by Tom Clancy
Each culture ticks differently. It isn’t that the basic values are different, it’s that there are cultural subtleties and cultural sensitivities that you really need to understand.
Early in 1997, General Peay was approaching the end of his tour as CINC. Though it was customary to alternate the job between Army and Marines, Zinni did not expect to be offered the job. No one ever before had risen from the DCINC position at CENTCOM to become commander. So Zinni was knocked off his feet when General Krulak told him he was nominating him as General Peay’s successor… It was a surprise; yet there was no job in the world Zinni would rather have had. It was the part of the world where his fighting experience, cultural experience, personal connections, and knowledge could be best used by his country.
But first a big obstacle had to be passed.
Zinni was informed that General Shalikashvilli, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, opposed his nomination, supporting instead his good friend Butch Neal (whose credentials for the job were superb), on the grounds that Zinni was far too “outspoken” and could not be “controlled.” Zinni had a hard time understanding the chairman’s objections (they had worked well together during Operation Provide Comfort), but he took a stoic approach to the situation: If the chairman didn’t support his nomination, it wouldn’t go through. Live with it.
That meant his career was effectively over. He told his wife to make quick retirement plans; he took the transition course for retiring military personnel; they bought property in Virginia, and talked to architects and contractors about building their retirement home.
General Krulak and the Secretary of the Navy, John Dalton, submitted both names, Zinni’s and Neal’s. Zinni was grateful, but convinced it wouldn’t matter. He went through what seemed to be a pro forma interview with the Secretary of Defense, Bill Cohen, and waited for the inevitable moment when he would call Butch Neal with his congratulations.
A few weeks later, Zinni got hit with another stunner: Secretary Cohen called to tell him he was the administration’s pick for CINC of CENTCOM; his nomination had been forwarded to the Senate for approval.
Tony Zinni:
After getting over the shock, I set about gathering advice about the emerging challenges of the command and its future direction in the dynamic environment we faced in our AOR. In time I expected these ideas would contribute to a new CENTCOM strategy for our region; I had thoughts on that score that I wanted to develop.
Of all the advice I received, three people — Joe Hoar, Binnie Peay, and Ed Fugit — gave me the wisest counsel.
General Hoar emphasized relationships. “In that part of the world, personal relationships are often more important than formal agreements,” he told me. “Remember our days as advisers in Vietnam. There we knew the value of building trust and friendship.”
The outgoing CINC’s political adviser (POLAD) reinforced General Hoar. Ed Fugit, an experienced diplomat and deeply familiar with our region, advised me to connect personally with both the leaders and the people. “But you can take that even farther,” he continued, “by showing interest in their culture and society. Do that and you build trust and confidence.”
I warmed to this approach. Too often we get caught up in crises, rushing around with requests, programs, and policy positions, without taking the time to listen to the concerns of the people who have to live with our decisions.
“And choose your POLAD well,” he concluded. “It’s the most important personnel decision you’ll make.” He was right; and I had the good fortune to select as my POLAD Larry Pope, a former ambassador, Arabic speaker, and brilliant diplomat… and my right hand for the next three years.
General Peay’s advice came on the final day of his command. “Be your own man,” he told me, “and don’t feel obliged to follow my strategy. The AOR is dynamic. You’ll have to reevaluate and update the command’s strategy and policies. You must take a fresh look, as all new CINCs should, and put your own personal touch on our tasks.”
I was grateful for his encouragement… and his blessing. Binnie Peay had become a friend and mentor. He had sought my input on every issue, trusted me to make critical decisions, and left me with a command in excellent condition to meet the many crises and threats we later had to face. His focus on building our war-fighting capabilities is still paying off.
On August 13, 1997, I became the sixth commander in chief of the United States Central Command.
STRATEGY, POLITICS, AND THE NEW AMERICAN EMPIRE
Tom Clancy: Tony Zinni will take the rest of the chapter.
My immediate priority as CINC was to reshape our strategy in the light of our ever-changing AOR and the emerging global strategy of the Clinton administration. We needed a structure, a horizon, and goals to meet the many challenges in this most risky part of the world. Without these, our day-to-day work would have no focus.
CENTCOM had twenty countries in its AOR (soon to be twenty-five) — a diverse region that spanned an area from East Africa through the Middle East to Southwest and Central Asia and into the Indian Ocean. Yet the command’s near-total focus was on the Persian Gulf and our long-standing problems with Iran and Iraq — our major threats in the region. We were operating under a national security strategy called “Dual Containment,” whose objective was to protect Gulf energy resources, contain both Iraq and Iran, and maintain local stability. We were the only unified command with two major “theater of war” requirements (as we say in the military): fight Iraq, or fight Iran.
These threats were not about to go away. Yet other parts of the AOR were heating up, requiring us to broaden our focus beyond the Gulf States.
Weapons of mass destruction were proliferating all through the region. The Iraqis had used them in the ’80s. The Iranians were acquiring them. Pakistan and India were in serious conflict over Kashmir and tossing ever louder threats at each other (Pakistan was in CENTCOM’s AOR; India was in PACOM’s); our relationship with Pakistan had soured for all sorts of political reasons; and both countries were nuclear powers.
Afghanistan was a catastrophe.
East Africa — Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia — were trouble spots.
Terrorist activity was picking up.
We’d had little recent contact with Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Somalia. Developing relationships with Yemen, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and the Seychelles required new engagement programs. Long-standing relationships with Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman had to be maintained and strengthened. We had to rebuild our shaky relations with Pakistan. And a little later, most of the Muslim states of Central Asia that had split off from the Soviet Union — Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan — were added to CENTCOM’s AOR. Each had its own special problems (including a civil war in Tajikistan).
CENTCOM found itself in a bubbling pot of crises from one end to the other. We had to develop a CENTCOM strategy to handle them… without necessarily using military force — or else only as a last resort. We needed to help build stability in this troubled region, in my view, or we would pay the price in the long run.
A regional conference was scheduled at CENTCOM headquarters for early 1998, and I wanted to firm up the strategy by then.
We were not approaching this process with a blank slate. Since ours was probably the most volatile region in the world, we were starting with thirteen preexisting war plans, an exceptionally large number for a unified command. These come out of taskings from the Secretary of Defense to prepare to counter either a specific threat or sometimes more generic situations, like what we call “consequence management.” Let’s say somebody explodes a nuclear device or uses other WMD. We had operational plans to police up these situations. Other plans dealt with Iraq or Iran. Others were aimed at generic missions such as “keeping the Gulf open for the free flow of oil.” And so on. Each plan had a real possibility of execution, given the nature of the region.
These plans gave
us a war-fighting orientation that we were well postured to deal with, thanks to the work of General Peay. We now needed to expand and broaden the strategy beyond that dimension.
In order to get a better fix on all the issues, I talked first to my commanders, then sought input from friendly leaders of the nations in our AOR and from U.S. diplomats with expertise in the area, to ensure that we were all working in sync.
For the bigger picture, we turned to President Clinton’s emerging National Security Strategy, with its stress on engagement and multilateral-ism. The military implementation of this strategy is the job of the Secretary of Defense, whose National Military Strategy looks at the National Security Strategy from a specifically military point of view. Every four years, the Secretary of Defense presents to Congress and the President what is called “the Quadrennial Defense Review,” which offers still more specifics about how the military side of defense is going to execute the National Security Strategy. It directs the Unified Commands to build new strategies for our assigned regions based on these concepts. The QDR directed the CINCs to “shape, respond, and prepare.” This reflected not only the war-fighting responsibilities (respond, prepare), but the new charge to “shape” our areas of responsibility.
The Secretary of Defense also directed the CINCs to prepare Theater Engagement Plans for our AORs. This is our strategy for engaging with the countries with whom we have relations on a day-to-day basis. Specifically, it is our plan for helping friendly countries build their militaries, for cultivating and building coalitions for security cooperation, and for welding together viable multilateral teams to deal collectively with the chronic problems we face and to better stabilize the region. In other words, it is the “friendly” side of our overall strategy.
The first problem CENTCOM had to fix was the near-total focus on the Persian Gulf. To that end, I decided to “subregionalize” our strategy, by breaking the AOR into four subregions — East Africa, the Persian Gulf, Central and Southwest Asia, and Egypt and Jordan — and developing a strategy and programs for each. This approach would ensure that our Gulf-centric tendency did not detract from the programs and relationships we developed in other areas. Though I knew this would not be a clean separation — many interests overlapped — I felt we could accommodate that.
Because the nations of each subregion had their own problems, we also had an articulated strategy for each country. In addition, I assigned each of our military components “focus” countries that fit their capabilities and their compatibility with the militaries of these nations. This spread the burden and balanced the span of control in managing our various engagement programs and crisis response requirements.
I then broke down our strategic goals into three areas: war fighting, engagement, and development.
The war-fighting goals were designed to have in place the right plans, forces, and basing options for any possible crisis. We also built a basis for responding to crises cooperatively with regional allies through training, exercises, military assistance, intelligence sharing, military schooling, and the like.
Three more practical war-fighting issues also had to be dealt with.
The first was agreement on a Joint Fires standing operating procedure (SOP) to coordinate fires on the battlefield. Up to this point, the services had been unable to agree on a joint doctrine for battlefield coordination, direction, and procedures for our air and ground-based fires systems. This may have seemed to be a mere intellectual issue back in the States, but for us it was life or death. In our AOR, war was always a near possibility. If war broke out, without coordination of fires we could expect serious friendly fire casualties or even battlefield failures. We couldn’t wait for the services to work through their bickering and rivalries. I therefore directed my component commanders to work together to produce the CENTCOM Joint Fires SOP (if they hit issues they couldn’t resolve, I told them I would make the call). These superb professionals delivered, providing an SOP that their services and service chiefs accepted (although only for the CENTCOM AOR).
My second objective was to finish work already started under General Peay to set up a command element, or small forward headquarters, in the AOR for each of my components, providing them command facilities they could rapidly fall into if the balloon went up. When I became CINC, the Navy already had its full headquarters in the region, and the Air Force had its air operations center there. But I also wanted the Army and Marine Corps to establish a forward element for the Joint Force Land Component Command (JFLCC), which would run the coordinated ground battle in Kuwait. As a result, we established Joint Task Force (JTF) Kuwait; and I had the CENTCOM Special Operations Command establish a forward command element in Qatar. This gave me a base to build on for all the functional component headquarters (air, ground, naval, and special operations) if we had to quickly respond to a crisis. Though this was controversial and caused grumblings among rear echelon doctrinal purists, who didn’t understand the purpose of these JTFs forward, we ignored their criticisms.
My third objective — never fully accomplished during my tenure — was to create one logistics command for the theater, to control and coordinate the massive logistics effort we would have to undertake in a major crisis. The system of separate and competing service and coalition systems, all putting stress on the limited lines of communications and infrastructure in the region, would really cause us problems if we didn’t have one umbrella organization to pull all the support needs together and ensure security for our rear area networks.
Though the components developed a basic design before I left command, and the U.S. Army was chosen to be the core of this joint/combined Theater Support Command for CENTCOM, the plan drew criticism and resistance again from doctrinal traditionalists, who didn’t understand the realities of the battlefield; and I was unable to accomplish this innovation before I left.
Our engagement goals were designed to build strong security relationships and allied capabilities, and to enhance the education of military leaders and familiarize them with principles and values that drove our military system. Though much of this area was related to war fighting, it went beyond that to work in cooperative areas that were not strictly military, such as environmental security issues and natural disaster responses. This built the day-to-day military relationships and capabilities needed to respond to crises and work as a combined team.
Our development goals were objectives for establishing new relationships, improving regional stability, and countering emerging threats. They were also related to the development of CENTCOM itself as it evolved to meet future challenges and a changing defense environment. These were the primary “shaping” efforts directed by the QDR.
In designing this ambitious strategy, we cooperated closely with the Joint Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and our State Department partners at embassies in the AOR and at the regional bureaus in State’s Washington headquarters. Our strategy also reflected ideas contained in the Clinton administration’s new global strategy… and from my own lifetime experience in the military, in conflict resolution, and in peacemaking.
The Clinton strategy represented a significant shift in the way the United States related to the rest of the world. Though the administration did not always handle this shift as effectively as they could have, their overall approach was, in my view, correct. Unfortunately, the Clinton strategy lacked the resources to be fully and effectively implemented.
In America, we look at the world from two powerfully opposed angles of vision. We are either “engaged” or “isolationist.”
The engaged — people like Wilson, Marshall, and Truman — believe we can prevent conflicts by actively shaping the environment that produces them, by directly involving our military, diplomatic, and economic capabilities in the world to make conditions better, to stabilize the various regions, to build partnerships, and to do it collectively — by using the UN and regional (or larger) multilateral coalitions and institutions. In the long run, they see engagement as les
s costly than any of the alternatives.
The isolationists fight this view. They see the world as so big, so messy, so out of control, that nobody can fix it. And even if we could help a little here or there, dozens of other hopeless cases lie festering. And besides, who says we have any responsibility for the rest of the world anyway? Who made us the policemen of the world? We should be bringing troops home, not committing them to useless foreign “engagements.” Who said we have to suffer all the risks and shoulder all the costs of making the world better? Foreign aid is just another way to throw good money down a bottomless hole. We could use it better at home tending — and protecting — our own garden. Yes, we have friends whom we will continue to support. We have interests that we will protect. But that’s all the involvement in the world that we want or need. During the Clinton years, Congress generally tended to back the isolationist side and was not supportive of providing resources for engagement.
“Engagement” was not an airy concept (though many portrayed it that way). It came with nitty-gritty specifics (though these varied, depending on whether the country in question was an adversary, a friend, or potentially a friend). We had very formal ways to “engage” both militarily and diplomatically (the two had to work in tandem). And we expected these to lead to clear and specific results.
For example, in a form of military engagement we call “Security Assistance,”[73] specific components — foreign military sales, foreign military financing, provision of excess defense articles, training, education in our school system, intelligence sharing, and so on — were expected to create a formal and developing military-to-military relationship.
Thus when we embarked on a new relationship of engagement (as we did in my time with the Central Asian states or Yemen), we’d usually begin programs informally, in a small way, and later we’d make them more formal… put them into one or more of the categories, set up a program to develop their actual resources, set up and fund joint training programs, and the like. In other words, engagement might start informally, but it was expected to grow into a more formal relationship. I felt that if we were more aggressive and planned and coordinated engagement programs better — military, diplomatic, economic, cultural, etc. — we could truly “shape” a more stable, secure, and productive environment in troubled regions of the world.
