Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (44 page)

On June 18, there was a near disaster. Joe Klein, writing a piece for
Time
magazine, was told by Obama that “he wanted to talk to Gates about serving in his administration.” Klein told my press spokesman, Geoff Morrell, that, and Morrell told me. I was really upset. I told Geoff that publication of such a quote would render me useless and impotent for the remaining six months of the Bush administration. I told him to tell Klein as much, and that if he ran the quote, I would issue an unequivocal statement saying there were no circumstances under which I would stay on beyond the end of Bush’s term. Klein agreed not to run the quote because, he told Morrell, he didn’t want to hurt that prospect. In the end, the
Time
story had Klein asking Obama if he would want to retain me as secretary and Obama responding, “I’m not going to let you pin me down … but I’d certainly be interested in the sort of people who served in the first Bush administration [Bush 41].”

About the same time I heard from John Hamre that it was too late
for me “to avoid being on the short list for SecDef for either Obama or McCain.” I e-mailed him back on Sunday, June 22:

What folks don’t understand is that they [McCain and Obama] are not on my short list. Or any list of mine. People have no idea how much I detest this job—and the toll taken by the letters I write [to the loved ones of soldiers killed in action] every day. Being secretary of defense when we are engaged in multiple wars is different than at other times.… Virtually all of the kids in Iraq and Afghanistan today are there by my order. Not to overdramatize, I will do my duty, but I can’t wait to lay down this burden.

In the midst of all this press speculation and to-ing and fro-ing, a most bizarre episode occurred on the last day of June, when I took a telephone call from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He told me that he was the one who had talked Obama into running for president (a lot of people were claiming that) but there was no candidate for vice president. Reid said he was thinking about me, and that was the reason for the call. It took a lot of willpower for me to keep from bursting out laughing. He asked me if I had a public position on abortion; I laughed, saying no. He asked if I was a longtime Republican. I said, actually no; I hadn’t been registered with either party for many years. He asked how long I had been an academic. He wanted us to keep all this very private between us. “Possibly nothing will come of it,” he said. I couldn’t figure out if he was serious, if it was just idle flattery, or if he was delusional. It was so weird, I never told anybody, in part because I didn’t think they’d believe me.

Washington, D.C., is always an ugly, jittery place in the months before, and weeks after, a presidential election. People outside government who want inside are jockeying for jobs in a new administration, and people on the inside are maneuvering to stay there—or beginning to look for new jobs outside. Sharp elbows and sharp tongues are everywhere. Gossip and rumors flow around town as freely as liquor at a lobbyist’s reception. Even senior career officials and civil servants are tense, knowing they will soon be working for new faces with new agendas and will be forced to prove themselves anew to people who will be suspicious of them because they served with the preceding administration.

On July 15–16, I chaired the last Defense Senior Leadership Conference
of the Bush administration, a gathering of the service chiefs, the combatant commanders, and the department’s senior civilian leaders. We spent a lot of time on the prospective transition. I said that terrorists had tested the previous two administrations early—the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 came a month after Clinton took the oath of office, the 9/11 attacks less than eight months after Bush became president—so it was important that Defense be watchful well into 2009. I warned that a full civilian leadership team wouldn’t be in place for some time after the inauguration and said I would try to persuade Bush 43 to allow us to brief both candidates after the conventions. The chairman and others spoke about trying to establish contact with the campaigns. I reminded them that in preceding transitions, the incumbent presidents’ practice had been to funnel all contact with the campaigns through either the national security adviser or the White House chief of staff, and that the only organization allowed to brief the candidates before the election had been CIA. This presidential campaign would be more complicated for us, though, because both candidates would be sitting U.S. senators with security clearances and Senate staff authorized to ask for briefings. McCain sat on the Armed Services Committee, both Obama and Clinton on the Foreign Relations Committee. I said we had to be very careful about responding to their offices’ requests lest we cross the line between their legitimate needs as senators and their desires as candidates. Rangel’s Senior Steering Group for the transition would be the sole point of contact.

An example of such complications came less than two weeks later. Obama was going to Iraq, and on his return trip, we were informed by one of his staff, a retired Air Force major general named Scott Gration, that the candidate wanted to visit the U.S. military hospital at Landstuhl, Germany. All American wounded—and many of our coalition partners’—in both Iraq and Afghanistan were flown to Landstuhl to receive further treatment and stabilization before being flown back home. Gration said two campaign staff members would accompany Obama to the hospital. He was told that under Defense Department directives, the senator was welcome to visit the hospital with personal Senate or committee staff, but no campaign staff would be allowed to accompany him. There was a dustup with Gration, who I thought at the time was just trying to insert himself into the senator’s visit and was not actually speaking for him. In any event, Obama ultimately decided not to visit the hospital
because he didn’t want there to be any perception that he was using troops—especially wounded ones—for political purposes.

About the same time, McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, attended a National Guard event in Alaska. The press asked Morrell why she was allowed to do so. He pointed out that as governor of Alaska, she was the commander in chief of that state’s National Guard.

Every day was a political minefield. The situation was not helped by rumors about my staying. These rumors were fed by occasions like Obama’s meeting with the House Democratic Caucus during the last week in July, where Representative Adam Schiff asked him if he was considering having me stay on for at least a few months. According to the magazine
Roll Call
, there were “quite a few moans and groans” from Democrats present, presumably appalled by the idea of keeping on a Bush appointee. In early September, the same publication suggested that McCain might keep me.

In September, Mike Mullen came close to inadvertently setting off a political bombshell that, in my opinion, would have seriously damaged him, the military, and the Defense Department. I wrote earlier that one of the few major disagreements I had with Mike and the chiefs was their nonconcurrence in my National Defense Strategy, specifically my view that we could take some additional risk in terms of future conventional capabilities against other modern militaries in order to win the wars we were already fighting. The usual practice, once the NDS is published, is for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to issue his own document, the National Military Strategy, intended to describe how the uniformed services would translate both the president’s National Security Strategy and the NDS into military planning and resource needs. I read a draft of the NMS closely and could see that Mike was plainly distancing himself and the chiefs from several fundamental elements of Bush’s National Security Strategy. A key component of that strategy for years had been “winning the long war,” a phrase encompassing the war on terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mike made no reference to it. The draft, however, did imply that our forces were unable to respond to multiple military contingencies, just the opposite of what he and I had been telling Congress. Mike also omitted any reference to promoting democracy, walking away from Bush’s “freedom agenda.” He told me he wanted to issue the NMS in early or mid-October.

To me, his timing was terrible. On October 5, I handwrote him a long letter stating my reasons:

I believe it would be a serious mistake to issue this kind of document in the last weeks of a presidential election campaign. The NMS is already some seven months past due, and with such timing, I think you run a high risk of being accused of trying to influence the outcome of the election. Issuing a major pronouncement on the perils the nation faces and the military power required to deal with them in the closing weeks of the campaign could be seen as an effort by the military to shift the debate back to national security issues [versus the economy] and thus help Senator McCain.

I have seen all too often how paranoid campaigns get as election day approaches, and any surprise, any unexpected development, makes them crazy—and they think the worst case.… The irony, of course, is that you have made a huge effort to take and keep the military out of politics. Putting the NMS out now, especially with the distancing from several aspects of the NSS and NDS, likely will land you squarely in the middle of the campaign.

More broadly, I worry that issuance now—as opposed to a week or so
after
the election—would raise questions in people’s minds about military motives, e.g., why now in the closing days of the campaign? Further, some would wonder, why is the senior military leadership asserting its independence from the civilian leadership—both the secretary and the president—just before an election? And what does that say about the civilian-military relationship going forward? The impact on both candidates could be quite negative. While leaks are always possible (and unclassified slides highlighting where you want to distance yourself from the current administration are tempting leak morsels indeed), that is not the same as formal issuance and roll-out.

In sum, Mike, I am convinced that issuance of the NMS so soon before the election would look politically motivated and would be a serious mistake. Accordingly, I am very strongly opposed to issuance prior to the election. The risk of creating a perceptions problem for our military among political leaders in both parties and the public—as well as problems for you regardless of the outcome of the election—is too great.

On the substance of the NMS, I objected strongly to omission of any reference to promoting democracy. I thought Bush’s freedom agenda as publicly presented by the administration was too simplistic in that real, enduring freedom and democracy must be based on democratic institutions, the rule of law, and civil society—all of which are the work of decades. As with Jimmy Carter’s human rights campaign, the only countries we could meaningfully pressure to reform were our friends and allies; the worst offenders, including Iran, Syria, and China, ignored our rhetoric. But I reminded Mike that promoting democracy around the world had been a fundamental tenet of American foreign policy since the beginning of the republic. “What has differed,” I wrote, “has been how to accomplish or pursue that goal, and a new administration probably will approach it differently [from] the current one. But it will not abandon the goal.” I concluded that omitting the goal from the NMS entirely—and in a way obviously intended to be noticed—“seems to me to go too far.”

Mike made some modest changes in the military strategy document and agreed to hold it until after the election.

On October 14, President Bush made his last visit to the Pentagon to meet with the chiefs and me in the Tank. It was a reflective session, with each of the chiefs talking about how his service had changed during the Bush presidency. Mullen led off by saying the period had represented the biggest change in the U.S. military since World War II. We now had the most combat-hardened, experienced, and expeditionary force in our history, and if we could keep the young leaders, we would be ready for the future. He said that our forces were more balanced, more innovative, more agile, and better integrated and organized than ever before. I chimed in that the biggest danger to the military in the next administration would be pressure from Congress to reduce the number of soldiers in order to buy equipment. George Casey talked about the transformation of the Army from a force trained to fight Cold War–type set-piece battles to smaller “modular brigades” able to operate more flexibly; he also talked about changes in equipment. When Casey said the Army had gone from eight unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in 2003 to 1,700 in Iraq in 2008, the president exclaimed, “Really? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Admiral Gary Roughead told Bush that in 2001 the Navy could put only one-quarter of our carriers to sea at once, but now we could put half of them out. He summarized the Navy’s contributions in Iraq and
Afghanistan, as well as success in developing shipborne ballistic missile defenses. Cheney asked about the Chinese missile threat to our carriers, and Roughead told him, “We’re making progress.” General Conway said the Marine Corps welcomed the increase in force levels that I had recommended and that the president had approved, and he said the Corps would achieve the new ceiling in three years rather than the earlier estimate of five. He said the Marines had no equipment issues. He reported on success with the Osprey aircraft (a program Cheney had tried to kill because of cost overruns and development problems in the early 1990s when he was secretary), and the vice president, with a chuckle, wished the Marine Corps the best with it. Finally, General Schwartz reported that the Air Force would grow from 300 UAV pilots to 1,100, underscoring that the service finally had embraced the future role of drones. He closed by asking the president and vice president to visit a bomber or missile base, before leaving office, to give a speech on the importance of nuclear deterrence. Finally, Admiral Eric Olson talked about Special Operations Command (responsible for training and equipping unconventional forces such as the SEALs and Delta for all the military services), which at 55,000 he said was 30 percent larger than in 2001. He said special operators woke up that morning in sixty-one countries doing their jobs. The president and Olson both observed that these elite units had suffered a high casualty rate. (Olson’s predecessor had told me eighteen months earlier that Delta Force had suffered 50 percent casualties—wounded and killed.)