Known and Unknown (34 page)

A
fter my meeting with Bush, Joyce and I spent the Christmas holidays with our family at our home just north of Taos, New Mexico. Dick Cheney called me the afternoon of December 26 to talk about the names I had passed along for the CIA and the Pentagon. I had suggested that they consider Jim Woolsey, who had been Clinton's CIA director, and Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic senator from Nebraska for secretary of defense.
¹
I liked the idea of someone who could give the administration bipartisan appeal. I also mentioned a CEO like General Electric's Jack Welch, who had been a successful manager and had a distance from politics. But I had another, more unorthodox notion that I wanted to suggest. “Dick, here's an interesting idea,” I began. “What if—”

“Hold on, Don, I've got another call,” Cheney interrupted. “Let me get back to you.”

Ten minutes later Cheney rang me up again. “We don't need any more advice, Don,” Cheney said. “That was the President-elect calling. He told me to tell you he wants you to be secretary of defense.”
²

“Actually before we were interrupted, I was going to suggest you as SecDef,” I told Cheney.

It was an idea similar to one I had suggested to President Ford a quarter of a century before, that Nelson Rockefeller, in addition to being the vice president, might also have substantive responsibilities running a cabinet department. There was nothing in the Constitution that prevented such an arrangement. Cheney had run the Defense Department before. I felt that if anyone could handle both positions, it was Dick.

Cheney didn't sound surprised by the suggestion. “The President-elect had the same idea,” he acknowledged. But Bush ultimately concluded that running a cabinet agency could conflict with bringing in Cheney as a key adviser on a wider range of policy matters and raised a question about having a sitting vice president regularly testify to Congress.

I told Dick I wanted to discuss Bush's offer with Joyce and think about it more before giving my answer. Later that day, I decided to accept the nomination. The young man who had joined me at the Office of Economic Opportunity as my special assistant back in 1969 would become one of the most influential vice presidents in American history. And to my amazement, I would go from having been the youngest secretary of defense in our country's history to the oldest.

 

W
hen I left the Pentagon in 1977, the Carter administration reversed many of our decisions seemingly just because they were made by the prior administration. I was not going to do the same. I wanted to understand the rationale behind the Clinton administration's decisions before making changes.

Eleven days before the inauguration, I met with President Clinton's outgoing defense secretary, Bill Cohen. I had known him when he was a Republican senator from Maine and was eager to hear his thoughts. Measured and knowledgeable, he touched on more than fifty issues he expected I would have to deal with as his successor. A number of them proved prescient. He mentioned the threat posed by Iraq's attacks on U.S. and British aircraft in the northern and southern no-fly zones. Noting the recent terrorist bombing of the USS
Cole
in Yemen, he raised the dangers posed by al-Qaida and its leader, Osama bin Laden. He also suggested that it might make sense to appoint a combatant commander to be in charge of protecting the American homeland from attack.
³
Cohen's briefing was enormously helpful as I prepared to testify as a nominee for secretary of defense for the second time.

When I was nominated by President Ford in 1975, the major issue of the day had been détente with the Soviet Union. Now, with the Cold War behind us, there had been upbeat talk during the 1990s of a “peace dividend” that would allow the U.S. government to spend more on domestic programs by reducing investment in national security. Some analysts and scholars had argued that we were at the “end of history”—that the United States and its democratic principles were beyond ideological challenge in the world.
⁴

If the world was moving steadily and irreversibly toward democracy and capitalism as some claimed, perhaps there was less need for a robust U.S. national security strategy. Focusing only on the short term and the immediate rather than taking time to consider longer-term potential challenges is an understandable temptation. There is often pressure for the seemingly urgent to crowd out the important. The post–Cold War holiday from strategic thought that characterized much of the prior decade turned out to be not a luxury but a dangerous misjudgment. Overconfidence had spawned complacency. U.S. intelligence capabilities had atrophied, and U.S. operations from Somalia to Haiti had communicated uncertain American resolve. The problems of Islamist extremism, the nuclear weapons programs of North Korea and Iran, the threats from ballistic missile programs, and the crumbling of the United Nations' containment measures for Iraq had been exacerbated.

I doubted we had reached a golden era when nations would pound their swords into plowshares. If there was anything new at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it was the status of the United States as the sole great power in the world, voluntarily shouldering enormous responsibilities for global humanitarian assistance, peace, and prosperity. Dean Rusk, the secretary of state during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, once observed that “only one-third of the world is asleep at any given time and the other two-thirds is up to something.”
⁵
Though to many our world seemed relatively peaceful, we needed to understand that the world of the twenty-first century, with weapons of unprecedented lethality and availability, is dangerous and untidy.
⁶

Not surprisingly, many of the questions at my Senate confirmation hearing tended toward short-term political considerations rather than long-term strategic considerations. The most contentious issue was Bush's call to withdraw the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Among other provisions, the treaty, signed by the Americans and the Soviets during the Nixon era, barred even the testing of antimissile technologies, let alone any deployment. Bush wanted out of the treaty so we could proceed with the development of a missile defense program.

In 1983, I was present in the White House when President Reagan announced his ballistic missile defense initiative. Though critics on the left derided his plan as an attempt to achieve
Star Wars
–like armaments, Reagan was a strong proponent. Bush now hoped to carry Reagan's legacy forward by building on two decades of planning, research, and design, and get to the point of actually deploying an operational system.

With the Soviet empire gone, with the Russian government seeking improved relations with the West, and with a number of impressive technological advances, I was surprised to see what had changed in congressional discussions of the issue—practically nothing. Opponents of Bush's plan used arguments almost identical to those wielded against Reagan. Sometimes they were the same arguments from the same people.

Critics were still contending that a missile defense program was not technologically feasible. Increasingly, however, testing indicated that such a system could work. Of course the tests also included some failures. But as I learned from my time in the pharmaceutical business, the development of important products often requires years of trial and error, and a failure can be a valuable learning experience. A zero-failure mentality means no one will try anything, and nothing new will be developed.

Critics also contended the system would cost too much. I pointed out that the defense budget was less than 3 percent of our country's gross domestic product, and that missile defense was less than 3 percent of the defense budget. Was the prospect of protecting Los Angeles or Atlanta from a dictator with a rogue missile not worth that cost? It seemed that a number of the biggest spenders in Congress suddenly became penny-pinchers to block defense programs they opposed.

Some senators argued that missile defense would be destabilizing, and lead to a new arms race or alienate the Russians.
⁷
In answering their concerns on this score, I recalled lessons that had been reinforced when I chaired the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission. “The problem with ballistic missiles, with weapons of mass destruction…,” I suggested, “is they work without being fired.”
⁸
To the extent that hostile regimes or terrorists could threaten America, our interests, our friends, and our allies with ballistic missiles or chemical or biological weapons, they could alter our behavior and perhaps cause us to acquiesce to actions that we would otherwise resist. Further, our lack of a missile defense system encouraged enemies to invest in offensive missiles to which we remained vulnerable. With an increasing number of nations working to advance their ballistic missile technology, vulnerability was not a strategy I favored for America in the twenty-first century.

Those arguments made little headway with senators such as Carl Levin, then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Over the years I would differ many times with Levin, who often wore his partisan-ship, like his half-glasses, right on the tip of his nose. Levin cloaked his passion with his studied prosecutorial demeanor but seemed curiously immune to reason on missile defense.

After forging no new ground on missile defense, the senators at the hearing turned to other matters. Senator Pat Roberts posed what I thought was the most interesting and important question at my confirmation hearing. “What's the one big thing that keeps you up at night?” the Kansan asked. There were a number of things I might have mentioned—North Korea, Iran, Iraq, nuclear proliferation, cyberwarfare, or terrorism. But if anything were to keep me up at night, I knew it was my concern about the quality of our intelligence. As I had said to Bush during our meeting in Austin, our country's most important national security challenge was “improving our intelligence capabilities so that we know more about what people think and how they behave and how their behavior can be altered.”
⁹
We needed an ability to uncover what our enemies were thinking and what motivated them. I believed that with more knowledge of that sort we would be better able to alter an enemy's behavior before they launched an attack, rather than waiting and having to take action after an attack.
¹⁰

The hearing ended on a pleasant note when my confirmation received the committee's unanimous support.
^*
Among others, Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat from my home state of Illinois, said positive words about my record in government and on the wrestling mat. I knew enough about Washington to suspect that, given the decisions ahead, such approbation was unlikely to last.

 

S
ix days after the President was inaugurated, Joyce and our family were welcomed to the White House for my public swearing-in ceremony. I had been privately sworn in right after the inauguration parade so I could begin my duties at the Department of Defense immediately, but the public event was special for Joyce and me because of those who had gathered with our family. Judge Larry Silberman, a friend and colleague from the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations, performed the ceremony. I was again in the Oval Office with Dick Cheney for the first time in twenty-four years.

“Don asked me to join him here in the White House staff, some thirty-two years ago, and [it] was a turning point for me, from the standpoint of my career,” the new Vice President recalled.
¹¹
“From that day on, he kept me busy enough so that I forgot about my graduate studies, gave up any idea of ever returning to academia, and set me on a path that I've never regretted.”

Dick noted that we'd both gone on to hold jobs as White House chief of staff and secretary of defense. “Some regard him as the best secretary of defense we ever had,” Cheney said. Then with a smile he added, “I would say he was one of the best.”

To commemorate the moment, Vice President Cheney later sent me two pictures. One was of the two of us as young men when we worked together at the Office of Economic Opportunity in the Nixon administration. The second was a more recent picture of us from the swearing-in ceremony. At the bottom, Cheney had written, “To Don, here we go again.”

M
y first day at the Pentagon included the ceremony that traditionally accompanies the arrival of a secretary of defense: a military parade and a nineteen-gun salute. It also included something I hadn't expected, a sign of the times. As I was getting settled in my office—the same one I'd occupied twenty-five years earlier—a young man walked in. “Mr. Secretary,” he said authoritatively, “I'm here to give you your drug test.”

He presented me with a plastic cup. As I went to the bathroom to follow through with the request, he added one more instruction. “Sir, please leave the door open.” I laughed, but complied. As the young man departed, he said, “I can't wait to tell my girlfriend that I just did the drug test on a secretary of defense.”

Back in 1975, one of my first acts in the Pentagon had been to turn the lights on—literally. I wanted to brighten up the halls with displays that conveyed the historical importance of the Department and the special privilege it was to be working in the Pentagon. In the quarter-century since I had departed, some had attached more to the meaning of privilege than I ever intended. Lunches for senior officials had become high-end affairs. The Pentagon even had a pastry chef, who displayed his colorful creations in glass cases in the hall just down from my office.

Another sign of how things had changed in the building were the Marine sentries posted at the door outside my office and the security detail that was assigned to follow me everywhere I went inside the Pentagon. These things made me uncomfortable. If the Pentagon was secure enough for the rest of the twenty-five thousand employees in the building to walk around without personal armed guards or sentries at their doors, I concluded it was secure enough for me. And if it wasn't secure enough, then we had even bigger problems than I thought.

Within days, I had removed as many of the vestiges of pageantry as I could with a few snowflakes. These short memos became my method of communicating directly with the individuals I worked with closely.
¹
Some would say they developed into an unrelenting snowstorm. They were raw thoughts that I dictated into my still trusty Dictaphone. Some were trivial housekeeping, some were humorous, and, I admit, some missed the mark. Nonetheless, they reminded Department officials of what I believed needed to be done. I hoped they would encourage people to reach out to me in return. After I had sent a few snowflakes, the sentries at my door were soon gone. But I was never certain about the pastry chef.

 

S
hortly after I arrived, I met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss my approach and what I hoped we could expect from each other. “I look forward to meeting with you frequently,” I said. I added that I hoped our meetings would not simply be gripe sessions on anyone's part. It was often the case that military leaders got caught up in rivalries among the services. I wanted an open atmosphere in which we put the interests of the Department and the country first.

“I am not one to believe that everything that was done previously was wrong,” I told the chiefs. “Indeed, I am assuming it is right.” I had respect for them and their contributions, and I intended to build on the work they had done. “As I said in my confirmation hearing, there is a lot I don't know. I need to get briefed up, and I intend to do so.”
²
I told the senior civilian appointees in the Department that they should seek out the chiefs' advice early and often and “find ways to ask them for their collective judgment.”
³
Early on I established a new entity called the Senior Level Review Group (SLRG) that brought together the military chiefs and civilian leadership in the decision-making process.
⁴
We met regularly to discuss important policy issues facing the Department.

My first task was to consider candidates for the post of deputy secretary of defense. I knew the job could be more difficult with a second-in-command who was not on the same page. President Bush had requested through Cheney that I consider two candidates for deputy: Richard Armitage and Paul Wolfowitz. They were part of the group called “the Vulcans” that had advised Bush on defense policy issues during his campaign. I don't recall ever having met Armitage before, but from the start of our meeting he was brusque. It quickly became clear that since he wasn't going to be secretary of defense, as he had hoped, he preferred to be number two at the State Department, working alongside his friend, Colin Powell. I was happy to accommodate him.

Though the President was considering Wolfowitz for the ambassadorship to the United Nations, he seemed far more interested in serving as deputy secretary of defense. I knew Wolfowitz would be an unusual pick. He did not have the industry background or deep management experience traditional for successful deputy secretaries of defense.
^*
I worried that a man with such an inquisitive, fine mind and strong policy interests might not take well to many of the crucial but often mundane managerial duties—making the hundreds of nonpolicy related decisions—that would come with the deputy post. Still I had had some success over the years in making unorthodox hiring choices. From my prior experiences with Wolfowitz, I knew that he would provide thoughtful insights. I expected to be able to take more time in the day-to-day management of the Department, though if we became engaged in a major conflict, that would have to change.

Wolfowitz was not confirmed by the Senate until March, two months after the presidential inauguration, a critical period in which we suffered from not having even a single Bush appointee confirmed and on the job with me in the Department.
^†
The slow pace of Wolfowitz's confirmation turned out to be a model of swiftness compared to the other four dozen presidential appointees for the Pentagon. It took months and months—almost a full year—to have many of the President's nominees confirmed by the Senate. “The process is outrageous,” I lamented to the Joint Chiefs.
⁵
We suffered from the absences of secretaries of the Army, Navy, Air Force, the undersecretary of defense for policy, and the assistant and deputy assistant secretaries. These were people needed to carry out the work of the Department. The problem was not only the delay in the Senate. It also took months for the President's nominees to receive the security clearances they needed to undertake their work. The White House personnel office was painfully slow in vetting candidates. The cumulative effect was that on average we operated with 25.5 percent of the key senior civilian positions vacant over the entire six years of my tenure, causing serious harm to the Department's activities.
^*

Despite the dysfunctional clearance and confirmation process, I had to get going quickly on an assessment of the Department and, more broadly, America's circumstance in the world. I sought out someone whose advice I had valued during my first Pentagon tour: Andy Marshall was still working in the department, though his work was less in vogue during the prior Bush and Clinton administrations, in part because of his cautions on China and Russia. After a few weeks on the job, I asked him to join me for lunch—not privately in my office, but in the lunchroom where senior officials often grabbed a sandwich or a bowl of soup. In the status-conscious Pentagon, I wanted to send a message that I valued Marshall's thinking. Over lunch, Marshall warned that the Pentagon bureaucracy was as resistant to change as ever.

It was clear that there would be challenges, especially with some of the leaders in the Army. Some of its senior officers were aware that I had overruled the Army on the M-1 tank decision in the mid-1970s. Over time, the Army and other quarters of the Washington defense establishment had raised pointed concerns about what was characterized as
my
defense transformation agenda. Early on, a story line developed, possibly because of my work on the Space Commission and Ballistic Missile Threat Commission, that I entered the Pentagon with a pet theory about relying more on technology and less on traditional ground forces. This line became the framework for myriad news reports and books about various aspects of my tenure this time as secretary of defense. That myopic focus on technology as a way for some to try to describe my approach to the job was understandable. It was also, to paraphrase H. L. Mencken, simple, neat, and wrong.

In fact, the transformation agenda that I supposedly brought with me to the Pentagon in January 2001 was not of my making. In my first meeting with the chiefs, I made a point of asking for their thoughts on what they believed “transforming” could mean for the Department.
⁷
I had not written on the issue of defense transformation, nor did I consider myself in the circle of national security experts who had promoted the idea throughout the 1990s. I was, however, generally open to proposals for reforming and adjusting old institutions and making them more responsive to contemporary circumstances. This, after all, was what I had done during my earlier service in government, and in business.

The President had given me explicit guidance to make the Defense Department “lethal, light and mobile.”
⁸
On the campaign trail, Bush had promised to direct his secretary of defense to begin “an immediate, comprehensive review of our military—the structure of its forces, the state of its strategy, the priorities of its procurement.” He was reasonably specific about what he wanted the end result to be:

I knew that accomplishing even one of Bush's stated goals could preoccupy the Department and its leadership for years. Working toward all of them simultaneously in the Pentagon—an institution that moved with all the speed and dexterity of a half-million-ton oil tanker—would be formidable. People naturally prefer to cling to established ways of doing things. Change is hard. Large organizations especially favor practices they have already mastered, even if those practices, fashioned decades before, are outdated. But the problems we faced, by almost all accounts, were serious. There was an acquisition system with excessive costs and redundancies. Too little attention had been paid to military housing and other infrastructure, as declining defense budgets shifted priorities to preserving costly and, in some cases, out-of-date weapons programs. Yet the resistance to change remained. In my first months in office, more often
than not I heard from senior officials: “Don't change anything. Everything is fine.”
¹⁰

A searing reality was that there were people in the world who were working hard to think of novel ways to harm us. The key to transforming the Department, as I saw it, was through encouraging its civilian and military leaders to be more forward-looking, and to think freely, not conventionally. In my view, transformation hinged more on leadership and organization than it did on technology. Precision-guided weapons and microchips were important, but so was a culture that promoted human innovation and creativity. In the information age it was critical that we be able to transmit information rapidly to the people who needed it. More often than not what prevents that is not a computer or a piece of equipment, but outdated organization charts and layers of bureaucracy.

We couldn't afford to be constrained by the way the Department was organized, trained, and equipped today because our ever adapting adversaries were seeking to exploit our weaknesses tomorrow. I often noted that the United States then faced no peers with respect to conventional forces—armies, navies, and air forces—and, as a result, future threats would likely lie elsewhere. Even so, I accepted that we couldn't change overnight. I wanted to stress the gradual and continuing nature of the process. Transformation began before I arrived at the Pentagon, and I knew it would need to continue after I left. It was a continuum, not a discrete event.
¹¹
“Transforming,” as I saw it, was a better term than “transformation.” The latter sounded as if an organization might go from being “untransformed” to “transformed” with a distinct end point, which was not the case.

I also understood that the President's objectives would face stiff resistance from the iron triangle of Congress, defense contractors, and the permanent DoD bureaucracy. What I had encountered in the 1970s was as strong as ever. As before, I anticipated resistance to any significant changes from some military officers—current as well as retired—who saw themselves as protectors of their service's traditions. Senior members of Congress would also fight changes for a variety of reasons: some to protect pork for their constituents; some to preserve the jurisdiction of their committees and subcommittees; some to lend a hand to friends within the Department; and some because they had honest disagreements with the President's agenda and about the best way forward.