Battlefield Ukraine

The Last Straw

The President was starting to think his generals and senior advisors either did not know what was going on in Europe, or were just incompetent. On top of everything else, things were heating up in Iran with the Straits of Hormuz now. Moreover, the Chinese were making waves about bringing Taiwan back into the fold, and were posturing towards Vietnam and Myanmar. The world situation was feeling very volatile.

Europe, however, was the immediate problem. President Gates knew he needed to think of solutions to the problems, but he couldn’t help but get lost in a sea of thoughts about how America had gotten into this situation to begin with. “I should have never gone against my own gut,” he bemoaned. “I can’t believe how many voices there were talking in my ear, telling me that this was a good idea. The intelligence agencies, my senior military advisors, congressional leaders; they all thought that if we stood up to Russia that Vladimir Petrov would back down. Then again, some of them, like Senators McGregor and Grandy, have made their entire careers advocating for military intervention against one country or another.”

“I should have paid better attention in history class,” thought Gates. “Eisenhower did warn that the military industrial complex craves for war. I wonder if this is somehow what the hawks in my party wanted all along.”

As the President listened to his advisors brief him on the situation up to this point, it all washed together as one sea of awfulness. The Navy had lost a Supercarrier, the Air Force had lost nearly 208 combat aircraft, and a stealth bomber had been shot down outside of Moscow after one of its bombs had gone off course, killing nearly 2,000 civilians. They had already used up or lost nearly $120 billion in military equipment, 8,000 service members had sacrificed their lives already, and nearly twice that number had been wounded.

“Ugh… is there any good news?” wondered the President.

Instead, the advisors moved from the military situation to the international scene. The president had to control himself from audibly groaning. He already knew about the issue with Turkey; they had announced that they were going to remain neutral in the fight with Russia, and they had withdrawn their warships from the NATO fleet in the Black Sea just before the Russian missile swarm attack. Further, Turkey declared that it would no longer allow NATO to use its military bases, in fear that the Russians might launch a strike against them. A few hours ago, the Turkish Ambassador to the United States had even suggested to the Secretary of State that they might close off the Bosphorus Straits to NATO military traffic.

President Gates had already partially responded to that last issue prior to this meeting. He had personally called President Yavuz. Among other things, he told him, “In no uncertain terms, if you close the Bosphorus Straits, I will use all available military force to keep them open, even if I need to destroy the Turkish Air Force and Navy. Do you understand?”

President Yavuz had cursed and hurled numerous accusations at President Gates, but ultimately, he had backed down.

Then there was Chancellor Schneider. The German armored brigade that was fighting alongside the Americans in Kiev had taken horrific combat losses. Casualties were so high that Schneider was reluctant to send additional forces. The Russians had also attacked a German airbase near Berlin, causing considerable damage. This assault so close to the German capital had shaken the government to the core, and caused them to become hesitant when they needed to be resolute.

Germany was not the only country reluctant to send reinforcements to NATO. France and Spain were also hesitant to put more troops in harm’s way. Poland was holding the bulk of their army in reserve along the Belarus border as the Russian 4^th Army continued to stay deployed not far away from their border. At least the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark were rushing whatever available forces they could to Ukraine. However, without that additional support from their other allies, it placed an enormous strain on the remaining US forces in Ukraine as they tried to hold out against a significantly larger Russian force. Though he was horrified by the situation, President Gates couldn’t help but admire President Petrov; he sure knew where to squeeze the Europeans to get the results he wanted.

As Gates watched his military advisors argue amongst themselves, he turned and watched two of the TV monitors. They created a split screen between CNN and Fox News. It was amazing to watch them side by side like this and see the almost night-and-day difference in the coverage. CNN had gone from their non-stop coverage of how he was a puppet of Vladimir Petrov to pounding the drum that he had led America into a war it couldn’t win against Russia. Fox News seemed to be trying to rally the country around him; they kept talking about how the U.S. was responding to an unprovoked attack by Russia.

Disgusted by the indecisiveness and bickering, the President got up and walked out of the room. He was repulsed by the whole lot of them. American soldiers were fighting and dying in a war they had pushed for, and now they couldn’t figure out how to win it. The Russians had suckered-punched them hard. If NATO had been able to hit the Russians on their timeframe, things would have turned out differently, but here they were.

Gates walked back to the Oval Office and sat down in the chair behind his desk. His Chief of Staff, Ishaan Patel, came in right after him.

“Sir, why did you leave the meeting?” he asked, visibly concerned. “We still need to make a number of big decisions… I think you should come back to the Situation Room.”

“I know that the President is losing patience with the generals, but we have a war going on right now,” thought Ishaan. “I need him to get his head back in the game. There are lives on the line.”

The President looked at his Chief of Staff, who was a good man by all accounts. Then he hung his head down and turned his chair to face the window. As soon as he looked outside, he saw crowds of protesters outside the fence. “It just doesn’t seem to even matter what I do,” he lamented. “Every decision I make is ridiculed, every action is attacked… Why did I give up my life to do this? I was so crazy to think that somehow I could fix this country.”

After not saying anything for a moment, he turned around and looked his Chief of Staff in the eye. “Ishaan, I’ve lost confidence in them. The generals have been wrong from the beginning, and so were Leibowitz, McGregor and Grandy. I trusted these men’s judgment. I believed them when they said NATO would hold together. I had confidence in the DIA, CIA, and NSA when they said Russia did not have the capability to attack us and push our forces out of Ukraine. They were all wrong.”

The President let out a long sigh before continuing, “They either lied to us, or they are just incompetent. In either case Ishaan, I just don’t trust their judgment any more.”

Ishaan sat down at the chair in front of his boss’s desk. This was a very serious thing that the President had just said. “Sir… I cannot say that I am completely surprised to hear you say this. I feel like we have been misled by some of them as well. However, right now, we are in the middle of a war, and lives are on the line. We need to figure out what we are going to do, and then, we can focus on righting the ship.”

There was silence as the two men thought. Ishaan decided on a different approach. “Mr. President, if I may, I recommend that Steve and Jonathan come in and we discuss this. We need to get this resolved now, so we can move forward. If we need to fire some people and get new ones in place, then that needs to happen ASAP. We have soldiers dying and we need to make sure we are doing our best to help them.”

The President nodded in agreement. “Make it happen, Ishaan. Tell the generals in the Situation Room to continue with their existing plans for now, fighting the war with the current strategy and orders in place. We will have a meeting tomorrow morning at 0700 to discuss the next steps.”

An hour later, Stephen Saunders and Jonathan Rosenblatt walked into the Oval Office with Ishaan Patel to discuss a major military shake up.

The President opened the meeting by saying, “As Ishaan has most likely hinted, I have lost confidence in a number of our military leaders, along with the broader intelligence community. We must replace some of them immediately and get the situation in Europe under control. What I need to know from you three is who do you think should absolutely stay in place?”

Stephen nodded to himself. “I have been arguing to clean house for a while now,” he thought. “It’s too bad I met so much resistance from Ishaan and other administration members — they said I shouldn’t shake the system too hard or else we might break it. Well, now that we have this horrible military disaster in Europe, at least we can finally make some changes.”

“Mr. President,” he began, “the men I believe we should leave in place are the National Security Advisor, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of State. For reasons I will explain later, I do think it is time to let go of the Director of the NSA though.”

Gates shifted in his chair. He wanted to know what that last sentence meant, but he decided not to interrupt and let Stephen continue. “Sir, for now, we should leave in place the Director of the CIA and Director of National Intelligence. Even though the intelligence community as a whole has failed you, these leaders are our new appointees and need to be in place to help us right the ship. This may sound severe, but honestly, we need to completely wipe the slate clean when it comes to the vast majority of the intelligence appointees at the SES and GS15 level. This is the level where the bureaucracy has been truly hamstringing us, setting us up for failure from day one. Our Secretaries have done as well as they can with the people the Senate has been appointing, but the continual delay in confirmations has left us operating with far too many holdovers from the previous administration. The red tape (and the failure of the system as a whole) have allowed the poor performers to float to the top, and the country is paying for it in a bad way right now,” Stephen said emphatically.

The President nodded. He had heard the saying floating around the government, “failing upwards.” Because it was nearly impossible to fire a government civilian, most organizations would promote the poor performers out of their organization. This would get rid of the person and made them someone else’s problem. Unfortunately, this often meant that the worst government employees ended up becoming some of the most senior leaders in the government civilian ranks.

“Does everyone else agree with Stephen’s assessment?” asked the President.

Ishaan nodded his head. “I have been against a complete house cleaning until we had more of our folks in place, but obviously, with the military catastrophe that is unfolding in Europe, something needs to change. I would add that I recommend we fire most of the generals in charge as well. They supremely misled us, and our soldiers, sailors, and airmen have been paying the price for it.” His tone was very solemn, as if speaking at a funeral.

The President’s son-in-law nodded his head in agreement. “The intelligence community has continued to provide us with intelligence that is either false or misleading since the day you were sworn into office. They insisted that Russia did not have the military ability to effectively attack NATO; we were told time and time again that the Russians’ military was old and outdated. Yet, we all sat in that briefing detailing the 1st Armored Division’s engagement against those T-14 Armatas. How in the world did the CIA and DIA not know about the tanks’ defensive systems? Our anti-tank missiles are not even hitting the tanks, and the rounds that do hit, bounce off. This is a complete disaster, and thousands of Americans are dead because of it. I agree with Stephen, we need to completely start over when it comes to the upper level intelligence appointees,” he said as he made an impassioned case for a major shakeup.

The President took in a deep breath and then let it out. “OK, here is what we are going to do. Tomorrow, we are going to fire the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the EUCOM Commander, the Director of the NSA, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Chief of Staff for both the Army and Air Force, along with the Navy Europe Commander. If the Commander of the Bush Carrier Group hadn’t been killed in that last naval engagement, I would have fired him as well. How was his battle group not ready to deal with a possible submarine attack and then subsequent air attack? I mean, he should have at least put his Marines ashore in Romania until we figured out what to do with them. Now most of them are dead.” The President felt horrible about how many sailors and marines had died in this war so far. It was appalling, and the public was rightfully outraged and in mourning.

Looking at his Chief of Staff, the President continued, “I want the base commanders at Ramstein and Spangdahlem both fired for allowing their bases to be hit.” He paused for a second, weighing the gravity of what he was about to say. “I know that it will not be popular, but I want every appointee from the previous administration who is still in the government to be fired. I want all of these people replaced with their deputies for the time-being, until we either find a replacement or determine if the deputy should stay in charge.” Ishaan was frantically writing everything down. It was going to be a long night crafting all these letters. They would have to bring the press secretary into the loop and make sure she was ready for the morning brief. The media was going to have a field day.

Saunders signaled that he wanted to add something, “Mr. President, as you know, I’ve been working on laying a trap inside the intelligence community to figure out who has been leaking classified intelligence to the media and potentially to our enemies. This has been an ongoing effort for the past five months, while I have had those three FBI agents working for me down in the basement. We’ve identified several leakers. Since we are cleaning house tomorrow, I believe it would be a great time to announce who the leakers are and have them publicly arrested and charged with treason.”

Everyone turned to Steve in a bit of shock. They knew he had been working on identifying who the leakers were, but they did not realize he had suspects yet. “How many leakers do we have?” asked the President, his left eyebrow raised.

“On the one hand, I feel some vindication that I might actually get some justice in this whole situation… but why in the world am I just now hearing about this?” wondered the President.

“Sir, just to back up a little — I had planned on telling you during our next one-on-one meeting, now that we have the evidence we need to charge them. I wanted to make sure the FBI agents had everything they would need to make an arrest. We also brought one DOJ lawyer into the mix to make sure she had everything she needed to secure a conviction. She informed me earlier this morning that she has everything needed, so we can make the arrests whenever we are ready. Now, as to the leakers… there are twelve leakers at the CIA, eight at the NSA, three inside the DIA, sixteen inside the DoD, eighteen inside the DOJ and nine at the FBI,” he said casually. Their mouths collectively dropped.

Ishaan was the first to speak. “Please tell me you have rock solid evidence on them, not conjecture, but rock-solid evidence.”

“As I said earlier, I’ve had my FBI team working with a DOJ lawyer to make sure everything is air tight on this one,” Steve replied, sounded almost irritated at being questioned. “We also have email, text and phone conversations of each one of them passing classified intelligence to a reporter or foreign intelligence agent. In the dragnet we setup, we also ensnared one Democratic Senator, two Democratic Congressmen, and one Republican Congressman.” He had a very smug and satisfied smile on his face.

Jonathan let out a soft whistle. “The question now is, do we charge the congressional members? If we do, do we have enough evidence to make it all stick?” he asked rhetorically.

Saunders replied, “We have them caught dead to rights. I do not see why we would not charge them with treason. The American people are sick and tired of politicians being held above the law and getting away with shady stuff like this. We should make an example of them all, and perp walk them in front of the cameras.”

Saunders continued before anyone else could jump in and add anything further, “There is one other major concern; one of the folks we identified as a leaker is currently working inside the Pentagon. We believe he is actually a deep cover SVR operative. We caught a text message that he sent to a known FSB agent operating in New York. The text gave the gist of the national security meeting where you decided that we would forcefully evict the Russians from the Ukraine if they did not withdraw. It was later that same day that the Russians launched their preemptive attack on us.”

The President and his other advisers were shocked at the news. “This would explain why we were caught off guard,” thought the President. “However, the military should have been able to handle the Russians’ attacks… and why didn’t the Director of the NSA bring this to my attention right away? Why am I hearing about it several days later from Saunders instead? Something is just not right with the intelligence community that they can’t identify high value information and get it to my office. No wonder Stephen wanted to fire the Director.”

Ishaan spoke up next. “This is incredible Steve. I am still not sure why the NSA did not bring this to us, but we will have to find out when we question the director about it tomorrow, now that we know. In the meantime, Mr. President, I think we should move forward with the arrests of the Congressional members who have betrayed our country. We cannot have them operating in their positions of power and influence while at the same time disclosing classified intelligence that is now being used against us by our enemies. People are dying because of their actions.”

Gates smiled at the thought of having them walked in front of the press while they were formally charged with treason. “OK, then here is what we are going to do. I want the traitors arrested first thing in the morning. We need to stop them from leaking information, especially that Russian agent. Then on Friday, I want the four Congressional leaders arrested and charged. At the same time, I want all of the firings of the government employees to take place across the spectrum. That will ensure the entire coverage over the weekend will be of the traitors within the government being arrested.”

Gates continued, “On Saturday, we will announce who will be taking over as the new commanders of the positions we just relieved, and publicize our new approach to the war in Europe.”

Ishaan jumped into the conversation, almost cutting the President off. “Mr. President, we do have one major thing that needs to be taken into consideration. While I agree with the firings, we are in the middle of a ground war with Russia. We still have important decisions that have to be made on what we are going to do next.”

Gates nodded. “I agree. I’m not about to lose more soldiers to incompetence. After the SACEUR is fired, I want to speak with the Deputy EUCOM Commander immediately. I want to know from him what the strategy is, along with his recommendations on what we should do next. I want him brought up to speed on what has transpired, and more importantly, I want his advice on what we should do in Europe to right the ship.”

The meeting continued for another hour as they dissected the various positions that would need to be backfilled quickly, and which ones could wait a few days or a week. It was going to be the largest shakeup of the government in history, but one that was much needed.