In My Time

by Dick Cheney

  McConnell reported that only three divisions were supporting the coup, and they were all within thirty miles of Moscow. The coup leaders were facing a tough choice, he said: either give up the effort or use force to try to bring it about. Boris Yeltsin, the newly elected president of Russia, was standing up to the coup plotters and calling for popular resistance, McConnell said, and every hour that he stayed free was further indication that the coup plotters were not in control.

  I had met Yeltsin on a few occasions, and he’d visited me in my office in the Pentagon in June 1991. By that time he had already left the Communist Party, but it was still startling to hear him declare, as he did in my office, that increasing the Soviet defense budget would be a “crime against the Russian people, who have suffered enough under seventy years of communism.” I was intrigued by his emergence and by his political success at getting himself elected president of Russia in 1991.

  I talked to Brent Scowcroft after I had hung up with Powell and McConnell, and we agreed that this was potentially an extremely serious event. If the coup succeeded, all our assumptions about reform in the Soviet Union and its impact on our national security planning would be upended. By now we knew that the coup plotters included some key members of the Soviet military command structure. I thought through a list of questions we needed to consider. What exactly do the coup plotters hope to achieve? If he retains power, can Gorbachev hope to resume his reforms? Is there any possibility that this event could lead to a peaceful, orderly progression to a less hostile, demilitarized democratic Soviet Union?

  And there were other matters of concern. How secure was the Soviet nuclear arsenal? Could it end up in the hands of the coup plotters or a third party? Were we about to see millions of Soviet refugees flee into Eastern Europe? Would the coup plotters use military force to crush the fledgling independence movements in places such as the Baltics, Georgia, and Armenia?

  Within a few days of my return to Washington, the coup had failed, and none of the worst-case scenarios had materialized. Quite the opposite—the changes it hastened were nothing short of historic. Boris Yeltsin, standing on a tank to defy the coup plotters, had seemed to capture a spirit of defiance of old ways and old thinking that was sweeping over the U.S.S.R. During the coup, Lithuania reaffirmed its 1990 declaration of independence, and Estonia and Latvia declared theirs. On August 24, the Ukrainian parliament voted for independence, and on August 25 Byelorussia did the same. August 24 was also the day Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the Communist Party and dissolved the Central Committee, signifying the true end of the Soviet communist era.

  On September 5 the Congress of People’s Deputies voted to respect the “declarations of sovereignty and acts of independence” adopted in the former Soviet republics, signaling that the end would not be violent. When President Bush convened the National Security Council that day at the White House, it was as though we were at the start of a new and unformed world that we might have the chance to shape. It was breathtaking to think that after so many years of facing down the Soviet nuclear threat and countering their efforts to subjugate people all over the world, we might be watching the Soviet Union disappear peacefully. I thought we needed to move quickly before we lost our chance to influence events, and to my way of thinking our objectives for the former Soviet Union ought to be democracy, demilitarization, economic reform, and independence for the former Soviet republics. These were the same goals the pro-democracy forces inside the Soviet Union were fighting for, and I believed we needed to be firmly and clearly identified with them.

  This was not a unanimous view among the president’s top advisors. Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft were both more cautious, urging that we did not necessarily want to see the breakup of the Soviet Union, out of concern for the instability that might generate. I thought we should do everything possible to push as hard as we could to lessen Moscow’s control over the former republics. First, I believed as a matter of principle that people should live in freedom. When Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Ukraine all voted for independence, I thought we should stand with them. Second, this was a case where our moral interests and our strategic interests were clearly aligned. It was right that we stand for freedom, and independence for the former republics would weaken our most dangerous adversary. I believed it was time for bold policy initiatives to cement the downfall of the Soviet Union.

  The president agreed. He directed us to develop proposals that would demonstrate support for Russia’s reformers and show the world we were ushering in a new era. For me and my colleagues at the Defense Department, the obvious place to begin was with our nuclear arsenal.

  In my first months as secretary of defense, I had been briefed on the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, the targeting plan for the use of our nuclear weapons. Over the years as we had added weapons to our arsenal, the planners had applied them to the same universe of targets. When we added, for example, fifty new Peacekeeper missiles, each with ten warheads, our nuclear target specialists would suddenly have five hundred new weapons they had to direct at a limited list. It seemed to me a commonsense question was in order. Tell me, I said to the planners, how many warheads are going to hit Kiev under the current plan? It was a difficult question to get an answer to because I don’t think anybody had ever asked it before, but I finally got a report back that under the current targeting plan, we had literally dozens of warheads targeted on this single city. It was time to rationalize our nuclear targeting. Under Paul Wolfowitz’s direction, the policy shop went to work with the joint staff and our nuclear targeting specialists and began to reform our targeting system, which in turn gave us the ability to reduce the size of our nuclear arsenal.

  It was a lesson that sometimes the simplest question—how many nuclear weapons are you planning to launch on Kiev?—is the most important one. I appreciated General Powell’s description of the significance of what we did. “Cheney and his civilian analysts,” he wrote, “reversed four decades of encrusted bureaucratic thinking and put nuclear targeting on a rational basis.” And we made it possible, working with Powell and his team on the joint staff, for the president to make bold proposals in response to the historic events unfolding in Moscow. The SIOP review made it clear we could make significant reductions in the size of our nuclear forces and still preserve our deterrent capabilities.

  As we pulled our proposals together, I was mindful of avoiding the trap into which so many previous arms control negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union had fallen. Agonizingly slow, these negotiations usually led to minimal, tit-for-tat reductions. This time we all agreed we should proceed differently. We should announce our intent to make significant real cuts in our nuclear forces and invite the Russians to do the same.

  In a speech to the nation on September 27, 1991, President Bush directed that the United States eliminate its entire worldwide inventory of ground-launched short-range nuclear weapons. We would bring home our nuclear artillery shells and short-range ballistic missile warheads from Europe. And he called on the Soviets to do the same. He also announced we would withdraw all tactical nuclear weapons from our surface ships and attack submarines and remove all nuclear weapons from our land-based naval aircraft. And, again, he called on the Soviets to do the same. Then he turned to the issue of our strategic nuclear weapons, which had been the subject of a new treaty, START, signed with President Gorbachev in July 1991. President Bush said he wanted to use that treaty “as a springboard to achieve additional stabilizing changes.” Therefore, he ordered all U.S. strategic bombers to immediately stand down from their alert posture. He also pledged to accelerate the destruction of the intercontinental ballistic missile systems scheduled to be eliminated as part of the START talks and announced the termination of the development of the new mobile Peacekeeper ICBM system.

  The president also announced that he would be consolidating operational command of our sea-, land-, and air-based strategic nuclear forces in one command, which is now call
ed STRATCOM, headquartered at Offutt Air Force Base. On October 5, 1991, Gorbachev, as president of the Soviet Union, responded to our proposals with an impressive set of cuts the Soviets were willing to make in both their tactical and strategic nuclear arsenals, and he agreed to take Soviet bombers off alert as well. We had succeeded in launching a new approach to arms control—faster, deeper, and more flexible than before.

  As we responded to changes in the Soviet Union by offering reductions in our nuclear inventory, we were also thinking about our overall force posture. From the end of World War II until the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1992, we had planned our defensive and offensive military capabilities primarily around meeting, countering, and defending against a Soviet threat. In late 1989 we had begun to think about cuts that could be made to reflect the emerging new strategic reality, and after months of analysis we had proposed the concept of the “base force,” which President Bush had accepted and outlined in a speech in Aspen, Colorado, on August 2, 1990. The speech came only hours after Saddam’s tanks rolled into Kuwait, and the attention of the world shifted to the Persian Gulf. Once we had liberated Kuwait, I asked Wolfowitz to take the concept laid out in our base force approach, and using some of the most important lessons we had learned from operations in Desert Storm, put together a new Defense Planning Guidance document that would describe the challenges America faced and the strategic position we should adopt to meet them throughout the 1990s and beyond.

  It had been my experience that too often everyday challenges prevent top policymakers from taking the time to think strategically. It is much easier to accede to the moment, blunting crises or responding to opportunities. It takes time and discipline to force yourself and those in the bureaucracy to take a step back and think about America’s strategic goals and challenges, but it is essential. You can’t hope to adopt the wisest policies without a sense of where the country should be heading and how we should steer the ship to get there. There are places set up to do this in the government, such as the policy planning shop at the State Department and the office of the undersecretary for policy in the Pentagon. But often the individuals in these offices either get drafted to help manage day-to-day crises or their strategic work is so removed from the real-time policymaking that it has little impact.

  The Defense Department, in my experience, is better at both strategic policymaking and at producing rigorous “lessons learned” reports than any other agency in government, and the individuals I had in key slots, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Andy Marshall, Scooter Libby, and Eric Edelman, were some of the best strategic thinkers around. It was to this group I looked when I determined that we needed a new defense strategy for the post–Cold War world. Working with retired Lieutenant General Dale Vesser and Zalmay Khalilzad, who were also part of the policy planning shop, they produced the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, which was a fundamental revision in U.S. defense policy and strategy.

  The DPG represented a shift from a focus on the global threat posed by the Soviet Union to defense planning based on regional threats. It also noted that we would work to “preclude hostile, nondemocratic domination of a region critical to our interests” as well as work to preclude the emergence of any hostile powers that could present a global security threat. There was a focus on alliances among democratic nations and the enhanced security that cooperation could bring. We would not only anticipate and plan for a future security environment, but also work to shape it so that we could advance U.S. security objectives.

  We would actively encourage former Warsaw Pact countries and, in time, even former Soviet republics to join in the alliances of democratic nations that had so effectively kept the peace. We would strengthen our common defense arrangements. We also recognized the growing threat of proliferation and emphasized that we would work to update our strategy for countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them.

  The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance was very significant in the way that it addressed critical global strategic shifts and set out a sound basis for the United States to continue to enhance its own security and that of its allies in the years to come. As I left office in January 1993, we published the “Regional Defense Strategy,” an unclassified strategic plan that incorporated much of the thinking in the Defense Planning Guidance.

  The RDS emphasized that U.S. leadership would continue to be crucial in the new defense environment. Our preference was to counter threats whenever possible with friends and allies at our side, but we were clear that America must lead. “Only a nation that is strong enough to act decisively,” it said, “can provide the leadership needed to encourage others to resist aggression.”

  IN RESPONSE TO THE fall of the Berlin Wall I had ordered a review of our major aircraft needs across the military services. I asked the services to look at whether we should move forward in building and buying planes like the B-2, F-22, C-17, and A-12, in light of the changed global security environment. I came into office inclined to support the construction of the A-12, the navy’s carrier-based stealth bomber, and in April 1990, I testified in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee in support of moving forward with it. “It’s a good system,” I said, and “the program appears to be reasonably well-handled.” A few months later, when I was informed that the contractor had cost overruns they could not absorb and would not be delivering the planes on time, I was, needless to say, not pleased. I had testified to the Congress in good faith that the program was on track, only to learn later that it wasn’t. We launched a review to determine why the information I had received was not accurate. As a result a number of individuals involved with the program inside the Pentagon were disciplined and removed from the program. Ultimately, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition resigned.

  Over the coming months it became clear that there were more significant cost overruns, technical problems, and delays. If the program were to proceed, I would have to exercise my authority as secretary of defense to modify the contract to prevent the contractor from being in breach of its obligations to the U.S. government. Modification would result in significant additional cost to the government with no certainty that the program would get back on track. In December I directed the secretary of the navy to show cause why the contract should not be terminated. I said in the show-cause order, “If we cannot spend the taxpayer’s money wisely, we will not spend it.” I called a meeting in my office on Saturday, January 5, with General Powell, Pentagon Comptroller Sean O’Keefe, Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett, and Donald Yockey, the new undersecretary for acquisition. The group discussed whether I should bail out the contractor. I listened and made my decision.

  Two days later I announced that we would not bail them out, a decision that resulted in termination of the program for default. No one could tell me how much more of the taxpayers’ money we’d have to spend to procure these planes. My decision not to provide a bailout and to withdraw support for the A-12 sent shock waves through the Pentagon and the defense industry. It was the largest weapons system cancellation in the history of the department, but the decision was the right one. And I am still convinced of that today, even with litigation about the cancellation in its twentieth year.

  ON A SATURDAY IN the summer of 1992, I got a call at home from Brent Scowcroft, who was up at Camp David. The president needed a new chief of staff. Sam Skinner, who had taken over from John Sununu, was heading back home to Chicago. Brent wanted to know if I was interested. I wasn’t, but I also wasn’t completely surprised to get the call. A year earlier when I had traveled with the president to California and Texas, he’d asked me to describe for him some of the problems I’d seen in the way Sununu was running the White House. I thought it was instructive to compare Sununu’s approach to Scowcroft’s approach, since Brent was running foreign policy for the president and Sununu essentially handled the domestic agenda.

  We had talked about the importance of having someone in the chief of staff slot who would be a completely honest brok
er, as Brent was on the national security side. Those of us in the president’s national security team knew that he would give his views to the president privately, but he would make sure to convey accurately all sides of an issue so the president could make an informed decision. And Brent was deeply experienced in the issues he grappled with every day, having already served a term as President Ford’s national security advisor.

  While I was flattered that Brent thought I might effectively serve as George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff, I told Brent I really was not eager to make the move back to the White House. I had already been chief of staff, and I was engaged in critically important issues at the Department of Defense. If the president had asked me directly, I would have done it, but I’m glad that he got Jim Baker to do it instead.

  IN OCTOBER 1992 I attended a NATO meeting in northern Scotland, and it was from there that I watched President Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot compete in the second of the televised presidential debates. As defense secretary, I had no part to play in the presidential election, but I was looking on with enormous interest, and it didn’t seem to be going well for our side. The press was pushing a false narrative that had a president who was detached from the lives of most Americans up against a challenger who was younger, more energetic, more empathetic. And unfortunately this was the debate in which the president looked at his watch, a perfectly normal thing to do, but an action that our opponents seized on and wrongly characterized as symbolic of a distracted president. In 1991 George Bush had won a war, but in 1992 he lost the presidency. When the votes were counted in November, it was Bill Clinton 43 percent, George Bush 37 percent, and Ross Perot, 19 percent.

  There were many farewells, but the finest was at Fort Myer’s ceremonial hall, where the United States military had a chance to say goodbye to the man who had commanded them so ably—and I had a chance to make my farewell too. I noted that it was easy to look back on historic events and regard them as inevitable, but that it mattered who was in command: