by Leon Panetta
I fought as hard as I could to keep Congress from adopting that imprudent reasoning as the basis for a federal budget. On August 23, just a few days after the president signed the act, I warned in a speech at the Naval Postgraduate School that Congress’s failure to approve thoughtful deficit reductions had encouraged it to create the “doomsday mechanism” of across-the-board cuts. “Hopefully the committee . . . will have the courage to be able to confront those issues if they’re serious about trying to reduce the deficit,” I added. “But I have to make it clear . . . that if it fails to do that, and it results in this sequester . . . it will be devastating to the defense budget. It will hollow out the force. It will weaken our national defense. It will undermine our ability to maintain our alliances throughout the world. And, most importantly, it will break faith with the troops and their families.”
To bring that point home, I traveled to the Hill again and again, privately meeting with members to urge them to find a solution. House Speaker John Boehner was sympathetic, agreeing that across-the-board cuts would be devastating. But he was confident that wouldn’t happen. “We’ll find a way,” he said. Senate majority leader Harry Reid wasn’t so sure; he believed Republicans were already committed to letting the cuts take effect. Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi, the minority leaders of the Senate and House respectively, were also worried about where this was headed. But no one had a plan to stop it. I was struck in those sessions by the absence of serious leadership in either chamber. Lots of members were talking in small groups, but there was no overall direction or urgency. I could feel Congress drifting toward the abyss, and no one on the Hill seemed to know what to do about it.
I was prepared to offer an additional $100 billion in defense cuts—beyond the $487 billion we already were implementing—if that would head off the sequester. The president and his advisers appreciated the offer, but didn’t encourage me to pursue it, in part, I’m convinced, because they were worried that I would cut a separate deal to spare defense, since Republicans might come up with the votes for that. In fact, as my efforts to fight the sequester began to get some attention, a few congressional Democrats, including Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski, urged me to emphasize the danger of cuts to domestic programs, not just defense. To my amazement, the rest of the cabinet, including the members responsible for those parts of the budget, largely stayed out of the debate. That left me to argue for all of us, which I tried to do, even when I found myself frustratingly alone.
In some ways that was symptomatic of what I regarded as a problem with President Obama’s use of his cabinet. Far more than in previous administrations that I’d witnessed—certainly more than in Clinton’s, when I’d been near the center of the action—President Obama’s decision-making apparatus was centralized in the White House. In the national security arena, that meant that aides such as Donilon and John Brennan played vital—and often highly expert and valuable—roles in coordinating policy and messaging. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it did have the effect of reducing the importance of the cabinet members who actually oversaw their agencies. Those agency heads were rarely encouraged to take their own initiative or lobby for priorities. In fact, several times when I reached out to Congress or the press without prior White House approval, I was chastised for it.
The problem that created, unfortunately, was evident in the sequester debate. The agency heads who best understood how cuts would affect them and the services they provided opted to strike a low profile; as a result, neither Congress nor the public got the benefit of their insights into what was about to transpire. My colleagues in the cabinet knew the cuts would be decimating, but for the most part they waited for permission to object. It never came.
As I was trying to avert the sequester that fall, we were proceeding at the Pentagon with our strategy review, driven in part by the $487 billion cut that we’d already agreed to. Even without sequester, we recognized that we weren’t going to be able to substantially cut defense spending by knocking out a cargo plane program or an amphibious vehicle here or there. We also weren’t going to be able to reach these cuts by eliminating duplication or trimming staff—the idea of Pentagon “bloat” is a misnomer. The fundamental problem is not duplication or waste, though there was plenty of both. To really cut spending required tough decisions to give up some of what we were doing, and to decide what we could afford to do without. We needed, in my view, a global vision of our military priorities. Starting that fall, we picked up Gates’s strategic review and put every program to the test: Did we need it, could we afford it, could we live without it?
The strategic review was led by Michèle Flournoy, Vice Chairman Sandy Winnefeld, and Christine Fox. I told them they were to project which missions our military had to perform over the next decade, which missions we could afford to sacrifice, and what a force of the future would look like.
I began to lay out my vision for the department with my first major public address as the new secretary. I’d been invited to give a talk at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington that fall, and my speech on October 11 seemed like a good opportunity to put some ideas forward and generate some public discussion that might help shape our internal deliberations.
I acknowledged that we were facing difficult choices at the Defense Department and that we had to confront them directly or risk the ramifications of hollowing out our forces in order to achieve reductions. Rather than follow that path, I told the audience that we were “adjusting our strategy and balancing our military to better confront the most pressing security needs.” What were those needs? Foremost, of course, was waging the war in Afghanistan and winding down our presence in Iraq. But those conflicts, as costly as they were and as much sacrifice as they demanded, would not go on forever. Combat operations in Iraq had already concluded, and negotiations were under way to determine what presence, if any, the United States would maintain after the end of 2011.
And then there were the challenges we could see forming on the horizon. First was nuclear proliferation. North Korea was actively pursuing a bomb and testing missiles, though not with much success; Iran was enriching uranium “far beyond its needs,” and defying international obligations. Next was the growing threat of cyber attack, which confronted the United States with the “prospect of a catastrophic disruption of critical infrastructure.” Especially nerve-racking in the area of cyber is that it was within the reach of not just governments but nonstate actors, terrorists. Finally, there was the emergence of China, which posed complex challenges for the United States, a relationship with tentacles of economic cooperation, regional rivalry, and geopolitical tension.
How then to respond to those challenges while also cutting spending? In the Wilson address, I suggested that we needed a force that was more agile, more technologically sophisticated, and more committed to efficiency, especially in weapons procurement. And then there was the inescapable: We needed to reduce the overall size of our military, “recognizing that a smaller, highly capable and ready force is preferable to a larger, hollow force.”
But the strategy required more than general observations about evolving threats and capabilities. To be successful, it needed the insights of commanders at all levels, sufficient specific guidance to be implemented, and political buy-in at the highest levels. That fall, we set out to gather information and design a new look for the U.S. military.
• • •
One of the most complicated international relationships to manage in my years with President Obama was that between the United States and Pakistan. At their core, both countries realized we needed each other’s help, but we didn’t trust each other. It showed.
The United States’ counterterrorism operations in the Pakistani tribal areas had done enormous damage to Al Qaeda and the Taliban by 2011, but our efforts there had aroused Pakistani opposition. Then there was Ray Davis, whose story was soon forgotten in the United States but bitterly remembered in Pakistan. And of course there was
our decision to undertake the bin Laden operation without notifying, much less cooperating with, the Pakistani government. Each of those episodes was in my view handled correctly, but it’s true that they took a toll on our relations with Pakistan. After bin Laden was killed, for instance, Pakistan expelled some of our military trainers, and the United States pulled back some of its military aid, then almost $2 billion per year.
For the most part, our uneasiness concerning Pakistan was unspoken. We grumbled about it in the inner circles of government, but made nice in public. Then, on September 22, Admiral Mullen, approaching the end of his tenure as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told a blunt truth and did so publicly. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, and with me sitting beside him, Mullen announced that the Haqqani network, a leading insurgent group fighting against American forces in Afghanistan, was a “veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.” That network, he added, was behind a recent attack on the American embassy in Kabul as well as a June 28 attack against the Inter-Continental Hotel in that same city. In effect, Mullen accused our Pakistani allies of suborning attacks on American forces, diplomats, and citizens.
That was sure to cause a controversy, and it did, but I was in some ways surprised by the expressions of shock. We had been discussing this for months, and it was an open secret that Pakistan’s intelligence agency had ties to terrorist groups—that, after all, was a major part of our rationale for not sharing our bin Laden intelligence with the ISI. As he usually did, Mullen spoke the truth at the hearing that day; as is too often the case, there were repercussions. Pakistani officials called his testimony “irresponsible” and said his comments threatened to rupture relations between our countries.6
Things went from bad to worse over the next few months. On November 26, International Security Assistance Forces, the formal name for our coalition in Afghanistan, came under attack along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, with incoming rounds emanating from the Pakistani side. The ISAF soldiers attempted to contact their Pakistani counterparts over the radio, but received no response. They then opened fire with a counteroffensive, calling in aircraft gunships to defend their positions. The battle ended with twenty-eight Pakistani soldiers dead. Pakistan was outraged.
I commissioned an internal inquiry to examine the actions of our forces even as tempers soared in Pakistan, where one senior official claimed that the attack was a deliberate invasion of Pakistan; in retaliation, the government closed supply routes into Afghanistan that our forces relied upon.
Within the administration, there was a pitched debate about whether to apologize. State Department officials responsible for managing our relationship with Pakistan wanted us to say we were sorry and get on with it, while I thought we should express our regrets but only apologize if we concluded we were to blame. I braced for the White House to side with State, but in this case McDonough told Jeremy that if we didn’t think we had something to apologize for, we shouldn’t. That gave me the political cover I needed to rebuff State’s apology caucus.
After yet another round of tit for tat with Pakistan, we released our internal investigation, accompanied by a statement. It emphasized that ISAF forces had fired in self-defense and acted appropriately under the circumstances as they knew them. But the statement acknowledged that poor communications and faulty maps had contributed to the tragedy and added, “For the loss of life—and for the lack of proper coordination between U.S. and Pakistani forces that contributed to those losses—we express our deepest regret. We further express sincere condolences to the Pakistani people, to the Pakistani government, and most importantly to the families of the Pakistani soldiers who were killed or wounded.”
That didn’t please everyone. It didn’t really please anyone, but the crisis passed.
• • •
The NATO assault on Libya, launched in March and supported largely by U.S. aircraft, succeeded in knocking out Qaddafi’s air defenses and then conducted strikes on his forces throughout the summer, but by the time I became secretary of defense, the momentum seemed to be petering out. The rebels were disorganized despite the efforts by the United States to train them. They still lacked basic command-and-control and maneuver capabilities. Qaddafi was nothing if not determined, and was digging in. To me it seemed a stalemate was in the offing.
That summer, however, I sat down in my office with our Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Admiral Jim Stavridis. Jim was a modern warrior-intellectual. He’d commanded an aircraft carrier strike group and served as senior military assistant to Don Rumsfeld, and was now on his second tour as a combatant commander. He also held a PhD, was a prolific author, and would go on to become dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts. Well spoken and geostrategically sophisticated, he was universally admired by the leaders of European governments. Moreover, the Libyan war was a NATO campaign, and Stavridis was responsible for it. And he turned my head that day.
My worry that Libya was headed in a bad direction was based on our intelligence from the country, most of which indicated that the opposition was not strong enough to make a move on Tripoli. To my surprise, Stavridis thought differently. He told me he thought Qaddafi’s regime was splintering and that the rebels were stronger and more determined than they appeared. I admit I was skeptical, but I recognized that Stav, as I called him, had a clear view of the situation and was smart enough to analyze it well. I left our meeting thinking there was hope after all.
It turned out that Stav was absolutely right, and soon proven so.
At the end of August, the rebels stormed Qaddafi’s Tripoli compound. Qaddafi fled. Two months later, after our punishing air campaign, rebels found him hiding out in his hometown, Sirte. He was dragged through the street, dazed, blood pouring from the left side of his head and soaking his jacket. He stammered incoherently, then was stood up before a mob and executed. As with so many of the events of the Arab Spring, this was captured on cell phones and shared around the world. Libya’s fate was now in uncertain hands, but the country had at least cast off a murderous and deranged dictator.
The Libya campaign was a hard one for the Obama administration. The president himself was conflicted about it—we were still trying to extricate ourselves responsibly from Iraq, and the last thing that President Obama wanted to do was launch another war in the Middle East. But the case for action in Libya was compelling: Qaddafi was demonstrably vicious, and the international community was solidly aligned against him, with NATO, the UN Security Council, and Arab leaders all united in calling for his ouster. If force could not be used under those circumstances, it raised the question of whether force could ever be used. Recognizing that, the president approved what I regarded as an intelligent compromise: We would not send in troops—no “boots on the ground”—but we would commit the forces necessary to play a decisive role in knocking down Qaddafi’s air defenses, clearing the way for the rebels to take the lead.
The result was, in military terms, resoundingly successful. A dictator was dispatched, and the Libyan people were given a new opportunity to lead themselves. What they do with it remains to be seen, but the operation proved that not all American military engagements need to become quagmires or occupations. There are other ways to fight.
• • •
At home, my worst fears about the budget and Congress were realized just before Thanksgiving. On November 21, the Super Committee gave up, its leaders announcing that they could not find common ground to cut the budget and avert the sequester. Having put the gun to its own head and loaded it up, Congress decided to fire it.
The only consolation was that sequestration would not take effect for another year. Figuring we could return to that later, I decided to go ahead and complete our strategic review while continuing to work on members of Congress to find a way out of their self-inflicted wound. Those talks remained frustrating, but our strategy deliberations were producing a thoughtful new vision for U.S. defense—a defense strategy for th
e twenty-first century, as we called it. After much deliberation, the strategy boiled down to these essential elements:
1. The new military would be smaller and leaner; coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan, we would draw down our forces but mold them into more agile and deployable units, armed with the latest technology. We would rely on the National Guard and Reserves and the country’s industrial base to ramp up in the event of a major war or wars in order to supply forces and equipment.
2. We would “rebalance” our forces toward Asia in order to be able to project force quickly and powerfully from the Middle East to the Pacific, a recognition that future conflicts were more likely to spring from those parts of the world than from Europe, where NATO provided an umbrella of security for our interests.
3. Elsewhere in the world, we would adopt a new style of presence we described as “rotational deployment.” No longer would we seek to put large occupying forces into a country for years at a time; instead, we would emphasize short-term deployments, exercises, training, technology, joint operations, and weapons systems—so-called small-footprint approaches. That reflected our economic realities as well as the political landscape in many of those countries. Emerging countries like Indonesia, for instance, do want our help and knowledge, but they don’t want to host an American military base to do it. In addition, we would stress new alliances and partnerships to help others develop security capabilities.
4. We would continue to maintain a capacity to fight, as the saying goes, “two wars at once,” but that would not mean the equivalent of World War II’s European and Pacific theaters. In effect, we would work to be able to fight one full-fledged war while in essence “freezing” the second and imposing severe costs on the adversary. We would continue, however, to be able to confront more than one adversary at a time—as we had done in Iraq and Afghanistan and even Libya.
