed mini-sub, as it were. For years they’d had “open” mini-subs of the wet variety, but, being “open,” the combat swimmers’ long exposure to cold water during the transit period impeded combat readiness upon their arrival. An enclosed environment would also allow for an enhanced underwater navigational capability, something that was lacking in the open SDVs (SEAL delivery vehicles). Ultimately, Northrup Grumman was contracted to develop and deliver the Advanced SEAL Delivery System, or ASDS.
Journey Page 22