Outside observers in the press and partisans have always taken note of and hyped differences within every administration. NSC meetings, some observers wanted to believe, were epic clashes of larger than life characters divided neatly into heroes and villains. Often news stories were reduced to fit the recognizable story line of an opera, a plot with winners and losers, no matter the facts. Our NSC discussions were nothing like what was described by the book chroniclers and so-called experts, none of whom had ever attended an NSC meeting.
In the Bush administration there were some differences over complex, difficult issues, to be sure. This is always how it has been, how it will be, and how it should be. But they were largely substantive differences. Instead of trying to understand the nuances behind the differences, it is considerably easier for nonparticipant observers, pundits, and lower-level staff to try to personalize disagreements that are otherwise abstract and to pigeonhole the cast of characters into a familiar story line. That approach doesn’t require much research, time, or thought—just a vivid imagination. But once the conventional wisdom hardens and the characters are defined in the popular press as good or bad, winners or losers, it is nearly impossible to change it.
The personalities were no more pronounced and the debates were no more epic or intractable in the Bush administration than I had seen in previous administrations. Indeed, if anything, the tensions were noticeably less.
Fashioning national security policies, corralling interagency interests, and ensuring that the departments and agencies responsible for implementing President Bush’s national security policies had clearly defined missions was not an easy task. Surely any inability to achieve this could be tolerable in times of peace. But, as I periodically wondered, could we be quite so tolerant if the United States again faced serious threats to its security? We would soon find out.
CHAPTER 25
The Agony of Surprise
When I spoke to President Bush in the Oval Office in May 2001, investment in America’s national defense, as a percentage of our gross domestic product, was at its lowest level since just before Pearl Harbor. A mismatch was emerging between the President’s campaign message about military needs and what was now being approved by his White House. I had recommended a $35 billion increase over the Clinton defense budget of the year before. I would have asked for significantly more if President Bush had not made clear to me that his other initiatives—such as increased federal aid to education and tax relief—were his major priorities.
I knew that the Defense Department’s resources had been stretched, but it was not until I arrived at the Pentagon and had an opportunity to survey the landscape that I realized just how bad things actually were. Shipbuilding, for one, was underfunded. In the Reagan years the United States had been planning a 600-ship Navy. After the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations we were at 315 ships and dropping. Military aircraft were aging; some planes were going to have to stop flying, and needed replacements were not coming along. Pay was uncompetitive.1 The spiraling cost of health care in the military further pressured the budget. And this was before considering the costs of meeting the President’s transformation agenda. I warned Bush about the approaching budgetary crunch and the impact it would have on the military and their families. “It will not be pleasant,” I cautioned.
I urged the President to advise the White House Office of Management and Budget that national security and defense were priorities for his administration. I was concerned that OMB would not approve the increases the Department needed. There were even suggestions at OMB that we cut military force levels.2
While the impression was that things were generally calm around the globe, I reminded the President of the intelligence community’s reports: Iran was pursuing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons; North Korea was aggressively pursuing longer-range ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons; the Chinese were increasing their military capabilities across the board. National defense could not be something that came after domestic issues.3
The President heard me out, but I soon learned that I had not been persuasive enough. Bush approved an $18 billion increase for the department, about half of what I had recommended. I was disappointed, but others were furious. Some conservatives called Bush’s defense spending plan “inadequate and reckless” and urged that I resign in protest.4
By late summer I was not gaining the traction necessary to carry out the President’s plans. Not only were we not getting the funding we needed, but also a large number of his civilian nominees remained unconfirmed by the U.S. Senate. Then, that August, White House chief of staff Andy Card delivered still more bad news: With a flagging economy, revised projections from the Congressional Budget Office were showing that the deficit would be even higher than had been predicted. Card said it was likely that DoD would get an even lower level of funding than the President had previously approved.
As I encountered the expected opposition to my initiatives within the Pentagon’s five walls, there was a palpable sense that inertia was playing a winning hand. Washington turned to its favorite summer pastime: speculating about a cabinet shake-up. “There’s been talk on the Hill—generated no doubt by Rumsfeld’s detractors, a fairly large generating source up there—that he might be on the way out soon,” wrote a columnist in the Washington Post. The criticism centered on my plans to transform the U.S. military. The article noted that a “sweepstakes” had already begun on who might succeed me.5
I knew how important it was to impart a sense of urgency and seriousness of purpose within the Pentagon. The moment there was any sign that I was backing off the reforms the President had promised, and that I was convinced were needed, they would be doomed. So I upped the ante. I gave a speech directly to the entrenched interests in the Pentagon and in Washington.
“The topic today,” I began, “is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America.”
This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans, and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk. Perhaps this adversary sounds like the former Soviet Union, but that enemy is gone: Our foes are more subtle and implacable today. You may think I’m describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world. But their day, too, is almost past, and they cannot match the strength and size of this adversary. The adversary’s closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy. Not the people, but the processes. Not the civilians, but the systems. Not the men and women in uniform, but the uniformity of thought and action that we too often impose on them.6
I stated that in the Pentagon, despite an era of scarce resources taxed by mounting threats, money was disappearing into duplicative duties and bloated bureaucracy. This was not because of greed, I said, but because of gridlock. Innovation was stifled not by ill intent but by institutional inertia.
The reception my speech received was polite. I knew some in the audience agreed with me. Others did not. “RUMSFELD DECLARES WAR ON BUREAUCRACY,” read some headlines.7 That was fair enough.
When I delivered that speech, I was worried, but not about my longevity in the office of the secretary of defense. I planned to serve at the pleasure of the President as long as I could be effective and not a day longer. But I was seriously concerned that we had a Department of Defense that was not ready for the challenges coming toward our country. The one thing I knew for sure was that challenges would come, and probably from unexpected sources. “The clearest and most important transformation is from a bipolar Cold War world where threats were visible and predictable to one in which they arise from multiple sources, most of which are difficult to anticipate, and many of which are impossible even to know today,” I warned.8 The date was September 10, 2001.
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p; I arrived at the Pentagon the next morning recalling my time as secretary of defense twenty-five years earlier, when I had to convince skeptics on the need for more investment in the defense budget. Again I found myself trying to persuade reluctant members of Congress to increase funding. At a eakfast for nine members of the House Armed Services Committee, most expressed support for my efforts but doubted if we would be able to get the necessary votes. Republicans feared that supporting a significant defense increase could leave them politically vulnerable.*
“Sometime within the coming period,” I said, “an event somewhere in the world will be sufficiently shocking that it will remind the American people and their representatives in Washington how important it is for us to have a strong national defense.” Mine was not a particularly original statement, and I’d said a variation of it many times before. Several months earlier, in fact, I had dictated a note to myself that I intended to offer when I was next testifying before Congress. “I do not want to be sitting before this panel in a modern day version of a Pearl Harbor post-mortem as to who didn’t do what, when, where and why,” I wrote. “None of us would want to have to be back here going through that agony.”9
I sometimes remarked that the only thing surprising is that we continue to be surprised when a surprise occurs. In 1962, Harvard economist Thomas Schelling wrote a foreword to a book on Pearl Harbor that captured this idea perfectly. “We were so busy thinking through some ‘obvious’ Japanese moves that we neglected to hedge against the choice that they actually made,” he wrote. “There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable.”10 I was so taken with his piece that I sent a copy to President Bush during our first month in office as well as to many members of Congress. I expressed the hope that the Senate Armed Services Committee would hold hearings on the subject of surprise.
As my breakfast with the members of Congress was coming to a close that September morning, my senior military assistant, Vice Admiral Edmund Giambastiani, passed me a note. An aircraft had crashed into one of the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York. It was, I assumed, a tragic accident. I said good-bye to the members of Congress, who returned to Capitol Hill, escaping by only a few minutes the traumatic scene that was about to play out at the Pentagon.
Back in my office, Giambastiani turned on the television to see the video of one of the towers burning. Putting the set on mute but glancing at it from time to time, I received an intelligence briefing from Denny Watson, my regular briefer. Her daily presentations were similar to those provided to the President each morning. Watson was a fine intelligence professional: engaged in the details and willing to pose questions to her fellow analysts. As we reviewed the threat reports from around the world, September 11 seemed to be no more or less different than any other day. From our chairs we could hear airplanes going by the building en route to Washington National Airport’s runway; the flight path down the Potomac River was only hundreds of feet from my office window. Aircraft often took off and approached for landing close to the eastern side of the Pentagon.
We were a few minutes into my briefing when the scenes on the television set distracted us. A fireball was erupting from the other World Trade Center tower as a second airliner tore through the upper floors of the building. Within the seventeen minutes between the first and second plane crashes, the world passed from one period of history into another.
I watched, stunned, as the twin towers of the World Trade Center, symbols of America’s economic strength, were engulfed in smoke and flames. Hundreds who were on floors above the site of the impact were trapped. As the flames rose the floors filled with asphyxiating smoke. Some people on the upper floors jumped to their deaths rather than wait for the fire to reach them. Years of increasingly brazen terrorist acts against American and Western interests had escalated to the ones that created the disaster now displayed on television screens across the globe. But they were not the last.
I was still in my Pentagon office, absorbing news of the attacks in New York, when I felt the building shake. The tremor lasted no longer than a few seconds, but I knew that only something truly massive could have made hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete shudder. The small, round, wood table at which we were working, once used by General William Tecumseh Sherman, trembled. A legendary Union general who had torched his way through the South to turn the tide of the Civil War, Sherman had famously commented that “war is hell.” Hell had descended on the Pentagon.
I could see nothing amiss through my office windows, so I left and moved rapidly along the E Ring, the Pentagon’s outer corridor, as far as I could. I soon found myself in heavy smoke, and it was not long before I was forced to a lower floor.
An Air Force lieutenant colonel improbably emerged from a cloud of fumes looking disheveled and uncertain. As the chaos intensified and buffeted those near the scene, all I retained was an image of the horrified look onhis face as he cautioned, “You can’t go farther.”
I headed to a nearby stairwell and down a flight of stairs toward an exit. Outside I found fresh air and a chaotic scene. For the first time I could see the clouds of black smoke rising from the west side of the building. I ran along the Pentagon’s perimeter, and then saw the flames.
Hundreds of pieces of metal were scattered across the grass in front of the building. Clouds of debris, flames, and ash rose from a large blackened gash. People were scrambling away from the building, refugees from an inferno that was consuming their colleagues. Those who could ran across the grass away from the building. Those who could not were being helped. Some were wounded and burned.
It had been but a few minutes since the attack. The official first responders—local police and firefighters—had not yet arrived on the scene. A few folks from the Pentagon were there doing what they could to assist the wounded. I saw some in uniform running back into the burning building, hoping to bring more of the injured out.
“We need help over here,” I heard someone say. I ran over. One young woman sitting in the grass, wounded, bruised, and a bit bloodied, looked up at me and squinted. Even though she couldn’t stand she said, “I can help. I can hold an IV.”
As people arrived on-site to assist, I turned back toward my office to gather what additional information I could. On my way I picked up a small, twisted piece of metal from whatever had hit the Pentagon. Minutes later I would learn from an Army officer that he had seen the unmistakable body of a silver American Airlines plane crash into the Pentagon. That piece of the aircraft has served me as a reminder of the day our building became a battleground—of the loss of life, of our country’s vulnerability to terrorists, and of our duty to try to prevent more attacks of that kind.
The smoke from the crash site was spreading through the building. The smell of jet fuel and smoke trailed us down the corridor. Upon arriving back in my office, I spoke briefly with the President. He was on Air Force One somewhere over the southeastern United States, having left an appearance at a school in Florida when the second plane hit the World Trade Center. He was anxious to learn what damage had been done by the attack on the Pentagon. I reported what information I had.
In retrospect, catastrophes inevitably raise “what ifs.” One was that the disaster could have been even worse. Most of the offices in the area of the building that was hit had recently been closed for renovations. Instead of the nearly ten thousand employees who would normally have been working near the impact site, less than half of that number were present that morning.11 Further, due to the recent renovations, the new walls of the section were reinforced with steel. It had blast-resistant windows and ballistic cloth to catch shrapnel.12 It also occurred to me that if the hijacked plane had hit the other side of the building, near the river entrance, a section that had not been renovated, much of the senior civilian and military leadership of the Department would undoubtedly have been killed.
Before long, the smoke in my office became heavy, so along with several staff members I headed to the National Mili
tary Command Center in the basement.* A complex of rooms outfitted with televisions, computer terminals, and screens tracking military activities around the world, the NMCC is a well-equipped communications hub. Despite the fires still raging in the Pentagon and sprinklers dousing wires and cables with water, our links to the outside world were functioning, although sporadically.13 The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Hugh Shelton, was in South America. The vice chairman, General Dick Myers, the man the President had recently nominated to be Shelton’s successor, had been on Capitol Hill making courtesy calls with members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Upon learning of the attack, he rushed back to the Pentagon and joined me in the command center.
There were two sides of Dick Myers, and I came to know both well. He looked like the grown-up version of a humble high school football hero from a Norman Rockwell cover of the old Saturday Evening Post. But the other side of Dick Myers was one that the public did not see. He had the self-confidence, fire, independent spirit, and tenacity of a fighter pilot tested repeatedly in combat. In his early years he had been frightened of planes because he had witnessed a crash as a child. Yet he came up through the ranks of the Air Force to the highest position in our armed forces. In our private meetings, the determined, persistent man who had logged over six hundred combat flight hours in Vietnam would often emerge.
Myers and I discussed raising America’s threat level to Defcon (Defense Condition) 3, an increased state of alert for the nation’s armed forces, two levels short of full-scale war.*
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