Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

As of January 2007, I had a new commander headed to Iraq, a new strategy, and 30,000 additional troops. Their success would require a sense of total commitment in the Department of Defense that I was staggered to learn did not exist. It was one thing for the country and much of the executive branch of government not to feel involved in the war, but for the DoD—the “department of war”—that was unacceptable.

Even though the nation was waging two wars, neither of which we were winning, life at the Pentagon was largely business as usual when I arrived. I found little sense of urgency, concern, or passion about a very grim situation. No senior military officers, no senior civilians came to me breathing fire about the downward slide of our military and civilian efforts in the wars, the need for more or different equipment or for more troops, or the need for new strategies and tactics. It was clear why we had gotten into trouble in both Iraq and Afghanistan: after initial military successes in both countries, when the situation in both began to deteriorate, the president, his senior civilian advisers, and the senior military leaders had not recognized that most of the assumptions that underpinned early military planning had proven wrong, and no necessary adjustments had been made. The fundamental erroneous assumption was that both wars would be short and that responsibility for security could quickly be handed off to Iraqi and Afghan forces. From the summer of 2003 in Iraq and from 2005 in Afghanistan, after months, even years, of overly optimistic forecasts, as of mid-2006 no senior civilians or generals had been sacked, there were no significant changes in strategy, and no one with authority inside the administration was beating the drum that we were making little if any progress in either war and that, in fact, all the signs were pointing toward things getting worse. (I was later told that some NSC, CIA, and State Department staff were making this case but without effect.)

The historian Max Hastings wrote in his book Inferno that “it is characteristic of all conflicts that until enemies begin to shoot, ships to sink and loved ones—or at least comrades—begin to die, even professional warriors often lack urgency and ruthlessness.” At the end of 2006, we had been at war in Afghanistan for over five years and in Iraq for nearly four years. The enemy had long been shooting, and many of our soldiers had died, yet our civilian and military leaders and commanders still lacked “urgency and ruthlessness.” I considered it my responsibility to do something about that.

Symbolically, there was no one of high rank in Defense whose specific job it was to ensure that the commanders and troops in the field had what they needed. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff spoke for the armed services and was the senior military adviser to the president, but he had no command authority over the military services or civilian components, and no money. The senior civilians who were my top deputies in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the undersecretaries, had a policy advisory role and direct authority only within their own areas of responsibility. The very size and structure of the department assured ponderousness, if not paralysis, because so many different organizations had to be involved in even the smallest decisions. The idea of speed and agility to support current combat operations was totally foreign to the building. It was quickly apparent that only I, as secretary, had the authority to change that. If that gargantuan, labyrinthine bureaucracy was to support the war fighter effectively and with speed, the initiative would have to come from the top. More often than not, that meant bypassing the bureaucracy and regular procedures and running the effort directly from my office. That personal effort to support the commanders and the troops would dominate my entire tenure as secretary.

The Department of Defense is structured to plan and prepare for war but not to fight one. The secretaries and senior military leaders of the Army, Navy, and Air Force departments are charged with organizing, training, and equipping their respective forces. The last of these chores is all about acquiring the weapons systems, ships, trucks, planes, and other matériel that the services likely will need in the future, a far cry from a current combat commander’s need for “make do” or “good enough” solutions in weeks or months. The military departments develop their budgets on a five-year basis, and most procurement programs take many years—if not decades—from decision to delivery. As a result, budgets and programs are locked in for years at a time, and all the bureaucratic wiles of each military department are dedicated to keeping those programs intact and funded. They are joined in those efforts by the companies that build the equipment, the Washington lobbyists that those companies hire, and the members of Congress in whose states or districts those factories are located. Any threats to those long-term programs are not welcome. Even if we are at war.

For the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the needs of the field commanders and their troops were forwarded as requests to the regional (Centcom) combatant commander, who reviewed them and, if he was in agreement, pushed them to the Pentagon. Each request then had to pass through a Joint Chiefs of Staff filter, a military department filter, a department comptroller (the money person) filter, multiple procurement bureaucracy filters, and often other filters, any of which could delay or stop fulfillment of the requested equipment. These current, urgent requests were weighed against the existing long-term plans, programs, and available budgets and all too often were found to be lower in priority than nearly everything else—which meant they disappeared into a Pentagon black hole.

There is an express lane for the most pressing war fighter needs, a process to address “joint urgent operational needs.” These requests are evaluated at a very senior level, including the deputy secretary of defense and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Those that are approved are sent to the appropriate military service, which is asked to come up with the money. Another black hole. If the money is authorized, all too often it will be months or years after the “urgent” request is made. Worse, even during two wars, protecting future needs, bureaucratic lethargy, an unwillingness to challenge Congress on pet programs, a peacetime mind-set, and weak leadership in refereeing fights over who should pay for matériel that everyone agreed was needed all too often resulted in no action at all—even as we had kids dying on battlefields because those needs were not being met. All that was intolerable to me.

Although I had decades of experience in the national security arena, I never made any claim to expertise as a military strategist or defense reformer. I had, however, as I said earlier, successfully led and run huge organizations. I had been brought in to turn around a failing war effort. My fight to sustain minimal support in Congress so that the troops would have time to accomplish that turnaround was tough enough, but I soon realized I would also have to fight the Pentagon itself. I decided I had to be the principal advocate in Defense for the commanders and the troops. I would be both “urgent” and “ruthless.”

To complicate matters, all the services regarded the counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as unwelcome military aberrations, the kind of conflict we would never fight again—just the way they felt after Vietnam. The services all wanted to get back to training and equipping our forces for the kinds of conflict in the future they had always planned for: for the Army, conventional force-on-force conflicts against nation-states with large ground formations; for the Marine Corps, a light, mobile force operating from ships and focused on amphibious operations; for the Navy, conventional maritime operations on the high seas centered on aircraft carriers; for the Air Force, high-tech air-to-air combat and strategic bombing against major nation-states.

I agreed with the need to be prepared for those kinds of conflicts. But I was convinced that they were far less likely to occur than messy, smaller, unconventional military endeavors. I was also convinced, based on history and experience, that we were utterly unable to predict what kinds of future conflicts we would face. In fact, after Vietnam, when we used our military—in Grenada, Lebanon, Libya (twice), Panama, Haiti, the Balkans, and elsewhere—it was usually in relatively small-scale but messy combat. The one time we used large conventional formations with limited objectives—against Iraq to liberate Kuwait in 1991—the war ended in one hundred hours. The war in Afghanistan, from its beginning in 2001, was not a conventional conflict, and the second war against Iraq began with a fast-moving conventional offensive that soon deteriorated into a stability, reconstruction, and counterinsurgency campaign—the dreaded “nation-building” that the Bush administration took office swearing to avoid. In not one of those conflicts had we predicted even six months beforehand that we would be militarily engaged in those places. I felt strongly that we had to prepare our forces in the future, both in training and in equipment, to fight all along the spectrum of conflict, from counterterrorism to taking on well-armed nonstate groups (such as the terrorist group Hizballah) to fighting conventional nation-states. Developing this broad range of capabilities meant taking some time and resources away from preparations for the high-end future missions the military services preferred. I would take on that fight in mid-2008, but in 2007 and early 2008, my focus was on getting the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan the equipment and support they needed.

MINE-RESISTANT, AMBUSH-PROTECTED VEHICLES

On April 19, 2007, while on an official visit to Israel, I noticed in the Pentagon’s daily press summary, “The Early Bird,” an article by Tom Vanden Brook in USA Today that began, “In more than 300 attacks since last year, no Marines have died while riding in new fortified armored vehicles the Pentagon hopes to rush to Iraq in greater numbers this year, a top Marine commander in Anbar province said.” The article described the vehicles’ raised, V-shaped hulls that deflected the force of blasts from homemade bombs buried in roadways—improvised explosive devices (IEDs). It quoted Marine Brigadier General John Allen, deputy commander of coalition forces in Anbar, as saying there had been eleven hundred attacks on these vehicles in the preceding fifteen months, with an average of less than one injured Marine per attack. I flew on to Iraq that afternoon for twenty-four hours for the key meeting with David Petraeus about troop drawdowns in the fall, returned home for thirty-six hours, and then, on the twenty-second, began a trip to Russia, Poland, and Germany. But I continued to think about this new kind of vehicle and asked for a briefing on it once I was back in Washington.

IEDs had been a problem in Iraq from the early days of the war. As time went by, the bombs became bigger and the insurgents more clever in how they planted, hid, and detonated them. By the end of 2006, the number of IEDs deployed by our enemies in Iraq accounted for up to 80 percent of soldier casualties. To make matters worse, Iran was providing its surrogates in Iraq with “explosively formed projectiles,” a fairly sophisticated warhead that, when fired, in essence became a molten metal slug capable of penetrating the armor of our heaviest vehicles, including the Abrams tank. To develop countermeasures against IEDs and get solutions, and training, to the field quickly, the Army created a task force that changed form several times, but ultimately, in February 2006, at Secretary Rumsfeld’s direction, it became the inelegantly named but critically important Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization. It received billions of dollars to develop surveillance and jamming systems to defeat the IED bomb-building networks and to detect and disable IEDs before they exploded. The organization was an early example of a secretary and deputy secretary of defense concluding they had to go outside the normal bureaucratic structure to get a critical combat task accomplished.

Despite these efforts, more and more of our troops were being burned, maimed, and killed by IEDs, many of them in Humvees. Humvees could be reinforced with armor on the sides, but there were few practical options left to further armor the underbelly of the vehicle. Soldiers were reduced to putting sandbags on the floors of the Humvees to try to protect themselves. It didn’t help much. Too many Humvees became funeral pyres for our troops, and I would see some of the surviving victims at the burn unit at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. Over time more and more side armor was attached to the Humvees, as additional protection from attacks by rockets, grenades, and other weapons, but it still provided little or no protection from bombs that blew up under the vehicles.

I received my first briefing on the mine-resistant, ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicle I had read about in USA Today on April 27, 2007. The secretary of defense’s conference room is not a big one by Washington (and Pentagon) standards, and it is quite plain, which suited me fine. I always tried to set an informal atmosphere so people would be more inclined to speak up; I don’t think I ever wore a suit jacket to a meeting of Defense officials in that room. The table seats about twenty, with another twelve or so chairs lining the wall. There is a screen for the omnipresent Power-Point slides, and combat photographs line the walls—including one of Doug Zembiec, “the Lion of Fallujah,” whose story had caused me to choke up publicly at the Marine Corps Association annual dinner. There was also a coffee cart, essential to my alertness and my self-discipline—for some reason, a coffee cup in my hand made it easier for me not to fly off the handle in briefings that were often frustrating and maddening. There was always a behind-the-scenes battle involving myriad people pushing and shoving to be in meetings I held, and it fell to my two senior assistants to decide who could or could not attend. I guess people felt they needed to be there to demonstrate to others that they were “on the inside” on issues or to protect their sector’s equities. Unfortunately, those in the room rarely gave me the background details—especially about bureaucratic infighting—on the matter at hand that would have helped me understand how the problem had ended up on my desk.

So it was with MRAPs. I learned the background story the same way I heard about the vehicle in the first place: from the newspaper. Two and a half months after my first briefing, I read in USA Today that the Pentagon had first tested MRAPs in 2000 and that the Marine Corps had requested its first twenty-seven of them in December 2003 for explosive disposal teams. At the end of 2004, the Army had solicited ideas for a better armored vehicle—to sell to the Iraqis, not for U.S. use. The first of those vehicles, nearly identical to MRAPs, were delivered to the Iraqis at the end of summer 2006. Meanwhile, in February 2005, Marine Brigadier General Dennis Hejlik in Anbar province signed a request for more than a thousand of the same kind of vehicles for his men. According to the newspaper, Hejlik’s request was shelved; fifteen months later, a second request won Pentagon approval. The first vehicles arrived in Anbar in February 2007, two years after the original request.

Multiple explanations have been put forward for the delay in getting MRAPs into Iraq. The most significant is that no one at a senior level wanted to spend the money to buy them. The services did not want to spend procurement dollars on a vehicle that was not the planned long-term Army and Marine Corps replacement for the Humvee—the joint light tactical vehicle. Most people believed the MRAPs would just be surplus after the war, which most also thought would soon end. Some argued that the threat from IEDs was evolving, and that only in 2006 had our troops begun encountering the explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) that could cut through our heaviest armor. Others contended that only in 2006 had road-implanted bombs become the primary threat, which ignores the fact that in the summer of 2004 more than 1,000 IEDs exploded in Sadr City alone, and another 1,200 were dug up. Procurement of the heavy MRAP vehicles may also have been delayed because they were seen to be contrary to Secretary Rumsfeld’s goal of lighter, more agile forces. There were doubts whether industry could produce MRAPs in numbers and on a schedule that would meet the need. Finally, most opposed acquiring MRAPs simply because they thought the vehicles were a waste of money; the enemy would just build bigger IEDs.

Whatever the reason, there were hardly any MRAPs in Iraq when I was briefed in April 2007. But I knew damn well that our troops were being burned and blown up in Humvees well before I became secretary and that had they been in MRAPs, many soldiers would have escaped injury or death.

My briefer at that April 27 meeting was the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, General Bob Magnus. (The Marine Corps had taken the lead in developing MRAPs.) In November 2006, the Corps had solicited proposals for an armored vehicle that could protect against roadside bombs, and in January 2007 it had awarded nine companies contracts to develop prototypes. Magnus explained the importance of the vehicles and said that 3,700 were on order for the Marine Corps and 2,300 for the Army, but that there was no money available to pay for them. Only 1,300 were to be built by the contractor in 2007. Business as usual.

On May 2, I met with the secretaries of the Army and Navy, Deputy Secretary England, Pace, and others on the need to dramatically increase the funding, size, and speed of MRAP procurement. I didn’t often get passionate in meetings, but in this one I laid down a marker I would use again and again concerning MRAPs: “Every delay of a single day costs one or more of our kids his limbs or his life.” To my chagrin, not a single senior official, civilian or military, supported my proposal for a crash program to buy thousands of these vehicles. Despite the lack of support, the same day I issued a directive that made the MRAP program the highest-priority Department of Defense acquisition program and ordered that “any and all options to accelerate the production and fielding of this capability to the theater should be identified, assessed, and applied where feasible.” This directive began an all-out push to produce MRAPs, an effort that would become the first major military procurement program to go from decision to full industrial production in less than a year since World War II.

Congress was fully supportive of the project. More than a month before my decision, Senator Joseph Biden on March 28 had offered an amendment, which passed 98–0 in the Senate, providing an additional $1.5 billion for MRAPs and pulling forward money from the FY2008 budget into 2007. At the end of April, Congress approved $3 billion to buy MRAPs during the following six months, and a House Armed Services subcommittee added another $4 billion for FY2008. Congress gave us every cent we requested. Indeed, given how large the MRAP procurement would eventually become, without congressional willingness to add money to the war funding bills for the vehicles, they would never have been built—at least not in the numbers we bought. Without this support from Congress, funding for the MRAPs would have had to come out of the military services’ regular budgets, which would have caused a bureaucratic and political bloodbath. Congress’s habitual lack of fiscal discipline in this instance was a blessing.

On Saturday, May 19, at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, I saw these huge new vehicles for myself. There were a number of different models from different manufacturers being tested. I watched in awe as a test model was blown up by a large IED and the passenger compartment remained intact. The soldiers inside would have survived. The experts at Aberdeen were identifying the weaknesses and strengths of the different models to inform the program managers, who would decide what to buy, and also to give feedback to the manufacturers about their vehicles. I had nothing to contribute except to reiterate my now-familiar exhortation: “Hurry up! Troops are dying.”

At the end of May, I approved putting the MRAP program in a special, very small category of Defense procurement, effectively setting aside many bureaucratic hurdles typical of military programs. It gave the MRAP program legal priority over other military and civilian industrial production programs for key components such as specialty steel, tires, and axles. I also directed establishment of a department-wide MRAP task force and asked to be briefed every two weeks. I emphasized that getting MRAPs to Iraq as fast as possible was essential and that everyone needed to understand that speed and multiple models meant we would face problems with spare parts, maintenance, training, and more. I said we would deal with those problems as they arose and that we should be candid with the president and with Congress that those potential problems were risks we were prepared to take to get better protection to the troops faster. We also reminded everyone that the MRAP wasn’t immune to successful attack and the enemy would adapt his techniques to the new vehicle. But it would provide better protection than anything else we had.

The magnitude of the challenge became clear at my first meeting with the task force on June 8. The initial approved requirement for MRAPs of all models at that point was 7,774 vehicles. In just a matter of a couple of weeks, though, the total proposed requirement had skyrocketed to 23,044 at a cost of a little over $25 billion—I think because the field commanders quickly recognized the value of the MRAP and realized that the vehicles were actually going to get built. But how to produce the huge quantities of critically needed materials for the vehicles, from specialty ballistic steel to tires? How to get the MRAPs to Iraq? Where to base them? How to maintain them? It fell to the task force led by the director of defense research and engineering (and soon to be undersecretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics), John Young, to find the answers to these questions, and find them they did.

On a trip to the Middle East in late summer 2007, I experienced a gut-wrenching validation of the need for MRAPs. While visiting Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, a gigantic logistics center supporting the war effort in Iraq, toward dusk, I was taken to the “boneyard”—an area covering many acres that contained the wrecked remains of thousands of American tanks, trucks, Humvees, and other vehicles. Nearly all had been destroyed by enemy attacks in Iraq. I separated myself a bit from the group and wandered through the endless sandy rows of equipment, each vehicle bearing witness to the suffering and losses of our troops. I imagined their screams and their shattered bodies. As I departed, I knew it was too late to help them, but by God, I would move heaven and earth to try to save the lives of their comrades.

Ultimately, we would buy some 27,000 MRAPs, including thousands of a new all-terrain version for Afghanistan, at a total cost of nearly $40 billion. The investment saved countless lives and limbs. Over time, casualty rates in MRAPs were roughly 75 percent lower than they were in Humvees, and less than half those in Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, and Stryker armored vehicles. And there would continue to be improvements. For example, underbelly blasts had such upward force that too often soldiers in MRAPs would suffer badly broken legs and fractured pelvises, so the flooring and seats were redesigned.

On January 18, 2008, I visited the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in Charleston, South Carolina, where MRAPs received a final fitting out before being shipped to Iraq. I toured the factory and talked to the workers, many of them veterans themselves. These men and women were skilled salt-of-the-earth patriots who were passionate about what they were doing. Each of those I talked with knew that the vehicle he or she was working on would very likely save the lives of our soldiers. One of them, a bearded, heavyset fellow in jeans and a plaid shirt, invited me to sit in the driver’s seat of the MRAP he was just finishing. He reached into the glove compartment and brought out a laminated card that would accompany the vehicle to Iraq. It had the signatures of the team that had worked on that vehicle. He said they knew lives depended on the quality of their work, and they wanted the soldiers riding in that vehicle to know that each member of that team took personal responsibility for that specific MRAP. He said such a card went with every MRAP.

Beginning in late 2007, every time I visited Iraq, units were proud to show me their MRAPs. Unit commanders especially loved them as they saw their soldiers walk away from attacks that previously would have been fatal. I learned from soldiers that the ride was very uncomfortable, that the vehicles were so heavy (the weight ranged from roughly fourteen tons to nearly thirty tons, depending on the model) that they were not very useful off-road, and that rollovers were a real risk. They were so tall that, when going through towns, the antennas could snag electric wires. Our ingenious troops simply improvised, using long pieces of plastic pipe to lift the electric wires as they went under. Others jerry-rigged ambulances out of MRAPs, and one brigade commander had a desk put in one to use as a mobile command post. But mostly they just delivered soldiers from one place to another with far greater safety than they previously had. Time and again, commanders would walk me over to a damaged MRAP, and there would be two or three soldiers standing by it who would tell me about surviving an attack on that vehicle. A journalist passed along to me the story of a colonel watching a live video feed showing one of his unit’s vehicles overturned and in flames after an IED attack and praying out loud, “Please, just save one of my guys.” And then he watched, astonished, as all three men inside emerged injured but alive. They had been in an MRAP.

Toward mid-2008 our attention turned to the need to get MRAPs into Afghanistan because of the growing IED threat there. As we began to ship growing numbers of the vehicles over time, it became clear that, having been designed for the relatively flat terrain and roads of Iraq, the heavy and hard-to-maneuver vehicles weren’t suitable for off-road use or for rocky and mountainous Afghanistan. Again, the MRAP task force—and industry—responded quickly by designing a lighter, more maneuverable vehicle—the MRAP-ATV (all-terrain vehicle).

There are a lot of heroes in the MRAP story, from those in the Marine Corps who kept pressing for an MRAP-like vehicle for years, to program director Marine Brigadier General Mike Brogan and his team, John Young and all those who worked with him on the MRAP task force, my own staff—especially Chiarelli, who was passionate about getting the troops more protection and who daily reminded everyone that I was watching like a hawk—our industry partners, all those great folks in Charleston, and Congress, which on this rare occasion did the right thing and did it quickly. On May 21, 2008, I wrote letters to all the key contributors thanking them for a great achievement. I hand-wrote, “Your efforts—and those of your team—have saved lives and limbs. On behalf of all who return home alive and whole because of your efforts, you have my most profound gratitude.”

As usual in a huge bureaucracy, the villains were the largely nameless and faceless people—and their leaders—who were wed to their old plans, programs, and thinking and refused to change their ways regardless of circumstances. The hidebound and unresponsive bureaucratic structure that the Defense Department uses to acquire equipment performs poorly in peacetime. As I saw, it did so horribly in wartime. And then, as I’ve already said, there was the department’s inexplicable peacetime mind-set in wartime. My role had been to push all these obstacles to the sidelines so that senior leaders like John Young could act urgently to save lives.

To those who contended then, and still do, that MRAPs were unnecessary and a costly one-dimensional, one-time-use vehicle that detracted from more important long-term priorities, I offer only this response: talk to the countless troops who survived IED blasts because they were riding in an MRAP.

INTELLIGENCE, SURVEILLANCE, AND RECONNAISSANCE

Time and again I would have to tackle that damnable peacetime mindset inside the Pentagon. By fall 2007 my impatience was boiling over. On September 28, I called a meeting of all the senior department officials—civilian and military—to read them the riot act. I told them that for our field commanders and troops engaged in the fight, “the difference between getting a decision tomorrow versus next week or delivery of a piece of technology next week versus next month is huge. This department has been at war for over six years. Yet we still use the processes that were barely adequate for peacetime operations and impose a heavy cost in wartime.” I told them that whether the issue was MRAP fielding rates, increasing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) coverage, or fixing troop rotations, it was obvious to me that business as usual “rarely meets the needs of our troops in the field.” I challenged them to look for opportunities to apply a sense of urgency and a willingness “to break china” if it involved getting something to the fight faster or in larger quantities: “The difference between getting something in the hands of our combat forces next month versus next year is dramatic…. We must all show up every day prepared to look at every decision and plan affecting our combat operations through the lens of how we can do it faster, more effectively, and with more impact.”

A month later I told the secretaries of the three military departments: “I need you and your team to continue to poke and prod and challenge the conventional wisdom if that is what it takes to support our kids in the field.”

On January 14, 2008, I sent Mike Mullen a very tough note that cited several examples “where a formal request addressed to me took numerous months (in one case over six) to wind its way through the Centcom/Joint Staff staffing process before it was brought to me for action.” I directed him to develop and implement a process by which I would be informed immediately of any request specifically addressed to me by our commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The immediate problem that provoked those expressions of impatience was the difficulty we were having in meeting our field commanders’ need for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities: a mix of unmanned drones, propeller-driven reconnaissance aircraft, analysts, linguists, and data fusion capabilities that collected and fed critical battlefield information—including intercepted phone calls of terrorist leaders and live video transmission of insurgents planting IEDs—to military commanders, who could then act on it.

In the case of the MRAPs, accelerating production and delivery was essentially a matter of empowerment and finding the money. In the case of ISR, I encountered a lack of enthusiasm and urgency in the Air Force, my old service.

The fusion of extraordinary technical intelligence capabilities with military operations in real time and in direct support of small units in both Iraq and Afghanistan produced a genuine revolution in warfare and combat. While aerial intelligence support for commanders on the ground dates back at least to the Civil War and the use of balloons, over the last quarter of a century this support has taken on an entirely new character. I saw an early example of this as deputy at the CIA in the spring of 1986, when we were able to feed real-time satellite information about Libyan air defense activity directly to the pilots who were conducting the attacks on Tripoli. That was horse-and-buggy technology compared to what has been done in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While I was CIA director, in 1992, I tried to get the Air Force to partner with us in developing technologically advanced drones, because of their ability to loiter over a target for many hours, thus providing continuous photographic and intercepted signals intelligence coverage. The Air Force wasn’t interested because, as I was told, people join the Air Force to fly airplanes and drones had no pilot. By the time I returned to government in late 2006, the Predator drone had become a household word, especially among our enemies, though the Air Force mind-set had not changed. In Iraq, the Army had converted small two-engine propeller planes into intelligence-collection platforms that could provide live video coverage—“full-motion video”—of an area over a prolonged period. This capability, Task Force ODIN (Observe, Detect, Identify, and Neutralize), became a critical asset not only in spotting individuals planting IEDs but in allowing analysts to track people and vehicles and thus to identify the networks producing and planting bombs. It was amazing to watch a video in real time of an insurgent planting an IED, or to view a video analysis tracing an insurgent pickup truck from the bomb-making site to the site of an attack. It was even more amazing—and gratifying—to watch the IED bomber and the pickup truck be quickly destroyed as a result of this unprecedented integration of sensors and shooters.

A number of other intelligence-collection platforms—various kinds of manned aircraft, aerostats (dirigibles), fixed cameras, and many other sensors—were developed. Initially, the full panoply of these platforms was used primarily by Special Forces in their operations, but over time, as other commanders saw what these ISR capabilities were, the demand for more of them for regular combat operations and for force protection grew exponentially.

There were impediments to meeting the demand. One was the limited production capacity of the single company that was making both the Predators and the ground stations necessary to process the collected information. Another was the need for more linguists to translate collected communications. A third was the limited number and availability of other kinds of collection capabilities. For example, one highly effective platform was the Navy’s P-3 aircraft, designed principally for hunting enemy submarines. Unless we essentially deprived ourselves of that capability in Pacific Command and elsewhere, only a handful of these aircraft would be available for Iraq and Afghanistan. They were also getting very old, limiting the number of hours they could fly.

The small number of trained crews available to pilot the drones, particularly in the Air Force, was another significant problem. The Army flew its version of the Predator—called Warrior—using warrant officers and noncommissioned officers. The Air Force, however, insisted on having flight-qualified aircraft pilots—all officers—fly its drones. The Air Force made clear to its pilots that flying a drone from the ground with a joy stick was not as career-enhancing as flying an airplane in the wild blue yonder. Not surprisingly, young officers weren’t exactly beating the door down to fly a drone. When I turned my attention to the ISR problem in mid-2007, the Air Force was providing eight Predator “caps”—each cap consisting of six crews (about eighty people) and three drones, providing twenty-four hours of coverage. The Air Force had no plans to increase those numbers; I was determined that would change.

There was an unseemly turf fight in the ISR world over whether the Air Force should control all military drone programs and operations. The Army resisted, and I was on its side; the Air Force was grasping for absolute control of a capability for which it had little enthusiasm in the first place. I absolutely loathed this kind of turf fight, especially in the middle of ongoing wars, and I was determined the Air Force would not get control.

In the ISR arena, each military service was pursuing its own programs, there was no coordination in acquisition, and no one person was in charge to ensure interoperability in combat conditions. The undersecretary of defense for intelligence, the CIA with its drones (mainly flown by the military), and the director of national intelligence all had their own agendas. It was a mess.

Whatever the complications, the surge of troops in Iraq and mounting difficulties in Afghanistan required a surge in ISR capabilities. Indeed, in nearly every one of my weekly videoconferences with Dave Petraeus, first in Iraq and later in Afghanistan, he would raise the need for more ISR. I asked Ryan McCarthy of my staff, a former Army Ranger and combat veteran of Afghanistan, to be my eyes and ears in this effort—and my cattle prod when necessary.

The first order of business during the summer of 2007 was to scour the world for additional capability. I was prepared to strip nearly every combatant command of much of its ISR to provide more to Petraeus. Every region of the globe is assigned a regional four-star headquarters. These commanders—sometimes compared to proconsuls during the Roman Empire—are loath to give up any military assets assigned to them. Nonetheless we rounded up every drone we could find that was not already deployed in Iraq and grabbed P-3 aircraft from around the world to send to Iraq and Afghanistan. An even more capable drone than the Predator was its larger cousin, the Reaper, and we worked to maximize its production and deployment to the theater as well. At the same time, we had to ramp up new production and accelerate training of new crews. I directed the Air Force to increase its Predator capacity from eight caps to eighteen, and I told its leaders that I wanted their plan by November 1.

Several developments late that fall confirmed for me that the Air Force leadership didn’t accept the urgency of the need for ISR “down-range” or the need to think outside the box about how to get more. This was especially puzzling to me because the Air Force was making an invaluable contribution to the war effort by providing close air support to ground troops under fire, in medical evacuations, and in flying huge quantities of matériel into both Iraq and Afghanistan. In late October 2007, Air Force Chief of Staff Mike “Buzz” Moseley directed a study on how the Air Force could get to eighteen caps by October 2008—far too slowly, in my view. Then, at a time when we were trying to put every intelligence platform possible into the war, the Air Force proposed ending all funding for the venerable U-2 spy plane by the end of summer 2008. The U-2, the same kind of spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers and shot down by the Soviets in 1960, was still providing remarkable intelligence. I thought proposing to ground it at this juncture was just plain crazy. Further, nearly every time Moseley and Air Force Secretary Mike Wynne came to see me, it was about a new bomber or more F-22S. Both were important capabilities for the future, but neither would play any part in the wars we were already in.

I saw firsthand some of the challenges when I visited Creech Air Force Base in Nevada very early in 2008. Creech is the headquarters of the 432nd Reconnaissance Wing and the 15th and 17th Reconnaissance Squadrons, and it was the control center where pilots actually flew many of the drones based in Iraq and Afghanistan. The base is in the middle of nowhere and, when I first visited, quite spartan. In the operations building, there were multiple cubicles, each with an Air Force pilot at a work station. The whole enterprise resembled a very sophisticated video arcade—except these men and women were playing for keeps. On screens in front of them, the pilots in Nevada could see exactly and simultaneously what the Predator or Reaper was seeing in Iraq or Afghanistan. Each pilot had a joy stick and an instrumentation panel for remotely flying a vehicle thousands of miles away. It was one of the most astonishing—and lethal—displays of technological prowess I have ever seen.

I was taken to a new hangar to see both a Predator and a Reaper. They both look like giant bugs, with long spindly legs, a broad wingspan, and a camera pod that looks like a huge, distended eyeball. The Reaper is quite a bit larger than the Predator and, when armed, can carry a weapons load comparable to some of our fighters. Looking at those aircraft, I could not understand why I was having such a hard time persuading the Air Force leadership that these “remotely piloted vehicles” were an integral part of the Air Force’s future and should become a significant and enduring part of its combat capability.

I spent some time with the drone pilots, who had a number of gripes. They had a two-hour round-trip commute every day from their homes at Nellis Air Force Base after a grueling day of flying multiple missions. There was no place where you’d want to eat at Creech. There was no physical fitness facility. There was no promising career path for the airmen who flew the drones without going back to flying airplanes—they weren’t being promoted, and they were ineligible for the kind of air combat recognition and medals that airplane pilots could receive. Within months of my visit, the Air Force extended the hours of the child care center at Nellis, funded a medical and dental clinic at Creech, and began construction of a new food outlet and dining facility.

As the need for more ISR kept growing through the winter of 2007–8, it was clear my haranguing wasn’t working. On April 4, 2008, I sent a memo to Admiral Mullen, a strong supporter and valuable ally in what I was trying to do with ISR, expressing my determination to press aggressively on all fronts necessary to get ISR support to Iraq and Afghanistan. I asked him for a briefing on initiatives under way and for his thoughts on any additional opportunities to increase ISR support over the ensuing thirty to ninety days. Ten days later I told Mullen that we needed a more comprehensive approach addressing how to maximize capabilities in the short term.

I soon established the ISR task force, led by the director of program evaluation Brad Berkson and Marine Lieutenant General Emo Gardner. I asked them for options for additional ISR capability in 30-, 60-, 90-, and 120-day phases. Each major Defense component with a stake in the outcome would have a senior representative on the task force, which would report to me directly once a month, beginning in two weeks.

Mullen, Undersecretary for Intelligence Clapper, Berkson, and I also agreed we needed to find more ISR resources in the United States and in other commands—for example, did we need as many pilots and drones in the training program instead of deployed in the field?—and that we had to look hard at whether the commands in Iraq and Afghanistan could more efficiently use the ISR resources they already had. For me, these bureaucratic fights always came back to my obsession to protect the troops currently in the fight and to do so urgently.

My first briefing by the task force soon thereafter underscored the problem and fed my frustration. Of nearly 4,500 U.S. drones worldwide, only a little more than half were in Iraq and Afghanistan. We needed to change that. We also needed to increase the number of translators for intercepted communications, unattended ground sensors to provide early warning of approaching insurgents, and people and hardware for quickly processing the information we collected and getting it to the commanders and troops who needed it. In August, I approved seventy-three new initiatives at a cost of $2.6 billion. On occasion, I would overreach. At one briefing when I was told we would soon have twenty-four “caps” (each with enough drones and crews to provide twenty-four-hour coverage), I asked whether the theater could manage ninety-two caps. I was told, “No, that would eclipse the sun.”

During the summer, Berkson and McCarthy launched themselves into the field, visiting Creech as well as Iraq and Afghanistan. They were not welcomed. As they counted the number of Predators in hangars at Creech, one Air Force officer there complained to the Pentagon about my micromanagers telling him what he did and did not need. But Berkson and McCarthy found two to three caps’ worth of capability in their visit to Creech and reported that the pilots there were “flying” only sixty hours a month. They could do more and subsequently did. Command staffs in Baghdad and Kabul were equally sore at having someone from Washington “grading their homework.” But what was important was that they found more capability.

The congressional appropriations committees were uneasy with the ISR task force because the funding did not go through the traditional budgetary process. They almost always ultimately approved, but it took too long, and they continued to press for dissolution of the task force and a return to regular procedures. I changed the structure of the task force a couple of times—and renamed it in the Obama administration—which amounted to a bit of a shell game with the Hill for more than three years, to ensure I had a mechanism at my disposal in Washington that could effectively serve the commanders in the field.

We would focus on getting more ISR capabilities to Iraq and Afghanistan for the remainder of my time as secretary. By June 2008 the Air Force was able to tell me it was dramatically increasing the number of patrols by armed drones. The following month I approved reallocating $1.2 billion within Defense to buy fifty MC-12 planes—dubbed “Liberty” aircraft—equipped to provide full-motion video and collect other intelligence, primarily in Afghanistan. These relatively low-cost, low-tech, twin-propeller aircraft—the kind traditionally despised by the Air Force—were more than capable of getting the job done. Allocating ISR assets between Iraq and Afghanistan was an ongoing challenge for Central Command, but one simple reality helped guide decisions: Predators were man hunters, whereas the Liberty aircraft were a superb asset in the counter-IED world. We would develop and deploy many other kinds of cameras and platforms, both airborne and at fixed sites on the ground, to provide our troops with intelligence that supported combat operations but that also protected their bases and outposts, especially in Afghanistan. There were almost sixty drone caps when I left office.

The difficulty in getting the Pentagon to focus on the wars we were in and to support the commanders and the troops in the fight left a very bad taste in my mouth. People at lower levels had good ideas, but they had an impossible task in breaking through the bureaucracy, being heard, and being taken seriously. The military too often stifled younger officers, and sometimes more senior ones, who challenged current practices. In a speech I gave to Air Force personnel a few days after I established the ISR task force, I made it clear that I encouraged cultural change in the services, unorthodox thinking, and respectful dissent. I spoke of earlier Air Force reformers and the institutional hostility and bureaucratic resistance they had faced. I asked the midlevel officers in the audience to rethink how their service was organized, manned, and equipped. I repeated my concern that “our services are still not moving aggressively in wartime to provide resources needed now on the battlefield.” In a line about ISR that I penciled in on my way to the speech, I said, “Because people were stuck in old ways of doing business, it’s been like pulling teeth.”

At West Point the same day, I delivered a lecture to the entire corps of cadets with a similar message about military leadership, knowing that my remarks there would be read throughout the Army. I told the cadets,

Mindful of an article published earlier by an Army lieutenant colonel that was highly critical of senior officers, I added: “I encourage you to take on the mantle of fearless, thoughtful, but loyal dissent when the situation calls for it.”

Because of the ISR issue and other concerns I had with the Air Force (more later), my speech to them was generally seen as a broadside against its leadership. At a press conference soon afterward, I was asked if that was my intention. I said there had been a lot of praise for the Air Force in my speech and that I had criticized the military bureaucracy across the board, particularly with regard to getting more help to the war fighter now. Everyone recognized that both speeches represented my first public assertion that supporting the wars we were already in and those fighting those wars, as well as preparing for future conflicts, would require cultural change in all the services. It was only the opening salvo.

WOUNDED WARRIORS

I believe that exposure of the scandalous problems in the outpatient treatment of wounded troops at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center mortified the senior military leadership of the services and the whole Department of Defense. I was always convinced they had been unaware of the bureaucratic and administrative nightmare that too often confronted our outpatient wounded, as well as the organizational, financial, and quality-of-life difficulties that faced our wounded troops and their families. The scandal prompted numerous reviews and studies of the entire wounded warrior experience, while the department and the services simultaneously began remedial actions.

During my entire tenure as secretary, I never saw the military services—across the board—bring to a problem as much zeal, passion, and urgency once they realized that these men and women who had sacrificed so much were not being treated properly after they left the hospitals. Senior generals and admirals jumped on the problem. I don’t think that was because I had fired senior people. I was always convinced that once the military leadership knew they had let down these heroes, they were determined to make things right for them. The established bureaucracies, military and civilian, in the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, however, were a different story.

The Army was the service, along with the Marine Corps, that had suffered the overwhelming preponderance of casualties, physical and psychological, in the post-9/11 wars. I met with Army Chief of Staff Casey in early March and told him not to wait on the reviews or studies but to act right away to fix Walter Reed and look at the rest of the Army’s treatment of wounded warriors. With respect to evaluating soldiers for disability, I told him, “When in doubt, err on the side of the soldier.” Casey and Army Vice Chief of Staff Dick Cody leaped on the problem without further urging from me. On March 8, I was briefed on the Army’s action plan. Under Cody’s supervision, other personnel changes had already been made at Walter Reed, a Wounded Warrior Transition Brigade was created (to give wounded soldiers an institutional unit to look after them while in outpatient status), a “one-stop soldier and family assistance center” was established, and all outpatient soldiers were moved into proper quarters. The Army was establishing a wounded warrior and family hotline, organizing teams to examine circumstances at the Army’s twelve key medical centers, and looking into how to improve the Army’s physical disability evaluation system. General Casey took the lead in aggressively tackling the problem of traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress. In June, Casey briefed me on a program to train every soldier in the Army on the causes and symptoms of post-traumatic stress in an effort not only to help them cope but also to begin to remove the stigma of mental illness. As he told me, “We’ve got to get rid of the mentality that if there are no holes in you, then you’re ready for duty.” The other services were not far behind the Army’s lead.

On March 9, I had sent a message to every man and woman in the U.S. armed forces on the Walter Reed situation. I described the actions taken so far, including establishment of the two outside review panels. I told them we would not wait on those reports before tackling the problems. I told them I had directed a comprehensive, department-wide review of military medical care programs, facilities, and procedures, and that I had told the senior civilian and military leadership that in dealing with this challenge, “Money will not be an issue.” I went on: “After the war itself, we have no higher priority than caring properly for our wounded.” It was a sentiment and an admonition I would repeat often over the next four years.

Shortly thereafter I created the Wounded Warrior Task Force, charged with reporting to me every two weeks actions that were being taken across the Defense Department to address the needs of wounded warriors and their families. The goals of the task force were ambitious: (1) to completely redesign the disability evaluation system; (2) to focus on traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress; (3) to correct the flaws in case management of wounded warriors and their support; (4) to expedite Defense–Veterans Affairs data sharing; (5) to ensure proper facilities for wounded warriors; and (6) to reexamine the entire process for transitioning wounded warriors to Veterans Affairs. These were also the primary issues addressed by the West-Marsh independent review I had appointed and by the presidential Dole-Shalala commission. I was in a hurry and was not concerned about the three efforts stumbling over one another; each had a somewhat different mandate.

I wanted to ensure that good ideas were being shared across the services and around the Defense Department. As with MRAPs and ISR, I intended to make clear from my personal engagement the priority I attached to this endeavor, and that I was going to make sure everyone was moving aggressively to fix any problems we found. Gordon England and I also reenergized a joint Department of Defense–Veterans Affairs oversight group—the Senior Operations Committee—cochaired by each department’s deputy secretary in an effort to make significant improvements in the process of transitioning from active duty to retired or veteran status.

I believe that at the outset of the Afghan and Iraq wars, neither Defense nor VA ever conceived of, much less planned for, the huge number of wounded young men and women (overwhelmingly men) who would come pouring into the system in the years ahead. Many of our troops would not have survived their wounds in previous wars, but extraordinary medical advances and the skills of those treating the wounded meant that a large number with complex injuries—including traumatic brain injuries and multiple amputations—faced prolonged treatment, years of rehabilitation, or a lifetime of disability. The Defense and VA bureaucracies, accustomed to dealing with older vets from Vietnam and earlier wars or retirees with all the ordinary problems of aging, seemed incapable of adjusting to wartime circumstances, just like the rest of Defense and the rest of government. There were three areas where I fought the military and civilian bureaucracy on behalf of the wounded, and all three stemmed from my strong belief that those wounded in combat or training for combat should be dealt with as a group by themselves and be afforded what I referred to as “platinum” treatment in terms of priority for appointments, for housing, for administrative assistance, and for anything else. I wanted them to have administrative staff for whom they were the sole “customers.” The Defense and VA health care bureaucracies just could not or would not differentiate the wounded in combat from all others needing care.

Wounded Warrior Transition Units were being created by all the services at posts and bases throughout the United States so the wounded would have a home unit to watch over them. The first fight was over who should be allowed into them. I was shocked to learn, only months into the program, that the Army units of this kind were nearly filled to capacity. My intent in approving these units had been that they be reserved for those wounded or injured in battle or training, but the Army had allowed in those with noncombat injuries and illnesses as well. So a transition unit berth that I had hoped would go to a soldier wounded in Iraq might instead go to a soldier who had broken his leg stateside in a motorcycle accident. I obviously wanted the latter to get first-class medical care, but that was not why we created these units. In talking to wounded warriors at various Army posts around the country, I was told that deploying units would often transfer soldiers with behavioral or drug problems to these units. Eventually I persuaded the new Army secretary, Pete Geren, to be more faithful to my original intent but agreed it could be done through attrition, so that no soldier was forced to leave a transition unit.

The second fight was over bureaucratic delays in making disability decisions. In the case of those severely and catastrophically wounded, there was no need to take months to determine if they were entitled to full disability benefits. Similarly, a decision to transition wounded troops unable to remain on active duty to the VA ought not take nearly as much time as it took. I called this approach “tiering.” President Bush was supportive of giving wounded warriors the benefit of the doubt on disability evaluations, erring on the side of the soldier initially and then making adjustments later if needed. Because the number of wounded warriors in the system was such a small subset of all those needing medical care and evaluation, I believed even more strongly that the system should be tilted in their favor. “We need to look at this from the perspective of the soldier, not the perspective of the government,” I told a group of West Point cadets in September. We were able to get a pilot program going in the Washington, D.C., area to expedite the disability evaluation process, but it was always limited by legislation and bureaucracy. I pushed for these changes for years, but the unified opposition of the military and civilian bureaucracies—and the lack of support for my efforts from their leaders—largely defeated me. Any new approach, anything different from what they had always done, anything that might require congressional approval, and any differentiation between troops wounded in combat and others who were ill or injured was anathema to most officials in Defense and VA.

The third fight was over the disability evaluation system itself. To be considered for a disability retirement, a wounded warrior had to be evaluated as at least 30 percent disabled. This seemed to me to involve a ridiculous level of precision. How can you quantify whether a person is 28 percent disabled or 32 percent? I knew there were rules and guidelines, and I knew some veterans tried hard to game the system to get more money. But when it came to wounded warriors, when it was a close call or there was doubt, I wanted to err on the side of the soldier, and generously. I argued that we could institute a five-year review process to reevaluate the level of disability and correct any egregious errors made initially. I had no luck.

I also pressed for more support of families of the fallen and severely wounded, in addition to advancing state-of-the-art medical care for the signature injuries of the current conflicts—post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, lost limbs, and eye problems and sight restoration. I predicted that these injuries would “continue to be the signature military medical challenge facing the Department for years to come.”

In mid-July, at a meeting with the senior civilian and military leadership, I was briefed on statistics that I thought proved my point about tiering. I was told that, as of that date, 1,754,000 troops had been engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thirty-two thousand had been wounded in action, half of whom had returned to duty within seventy-two hours. Ten thousand troops had been medically evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan, not all of them for combat-related injuries, and a total (as of July 15) of 2,333 had been catastrophically injured or wounded. In short, the number of troops wounded in combat at that point in the wars represented a small fraction of all those being treated.

I felt a great sense of urgency in addressing these issues, in no small part because I assumed I had only six months remaining as secretary. I knew that if I didn’t make progress in these areas, and if my successor was not as committed as I to fixing these problems, very little would happen. I knew one of the chief obstacles to proper treatment of wounded troops and veterans was the bureaucratic territoriality of both the Defense and Veterans Affairs Departments. A wounded soldier had to go through two separate disability evaluations, and getting health records from one department to the other was always a challenge. The secretaries of veterans affairs whom I worked through most of the Bush and Obama administrations (respectively, James Peake and Eric Shinseki) were committed to working out these problems. Unfortunately, if there is one bureaucracy in Washington more intractable than Defense, it is VA. Only when the VA secretary and I personally directed an outcome was any progress made at all. Unless successor secretaries are equally committed to change, whatever progress we made will be lost. And again, as far as I was concerned, a big part of the problem was the system’s unwillingness to differentiate in the process between someone wounded in combat and someone retiring with a hearing problem or hemorrhoids.

Wounded warriors and their families would often mention how difficult it was to get information on what benefits were available to them. When I raised this at the Pentagon, I was sent a two-page list of Web sites where wounded warriors could go to find all they wanted to know about support and benefits. But the effort required to access and read all that material—and the assumption that every wounded warrior family had a computer, especially when assigned to medical facilities away from home—seemed to me symptomatic of what was wrong with the system. In January 2008, I formally asked the personnel and readiness organization in the Pentagon to prepare a paper booklet for wounded warriors that could serve as a ready reference for benefits and care. I received a response a month later in the form of multiple brochures and handouts, a list of more Web sites and 1-800 call centers, all developed to address the needs of the wounded warrior community. I wrote back, “This is precisely the problem. We need one, easy to read, tabbed and indexed comprehensive guide. Like I originally asked for months ago.” Two weeks later I received a memo laying out plans for the handbook and all that would need to be included in it, and I was informed that it would be available on October 1. I hit the ceiling. I wrote back on the memo, “Strikes me that if it takes six months to pull all this together, we have a bigger problem than even I thought.” And we did.

Many of these matters came under the purview of the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness (P&R). For that office, it seemed the status quo was satisfactory. Virtually every issue I wanted to tackle with regard to health affairs (including the deficiencies in Tricare, the military health insurance program, which I heard about continuously from those in uniform at every rank), wounded warriors, and disability evaluations encountered active opposition, passive resistance, or just plain bureaucratic obduracy from P&R. It makes me angry even now. My failure to fix this inert, massive, but vitally important organization will, I fear, have long-range implications for troops and their families.

Beyond the Defense and Veterans Affairs bureaucracies, there were two other obstacles to reforming the disability system for wounded warriors. The first was Congress, which has over the years micromanaged anything dealing with veterans and responds with Pavlovian reliability to lobbying by the veterans service organizations (VSOs, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion). Nearly any change of consequence requires new law—a huge challenge. In October 2008, I directed development of a “stand-alone” legislative proposal that would give us the authority to create an express lane for catastrophically and severely wounded warriors.

In December, Mullen and I met again with the people in Defense working on the wounded warrior problem to discuss what initiatives we might suggest to the new presidential administration. I said that I had reached out to the new veterans affairs secretary, Eric Shinseki, who was eager to work with us on the disability evaluation issue. There were two choices: either Defense and VA worked this problem out together or we would go the legislative route. Mullen noted that we needed to improve support for families of the wounded, and I responded that we needed legislative relief to reduce their financial burden. Finally, I said we needed to make sure the National Guard and Reserves were provided for in any legislation. We knew that the legislative path would be tough because of the veterans organizations.

I greatly admire the VSOs for their work on behalf of veterans, for their patriotic and educational endeavors, and for their extraordinary efforts to help military families. That said, again and again they were a major problem whenever I tried to do something to help those still on active duty—for example, my attempt to bring about the changes in the disability evaluation system as described above. The organizations were focused on doing everything possible to advantage veterans, so much so that those still on active duty seemed to be of secondary importance, especially if any new benefits or procedures might affect veterans. The best example of this was their opposition to legislation implementing some of the excellent recommendations of the Dole-Shalala commission. That was unforgivable.

Another example: Senator Jim Webb authored a new GI Bill that was immensely generous in its educational benefits for veterans. I felt the benefits were so generous they might significantly affect retention of those on active duty. I wanted Congress to require five years of service to qualify for the benefits so we could get at least two enlistments out of troops before they left the service. When I called House Speaker Pelosi to press for this change, she told me, “On matters such as this, we always defer to the VSOs.” (When I visited Fort Hood in the fall of 2007, a soldier’s wife suggested to me that a service member ought to be able to share his or her GI Bill education benefits with a spouse or children. I thought it was a great idea and suggested it to President Bush, who included it in his 2008 State of the Union Address. There was little enthusiasm for it on Capitol Hill, but we were able, ultimately, to get it included in the final GI Bill—a benefit I saw as somewhat offsetting our inability to require five years of service to qualify for the education benefit.)

I found it very difficult to get accurate (and credible) information from inside Defense about whether we were making progress in helping wounded warriors and their families. The bureaucrats in the personnel and readiness office would regularly tell me how well we were doing and how pleased our troops and families were. Meanwhile I was hearing the opposite directly from the wounded. I insisted that we get more comprehensive and accurate feedback from the wounded, other troops, spouses, and parents. “I want an independent evaluation of soldiers and families and a list of programs where you need money,” I said.

I would never succeed in cracking the obduracy and resistance to change of the department’s personnel and health care bureaucracy, both military and civilian. It was one of my biggest failures as secretary.

THE WAR ABOUT WAR

In the spring of 2008, the vital issue of the military services’ preoccupation with planning, equipping, and training for future major wars with other nation-states, while assigning lesser priority to current conflicts and all other forms of conflict, such as irregular or asymmetric war, came to a head. It went to the heart of every other fight with the Pentagon I have described. In my four and a half years as secretary, this was one of the few issues where I had to take on the chairman and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Their approach, it seemed to me, ignored the reality that virtually every American use of military force since Vietnam—with the sole exceptions of the Gulf War and the first weeks of the Iraq War—had involved unconventional conflicts against smaller states or nonstate entities, such as al Qaeda or Hizballah. The military’s approach seemed to be that if you train and equip to defeat big countries, you can defeat any lesser threat. I thought our lack of success in dealing with the Iraqi insurgency after 2003 disproved that notion. I didn’t disagree with the importance of preparing for war against other nations. While that kind of conflict was the least likely, it would have the most significant consequences if we were not prepared. However, I thought we also needed explicitly to budget, train, and equip for a wide range of other possible adversaries. It was never my purpose to relegate state-to-state conflicts and the sophisticated weapons to fight them to second-level status compared to the wars we were currently fighting, but rather to ensure that we maintained our nontraditional capabilities. I wanted them to have a place in the budget and in the Defense culture that they had never had.

In short, I sought to balance our capabilities. I wanted to institutionalize the lessons learned and capabilities developed in Iraq and Afghanistan. I didn’t want the Army, in particular, to forget how to do counterinsurgency—as it had done after Vietnam. I did not want us to forget how we had revolutionized special operations, counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency through an unprecedented fusion of intelligence and combat operations. I did not want us to forget that training and equipping the security forces of other nations, especially developing nations, might be an important means of avoiding deployment of our own forces. My fights with the Pentagon all through 2007 on MRAPs, ISR, wounded warriors, and more made me realize the extraordinary power of the conventional war DNA in the military services, and of the bureaucratic and political power of those in the military, industry, and Congress who wanted to retain the big procurement programs initiated during the Cold War, as well as the predominance of “big war” thinking.

As mandated by law in 1986, the president must produce a National Security Strategy, a document that describes the world as the president sees it and his goals and priorities in the conduct of foreign affairs and national security. The secretary of defense then prepares the National Defense Strategy, describing how Defense will support the president’s objectives through its programs. The NDS provides a framework for campaign and contingency planning, force development, and intelligence. Given finite resources, the NDS also addresses how Defense would assess, mitigate, and respond to risk, risk defined in terms of “the potential for damage to national security combined with the probability of occurrence and a measurement of the consequences should the underlying risk remain unaddressed.” Finally, drawing on the NDS, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff prepares his own document, the National Military Strategy, providing even more specific guidance to the military services and combatant commands in terms of achieving the president’s goals.

Each of these three documents takes many months to write, in part to ensure that every relevant component of the government and the Defense Department can weigh in with its own views on the drafts. There is a high premium on achieving consensus, and countless hours are spent wrangling over the texts. The disputes are occasionally genuinely substantive, but more often they reflect efforts by each bureaucratic entity to ensure that its priorities and programs are protected. Ironically, and not atypically, the practical effect of the content of these documents is limited at the most senior levels of government. Personally, I don’t recall ever reading the president’s National Security Strategy when preparing to become secretary of defense. Nor did I read any of the previous National Defense Strategy documents when I became secretary. I never felt disadvantaged by not having read these scriptures.

The NDS became important to me in the spring of 2008 in part because my name would go on it, but also because I wanted it to reflect my strongly held views on the importance of greater balance between conventional and unconventional war in our planning and programs. The key passage in the draft concerned the assessment of risk:

This passage, and especially the italicized sentence, led to a rebellion; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the secretaries of the Navy and Air Force, and the chief of staff of the Army all refused to agree to that language. There was “no margin to accept additional risk in traditional capabilities to invest in other capability areas,” they argued.

I met with the Joint Chiefs and combatant commanders in mid-May. I asked how they differentiated between “risk” associated with current wars and “risk” associated with our ability to respond to future threats. “Why do you assume that state competitors will rely on traditional capabilities to challenge us?” I asked. I did not disagree with them on the need to prepare for large-scale, state-to-state conflict, but I was not talking about moving significant resources away from future conventional capabilities. I just wanted the defense budget and the services formally to acknowledge the need to provide for nontraditional capabilities and ensure that the resources necessary for the conflicts we were most likely to fight were also included in our budgeting, planning, training, and procurement. I was moving the needle very little. But even that was too much, given the threat it posed to the institutional military’s modernization priorities.

Ultimately, I agreed to somewhat water down my language in the NDS, but I would continue to advocate publicly for more balance in our defense planning and procurement. This may seem abstract and like prosaic bureaucratic infighting, but these matters, which rarely engage the general public, have very real consequences for our men and women in uniform and for our national security, especially when budgets are tight and hard choices must be made.

At the end of September 2008, at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., I summarized the issues and concerns that had been at the root of my war with the Pentagon for nearly two years.

The balance we are striving for is:

• Between doing everything we can to prevail in the conflicts we are in, and being prepared for other contingencies that might arise elsewhere, or in the future;

• Between institutionalizing capabilities such as counterinsurgency and stability operations, as well as helping partners build capacity, and maintaining our traditional edge—above all, the technological edge against the military forces of other nation-states.

I do not want to leave the impression that I fought my wars inside the Defense Department alone. With the exception of the NDS and one or two other issues, Mike Mullen was a steadfast ally. Most combatant commanders and all field commanders engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan obviously were supportive. On many issues, especially those involving wounded warriors, the senior military leadership was either right beside me or well in front of me, once the problems were identified. Senior civilians in the department like Edelman, Young, Clapper, and those who worked for them, provided critical support and leadership. My adversaries were those with a traditional mind-set, the usual opponents of any idea “not invented here,” those fearful that what I was trying to do threatened their existing programs and procurements. Moreover, the size and complexity of the department itself made doing anything differently than had been done in the past a huge challenge. My wars inside the Pentagon in 2007–8 had been to address specific problems and shortcomings in supporting those fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The broader, bigger issues I had addressed only rhetorically. But when I found out I would remain as secretary under President Obama, I began to plan how I would actually begin to implement my ideas in the budget. As Gordon England put it, “We do what we fund.” And I would, for the first time, take charge of that process.

THE BLAME GAME

In Washington, everyone wants a scalp when things don’t go right. But, in truth, there isn’t a simple answer as to who should bear responsibility for the failure to act earlier in the areas I have been discussing. When I sought to fix the problems I have described, I came to realize that in every case, multiple independent organizations were involved, and that no single one of them—one of the military services, the Joint Chiefs, the undersecretary for acquisition, the comptroller—had the authority to compel action by the others. The field commanders had been talking about withdrawing troops from Iraq throughout 2005 and 2006. If that was to be the case, why would the Army’s civilian and military leaders take money away from future programs to buy a new kind of armored vehicle for use in a war that presumably was ending? The Air Force had never liked the idea of aircraft without pilots—why invest heavily in them at the expense of other programs? No one anticipated the huge influx of grievously wounded soldiers and Marines, nor the repeated tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan that would take a heavy toll on their bodies, their minds, and their families. Walter Reed hospital was scheduled to be shuttered as part of the base realignment and closure process. So why spend money for upkeep and facilities for outpatients or add administrative staff to work there?

There never was intentional neglect of the troops and their well-being. There was, however, a toxic mix of flawed assumptions about the wars themselves; a risk-averse bureaucracy; budgetary decisions made in isolation from the battlefield; Army, Navy and Air Force focus in Washington on the routine budget process and protecting dollars for future programs; a White House unaware of the needs of the troops and disinclined to pay much attention to the handful of members of Congress who pointed to these needs; and a Congress by and large so focused on the politics of the war in Iraq that it was asleep at the switch or simply too pusillanimous when it came to the needs of the troops. A “gotcha” climate in Washington created by investigative committees, multiple inspector general and auditing organizations, and a general thirst for scandal collectively reinforced bureaucratic timidity and leadership caution. All this translated into a ponderous and unresponsive system, the antithesis of the kind of speed, agility, and innovation required to support troops at war.

In my mind, what blame there is to be apportioned for failure to support the troops should be directed at those in senior positions of responsibility who did not scream out about these problems, and those who had authority but failed to act.

In the first category must be counted the field and combatant commanders; the service secretaries and chiefs of staff whose troops were at risk; the chairmen and vice chairmen of the Joint Chiefs; civilian political appointees at all levels in Defense; and the Armed Services Committees of both houses of Congress.

In the second category must be, principally, the secretaries and deputy secretaries of defense. Only they had the authority to ignore every organizational boundary and parochial budgetary consideration and force action. Only they, by taking ownership of problems, could remove risk from individuals and organizations. Only they could sweep aside with the stroke of a pen most bureaucratic obstacles and ponderous acquisition procedures and redirect budget resources. Secretary Rumsfeld did this successfully when he created the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, the counter-IED organization. He did not act on other issues that I found critically important. I failed in some key respects in my efforts to transform the care of wounded warriors, especially providing administrative and financial support over and above that given others in uniform, and in fixing an outdated, complicated, and opaque disability evaluation system. I’m sure I fell short in other areas as well.

Secretary Rumsfeld once famously told a soldier that you go to war with the army you have, which is absolutely true. But I would add that you damn well should move as fast as possible to get the army you need. That was the crux of my war with the Pentagon.