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.
Six 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.”
CHAPTER 22
Dogs Don’t Bark at Parked Cars
“If you are not being criticized, you may not be doing much.”
—Rumsfeld’s Rules
My 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.
Shortly 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:
Our forces in the next century must be agile, lethal, readily deployable, and require a minimum of logistical support. We must be able to project our power over long distances, in days or weeks rather than months. Our military must be able to identify targets by a variety of means—from a Marine patrol to a satellite. Then be able to destroy those targets almost instantly, with an array of weapons, from a submarine-launched cruise missile, to mobile long-range artillery. On land, our heavy forces must be lighter. Our light forces must be more lethal. All must be easier to deploy. And these forces must be organized in smaller, more agile formations, rather than cumbersome divisions.9
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.
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:
The maze of constraints on the Department forces it to operate in a manner that is so slow, so ponderous and so inefficient that whatever it ultimately does produce is late, wasteful of taxpayer dollars, and has the unintended result of leading to still more letters of complaint and calls of criticism from Congress, more critical hearings and more condemnation in GAO [General Accounting Office] reports, to be followed by a still greater number of amendments, restrictions and requirements to try to correct the seeming mismanagement…. Over time, the regulations and requirements that have been laid on are so onerous that…they are smothering incentive, innovation and risk taking.12
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 2001.13 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.”14 Well, I was going to at least give it a try.
As 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?”15
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