Known and Unknown (35 page)

A shift in Washington had taken place since I left the Pentagon in 1977. The relationship between the executive and legislative branches had evolved from proper congressional oversight to what was becoming legislative micromanagement. The Defense Department was receiving between four and eight hundred letters every month from members of Congress, in addition to countless phone calls. All of these inquiries initiated a flurry of bureaucratic activity to resolve them.

In a memo I drafted soon after my return to the Department, I wrote about the challenge posed by the increasingly intrusive role of the Congress. The Defense Department was “tangled in its anchor chain,” I wrote. The memo continued:

I was astonished, for example, to discover that the legislation authorizing the Department of Defense's budget had exploded from a bill totaling 16 pages in 1977 when I left the Pentagon to a whopping 534 pages in 2001.
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I knew that Washington lobbyists had invested many years, sizable political contributions, and a great many golf games and private dinners to build intimate relationships with key members of the House and Senate, as well as with select DoD officials. “It is hard to imagine how a collection of such talented, intelligent, honorable, dedicated, patriotic people, who care about the security of the U.S. and the men and women of the armed forces, could have combined to produce such a mess,” I dictated in a note to myself that May. “And yet, they conclude that nothing should be done to clean up the mess.”
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Well, I was going to at least give it a try.

 

A
s ambitious as the President's transformation agenda was, at its core was a humble recognition of the limits of our intelligence capabilities. I wanted everyone in the Department to be aware that, no matter how much information we collected and no matter how much we planned, surprise was inevitable. No large, complex plan ever gets executed as written. A belief that assumptions will play out as planned is a dangerous form of intellectual arrogance. It can lead to confusion and paralysis when those assumptions turn out to be wrong, as they often will. I believed the dangers that flow from error and surprise could be reduced if built into the plans was the expectation that not only will some anticipated problems be handled imperfectly, but that we will inevitably face problems that had not been anticipated. Indeed, I saw preparing for the inevitability of surprise as a key element in the development of defense strategy. We had to consider our vulnerabilities with imagination and ask ourselves the question Frederick the Great once posed to his generals: “What design would I be forming if I were the enemy?”
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A second critical task was to adapt operations as needed and shift resources quickly. That required us to have forces that were agile and could move rapidly. For these lighter forces to be as capable as more traditional heavy forces, far greater precision was required. And to take advantage of the improved precision of our weapons, our forces needed more accurate targeting intelligence.

We also had a responsibility to capitalize on advances in science and engineering. During many years of involvement with national security issues I had seen impressive technological breakthroughs used to vastly improve our military capabilities. When my father served in World War II, for example, it could take dozens of harrowing combat aircraft sorties to ensure that our forces could knock out a single military target. By 2001, however, technological advances had made it possible for a single aircraft to destroy multiple targets with precision on a single sortie.

Because new military systems would only be as good as the human beings who volunteered to operate them, we also needed to make better use of our most valuable asset: the men and women, military and civilian, who make up the Department. This led to one of my high-profile battles as secretary of defense.

For Defense Department civilian employees—some seven hundred thousand strong—the existing personnel system was a tangle of contradictory rules and regulations and, as a result, was counterproductive. The system did not move people into the positions for which they were best suited, nor did it reward good performance. As I knew well, the ability to hire and reward the most talented and move underperformers into other lines of work was essential to success in the private sector. Yet due to congressional restrictions and the influence of government labor unions, it was nearly impossible for senior DoD officials to recruit, promote, transfer, or replace civilian workers efficiently. As a result, instead of trying to fire underperforming workers and hiring new ones, managers were turning to uniformed military personnel and outside contractors, because they could be brought in rapidly to do a job and then be moved out when the job was done. Billions of tax dollars were supporting antiquated personnel systems that were undermining the important work of the Department of Defense.

We made it a high priority early on to address this by proposing a modern personnel system befitting one of the largest, most technologically advanced workforces in the world. I worked with a team at the Pentagon, led by a tenacious undersecretary for personnel and readiness in Dr. David Chu, and a determined secretary of the Navy in Gordon England, to develop and launch the National Security Personnel System. The new system permitted considerably more mobility among the Pentagon civilian workforce and instituted pay for performance. Bush offered his full support for the plan, yet it barely survived several union-led attempts to roll it back.
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The Department and many of its civilian employees benefited from the changes Chu and England proposed, but it was met with vigorous opposition, especially from the employees' unions.

Those within the Department who felt the new system would not work in their favor tried to stir up fear and uncertainty among the workforce. Nobody likes to have their job performance reviewed or questioned—indeed, the Pentagon had become arranged in such a way that an effective review system was all but impossible. My determination to untangle the system and make it easier for supervisors to oversee their employees left me vulnerable to the charge that I was trying to punish civilians in the Department. These accusations fed the developing misperception that I cared more about weapons systems than I did about people.

 

M
y focus on personnel was not limited to civilian manpower alone. I felt it important to review military personnel operations as well. Over the prior decade, the military services—Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines—had been the dominant voices in deciding who would move up to become senior generals and admirals. I was given not too subtle hints from senior uniformed officers that the secretary of defense was expected to steer clear of the senior promotion process. My task, as it was suggested to me, was to give pro forma approval to the candidates presented by the services and to duly forward their recommendations to the President. The President's approval was expected to be a similar formality.

The results, predictably, tended to reflect each individual service's interests, which were not always the same as Department-wide interests. The passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 imposed requirements for a more joint perspective as a key element for promotion. I sensed that service parochialism remained in the list of officers submitted from the services. I recognized that officers with stars on their shoulders had generally earned them for good reasons. But I felt that special attention was essential in selecting the three-and four-star generals and admirals. They would become the key leaders of the military services and the combatant commands for the twenty-first century.

One crucial aspect to transforming the Department, in my mind, was aggressively carrying out the intent of the Goldwater-Nichols legislation by reducing the redundancies, divisions, incompatibilities, and rivalries among the services—a process referred to as achieving “jointness.” Goldwater-Nichols had set the stage for developing joint capabilities that would both reduce costs and allow the services to leverage and capitalize on each other's strengths. I wanted to encourage as much joint planning and as many joint operations among the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps as possible. I was convinced that jointness could not be mandated from the top. It had to be inculcated in layers well below the secretary of defense. This required multiple leadership centers and individuals some layers down who shared that conviction and recognized the need for innovation and flexibility within their own services. They needed to be able to work in Washington with other departments and agencies that were out of their well-established comfort zones. And above all, they had to be candid and forthright, willing to disagree in private with me and with the President if their military advice differed from a course being considered.
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I felt that the only way to ensure that I was recommending those kinds of candidates to the President was to be personally involved in the selection process.

I called on my senior military assistant from my first tour as secretary, Staser Holcomb, a retired vice admiral living on the West Coast. Staser came to Washington and worked with the service chiefs to put together dossiers on their candidates for the key service and joint positions so we could conduct a more than perfunctory review. Knowing that I needed senior input to help with these decisions, I established a four-person committee that included the Department's top two civilian officials and top two military officers: the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the deputy secretary of defense, and me.

We discussed the tasks that would need to be performed for a specific post and the qualities and experiences that would best qualify an individual. Then we considered the recommendations of the services, secretaries, and chiefs, as well as other candidates. This was not a simple exercise. What may make for an outstanding fighter pilot, for example, is not necessarily the same set of skills needed for success as a combatant commander or service chief. After considering the various candidates, each of the four members of our committee made a point of becoming acquainted with the services' top candidates, well before we needed to make our recommendation to the President. I did not want the prospects who happened to work in the Pentagon to have an undue advantage just because we were more likely to know them. So as I and the others traveled around the country and the world, we made a point of meeting with the top prospects for the senior posts that would soon be vacant.

In my view it was certainly proper that I be involved in senior promotions. Indeed, it was the secretary of defense who had to make the recommendations to the President, and it is the President who makes the nominations to the U.S. Senate. I saw it as an important responsibility. I had had a good relationship with many of the military leaders I worked closely with as secretary under President Ford. I was the one who came to the defense of then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, George Brown, when many were calling for him to be fired. But because my new system represented a major change in how the Department currently operated, it caused considerable contention. Despite the pushback, however, it resulted in an exemplary bench of officers.

I remembered during my first year at Searle that I had ruffled some feathers as I raised questions about the old way of doing business. That was also the case at the Pentagon. It was clear that there were some in the Department who felt I was brusque or asked more questions than made them comfortable. In a large bureaucratic institution, Newton's laws of physics apply: A body at rest tends to remain at rest, and a body in motion tends to remain in motion. I was determined that the Department of Defense accelerate forward.

Then, at President Bush's specific direction, I launched an unprecedented, comprehensive review of America's global defense posture. This was one of the most fascinating, well conceived, and fruitful projects we implemented at the Pentagon. But it too rankled several groups—some in the military, some in foreign governments, and some in the State Department—stirring up a veritable trifecta of harrumphing, protest, and consternation. Admiral Jim Ellis told me what his Naval Academy physics professor had taught him: “If you want traction, you must first have friction.” We were generating more than our share of heat.

 

T
he way our forces were stationed overseas was so outdated, it was as if they had been frozen in time for the decades since Berlin and Tokyo fell in 1945, the armistice halted the Korean War in 1953, and the Cold War ended in 1991. Of the quarter million troops deployed abroad in 2001, more than one hundred thousand were in Europe, the vast majority stationed in Germany to fend off an invasion by a Soviet Union that no longer existed. An additional one hundred thousand were in East Asia and the western Pacific, vestiges of the occupation of Japan in World War II and the Korean War. Those deployments were obviously not taking into account the twenty-first-century reality that Germany was now one of the wealthier nations in Europe and that Japan and South Korea were among the most capable and self-sufficient in Asia.