by Leon Panetta
From the start, Clinton was regarded with some suspicion by the military—the “draft dodger” label was hard to shake. And when he tried to turn his campaign promise into a change in military policy, his chiefs rebelled. Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, warned that it would be “prejudicial to good order and discipline,” and other military leaders raised practical and even moral objections.1 Congressional leaders echoed some of the same concerns, and the new president could hardly afford a showdown with the military so early in his administration, especially one that he was sure to lose on the Hill. The result was a wobbly compromise: Gays would no longer be hounded out of the military merely for being gay—or for going to a gay bar or living with a person of the same sex—but they could still be removed if they openly acknowledged their orientation. I wasn’t part of the debate that produced “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—I was still budget director at the time—and in one sense it did represent progress. It did for the first time allow gays to serve in the military, and it ended some of the witch-hunt efforts to ferret out the sexual habits of service members. Still, it rested on soldiers’ concealing their identities, even lying about them. That’s hardly a strong foundation for an organization that demands integrity from its employees. I thought even then that it was not destined to last.
To his credit, President Obama wanted to complete the work that Clinton began. In his State of the Union address at the beginning of 2010, he vowed to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” announcing that he would “work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are. It’s the right thing to do.” Gates and I reacted differently to that pledge. Gates was conflicted, generally supporting the president’s goal but also feeling blindsided by a policy position he’d only been notified of the day before. I had not been privy to those conversations, but my view was that the old law should be repealed and that gays should be allowed to serve openly.
As promised, the president did spend 2010 working out the details, and Gates supported the effort, though wanting to be sure that the Joint Chiefs were fully consulted and on board. In order to assess the impact that integration would have on our forces, Gates asked Jeh Johnson and army general Carter Ham to cochair a study; they began their work in March 2010 and conducted a thorough and insightful analysis, interviewing hundreds of men and women in the service and retired from it, as well as hosting focus groups and soliciting opinions through a major survey of the force. Among their many findings was that 70 percent of those questioned believed ending the ban would have no effect, a mixed effect, or a positive effect on their unit’s ability to “get the job done.” About the same percentage indicated that they had worked at some point in their military career with someone they believed to be gay—a surprisingly high number, given that disclosing one’s orientation in those days often led to dismissal. In the 1980s alone, the military estimated that it had spent roughly $500 million to expel seventeen thousand gay soldiers from the ranks.2
In addition, the report highlighted the military’s experience with racial integration begun after World War II. No less than George Marshall, perhaps the most revered American military man of his day, had argued in 1941 against racial integration of the services, warning that “experiments within the Army in the solution of social problems are fraught with danger to efficiency, discipline, or morale.”3 Five years later, a survey of enlisted men found that more than 80 percent opposed integrated training, housing, or assignments.4
Despite those reservations, in 1948, President Truman issued an executive order mandating the end of racial segregation in the armed forces, at a time when southern schools, buses, and other public accommodations still were segregated by race. It did not happen quickly or without incident—a year after Truman’s order, a majority of servicemen and -women still opposed integration, and compliance was spotty. And yet change did come: By 1953, some 95 percent of servicemen and -women served in integrated units.
The bottom line of the report:
We conclude that, while a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will likely, in the short term, bring about some limited and isolated disruption to unit cohesion and retention, we do not believe this disruption will be widespread or long-lasting, and can be adequately addressed by the recommendations we offer below. Longer term, with a continued and sustained commitment to core values of leadership, professionalism, and respect for all, we are convinced that the U.S. military can adjust and accommodate this change, just as it has others in history.
That report was finished and submitted in November 2010, and helped the proposal overcome resistance in Congress, particularly the Senate, which soon after passed legislation to end the ban. On December 22, 2010, the president signed the law that struck down this remnant of antigay bigotry, pending completion of training to prepare the services and certification that we were ready to go ahead. That certification was broken into three segments, the last of which was given to me just three weeks after I took over from Gates.
There were some lingering concerns. Despite the strong majority of service members who did not anticipate any problems with ending the ban, a significant minority, roughly 30 percent, did believe it would undermine cohesion or discipline. Those concerns were amplified by the fact that we were at war, so any negative impact of integration could have battlefield consequences. General Jim Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps, had publicly warned that allowing gays to serve openly could cause “disruption” in smaller units, and he remained wary of the idea almost to the end. But the Johnson-Ham report had impressed him as well as others. When I joined with the chiefs in late July in the conference room outside my office, I wanted to hear any specific concerns that any of them had; I did not want to sign off on the proposal and then have my subordinates publicly denounce it. Amos was my main worry.
He surprised me. “I’ve seen these briefings,” he said that day. “I’ve read the report. I’m now convinced we can do this. We are prepared to implement repeal.” The navy and air force were also on board; the army had concerns and reservations. But they all repeated the refrain, “We are prepared to implement repeal.” I knew that this represented a dramatic change from the military in which these men were raised, and I knew that they were worried about whether the rank and file under their command would react negatively. But I was also proud of their workmanlike professionalism. The mission was repeal. They would carry out that mission without hesitation.
With that, we had consensus, and I certified that the military was ready to go ahead. In the Oval Office on July 22, with Mike Mullen and me on either side of him, President Obama signed the certification. Sixty days later, the ban ended.
Most of the hard work on this issue had been completed before my arrival, but I was gratified to play the small but important role of wrapping it up. I released a statement expressing appreciation for the work that so many had done to bring about this achievement. “Thanks to the professionalism and leadership of the U.S. military,” I said, “we are closer to achieving the goal that is at the foundation of America—equality and dignity for all.” Personally, it was especially gratifying to contribute to a historic civil rights milestone, having worked early in my career to enforce school desegregation. The story of American civil rights is one of the noblest in our country’s long history. I’m very proud of the small part I played at those two junctures—and at one more before I wrapped up my service the following year.
There was one last piece of business to conclude once “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was repealed. Having ended that doctrine, we were now faced with the difficult question of how to extend benefits to the partners of gay service members. Military spouses are eligible for all manner of benefits: access to commissaries, health care, educational opportunities, even burial in veterans’ cemeteries. Gays and lesbians could now serve openly as members of the military, but those who were legally marri
ed to those service members had no spousal rights. And because the Defense of Marriage Act was still the law of the land, the federal government couldn’t officially recognize marriage even in those states that allowed same-sex marriage.
The White House was putting enormous pressure on all departments and agencies to ensure that every person who stepped forward to serve his or her country, gay or straight, would have the same benefits for their loved ones. At the White House, Denis McDonough and White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler were strong champions of extending these benefits. I supported that goal wholeheartedly. But we struggled with the legal question of how to recognize a relationship between two people who weren’t married under federal law. Having pushed the chiefs on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” I was worried that they would revolt. After hours of consultations, I hammered out an agreement with the chiefs that would allow gay service members to sign affidavits that they were in a long-term, committed relationship, and to allow those partners the same benefits as other military spouses. The memorandum implementing those changes and extending those benefits was distributed over my signature just days before I concluded my time as secretary of defense.
Interestingly, for all the debate and worry over ending the ban on gays in the military, the actual implementation was strikingly without incident. Beginning with the formal abandonment of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” on September 20, 2011, I received monthly reports from the field on the new dynamic and its effects—if any—on units around the world. There was virtually no protest or complaint. A major obstacle to equality fell almost silently.
• • •
During my tenure as secretary of defense, Washington and the world sometimes seemed to be moving in opposite directions, placing special tension on the Pentagon. On one hand, as the helicopter crash on August 6 powerfully underscored, we were fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. And we were fighting fires breaking out across the Middle East—challenges for a military that had spent nearly a decade at war. All of that required staggering investment; the 2009 surge in Afghanistan alone, which we were now gradually tapering off, cost nearly $50 billion a year. Maintaining those forces without conceding other strategic areas to adversaries argued for steady, even increased defense spending, an argument Gates had made in support of the modest increases he sought.
But the politics of Washington pulled the other way. Democrats believed that the large troop deployments were no longer achieving important objectives—and often with very high costs—and wanted to bring troops home, sometimes without sufficient concern for what troubles we’d be leaving behind. And the Republicans were torn between establishment figures such as John McCain who remained committed to the national defense and the emergent members of the Tea Party who wanted to cut government down to a new size, irrespective of the vulnerabilities that such an action might create. In a town where the two parties agreed on almost nothing, they suddenly settled on the consensus that we could dramatically cut defense spending during wartime.
Compounding all that was the more than doubling of military spending in the Bush years, which made sustaining the current levels of funding hard to justify. Before 9/11, the United States spent about $287 billion a year on its military. By the time I became secretary of defense, that number had grown to more than $718 billion.* The growth in spending meant that the United States had spent more than an additional $2 trillion on defense over that decade, much of it to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By 2011, the United States spent more on its military than the next thirteen highest-spending nations—combined.5
At the same time, just slashing—in the form, say, of across-the-board cuts—was guaranteed to damage America’s military readiness. As I had long learned, the problem with cutting programs across the board is that it makes everything less effective. It does not distinguish between programs that are valuable and should grow and programs that are underperforming or no longer relevant and should be shed.
One Saturday in July, I got an urgent call from Jack Lew, then the OMB director and soon to become White House chief of staff, tracking me down to alert me to a development in the talks between the White House and congressional leaders. The Republicans had manufactured a crisis around the routine matter of approving an increase in the nation’s debt ceiling, which allows the government to pay lenders for money it has already borrowed and spent. Without budget concessions, Republicans were threatening to refuse to raise the limit, potentially forcing the U.S. government into default on loans it owed. That was playing with fire, but it had brought the White House reluctantly to the negotiating table on spending cuts. Under consideration, Jack told me, was a deal whereby the White House would agree to strict caps on discretionary spending for a decade in return for the support of Boehner and congressional Republicans on the debt ceiling vote. That seemed to me a lot to give in return for a ministerial vote, but I was okay with the caps in theory—the real question was how they would be set and applied.
Then came the kicker: The defense cut, Lew told me, would be about $500 billion (it turned out to be $487 billion) over ten years. The Pentagon forecasts budgets only five years out, so some of this was guesswork, but the bottom line was that we would have to take our plan for fiscal year 2012 and slash it by about $50 billion every year. That’s $1 billion a week, or almost $200 million a day, every day, for ten years. I warned Jack that we could endure those cuts for a few years, but after a while the fat would be gone and we’d be gouging into muscle.
And that wasn’t even the whole story. Jack continued, saying the deal also included creation of a special “Super Committee” of senators and congressmen charged with finding an additional trillion dollars in savings. They’d get a few months to hash it out, and if they didn’t reach agreement, steep across-the-board cuts would go into effect automatically, slashing yet another $500 billion from defense over ten years. To me, that was stunning, a return to the goofy, meat-axe approach that harkened back to the Gramm-Rudman automatic spending cuts in the 1980s, when I’d fought against automatic cuts as chairman of the House Budget Committee. I sputtered a bit, but Jack told me it was the best deal the White House thought it could get. In August, the president signed the Budget Control Act. God help us, I thought, if this committee failed to do its job.
In the following days, I huddled with my team, including the Pentagon’s comptroller, Bob Hale; my director of cost assessment and program evaluation, Christine Fox; Ash Carter; Michèle Flournoy; the Pentagon’s acquisition chief, Frank Kendall; and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Martin Dempsey. We agreed on a two-pronged strategy. First, we would pick up the Gates strategic review and focus it on how to achieve certain priorities within these Budget Control Act levels. Second, I would rail publicly against sequestration and try to use my position and whatever standing I enjoyed to push the so-called Super Committee to cut the deal rather than give in to automatic cuts. I thought I might get some attention from both sides of the aisle since Republicans as well as Democrats would be reluctant to have us cancel troop training, mothball ships and airplanes, or delay acquisitions—all of which could slice deeply into readiness, something no one professed to want.
There are many reasons why defense spending increases over time, and most relate to the size of the department. Pay hikes of just a couple percentage points can cost upwards of $2 billion; health care, fuel, insurance, building maintenance, the basic expenses of running a mammoth organization together add more than $15 billion a year of additional spending to the Defense Department budget, so holding it flat means cutting other spending in order to accommodate the natural growth of the budget. And you tinker with those expenses at some peril: Politicians don’t like the idea of cutting military pay or benefits, especially in wartime, and that’s particularly hazardous in the context of a volunteer military. If you make it unappetizing to join, young people will opt for something else. Alternatively, you can save money by shutting down bases, but as I’d learned during the Fort Or
d experience back in Monterey, that’s a complicated, politicized business.
An aversion to complexity and an abundance of politics are what drove the budget debate to the across-the-board alternative, and it had surface appeal: What could be wrong with cutting “across the board”? If everyone takes a modest hit, then no one has to take a huge one, or at least so the theory goes. In fact, it doesn’t work that way. Let me try to illustrate the folly of the across-the-board approach with an example. Imagine you’re looking over your family budget and trying to find ways to tighten your belt. You notice that you’re spending a lot on fuel—gassing up your cars, running the clothes dryer, heating the house. And let’s say you own two cars, one an old gas guzzler, the other a modern, fuel-efficient compact. You might conclude that you could save money by driving the gas guzzler less and using your compact for more errands. Or even that you’d be better off making a short-term investment for long-term gain, say, by trading in the gas guzzler and buying a second, more efficient car. You might have to put some money down for the new car, but you’d save every time you filled up and it might soon pay for itself. Or you might elect to turn down the thermostat and wear sweaters for the winter. All of those are potentially sensible solutions to a real problem, one best solved by thinking creatively and having the flexibility to implement the best solution for your particular problem.
What you almost certainly would not do is try to cut across the board. It makes no sense, for instance, to simply drive both cars 10 percent less; you might be better off driving the smaller car 10 percent more and the larger vehicle 20 percent less. You might have a child who’s sick and needs to be in a warm house, so cutting there might be dangerous. Or last winter might have been especially mild and this one especially harsh, so you might have no choice but to spend more on heating and save elsewhere (one problem with across-the-board cuts is they reduce from arbitrary baselines). The best solution for you is not to cut everything the same—it might be to spend a bit more in some areas and a lot less in others. For you, targeted cuts could be prudent and save you money, even prepare your family for the future, while an across-the-board cut could be foolish, expensive, and even dangerous.
