Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (52 page)

There were a number of other matters affecting men and women in uniform and their families that remained high on my priority list. We still had to do better in getting needed equipment to the field faster; more intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) was always on the list. We needed to keep improving the special units on active duty posts and bases—warrior transition units—created to provide a home for wounded troops while they recovered before returning to active duty or leaving the service. Ever more focus needed to be placed on post-traumatic stress and the shocking rise in suicides. We needed to expand and sustain programs for child care, family counseling, and others helping families. And we needed a much greater effort to eliminate sexual assault, a criminal act that destroyed trust, morale, unit cohesion—and lives.

Occasionally, amid so many issues and problems affecting our troops that wore me down, there would be an incident or moment that made me laugh or raised my spirits. Two such occurred in the first few months of the Obama administration. One morning in May, on the front page of
The New York Times
, there was a photograph of a soldier firing his rifle at Taliban attackers from the ramparts of Firebase Restrepo in Afghanistan. An Associated Press photographer had captured Specialist Zachary Boyd defending his firebase dressed in helmet, body armor, flip-flops, and pink boxer shorts with little red hearts in which were printed “I love New York.” I burst out laughing. “Any soldier who goes into battle against the Taliban in pink boxers and flip-flops has a special kind of courage,” I said publicly. “What an incredible innovation in psychological warfare!” I loved that picture so much that an enlargement hung on the wall outside my office for the next two years.

For inspiration, I would turn again and again to Lieutenant Jason “Jay” Redman, a Navy SEAL who had been shot seven times and had undergone nearly two dozen surgeries. He had placed a hand-drawn sign on the door to his room at Bethesda Naval Hospital. It read:

ATTENTION. To all who enter here. If you are coming into this room with sorrow or to feel sorry for my wounds, go elsewhere. The wounds I received I got in a job I love, doing it for people I love, supporting the freedom of a country I deeply love. I am incredibly tough and will make a full recovery. What is full? That is the absolute utmost physically my body has the ability to recover. Then I will push that about 20% further
through sheer mental tenacity. This room you are about to enter is a room of fun, optimism, and intense rapid regrowth. If you are not prepared for that, go elsewhere. From: The Management.

I met with Jay and his family in early February 2009, when he returned to Washington to donate his sign to the hospital. I drew great strength from young Jay Redman and from so many like him I encountered. Their example kept me going.

I mentioned earlier our need to prepare for future potential large-scale conflicts against other modern military powers while preparing for and fighting the conflicts we were already in or most likely to face in the years ahead—combating insurgents, terrorists, smaller rogue states, or groups taking advantage of chaos in failed states and humanitarian disasters. This had been at the heart of my disagreement with the Joint Chiefs over the National Defense Strategy.

I resumed the dialogue on these issues with the senior military and civilian leadership of the department in early January 2009, before Obama was inaugurated. It was the last gathering of the Bush Defense team, and the night before we began, the president and Mrs. Bush invited the chiefs and combatant commanders and their wives, along with several wounded warriors, to the White House for a wonderful, if poignant, farewell dinner. The next morning we got down to business. The assigned reading was my speech at the National Defense University—which had subsequently been adapted and published in the journal
Foreign Affairs
—where I had laid out my views. I led off our meeting by saying that I was “determined … to ‘operationalize’ the strategic themes I have been talking about for the past two years.” I warned that the strategic environment facing us had altered dramatically with a change in administrations, domestic and global financial crises, waning public support for increased defense spending, a strategic shift from Iraq to Afghanistan, seven years of constant combat operations and the resulting stress on the force, and resolve by Congress and the new administration to “fix” defense acquisition.

Circumstances had presented us with an immensely difficult bureaucratic challenge. In 2009, we had to carry out four complex, difficult periodic assessments required by Congress (the Quadrennial Defense
Review, the Nuclear Posture Review, the Space Review, and the Ballistic Missile Review), all intended to shape Defense planning and budgets. We also had to execute the FY2009 budget, get approval of the FY2009 war supplemental, build the FY2010 budget and supplemental within a few weeks, and by fall develop the FY2011 budget. For a bureaucracy as ponderous as ours and the long lead times to complete each of these endeavors, this was a staggering agenda. I told the senior military and civilian leadership of the department we did not have the time to do all these things sequentially, and so even as the congressionally mandated reviews were being drafted, we needed to use them to help shape the budgets. I made clear this presented us with an opportunity to use these parallel processes to accelerate the strategic and programmatic changes that needed to be made. I asked for their opinions and ideas on how to proceed. I posed some tough questions:

• Did I get it wrong at NDU? “You should know me well enough by now to know that I welcome real debate on these fundamental issues.”

• What were the implications of our inability to anticipate where we would use military force next?

• How would we achieve the rebalancing I called for to deal with hybrid conflicts covering a spectrum of capabilities from the primitive to high tech—and, at the same time, be prepared to respond to future threats from “near peers” (e.g., China)? How much did these capabilities overlap?

• How should we assess real risk, and how would that drive investment?

• How should we look across the services in assessing risk? For example, could we mitigate risk caused by reducing one or another program in one service by doing more in a complementary capability in another service?

My first opportunity to translate some of these ideas into action actually had occurred in the fall of 2008 while preparing the FY2010 budget. Members of Congress from both parties had complained repeatedly about the wars being funded through “supplemental” appropriations, outside the regular “base” budget of the Defense Department. It took me a while to realize this was political bullshit. Most members of Congress loved supplementals because they could irresponsibly hang all manner of parochial, often stupid, and militarily unnecessary expenditures onto
those bills—earmarks for their districts and states—with no regard for fiscal discipline. Even worse, members would often eliminate items we had requested in the supplementals to fight the wars and substitute their pet projects. The Pentagon was not innocent in this regard either, as a good deal of defense spending that would normally be in the base budget—from Army reorganization to an additional F-35 fighter—got shoveled into the war funding request, which would make weaning the military off supplemental funding all the more painful in the future.

In any event, given bipartisan criticism of the supplementals, I decided we should begin to move certain war-related costs that we knew should continue beyond the wars themselves—including, for example, the expansion of the Special Forces and programs to help military families—into the regular defense budget. Anticipating that we would be deploying the equivalent of several brigades to various hot spots around the world for years to come, for everything from small-scale conflicts to training and assistance missions, as an experiment we added $25 billion to the regular budget to pay for such operations, thereby reducing the need for future supplemental appropriations. In their last meeting with President Bush, the Joint Chiefs pressed their budget concerns, and the president encouraged them to make his last defense budget very forward-leaning in terms of modernization, reequipping our forces after the two wars, and funding “unplanned contingencies.” His encouragement only abetted the traditional practice of a departing administration leaving behind a budget that would immediately be ripped apart by the new team. Only this time, of course, I was “the new team.”

By the time we were finished putting together an FY2010 budget that incorporated what the Joint Chiefs had discussed with Bush and a good deal of spending previously covered by supplementals, it had exploded to $581 billion, $57 billion more than the earlier projected budget for FY2010. I knew immediately that that dog wouldn’t hunt. What I had not taken into account was that an effort that I had seen as experimental and illustrative for the White House and Congress had been immediately embraced as firm financial guidance by the Joint Chiefs and others. Every element of the Pentagon had built its budget down to the last dime on the basis of a $581 billion request. And when we had to develop a real-world budget tens of billions of dollars lower, there was all manner of screaming and yowling out of the Pentagon about a huge “cut.” Needless to say, as all this was playing out, more than a few Obama folks—with
some justification—thought the Bush administration had sandbagged them, seeking to make Obama look weak on defense, as he inevitably would have to pare back the budget. Trying to begin moving away from supplementals had blown up in my face. I also realized I should have stopped the additions encouraged by Bush. These were both my errors. After all my years around Congress and my own building, I had, to my chagrin and embarrassment, been naïve about both.

This fiasco behind me, I set about to rebuild the 2010 budget. In a meeting with the president on February 2, I acknowledged the need to curtail the growth in defense spending, but in a refrain I returned to again and again, I said the cuts should be “strategy-driven, not accountant-driven,” that we should do what was best for the country and not worry about the politics. The president agreed. The numbers we settled on in early February ($533.8 billion for the 2010 base budget and $130 billion for the war supplemental) were lower than I wanted but higher than what the Office of Management and Budget wanted.

I had a long private conversation with the president on February 11, during which I told him I “hoped and expected” to send him a new budget that cut many programs and reshaped spending to provide greater balance between current and future needs. This would involve making very difficult decisions, I said, and would be very controversial on the Hill. If we waited to speak out publicly until after the administration formally submitted its full budget to Congress in April, every major decision would have leaked, giving industry, lobbyists, and members time to galvanize support for sustaining every major individual program.

I recommended a highly unusual, if not unprecedented, political strategy. I told him, “I propose to review the major elements of the package with you and Peter [Orszag, director of OMB]
before
I even send it to OMB. Then I will go public and brief the recommended actions in their entirety—a holistic, coherent reform package. It will be harder to cherry-pick parochial interests if the package is seen as a comprehensive whole that serves the nation. We can capture the political high ground.” Another advantage, I told him, was that he and OMB could gauge the reaction and, if necessary, turn down one or more of my recommendations. The president was very supportive but wanted Orszag on board. I used Obama’s support to ensure that that was the case.

Rebuilding the 2010 budget gave me the opportunity not only to make “rebalancing” meaningful but also to weed out over-budget, overdue, or
unjustifiable programs and to turn my attention to the herculean task of reforming the defense acquisition process. The history of cutting defense programs, especially big ones, is not pretty. When Dick Cheney was secretary in the early 1990s, two programs he tried to cut were the A-12 Navy and Marine Corps ground attack aircraft (nicknamed “the Flying Dorito” for its triangular shape) and the Marine Corps’ tilt-rotor Osprey, a combination helicopter and airplane. The A-12 matter was still in litigation twenty years later, and Congress overruled Cheney to keep the Osprey flying. When other secretaries had tried to kill programs, the services would work behind the scenes with sympathetic members of Congress to keep the programs going and preserve the jobs they provided. When the services wanted to kill a program, Congress would usually just override them and fund the procurement over their objections. For most members of Congress, the defense budget is a huge cash cow providing jobs in their districts and states. Thus, even in those rare instances when the Pentagon tried to show some acquisition discipline, Congress made it tough, if not impossible, to succeed. To beat the system, I needed the radically different political strategy that I had described to the president.

I threw myself into the budget process. During February and March 2009, I chaired some forty meetings as we considered which programs should have more money and which were candidates to be eliminated or stop production. It was an intense period, partly because of the amount of work that had to be done, and partly because everyone knew that hundreds of billions of dollars in programs were at stake. Most of my meetings were with what we called the “small group”—deputy secretary Bill Lynn (after he was confirmed on February 11); the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mike Mullen and Hoss Cartwright; the director of program evaluation, Brad Berkson, and his deputy, Lieutenant General Emo Gardner; the acting comptroller, Mike McCord and (once confirmed) the comptroller, Bob Hale; the undersecretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics, John Young (a Bush holdover); the undersecretary for policy, Michèle Flournoy; and Robert Rangel and Ryan McCarthy of my staff. Gardner was the real workhorse on much of the effort. Every few days we would hold expanded meetings (the “large group”) that included the service secretaries and chiefs and other senior civilians. And twice we brought in the entire senior Defense leadership, including the combatant commanders. One key point I would keep repeating, especially for the military, was that this was not driven by a
reduction in the overall budget—money saved in some areas would be reinvested in programs of higher value.