Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL

Two thousand ten began inauspiciously for me with the president’s State of the Union address, on January 27. I absolutely hated going to this political theater. The president stands before both houses of Congress in the Capitol with packed galleries (the first lady’s box is filled with people handpicked to highlight one or another parts of the president’s message and always several uniformed military). He tells Congress and the American people that everything in the country is going—or will go—swimmingly with him as president (or at worst, “unprecedented” challenges will be tackled “boldly”) and lays out his agenda for the coming year. Major elements of the address are inevitably partisan. His supporters in Congress rise—over and over—to applaud and cheer while the opposition sits on its hands except in the rare moments when the president mentions something they like, or makes the obligatory references to the U.S. military. The Supreme Court justices sit stoically, unsmiling and almost never applauding, never standing except when the president enters and leaves. The Joint Chiefs of Staff follow the lead of the chairman in terms of whether to applaud and whether to stand. Mostly they just sit, rising and applauding only when the troops are mentioned or there is some utterly innocuous declaration about what a great country the United States is. The president’s cabinet, on the other hand, must rise with virtually every paragraph and every jab intended to outrage the opposition. I disliked doing these political deep knee bends under both Bush and Obama. Being part of a political cheering squad was embarrassing for me, especially standing to applaud highly controversial domestic initiatives and views. A close observer would have seen how often I was the last to rise and first to sit.

One such moment occurred on January 27, when the president announced toward the end of his address, “This year, I will work with the Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are. It’s the right thing to do.” I had already agreed that repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) was the right thing to do, but in what I considered a serious breach of trust, the president had blindsided Admiral Mullen and me with this announcement, informing us of what he intended to do just the day before the speech. He dropped this bombshell without consulting with the service chiefs of staff, who would have to implement the policy change, and without allowing Mike and me time to consult the chiefs ourselves. All we could do was tell them the announcement was coming. The U.S. military leadership had adamantly opposed gays serving openly since the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law had been enacted in 1993, and the service chiefs, if not opposed outright, continued to have strong reservations about the timing and implementation of a change to DADT. The president’s preemptive strike, perhaps intended to head off leaks from the Pentagon ahead of the State of the Union, had irked the military—and me—on this sensitive initiative.

My position, as I said earlier, had been clear from the start. I felt that to have legitimacy with the troops, a matter as sensitive as reversing DADT had to be enacted through a change in the law by Congress, the elected representatives of the American people, not through presidential edict or a court order. We also had to give the troops, at every level, the chance to provide their views so we would better understand the challenges facing us and them in implementation. We needed time to train both leaders and troops so there would be minimal, if any, impact on unit cohesion, discipline, morale, or recruitment and retention. The military never gets a “vote” on what it must do, and I was not advocating anything like a plebiscite. But every argument made about what men and women in uniform felt or thought about DADT, pro or con, was either based on assumption or was entirely anecdotal. I would often get questions about DADT from the troops in town halls, and my response was always the same: we would do what the commander in chief and Congress directed, but we had to prepare properly.

In response to a number of lawsuits challenging DADT, the courts seemed to be moving quickly and inexorably toward overturning the law, which would require a change in policy overnight—the worst of all possible outcomes, as I said earlier, because there would be no time to prepare or to train. The challenge I faced was how to juggle all three branches of government: to get the president to hold off from acting preemptively through executive action, to get Congress to change the legislation (which in early 2010 seemed unlikely), and to effect change before the courts gave us no choice and no time.

Fortunately Mullen and I, fully aware of the president’s determination to eliminate DADT, had asked our staffs to begin preparatory work during the summer of 2009. In June, the Joint Staff gave us a comprehensive briefing on DADT that identified the risks of overturning the policy as: losing control of the change; degraded readiness, unit cohesion, and discipline; implementing a policy for which the force was not prepared; and the unpredictability of implementing a major policy shift in time of war. On the other side of the ledger, the Joint Staff cited several potential mitigating factors: the fact that men and women who join the military expect some reduction in personal freedoms and adjust their behavior accordingly; the determination of gay and lesbian service members “to prove their worth and capability”; force preparation and training with an emphasis on shared values and a focus on commonalities rather than differences; and active leadership at every level. The report offered several alternative approaches to conducting a study of the force and who should lead that study. So while the president surprised us in his State of the Union speech, we were reasonably well prepared to move ahead quickly.

It’s a good thing Mullen and I were ready, because six days later, on February 2, both of us were summoned by the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Senator Carl Levin, to testify on DADT. We had met with the president the previous afternoon and outlined what we intended to say and do, and he was supportive. The hearing was a historic moment, and everyone knew it. I opened with the declaration that “I fully support the president’s decision.” I said the question now was not whether the military would make this change but how best to prepare for it. I announced that, in consultation with Mullen, I had appointed a high-level working group within the Defense Department that would make recommendations in the form of an implementation plan by “the end of this calendar year.” A guiding principle of the effort, I continued, would be to minimize disruption and polarization within the ranks, with special attention paid to those on the front lines.

I said the working group would examine a number of lines of study, all proceeding simultaneously:

I told the senators that it would take the better part of a year to accomplish this because the overriding imperative was to “get this right and minimize disruption to a force that is actively fighting two wars and working through the stress of almost a decade of combat.” To underscore the importance of the endeavor, I said it would be cochaired by Defense Department general counsel Jeh Johnson and General Carter Ham, the four-star commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, who had previously led soldiers in Iraq. I concluded with a plea to the senators present and to the entire Congress not to politicize the issue.

The high point of the hearing was the statement by Mullen. He began by saying that the Joint Chiefs owed the president their best military advice on the impact and implementation of repeal, and as chairman, he endorsed the process I had laid out. Admiral Mullen’s next three sentences, after seventeen years of nearly unanimous senior military opposition to gays serving openly, made history:

There was an audible gasp in the packed hearing room as Mullen uttered those words. I do not believe anyone expected such a strong, unambiguous personal endorsement of a change in the law from the chairman. But Mullen had put his finger on the fundamental flaw in the 1993 law: it allowed gays to serve in the military, an institution that places the highest possible value on personal integrity, but only by compromising their integrity. Mullen went on to say that while he believed men and women in uniform could and would accommodate such a change, he did not know this “for a fact.” The review would provide an opportunity to address that uncertainty.

We appeared before the House Armed Services Committee, chaired by Representative Ike Skelton, the next day. While this hearing was mainly on the budget, there was considerable discussion of repeal of DADT, which Skelton opposed. When a couple of members began arguing with each other about the review, I jumped in. I said I had led three large institutions—CIA, Texas A&M University, and Defense—and I had managed change before. I had done it smart, and I had done it stupid. I had done it stupid, early in my career at CIA, by trying to impose significant change by edict from the top. This review was doing it smart—getting the troops and their families involved and sharing their views.

Reactions to our testimony in both houses were, unfortunately, fairly predictable. Advocates of repeal welcomed the change in views at the top of the Pentagon but expressed concern that we would proceed to drag our heels and delay implementation for years. Opponents, such as John McCain, acidly expressed “deep disappointment” in what we had said, adding that the prospective review would be “clearly biased” because it presumed the law should be changed. Sadly, the issue of repeal, like everything else in Congress, was going to be largely a partisan one, although there were a few outliers in each party. But within a few days after our testimony, I was confident we would have the time to do the review right. Democrats in the Senate clearly did not have the sixty votes necessary to break a Republican filibuster, and even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she might hold off a vote until after the midterm elections in November.

Despite my support for the initiative, I shared the concern of the service chiefs about the impact of making the change while we were fighting two wars, with all the stress already on the military. I was especially concerned about the impact on the combat and direct support formations of the Army, Marine Corps, and Special Forces, a relatively small portion of the overall military but the portion that had borne the brunt of the post-9/11 conflicts and where small-unit cohesion and camaraderie were crucial to success and survival. I knew the principal burden of making the new policy work would fall mainly on the same company grade officers and NCOs who were under the most stress. I wanted the troops down-range (in Iraq and Afghanistan) involved in the review as little as possible; I wanted instead to focus on recently returned units. Personally, I hoped we could get past the midterm elections before a vote, though I was quite aware of the hot breath of the courts on my neck. To be honest, I was skeptical Congress would pass repeal. While I wanted the review completed expeditiously, I wanted to avoid roiling the military over a change that I thought might well not happen. Of course, if it did, I would do my very best to lead and implement the change without incident.

Mullen’s “personal” testimony complicated life for the service chiefs. They all had been quite public—especially the commandant of the Marine Corps—in opposing repeal anytime soon. They expressed their concerns to me in a meeting in the Tank on February 19, Army chief of staff George Casey and Air Force chief Norty Schwartz being the most outspoken. Casey said he was comfortable with my approach but emphasized the need to consult with the troops and to avoid the appearance that “all of this is a done deal.” He added that he wanted to reserve the right to provide “informed military advice,” especially if the outcome of the review was to suggest that going forward with a change in DADT was a bad idea. “You can only change culture so much at a time,” he said. Schwartz said, “This is not the time for this.” Marine commandant Jim Amos expressed his concerns about the risk to unit readiness, then asked me what the chiefs should say if asked their “personal views.” I said matter-of-factly, “All you can do is be honest.” But I also told them that the review gave them a way to avoid disagreeing either with Mullen or their commander in chief. They could continue to express their concerns but promise to withhold final judgment until after the review was done. All of them were clear with me about one thing: if the law changed, they would implement it effectively.

Thanks to the good work of Jeh Johnson and others, I was able to announce in late March a number of changes, effective immediately, to make application of the existing policy and law fairer. I announced that I would raise the rank of officer authorized to initiate an inquiry or separation because of homosexual conduct to general or admiral. We would revise what constituted “credible information” about a service member’s homosexuality to require, for example, that a sworn statement would be necessary and hearsay would not be allowed. We would revise what constituted a “reliable person,” upon whose word an inquiry could be initiated, “with special scrutiny on third parties who may be motivated to harm the service member.” This was meant to address the problem of jilted lovers and spurned romantic advances, situations in which the accuser used the DADT policy to get revenge by “outing” a service member. Certain categories of confidential information would no longer be used in support of discharges, including information provided to lawyers, clergy, and psychotherapists, medical professionals in furtherance of medical treatment, and public health officials. In effect, these changes limited DADT inquiries and separations to service members who had “outed” themselves intentionally or made little or no attempt to hide their orientation. The military would not consume time and resources trying to ferret out gays and lesbians in the ranks who kept their personal lives to themselves.

As one reporter put it, “There will no longer be an investigatory zeal, a prosecutorial mode, or a policy designed to search for serving gays. A small step, but it will help change the culture.” Since 1993, more than 13,500 service members had been discharged for homosexual conduct. Now the number would plummet.

Since Mullen’s and my testimony, there had been considerable talk on the Hill about quickly enacting some kind of legislation for repeal. Senator Levin wanted to declare a moratorium on discharges until Congress could act. I wondered how you could declare a moratorium on the enforcement of any law. Fortunately Jeh Johnson backed me up. I made clear to the president and to Emanuel that any effort to legislate DADT before completion of the review was unacceptable to me because it would be perceived as a direct insult by men and women in uniform who had just been told that their views would be sought out before any policy change. It would send the message that neither the president nor the Congress gave a damn what they thought. Obama and Emanuel promised—unequivocally and on several occasions—to oppose any legislation before completion of the review.

By mid-April, we were hearing rumors of quiet side deals being discussed between members of the White House staff and Congress. I met with Rahm on April 21 and told him there were multiple indications from the Senate that White House officials were actively encouraging Senators Lieberman and Levin to move legislatively on DADT in advance of the Defense review. I told Rahm I was getting tired of the White House preoccupation with responding to pressure from gay advocacy groups on DADT without taking into account the impression on the troops that no one “over here” (at the White House) cared about military views and attitudes.

Nine days later Mullen and I repeated our position in a response to a letter from Ike Skelton on the advisability of legislative action to repeal DADT prior to completion of the Defense review: “I strongly oppose any legislation that seeks to change this policy prior to the completion of this vital assessment process.” Our concern fell on deaf ears. The politicos at the White House, despite protestations of innocence, continued to negotiate with congressional staffers and outside supporters on the terms of legislation. I knew this because on several occasions during the first part of May, Rahm approached me with one formulation or another to ask if it would work for me. After the assurances from the president and Rahm that they would oppose congressional action before the review was complete, I felt there had been a breach of faith by the White House.

On May 21, Robert Rangel and Jeh Johnson met with White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, NSS chief of staff McDonough, and several others from the White House on how to proceed with Congress. Rangel laid out my position (again). Messina said that the president could not publicly declare opposition to congressional action now. He said they had been able to “finesse” and “dodge” the issue over the last several months, but Congress’s insistence on taking action was about “to force his hand.” Johnson and Rangel explained why Mullen and I felt so strongly about preserving the integrity of the review process and asserted that no matter how “artfully” we rationalized a change of position in a way that could be sold in Washington, “it will not translate well to the world where the troops live—to them it’s a simple matter of Congress repealing in advance of the review or not.”

On Sunday, May 23, as Rangel, Johnson, and the White House tried to reach agreement on how to proceed with Congress that coming week, Mullen joined me on my porch at home to discuss the state of play. As I puffed on a cigar, I told Mike that Emanuel was pushing me to accept some sort of legislation that would repeal DADT but would delay implementation until after the review was done and recommendations considered. I said it still sent the wrong message to the troops—that Congress didn’t care what they thought. Mullen said he had been “diddled” by the White House on an issue where he already was way out in front of the chiefs. He was also deeply bothered by the recently published Jonathan Alter book The Promise, which portrayed the White House and the president as distrustful of the military leadership. I responded that I, too, was frustrated and stressed. Afterward I jotted down what I had told him: “The Democrats fear losses in the fall will prevent action on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell after the election (and after the review).” They are listening only to the gay and lesbian groups, I had said, and not willing to wait to listen to the troops: “It’s all politics, and I’ve had it.”

One last time, on May 24, I tried privately to dissuade the president. I told him that in 1993, the Joint Chiefs, including the chairman, had all come out together against the president on gays serving in the military. I said that seventeen years later Mike and I had gotten the chiefs on board by promising, based on Obama’s assurances, that we would have time to complete the review process and there would be no action beforehand. “You’re about to blow that up,” I said, and “I cannot predict the results.” I made no headway, so I threw in the towel. I told the president I could live with the proposed legislative language as a minimally acceptable last resort.

The deal with Senators Levin and Lieberman repealed the 1993 law, but the repeal would not become legally effective until the Defense Department review was complete, its recommendations to prepare for the change fully implemented, and the president, secretary of defense, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs each certified that implementation would not affect military readiness, recruitment, or retention. “I continue to believe that ideally the DoD review should be completed before there is any legislation to repeal the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law,” I announced. “With Congress having indicated that is not possible, I can accept the language in the proposed amendment.” As CNN’s John King reported on May 25, I had “put out a statement that indicates support for it [the amendment], but wow, it is a very, very, very tepid statement.” He got that right. While the bill was passed by the Senate Armed Services Committee that week 16–14, it would stall in the Senate. The House Armed Services Committee passed repeal legislation over the objections of its chairman, and the full House voted in favor 229–186. Due to the obstruction of Republicans in the Senate, however, full repeal did not pass until just before Christmas during the lame duck session of Congress—after the review was complete.

Superbly managed by Jeh Johnson and General Ham, the review consisted of a survey sent to 400,000 service members (the original plan was for 200,000, but I told the cochairs to double it), another survey sent to 150,000 military spouses, focus group meetings with Johnson and Ham that involved face-to-face dialogue with nearly 25,000 troops, and a third-party-managed hotline where gay and lesbian service members could offer their views confidentially. The surveys were the largest ever conducted of our military and represented the first empirically based review of military attitudes on gays and lesbians serving openly.

On September 27, I received a first, preliminary report on the results of the surveys. It was encouraging: 15 to 20 percent of respondents said that repeal would have a positive effect, and another 50 to 55 percent said repeal would have little or no effect on their unit’s ability to carry out its mission. About a third were opposed. The percentage of those opposed was substantially higher in all-male combat arms units in the Army, among Special Forces of all the services, and in the Marine Corps generally. The survey was helpful in identifying areas of concern that would require special attention in changing our policies and in training prior to repeal. The bottom line, even in the preliminary report, was that opposition to repeal was considerably less than I expected. Implementation of the change would present challenges, but the survey strongly suggested they were manageable. The report, I felt, might just persuade the Senate to pass the legislation.

Just when I thought we had a path forward for repeal of DADT and successful implementation, the courts threw everything into chaos. On September 9, Federal District Judge Virginia Phillips in San Diego ruled that the DADT law was unconstitutional. On October 12, she denied the administration’s request to keep the law in place and issued an injunction ordering the military to stop enforcing the law. My worst fear had come to pass. It precipitated the worst confrontation yet between the president and me.

I was in Brussels for a NATO defense ministers meeting when Judge Phillips issued her injunction. The president called me on the thirteenth and said he was prepared to seek a stay of the judge’s order, but we needed to figure out a way to “suspend” application of the law long enough to give Congress time to act—“suspended animation,” he called it. I said I thought we still had to enforce the law if the judge’s decision was stayed by the court of appeals. I suggested that Jeh Johnson, White House counsel Bob Bauer, and Justice Department folks get together to decide what options were available to us “in the context of the law.” The president agreed that that group should get together, but there was “a need to find a way to turn the temperature down on the issue.”

The battle lines for the next week between the White House and Defense—between the president and me—were drawn that same night, when the attorneys’ meeting I had suggested took place. Bauer proposed that Justice seek a stay and appeal Judge Phillips’s ruling but also tell the court that we would suspend any further DADT proceedings and/or separations pending a ruling on the appeal by the Ninth Circuit Court (the most liberal in the nation). Johnson and Rangel said such a step was not legally permissible in light of the long Defense Department history in applying the law. They reminded Bauer that the administration had rejected this same rationale in opposing Senator Levin’s proposal for a moratorium earlier in the year, and observed the negative impact if the administration suddenly decided not to faithfully enforce the law. The two sides were at an impasse. The White House team said they would reengage with the president.

Even though I was still traveling overseas, arrangements were made for the president and me to talk again on the telephone on October 15. Before the call, Johnson told me it was clear from Bauer that the president “really wants” to suspend separations on a temporary basis while appealing the lower court’s decision: he had “thought long and hard about this” over the preceding two days. Johnson told Bauer that I, too, felt strongly and that the president needed to know we were still far apart on the issue.

I talked with Mullen, Johnson, and Rangel from my plane. I told them, “I’m so jet-lagged I’m barely coherent. How do I play the role of constitutional lawyer with a president who is a constitutional lawyer?” Rangel said I just needed to question the wisdom and legal sustainability of suspending separations, not argue the merits of the law itself. “It seems to me that a stay means the law is in effect—all the law,” I said. “I think it’s black and white: law or no law.”

When the president called, he said he still wanted a suspension of separations while the case was heard by the Ninth Circuit. Bauer and Johnson were talking with the Office of Legal Counsel at Justice (the component in the department that tells the government whether its actions are legal) about whether that was possible. The president pretty much ignored my objections.

The president and I reengaged on the issue on October 19 at the White House. I said, “I have a problem enforcing part of the law but not all of it…. There is either law or no law—there is no gray area.” Mullen agreed. The president leaned forward in his chair and said very firmly, “I strongly disagree. I believe the law is wrong, that the plaintiffs have a stronger case than the government.” With barely suppressed anger, he went on: “Two years into my presidency, and there is no action on this. No one can accuse me of being precipitous.” He told us to think again and that we would meet again the next day; the matter needed to be decided within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. He and I then talked privately for a few minutes, and he told me that he thought the Ninth Circuit, despite its liberal reputation, would reverse the district court’s decision. He would need to react somehow, “or the groups [gay activists] will go crazy.” He said that suspension of separations during the appeals process would allow him to be seen as doing something to mitigate DADT once the reversal reinstated the policy.

The next day, after an NSC meeting on Afghanistan, the president asked to see Mullen and me in the Oval Office. He asked where we were on DADT, and I said we were in the same place as before. I said I had been told that once it had been determined that a person had engaged in what the law defined as “homosexual conduct,” the law was crystal clear in mandating separation. I told the president that, according to Jeh Johnson, “you are proposing to suspend the most directive part of the law.” When it was clear there was no give in my position, the president vented: “I won’t ask you to sign up to something you’re not comfortable with. I’m the leader of the free world, but I can’t seem to make anything happen.”

During the meeting, the president’s voice had been raspy. On the way out of the Oval Office, I unwisely asked him if he was catching cold. He made a dismissive gesture that said, Don’t even try to be friendly with me because I am really angry. He was as angry with me as I had ever seen him. He felt deeply that the DADT law was wrong, and he was enormously frustrated by his inability to do anything about it. I was a major obstacle, but he was clearly not prepared to order me to do something I thought was wrong.

That same day, October 20, the Ninth Circuit granted the government’s appeal for a stay of the lower court’s decision, and the DADT law was reinstated. The next day I signed a directive that separations of service members could be approved only by the service secretaries, after coordination with the general counsel and the undersecretary for personnel and readiness. For all practical purposes, it was a suspension of separations, but it upheld the principle that as long as the law was in effect, we would continue to enforce it.

Admiral Mullen and I publicly reported the results of the Pentagon review process on November 30. I summarized it by saying that “for large segments of the military, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, though potentially disruptive in the short term, would not be the wrenching, traumatic change that many have feared and predicted…. The key to success, as with most things military, is training, education, and above all, strong and principled leadership up and down the chain of command.”

I concluded by strongly urging the Senate to pass repeal legislation and to send it to the president for signature before the end of the year. Now that we had consulted the troops, my position on DADT repeal was in line with the White House as far as moving forward with legislation. I ended with a warning meant for Senator McCain and other opponents of repeal: “Those that choose not to act legislatively are rolling the dice that this policy will not be abruptly overturned by the courts.” The bottom line of Admiral Mullen’s corresponding statement was “This is a policy change we can make.”

Mike and I testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on December 2 on the results of the review. The testiest exchange was when I was asked whether it was a good idea to push for repeal when the survey showed substantial resistance among combat forces. I replied rather brusquely: “I can’t think of a single precedent in American history of doing a referendum of the American armed forces on a policy issue. Are you going to ask them if they want fifteen-month tours? Are you going to ask them if they want to be a part of the surge in Iraq? That’s not the way our civilian-led military has ever worked in our entire history.”

The votes of several undecided senators were influenced by the results of the Pentagon review, and contrary to most expectations even that fall, on December 18 the Senate voted to repeal DADT, and the president signed it into law on December 22. In a not-so-subtle spike of the football, the stage planners at the White House made sure the Marine Corps flag was prominently displayed behind the president as he signed. The massive bureaucratic wheels of the Pentagon began to move with uncommon speed in conforming Defense policies and regulations to the new law and in preparing training materials for the forces. By late February, training was under way for commanders and leaders and then was extended to all two million men and women in uniform. The service chiefs, after all their concern and skepticism, led this massive effort effectively and positively. The new commandant of the Marine Corps, James Amos, who had been, like his predecessor, the most negative toward repeal among the service chiefs, was hell-bent on the Marines being trained best and first.

The training went smoothly, but the certification process was not complete before I left office. The president signed the third and final certification required to bring repeal into effect—Secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman Mike Mullen had already certified—on July 22, 2011, three weeks and two days after I retired. Under the terms of the repeal law, DADT was abolished in the American armed forces on September 22, 2011. The transition went as smoothly as anyone could have hoped. We had turned a page in history, and there was barely a ripple.

Some might argue the transition went so smoothly that our fears and concerns had been greatly overdrawn and that implementation could have taken place much faster. I will always believe implementation proceeded with so few incidents and issues because of the planning and preparation that preceded it.

THE WAR WITHIN (CONTINUED)

Getting the troops in the fight what they needed continued to be a challenge in 2010. In Afghanistan, the all-terrain MRAPs began flowing in early in the year, providing much better—and much needed—protection for the troops when they were in vehicles. We were making considerable progress in getting more aircraft and drones into the theater for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. But as the strategy changed to emphasize protecting the Afghan people, more troops were moving into hostile terrain on foot. Casualties from IEDs were increasing and the wounds becoming more grievous. When a soldier stepped on an IED, all too often the result was legs and arms blown off, with further blast damage to the groin, pelvis, and abdomen. Dirt and debris was blown into these wounds, further complicating medical treatment. Because of improvements in medevac times and battlefield medicine, most of those so horribly wounded lived and would face years of surgeries and rehabilitation, years of struggle and pain.

I earlier described meeting in the spring of 2009 the wars’ first quadruple amputee, Private Brendan Marrocco, wounded in Iraq by an IED. Nearly a year later at Walter Reed, I met the second quadruple amputee, a Marine injured by an IED in Afghanistan. Marrocco, by then with prosthetic arms and legs, was the Marine’s hero and role model, giving him hope that he, too, could become functional again. I had signed the orders sending them both into combat, and while it broke my heart to see them like this, their courage and determination to move on with their lives left me in awe.

Months later the cost of war came close to home when my great-nephew e-mailed me that a high school friend of his, Jonathan Blank, from the little town of Augusta, Kansas, had lost both legs in Afghanistan. I visited Jonathan at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He, like Marrocco and so many others I saw, was so young, so vulnerable. And so amazingly tough.

Each visit to a hospital steeled my resolve to drive the Pentagon bureaucracy to do more to protect these kids. The MRAP–all terrain vehicles and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets were important but not enough. As we began the Afghan surge, 75 percent of all casualties were due to IEDs, 90 percent of them in the south. And the bombs were getting bigger. In 2008, the average size of an IED was ten kilograms; by early 2010, it was three times that; in 2008, 10 percent had been over seventy-five kilograms, and that number too had nearly tripled by 2010. A growing source of explosives for the IEDs was a common fertilizer, ammonium nitrate, which was trucked in from Pakistan. We had to slow that flow.

There were many technologies and much equipment that could help troops find IEDs before they injured or killed someone, as well as provide more protection for our most exposed outposts. These included handheld mine and explosive detectors, and large tethered airships (aerostats) providing eyes in the sky over outposts and operations. The wide diversity of the equipment meant that multiple organizations and bureaucratic layers were involved in acquisition and fielding, and that cost time. I wanted these additional capabilities deployed fast enough to match the surge of 30,000 more troops going to Afghanistan in the spring of 2010.

In November 2009, I was made aware of the problems we faced: there was no master integrator of all the capabilities being pushed into the theater; our intelligence analysis was sufficiently focused neither on the enemy’s IED tactics and techniques nor on our own approach to disrupting and destroying the IED networks; we had to figure out how better to use the dozens of Liberty surveillance aircraft we had in Afghanistan—especially deciding whether to use them to develop information about the IED networks or to provide coverage for road and troop protection; we needed to get all the Pentagon task forces fused together to focus on the top priorities; we required more analysts and for them to develop targets faster; information about IED detection had to be shared more effectively among the different regional commands in Afghanistan; and we needed to move counter-IED assets faster from Iraq to Afghanistan. The briefing proved, yet again, that the Pentagon was not properly structured to support a constantly changing battlefield or to fight an agile and adaptable enemy.

Once again I went outside the regular bureaucracy to tackle these issues and to do so urgently. On December 4, 2009, I established the Counter-IED Task Force, cochaired by the undersecretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics, Ash Carter, and Marine Lieutenant General Jay Paxton, director of operations for the Joint Staff. Like the MRAP and ISR task forces, this one was to focus on what could be delivered to the theater within weeks and months. Carter and Paxton seized the opportunity with real passion.

Others, however, still needed to have a fire lit under them. I met with the leadership of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO)—the organization formed in 2004 to lead department-wide efforts to deal with IEDs—on January 8, 2010, and told them, “Your agency has lost its sense of urgency. Money is no object. Tell me what you need.” We still had two wars going on, one of them about to get significantly bigger. Three years into the job, I just couldn’t figure out why I still needed to be exhorting people on the urgency of taking care of the troops.

By the end of January, Carter and Paxton had developed plans to disrupt the fertilizer supply chain—now designated HMEs, homemade explosives, including the deployment of nearly 90,000 handheld explosive detectors. They proposed increasing the number of aerostats from thirty to sixty-four by September, growing the number of tower-based sensors at our forward bases from 300 to 420, accelerating the production of MRAP-ATVs, and surging mine detectors and ground penetrating radars; they even had developed plans to fulfill my commitment to our allies that we would provide them with counter-IED training and equipment. Because the kind of detectors needed for a patrol might vary depending on the nature of the mission, instead of every unit getting a standard set of detection equipment, I thought we should have a kind of warehouse at the local level holding every kind of counter-IED kit available so that troops could draw whatever detection or protective devices were most appropriate to that day’s mission or a unit’s operational environment. Carter and Paxton even figured out a way to do that.

By the end of March 2010, arrangements were in place to buy significantly more minirobots, handheld command-wire detection devices, electronic warfare kits, mine rollers, and explosive trace detectors. No idea for a new technology, technique, or approach was considered out of bounds. But for all the technology, there was common agreement that one sensor worked better at detecting IEDs than anything else: a dog’s nose. And so acquiring and training many more dogs became a high priority. New counter-IED capabilities of all kinds just for the surge troops would cost $3.5 billion, and much more for the entire deployed force in Afghanistan. I thought it was worth every cent. The task force continued its efforts into 2011, developing and deploying whatever capabilities might provide better detection and warning of IEDs but also better personal protection for the troops, including developing protective underwear to diminish IED damage to the groin, genitals, and abdomen.

Despite the achievements of this and the other task forces I established, I was still troubled that it was all so ad hoc. I was not fixing the bureaucratic problem, I was bypassing it in the interest of speeding matériel to the battlefield. Ash Carter and I discussed this repeatedly. I asked him to think about how to institutionalize what we were doing. If my successors were unwilling to breach the bureaucratic wall, how could we ensure that future war fighters could get what they needed in a hurry? We needed an acquisition “express lane” at the departmental level to ensure that urgent needs were met. The biggest challenge with the existing system—the Joint Urgent Operational Needs process—was finding the money for those needs. When approved, any such “need” was sent to the most appropriate military service, which was asked to pay for it. All too often the service lacked the money or decided its own priorities were higher and failed to produce the funding. We needed to have a system whereby unfunded battlefield needs would be brought to the attention of the secretary or deputy secretary, who could then direct that funding be found from any source within the entire department. We had not yet formalized this approach when I retired, but I left confident that Carter, who shared my passion for protecting the troops, would make it happen, especially when he was elevated to deputy secretary a few months later.

In dealing with America’s vulnerability to cyber attacks on the computers so vital to our critical infrastructure, business, and government, we were in uncharted waters both bureaucratically and legally. There was a deep division within the government—in both the executive branch and Congress—over who should be in charge of our domestic cyber defense: government or business, the Defense Department’s National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, or some other entity. There was a split between those whose priority was national security and those whose priority was the protection of privacy and civil liberties. The result was paralysis. Soon after my arrival in office, I asked the department’s deputy general counsel for a memo on what kind of cyber attack—by us or on us—would constitute an act of war justifying a response in kind or conventional military retaliation. I was still waiting for a good answer to that question three years later.

The Defense Department was not well organized internally to deal with cyber issues. The director of national intelligence under President Bush, Mike McConnell, had urged me in 2008 to create a separate combatant command to deal with cyber threats. We were just then establishing Africa Command, and I thought the president and Congress would balk at yet another major command. But I made some organizational changes in the fall of 2008 and in June 2009 established Cyber Command as a subordinate component of Strategic Command. I recommended that the president nominate Army Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, to run this “subunified” command as well. Its purpose would be to better organize Defense operations in cyberspace, to ensure our freedom of access to cyberspace, and to oversee investments in people, resources, and technology to prevent disruptions of service to the military.

On May 21, 2010, I took the step suggested two years before by McConnell and established an independent Cyber Command with now-General Alexander in command. (Part of my motivation for creating the independent command was to get a fourth star for Alexander, whom I considered one of the smartest, best officers I ever met. Without such a command and promotion, I feared we would lose him to retirement.) I also created a new civilian office to lead policy development and provide oversight to the new command. Overall, thanks to the NSA and other components in Defense devoted to information and cyber security, and with these organizational changes, I felt reasonably comfortable that Defense Department cyber networks were protected, even though they were attacked by hackers many times a day. A major initiative, led by Deputy Secretary Lynn, to get key defense industries to come voluntarily under our cyber umbrella for protection, was also enjoying considerable success. By mid-2010, I thought we had made considerable progress.

Not so in the rest of government. A major issue was the role of the NSA. Specifically, privacy advocates and civil libertarians were loath to use this military intelligence agency to protect cyber networks at home. The real-world implication of their position was creation of some kind of domestic counterpart to the NSA. I thought that was sheer idiocy. Time and again I argued that there wasn’t enough money, time, or human talent to create a domestic clone. When we got warning in the summer of 2010 that a major cyber attack was being planned on the United States in the fall, I saw an opportunity to break the stalemate.

I devised a politically risky but potentially successful way to bypass the entire bureaucracy, including the White House staff, and present the president with a solution. To somewhat oversimplify, as secretary of defense I had responsibility for national-security-related cyber matters outside the United States, and under the law, the secretary of homeland security—Janet Napolitano—had responsibility for network protection inside the United States. I invited Janet to lunch. We met on July 7, and I proposed that we assign several of our top people to work together urgently on a plan for her department to be able to use the NSA to defend U.S. domestic cyber networks. My idea was that I would appoint a senior homeland security person—recommended by Napolitano—as an additional deputy director of the NSA, with the authority to use the agency’s unique capabilities to protect domestic computer networks. This homeland security appointee would have his or her own general counsel inside the NSA, and together we would build firewalls to protect privacy and civil liberties, to ensure that the wide authority that the NSA had for operating abroad was limited at home.

We met again for lunch a week later to review a preliminary draft proposal. We made some adjustments, and the two of us presented the proposal to the president in the Oval Office on July 27 (unheard-of speed in Washington). We had bypassed everyone else in government—but we told the president the two of us were the ones with operational responsibility, and we could make this work. We told him he could have John Brennan quickly run it through the interagency coordination process (especially the Justice Department) to make sure we hadn’t missed something, but that he ought to be able to approve our signing a memorandum of understanding by August 15. Napolitano and I met on August 5 with Brennan in his West Wing basement office, a large but low-ceilinged and cluttered room. With his support in moving the proposal quickly, within three weeks of our meeting with him, the president signed off on the proposal.

Napolitano and I had briefly been able—with the president’s support—to part the bureaucratic Red Sea, but the waters soon came crashing back together. Although we fairly quickly made the organizational and personnel decisions and changes at NSA to implement our plan, months later General Alexander told me that Homeland Security wasn’t much using the new authority. I don’t know why to this day. But because of the failure to make this or something like it work—along with political paralysis in Congress on how to deal with the cyber challenge—the country remains dangerously vulnerable, as my successor starkly pointed out in a speech in 2012.

The process by which the secretary of defense formally conveys presidential authority to use military force to combatant commanders is through the preparation and signature of “execution orders,” and they apply to the use of force outside war theaters such as Iraq and Afghanistan. These orders, called EXORDs, usually are quite specific, but there were some on the books from the Bush administration, particularly in the counterterrorism arena, that provided combatant commanders broad authority to launch operations without further authorization—particularly when the opportunity to hit a target might require a very fast decision. In every case, the president had broadly authorized the use of lethal force, but I was uncomfortable with any arrangement where use of that force would catch the president by surprise. Under President Bush, I made clear that whatever the EXORD said, I wanted to be informed of any action beforehand so I could inform the president.

In 2010, I decided we should review all the EXORDs to bring the language in them into conformity with my practice of informing the president in advance. Neither Obama nor his advisers had reviewed the EXORDs approved by President Bush in detail. What I had envisioned as a largely mechanical effort to ensure that the president was properly informed became a broad, time-consuming interagency effort led by an NSS always eager to micromanage the Pentagon. The effort on our side was led by Michèle Flournoy and the assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict, Mike Vickers. We often had to push back hard to keep the White House and State Department from getting too far into our military knickers, but at the end of a year’s work, we had updated the EXORDs, ensured that except in the most extraordinary circumstances the secretary and president would know about operations prior to launch, and had Obama administration buy-in. When we were finished, there didn’t seem to be too much unhappiness on the part of the combatant commanders about the curtailment of their unilateral authority to launch military operations.

In a place as big as the Defense Department, something is always going wrong. Most of the time, it’s just a bureaucratic screwup. But when our nuclear forces are involved, it can quicken your pulse. The first two such incidents on my watch, as I’ve described, had led to my firing of the secretary and chief of staff of the Air Force in 2008. In October 2010, at F. E. Warren Air Force Base near Cheyenne, Wyoming, all communications were lost with a squadron of fifty Minuteman III nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. While alternative communications were soon reestablished, no one had informed the secretary of defense or the president when we lost contact with a launch control capsule and fifty ICBMs. And of course, when the communications went down, no one at the base, or at its higher headquarters at Strategic Command, knew at that moment how long they might be down or whether they had been lost due to a technical malfunction, terrorist act, sabotage, or some other scary scenario—or even whether one or more of the missiles might somehow be at risk. In a masterpiece of understatement, Obama allowed as how he would have liked to have known about it. It was a sentiment I shared.

After a massive investigation, a technical problem was found to be the cause and quickly remedied. The missiles had never been outside our control or at risk. I told the president in early November that new regulations were in place providing that in the event of any future problem involving the nuclear force, the national military command center at the Pentagon would be informed within ten minutes, and both the chairman and secretary notified within fifteen minutes of the event. It would be my decision whether to inform the president. It was a sure bet I’d make the call.

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY

Two wars and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” notwithstanding, I spent more time on the defense budget in 2010 than on any other subject. For all the bleating from Congress about defense acquisition reform, tighter management, reducing waste, and auditable accounting, they made it nearly impossible to manage the Pentagon efficiently. I oversaw the execution or preparation of six defense budgets, and not one was enacted by Congress before the beginning of the fiscal year. Every year we had to operate for anywhere from a few months to an entire calendar year under a “continuing resolution,” which, in the absence of an enacted appropriations bill, meant we received exactly the same amount of money as the previous fiscal year, without authority to start any new program. Such madness played havoc with acquisition programs. We were left in a state of near-perpetual financial uncertainty.

On several occasions, political fights over the continuing resolutions led us to the precipice of government shutdowns. Warnings of civilian furloughs had to be issued, and we had to interrupt countless programs and initiatives. Under these ridiculous circumstances, when we had to move money from one account to another to cover a dire shortfall, regardless of the amount, we had to get the approval of four congressional committees; a single hostile staff member could gum up the works for weeks. Congress had no problem expeditiously voting in favor of National Pickle Week, but one task it had to do under the Constitution—appropriate money in a timely way—seemed beyond its grasp. Even eliminating wasteful or obsolete programs was almost always a monumental political lift on the Hill, as I learned in 2009. And each year we would get a defense authorization bill from the Armed Services Committees that contained about a thousand pages of nearly paralyzing direction, micromanagement, restrictions, and demands for reports. You can imagine why congressional complaints about inefficient management at the Pentagon rang very hollow with me. The legislature played its own significant part in making it so.

For three years, I had endured this congressional incompetence with public equanimity and patience. But I was coming to the end of my tether. Because of the growing effort it took to maintain self-discipline, I increasingly resisted going to the Hill to testify or even to meet with members. Throughout my tenure, before every hearing I held meetings with my staff ostensibly to work through answers to likely questions from members of Congress. Actually, the meetings were more an opportunity for me to cathartically vent, to answer the anticipated questions the way I really wanted to, barking and cursing and getting the anger and frustration out of my system so that my public testimony could be dispassionate and respectful. New members of my staff were sometimes shocked by these sessions, fearful that I would repeat in the hearing what I had just said privately. By 2010, the effectiveness of even these sessions was wearing off. Cuffed and shackled, my heel marks visible in the hallway, I would be dragged to the car and hauled before the people’s elected representatives. At least that’s how I felt. Robert Rangel warned another member of my team, “You need to give hard counsel to the secretary—that is, telling him to do things when he doesn’t want to.” He had to be referring to visiting Capitol Hill.

During the first months of 2010, as usual for a secretary, I was dealing with three annual budgets simultaneously—executing the FY2010 budget; defending the proposed FY2011 budget, presented in February; and preparing the FY2012 budget. Beginning with the significant program cuts and caps I announced in April 2009 for the 2010 budget, I was determined to use my remaining time in office to try to shape these budgets to create the versatile military I thought we would need. I also wanted to build on our 2009 success in cutting wasteful and unnecessary programs and activities. However, as I looked at the ever more complex and turbulent world beyond our borders, and remembered history, I had no intention of cutting the defense budget. I readily admit it. As I looked to FY2011 and 2012, what I very much wanted to do was cut bureaucratic overhead and invest the money thus saved in additional and new military capabilities. I continued to hope, as pressures to cut the federal budget deficit built, that if the department operated in this manner, we could avoid the kind of drastic reductions in defense spending that had followed the Vietnam War and the end of the Cold War.

When Congress got around to passing a defense appropriations bill for FY2010 in December 2009 (two and a half months into the fiscal year), they gave us a base budget of $530 billion, $5 billion less than the president’s request but still about a 4 percent increase, including inflation. (When asked at one point by a reporter whether I was “gutting defense,” I retorted, “In what parallel universe are you living where a four percent increase in the defense budget is a cut?”)

For everyone in the executive branch except the president, the Office of Management and Budget is the villain. It recommends to the president how much each agency and department should spend, and it’s always lower than the request, sometimes a lot lower in the case of the State Department. Of course, if everyone got what he wanted, we would have a deficit far bigger than the one we have. Defense was no exception. As we worked on the FY2011 budget, OMB director Peter Orszag was telling us to plan for no budget growth beyond the rate of inflation for 2011 and several years beyond that. OMB and I were, shall we say, far apart.

(I shared with Rahm Emanuel a story about the time during the Reagan administration when all the deputy cabinet and agency heads met for dinner at the Justice Department and beforehand saw a live demonstration of the FBI’s hostage rescue unit, with the lights going out and the unit walking among us firing blanks at “terrorist” targets. I told everyone afterward I thought it could have been played as a scene right out of Agatha Christie’s novel Murder on the Orient Express, with the murder victim the deputy director of OMB because everyone in the room would have had a motive for killing him.)

I had several arguments to justify the budget growth we requested. We had already made significant program cuts in 2009, more extensive than ever before, cutting many large programs that were weak, wasteful, or unnecessary. Because no other department had done anything comparable—even proportionately—we deserved some consideration for that. Moreover, our costs rose inexorably. Year in and year out, Defense health care costs would rise $4 billion, military pay raises would cost an additional $3 billion, fuel inflation another $4 billion—in short, the military’s basic overhead and operating costs would rise by about $13–$15 billion even if we didn’t add a dime for existing or new programs. A broad range of equipment bought during the Reagan years—particularly ships and aircraft—had not been replaced during the defense budget downturn in the 1990s and early 2000s and were coming to the end of their useful lives. After ten years of war, much of our equipment was worn out and would need to be refurbished or replaced. Even the further reductions in overhead I was planning would be inadequate to cover these costs.

My discussions with Orszag and the president on the FY2011 budget began in mid-July 2009. I asked for $558 billion for FY2011, $16 billion more than OMB had proposed. Citing the longer-range factors mentioned above, I also asked for an additional $208 billion for the period from 2011 through 2015. Emanuel, Orszag, and I met privately several times, including once on Rahm’s West Wing office patio, where I balanced a sandwich in one hand and PowerPoint slides in the other. After countless meetings through the fall between OMB and the defense budget team, led by our comptroller Bob Hale, it finally fell to me to cut the final deal. I met with Emanuel and Orszag again in Rahm’s office on November 23, and we agreed to split the difference for FY2011 at $550 billion (up $8 billion from OMB’s original guidance) and a five-year increase of $100 billion over the original OMB number. The president signed on. It was the best budget day I would have as secretary. Everything afterward would go downhill between the White House and me when it came to the defense budget.

The Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) is a congressionally mandated report—yet another tasking from the Hill that had been introduced since I last left government—that requires a reexamination of defense strategy and priorities roughly every four years. It is a massive undertaking within the department, involving countless military and civilian hours over a period of months. The effort in 2009–10 was led by Michèle Flournoy, with the day-to-day leadership falling to her colleague Kathleen Hicks. The primary complaint about the QDR—other than the blandness that typically characterizes documents based on bureaucratic consensus—in past years had been that its conclusions about strategy and priorities were detached from actual budget decisions. We tried hard but with incomplete success to avoid that pitfall in the 2010 QDR.

On February 1, 2010, I went public with the FY2011 budget, as well as the results of both the QDR and the Ballistic Missile Defense Review. I announced that we would be asking for a base budget of $549 billion and a war supplemental (now euphemistically called “overseas contingency operations”) for Iraq and Afghanistan of $159 billion. It added up to a staggering $708 billion.

I said the budget requests and the strategy reviews had several themes. One was continued reform—fundamentally changing the way the department did business: the priorities we set, the programs we funded, the weapons we bought, and how we bought them. I was also introducing a “bracing dose” of realism with regard to risk. I observed that for years, U.S. defense planning and military requirements were based on being prepared to fight two major conventional wars at the same time. I said that that model had been overtaken by events, and we now had to prepare for a much broader range of security challenges, from an adversary’s use of new technologies to deny our forces access to “the global commons of sea, air, space, and cyberspace,” to the threat posed by nonstate groups developing the means to attack and terrorize. I voiced a view I would express repeatedly until I left as secretary:

For the first time, both the budget and the QDR sent the message that prevailing in the wars we were already in had to be our highest priority. This meant more money for special operations, helicopters, ISR, and drones. We would also focus on preventing and deterring future conflicts by increasing investment in regional as well as homeland missile defense, spending more on our ability to train and equip the militaries of other countries, maintaining our nuclear deterrent, and funding the establishment of Cyber Command. We would prepare for possible future conflicts by moving forward with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, improving and increasing the shipbuilding program, modernizing our ground forces, and developing new capabilities for long-range strike (including a new bomber). We had to preserve the all-volunteer force, and that required allocating more money for wounded warrior programs, family support programs, and health care benefits.

In the long list of initiatives, including a number of additional program cuts, there were three that were controversial. As with every new aircraft in recent decades, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter was over budget and behind schedule. The undersecretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics, Ash Carter, presented me with a long list of changes to the program in early 2010 to try to get it back on track. I accepted all his recommendations, including withholding $614 million in performance fees from Lockheed Martin, the lead contractor, and firing the two-star general who had been our program manager and replacing him with a more senior and capable officer. We also reduced the number of planes we would buy in the immediate future. Finally, to compensate for the delays in the program, I agreed with a recommendation to buy more F/A-18 fighters for the Navy so our carriers would not end up short of their full component of aircraft.

The two remaining programs with strong congressional support from my 2009 hit list were the C-17 cargo plane and an alternate engine for the F-35. Despite multiple Air Force studies showing that we had plenty of cargo aircraft, Congress just kept stuffing more C-17s into the budget in order to preserve the jobs on the production line. The Air Force didn’t need more, didn’t want more, and couldn’t afford more. President Obama agreed to back me up with a veto threat on capping the number of C-17s.

As for the F-35 alternative engine, early on Pratt & Whitney had won the competition to build the engines. Needless to say, members who had a General Electric presence in their districts and states weren’t happy about that and put money in the budget to fund development of an alternative—produced, of course, by GE, partnering with Rolls-Royce. In no time, Defense was spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to support a program that, again, we didn’t want, didn’t need, and couldn’t afford. Facts and logic play no part in debates on the Hill when jobs at home are at stake, and so members and I would go around and around on the extra engine. Here, too, the president agreed to support my decision with a veto if necessary. When a reporter asked me if I was sure the White House would back me up with a veto, I responded, “I don’t go out on a limb without looking back to see if there’s a guy back there with a saw.”

The initial face-off on both issues came when Mike Mullen and I presented the budget to the Senate and House Armed Services Committees on February 2 and 3. Among the members with strong views one way or the other, when it came to issues involving defense programs, the two committees (and the Appropriations Committees as well) were largely split not by party or ideology but, with a few exceptions, by the location of the pork. I suppose the two issues also ended up becoming a test of wills between Congress and the president over who had a final say on defense acquisition. Congress had held the upper hand for a long time, and now it was being challenged. At one point, Representative Neil Abercrombie, a longtime Democratic congressman from Hawaii, said that I and the executive branch needed to learn that Congress made the final decisions on acquisition issues. I replied, maybe a little confrontationally, “Only if you have sixty-seven votes”—the number needed in the Senate to override a presidential veto.

Undeterred, the House Armed Services Committee put $485 million for the extra engine into its bill, along with more C-17s—and repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” exactly the scenario I had worried about in terms of getting a presidential veto. The House committee, in which Democrats were a majority, was prepared to fight for the extra engine until the last dog died, but after months of debate and confrontation, the newly Republican-controlled House—led by Tea Party members—in February 2011 killed the program. A full vote in the Senate led to the same result. Proponents of buying more C-17s gave up the ghost more easily. So I had put two more notches on my budget gun. I had now secured congressional approval of all thirty-three program cuts or caps I had announced in April 2009, a record.

The history of Defense Department acquisition and development of new programs is rich in over-cost, overdue, and flawed programs. There have been enough studies on how to fix the problem to fill a room, and repeated attempts at legislative remedies have been made, including as recently as 2009. Ash Carter and I spent a lot of time talking about the problem, and I concluded that the principal fixes were pretty straightforward: make sure there is competition for contracts, but real competition, not the kind Congress likes where everybody wins (such as proposals on the Hill to split the Air Force tanker buy between Boeing and Airbus/EADs or for the F-35 alternative engine); have experienced and tough government contract negotiators, people with really sharp pencils; in big, long-term programs—excluding current wartime needs—wherever possible, build prototypes of new equipment, and don’t start production until testing is complete and problems have been resolved; freeze requirements early in the process (anybody who has ever added a room onto his house knows that if you change the plans after construction begins, it will cost you an arm and a leg; same thing with warplanes and ships); demand accountability—be willing to fire government project managers or contractor managers if programs go off the rails; finally, the secretary of defense has to get his (or her) hands dirty overseeing all this, getting knowledgeable enough about the big programs, and keeping up to speed on progress to be able to know when to blow the whistle if things go awry.

Responsibility for overseeing acquisition cannot be delegated to the deputy secretary, as has so often been the case in the past. This is not about micromanagement, it’s about accountability in leadership. Too many top executives in business and government think the details are beneath them, often with calamitous results. Frankly, I did not involve myself in acquisition issues in the Bush administration apart from urgent wartime needs, but I changed course early in the Obama presidency.

As we began to prepare the FY2012 budget in the spring of 2010, my sense of foreboding about Defense’s budgetary future turned to alarm as I listened to the debates in Congress, followed the media, and listened to Obama. I believed our budget would remain flat at best and probably decline. To afford the weapons programs and equipment that I strongly believed we had to buy, we would need to find the money internally. Defense’s base budget—not counting funding for the wars—had nearly doubled during the previous decade, and I believed the Pentagon had forgotten how to make tough decisions and to prioritize. We needed to begin to change a culture of spending into a culture of savings. This, then, required a new, even more aggressive examination of every part of the Defense Department. Thus began the “efficiencies” initiative of 2010.

I hoped to set the tone for what we would do in a speech on May 8 at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library. Eisenhower, one of my great heroes, had told the Pentagon he wanted it cut down to “a Spartan basis,” noting that “I say the patriot today is the fellow who can do the job with less money.” I said in my speech that I found it compelling that under Eisenhower real choices were made, priorities set, and limits enforced—even in the face of a superpower adversary like the Soviet Union. The post-9/11 “gusher of defense spending,” I warned, “has been turned off and will stay off for a good period of time.” Accordingly, the department had to take a hard look at every aspect of how it was organized, staffed, and operated—indeed, every aspect of how it did business. I concluded: “The goal is to cut our overhead costs and to transfer those savings to force structure [military capabilities] and modernization…. What is required is not more study. Nor do we need more legislation. It is not a great mystery what needs to change. What it takes is the political will and willingness, as Eisenhower possessed, to make hard choices.”

Three and a half years into the job, I had again declared war on the Pentagon—on the 40 percent of its spending that went to overhead, on layers of bureaucracy that put as many as thirty layers of staff between me and an action officer, on unnecessary programs, on too many generals and admirals for the size of our forces, on too many senior civilians in the department, and on too many contractors.

Most of my predecessors railed about the same problems. But most were trying to cut budgets, and some, including Robert McNamara, had come up with dramatic reform and restructuring initiatives that were imposed by fiat on the military services. These efforts, not surprisingly, met with significant resistance from the military. My strategy was different. I told the services that the money they saved through changing their way of doing business and cutting overhead I would return to them to invest in military capabilities. As with the program cuts and caps in 2009, the services would be deeply involved in the process. Critically important was getting agreement in advance from the president and the new director of OMB, Jack Lew, that we could keep all the savings from these efforts to reinvest in military capabilities. They were both supportive.

Between mid-May and mid-December, I chaired nearly sixty meetings ranging from half an hour to nearly eight hours on the efficiencies initiative. We delved into every aspect of the Pentagon. I was intending to bring about a cultural shift—“How do we make this place more efficient, make staffs more lean, flatten decision making, and pay more attention to cutting unnecessary costs.” I did not want to wait eighteen months until FY2012 to begin implementing these changes; I wanted to identify things we could begin to do right away.

I went public with the first changes on August 9, 2010. Among other decisions, I announced we would:

To underscore the importance I attached to making these changes, I said that I intended that all the initiatives lead to operational plans or measurable results within 90 to 120 days, and I appointed Robert Rangel and Hoss Cartwright to cochair the effort.

While collectively the measures amounted to an earthquake inside the department, only my recommendation to close the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, was controversial on the outside. Its role was to infuse, or occasionally compel, “jointness”—the military services working together—in everything the military did: train joint forces, create joint doctrine, and experiment with that doctrine. I said those goals remained important, but much progress had been made since the command was created, and it no longer required a four-star combatant command, 2,800 military and civilian positions, 2,000 contractors, and a billion-dollar budget to accomplish the mission. The Virginia congressional delegation went wild. A couple of the congressmen became my worst enemies on the Hill and would remain so throughout the rest of my tenure as secretary.

Even as we were devising and implementing these efficiencies that summer and fall, we were negotiating with OMB over the size of the FY2012 budget. My proposal was exactly the same set of numbers that former OMB director Orszag and I had agreed to—and the president had blessed—in November 2009. Under a new director, Jack Lew, OMB walked away from that agreement and proposed instead a $20 billion reduction from our request and wanted to cut the five-year defense program by $148 billion in projected spending. It quickly got ugly.

On November 24, I gave the president a long memo summarizing our progress on the efficiencies initiative since my August announcement, reporting that the military services had indeed come up with $100 billion in overhead savings over five years, to be applied to increasing our capabilities. I also said we had identified a further $20 billion in department-wide savings over the same time period, which we intended also to plow back into “tooth.” I briefed him in more detail on November 30, with Mullen, Lew, and Donilon present. With regard to the dispute with OMB over the current and future budget numbers, Obama told me to “work out” the number with OMB. I met with Lew for an hour on December 3, and while the meeting was friendly, we didn’t make much progress.

On December 14, Obama met with me, Cartwright, Lew, and Donilon for the budget endgame. I offered to cut our FY2012 request to $555 billion and make further cuts of $63 billion over the following five years—a considerable concession, I thought, given our agreement of the previous year. The president said we had to do better. He talked about the budget crisis and the deficit and cuts he was making to domestic programs. He said he couldn’t slash domestic spending and leave Defense with real growth. I reminded him that he had agreed we could keep all the savings we identified for reinvestment. I said I recognized the challenges facing the country, but that Defense should get credit for the cuts we had already made.

At that point, I intemperately told Obama that I could break the Defense Department, put hundreds of thousands of people out of work, and wreck programs, but that wasn’t in the country’s interest. He then asked Lew and me to continue talking.

The next morning I called Lew and told him we could cut another $1 billion (to $554 billion) for FY2012 and a total of $78 billion over the five years—“and that’s it.” The president called me after lunch and was somewhat apologetic, saying with respect to our meeting the day before, “At least you didn’t yell at me.”

That same afternoon, the fifteenth, I was waiting alone in Donilon’s office for my regular weekly meeting with him and Hillary (they were both in with Obama) when the door opened and the president walked in carrying a gift-wrapped package. He gave it to me, and I unwrapped an expensive bottle of vodka. Enclosed was a handwritten note: “Dear Bob, Sorry I drive you to drink. Barack Obama.” It was a very thoughtful peace offering.

In truth, I was extremely angry with President Obama on the afternoon of the fourteenth. I felt he had breached faith with me both on the budget numbers for FY2012–16 that Orszag, Emanuel, and I had agreed on—with Obama’s approval—in the fall of 2009, and on the promise that Defense could keep all the efficiencies savings for reinvestment in military capabilities. I felt like all the work we had done in the efficiencies effort had been unrewarded and, further, that I had been forced to break my word to the military services. As in the spring with “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” I felt that agreements with the Obama White House were good for only as long as they were politically convenient.

In the end, we got about the same amount of money—roughly $530 billion—in FY2011 as in FY2010. Budgetary pressure on Defense would only increase for the rest of the time I was secretary and well beyond.

Nonetheless, we continued our efficiencies endeavor. On January 6, 2011, I gave a status report to the Pentagon press corps detailing the savings each of the services had made to reach the $100 billion mark. I outlined an additional $78 billion in savings that came from department-wide reductions, mainly in information technology, contracting, workforce size, general officer and flag officer positions, civilian executive positions, and intelligence organizations. I announced the cancellation of a number of additional procurement programs, the most controversial of which was the Marine Corps decision to cancel the expeditionary fighting vehicle, an amphibious assault vehicle that had proven far more costly than anticipated and that would have excessively high operating costs.

I then elaborated the areas in which the services would invest their overhead savings: a new long-range bomber for the Air Force; modernizing the Army’s battle fleet of armored vehicles; and additional ships, F/A-18s, and unmanned strike and surveillance aircraft for the Navy. I said we would make more investments in long-range and regional missile defense. As it turned out, I was able to return virtually all of the $100 billion in savings to the services for “must pay” bills such as fuel price increases, and for reinvestment. The $78 billion in departmental savings was applied to the reduced budget levels in the future. The effort to reallocate funds through the efficiencies initiative had been successful, but actually realizing those savings would require very tight discipline and top-down managerial toughness for the entire projected five-year period. That would be a high hurdle indeed.

I have long believed that the way to change bureaucratic culture and performance is not through reorganization but by affecting day-to-day operations and ways of doing things. You need to get at the essence of what people are doing and encourage, incentivize, or force them to alter behavior. The crux of what I was trying to accomplish through the efficiencies effort was to pry open all the components of the defense budget that cost hundreds of billions of dollars but didn’t get close scrutiny either within the Pentagon or by Congress. We needed to get at that daily “river of money” running through the building, as my Bush-era deputy Gordon England had so eloquently put it. We made a beginning, but only that.

As the Defense Department continues to face deep budget cuts, the effort to cut overhead costs must be intensified; as we learned from the “efficiencies” exercise, such efforts can succeed only if enforced from the top with regular reporting and strict accountability.

RESPITE

My last full year as secretary, 2010, was my toughest because of the multiple fronts on which I was fighting. The only thing that kept me going was getting out of the Pentagon and being around the troops. There is not much about being secretary of defense in wartime that is fun, but there are moments.

In May, I helicoptered into an open area at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida as a couple of hundred exhausted, hungry men training to be Army Rangers emerged from the deep woods to assemble for a few words from me. One of my key staff people, Ryan McCarthy, had been a Ranger captain, and he alerted me that these guys had not eaten or slept in days and were filthy and barely conscious. He told me that ordinarily they would not remember me or my visit. But, he said, if you bring them frozen Snickers candy bars, they will never forget you. He added that I should make the soldiers eat while I was talking because if they didn’t, their instructors would take the candy away from them after I left. I’ll never forget the look on those soldiers’ faces as we hauled coolers full of Snickers bars out of the helicopter to pass out to them. Months later I was still hearing from parents and friends of those soldiers who had heard about my visit.

In August, I visited the Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, watched new recruits in training, and spoke to several hundred brand-new enlisted Marines at their graduation ceremony. I was amazed how many of their parents were present. I then visited the Naval Special Warfare Center in San Diego, where sailors undergo the toughest training imaginable in the hope of becoming Navy SEALs. Only 67 out of the previous entering class of 180 graduated. The fifth week of training—“Hell Week”—is the toughest. I arrived at the end of that week and had the pleasure of telling the sailors that it was over and they had survived to continue their training. These aspiring SEALs were a mess: having gone days without food or sleep, they were hollow-eyed, freezing, and barely able to stand. Formed up on the beach, they were covered head to toe in sand, unshaven, a little drool here and there, snot running out of their noses. I was proud to shake every filthy hand. These young men, like the Ranger trainees and so many others in uniform, are the best our country can produce. Being able to thank them personally was, for me, one of the greatest honors of being secretary of defense.

In the spring of 2010 I began a speaking campaign to impart to young people in uniform my views on how they should think about their military careers and what kind of officers they should become. I wanted to talk with them about the military challenges I thought they would face, the same challenges I was trying to get their four-star leaders and Congress to address. I began in April with visits to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and West Point. At each academy, I spent nearly an hour in each of two classrooms, taking questions from the cadets and midshipmen and talking about the future.

My main messages were delivered in lectures to the entire student body of cadets and middies. At each academy, I talked about the great officers of the past in their branch of service who had the “vision and insight to see that the world and technology had changed,” understood the implications of that change, and then pressed ahead at the risk of their careers in the face of “incredible fierce institutional resistance.” I spoke about how each of these officers had put his career on the line “to speak truth to power,” and I said they must be willing to do so as well. I also warned them: “In most of these cases, integrity and courage were ultimately rewarded professionally. In a perfect world, that should always happen. But sadly, in the real world it does not, and I will not pretend there is no risk. You will, at some point or another, work for a jackass. We all have. That is why speaking up often requires courage. But that does not make taking a stand any less necessary for the sake of our country.”

I told the aspiring young officers at the academies that the complexity of the twenty-first-century battlefield would require leaders of great flexibility, agility, resourcefulness, and imagination, leaders willing to think and act creatively and decisively in different kinds of conflict than we had prepared for during the previous six decades—precisely the qualities I had found in Petraeus, Odierno, McChrystal, Dempsey, Austin, Rodriguez, Chiarelli, and others. I urged them to reject service parochialism, convention, and careerism and instead “to be principled, creative, and reform-minded” on and off the battlefield.

I believe the ever-changing complexity of the world in the years ahead and the agility and adaptability of our adversaries make the willingness of our officer corps to challenge orthodoxy and conventional thinking essential to our success, and that is the message I wanted to convey to the cadets and midshipmen. I would tell both cadets and generals that we must not stifle the young officers and NCOs coming back from the wars. They had been forced to be innovative, adaptable, independent, and entrepreneurial and to take responsibility. Our future depended on keeping them in the services and sustaining those same characteristics at home that we had so valued on the battlefield. All these were messages I would continue to preach until I left office, and I would damn sure make certain the officers I recommended to the president to lead the military in the years to come understood and shared those same views.

At the end of my remarks, I always thanked the young officers-to-be for their service. And then, my voice breaking each time, I said, “I consider myself personally responsible for each and every one of you as though you were my own sons and daughters. And when I send you in harm’s way, as I will, I will do everything in my power to see that you have what you need to accomplish your mission—and come home safely.”

Perhaps my voice broke because I knew that on my return to Washington, as always, I would have to turn again to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And send more of those kids in harm’s way.