Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (67 page)

Independent of these findings and assessments, in preparing the fiscal year 2010 budget, I decided to cancel several huge, expensive, and failing missile defense programs, such as the airborne laser and the kinetic energy interceptor, as described earlier. At the same time, I decided to keep the number of silo-based GBIs in Alaska and California at thirty rather than expanding the deployment to forty-four, and I authorized continued research, development, and testing of our defenses against the long-range-missile threat from Iranian and North Korean missiles. (I also canceled completion of a second field of silos for the GBIs at Fort Greely, but after visiting there a few months later and seeing how close they were to completion, I reversed myself and approved finishing the second field. I was no expert but was always willing to listen to those who were.) Meanwhile, reflecting the new emphasis on regional missile defense, I allocated a great deal of money in the budget to accelerate building the inventory of SM-3 missile interceptors, as well as other regional missile defense systems. I also agreed to fund improved missile defense capability on six more destroyers.

I was determined to increase our capability as quickly as possible to protect our deployed forces and our allies. We briefed Congress on these
changes on several occasions between May and July, and the response was generally favorable. The only opposition was focused on my cancellation of several of the big—and failing—development programs.

Those who would later charge that Obama walked away from the third site in Europe to please the Russians seemed oblivious to growing Polish and Czech opposition to the site and, more important, to the reality that the Defense Department was already reordering its missile defense priorities to focus on the immediate short- to medium-range-missile threat. While there certainly were some in the State Department and the White House who believed the third site in Europe was incompatible with the Russian “reset,” we in Defense did not. Making the Russians happy wasn’t exactly on my to-do list.

In August, the NSS asked the Defense Department to prepare a paper on what had changed to warrant a new direction for missile defense in Europe, and we laid it all out. The principals met on September 1, 2009, and agreed to recommend that the president approve the phased adaptive approach to missile defense in Europe, while agreeing to my proposal to guard against the longer-term threat by keeping open the option for eventually deploying European-based radar and GBIs. The continued investment in GBIs was opposed by some Obama appointees at the State Department and the NSS. We agreed to continue to seek opportunities for cooperation with Russia, including the possible integration of one of their radars that could provide useful tracking data. I formally proposed the Phased-Adaptive Approach in a memorandum to the president on September 11, nearly three years after proposing the third site to President Bush. Times, technology, and threats change. We had to change with them.

Then, as so often happened, a leak made us look like a bunch of bumbling fools, oblivious to the sensitivities of our allies. To date, there had been none of the obligatory consultations with Congress or our allies about what would be the first major reversal of a Bush national security policy and a major shift in the U.S. missile defense strategy in Europe. When we learned on September 16 that the details of the new missile defense approach were in the hands of the press, we had to act quickly to correct that. That evening Hillary dispatched a team of officials from both State and Defense to brief European governments and NATO. The president called the prime ministers of both Poland and the Czech Republic to inform them of his decision and to promise that he was dispatching
administration officials immediately to Warsaw and Prague to brief them.

The morning of the seventeenth, the president publicly announced the new approach. In one of those unanticipated and unfortunate coincidences, that month was the seventieth anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland. Some news stories asserted that Poland had again been “betrayed,” and most suggested that our timing had added insult to injury with the Poles. The president and his domestic advisers clearly wanted me out front to defend this new strategy; I had recommended the earlier approach to Bush and had the credibility to justify a different approach under Obama. It was neither the first nor last time under Obama that I was used to provide political cover, but it was okay in this instance since I sincerely believed the new program was better—more in accord with the political realities in Europe and more effective against the emerging Iranian threat. And I had been successful in preserving the GBI alternative, at least for the time being.

By the time General Cartwright and I sallied forth to the press room to talk about the new program, Republicans in Congress and former Bush officials were all over the airwaves harshly criticizing this “betrayal” of our allies in order to curry favor with the Russians. Senator McCain called the move “seriously misguided.” I told the press what had prompted the reassessment and explained the details of the planned system. In response to a question, I said the Russians had to accept that there was going to be a missile defense system in Europe. We hoped they’d join it, but we were going to proceed regardless.

The damage from the leak was manageable in Europe. I thought the Polish and Czech governments were probably relieved that they could avoid a showdown with their parliaments; the plan would have lost for sure in Prague and probably in Warsaw. In my calls with both defense ministers on the eighteenth, I said we still wanted them to be involved with missile defense in Europe.

Under both the Bush and Obama missile defense plans, I thought our goals and those of the Polish and Czech leaders were completely different, although no one ever had the audacity to say so publicly or even privately.
Their
goals were political, having nothing to do with Iran and everything to do with Russia: the U.S. deployments on their soil would be a concrete manifestation of U.S. security guarantees against Russia beyond our commitments under the NATO treaty.
Our
goals under both
plans were primarily military: to deal with a rapidly evolving Iranian missile threat, as we repeatedly made clear to them and to the Russians. Indeed, Rice and I had told Putin that if the Iranian missile program went away, so would the need for U.S. missile defenses in Europe. That’s why I had offered to Putin in 2008 to delay making the sites operational until the Iranians flight-tested a missile that could reach Europe. Obama would catch hell for saying nearly the same thing to Russian president Medvedev.

The New York Times
bottom-lined all this with the headline “Obama Reshapes a Missile Shield to Blunt Tehran,” and
The Washington Post
subheadline was “New Plan Designed to Confront Iran’s Capabilities More Directly.” I never understood the fury of the U.S. critics. The new plan would get defenses operational in Europe and for our 80,000 troops there years earlier than the Bush approach, while still going forward with development of the ground-based interceptors for homeland defense. Obama would still be taking heat for “canceling” missile defense in Europe during the 2012 election.

Obama’s new missile defense plan had one unintended, but welcome, consequence. For the first time since before Reagan’s “Star Wars” speech, building a limited American missile defense had broad bipartisan support in Congress. That was no small thing.

R
USSIA

The Obama administration’s desire to “reset” the relationship with Russia got off to an awkward start. Hillary had her first meeting with Russian foreign minister Lavrov in Geneva on March 6, and someone persuaded her to present him with a big red button, with the word “reset” printed on the top in Russian. Unfortunately, the Russian word on the button actually said “overcharge.” This reaffirmed my strong view that gimmicks in foreign policy generally backfire. They are right up there with presidents putting on funny hats—they result in pictures you have to live with forever.

Russian behavior in 2009–10 vis-à-vis Iran was mixed. At one point early on, Medvedev conceded to Obama that the United States had been right about Iran’s nuclear and missile ambitions (words that could never have crossed Putin’s lips). The Russians would not block efforts to get
new sanctions against Iran approved by the UN, even though they would continue to work to water them down. They refrained from sending the Iranians a very sophisticated new air defense system—the S-300—which would have made an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities considerably harder. Putin had promised Bush he would not send the system to Iran and, after Obama became president, actually broke the contract with the Iranians.

When it came to missile defense in Europe, however, the Russians almost immediately concluded that the new approach announced by Obama was potentially a bigger problem for them than the Bush plan had been. They were worried about the possibility of future modifications to the systems that would, in fact, give them capabilities against Russian ICBMs. They came to believe the potential deployment of hundreds of advanced SM-3 missiles that we were planning between 2018 and 2020 posed an even bigger threat to them than the GBIs. From that point—a few weeks after the September announcement—the Russians mounted an even more aggressive campaign against the new approach than they had the old, and they would continue to do so for the rest of my time as secretary and beyond. Discussion of potential partnering on missile defense continued for political purposes on both sides, but in reality, a slim chance had become no chance. Missile defense would continue to be the Russians’ principal target in meetings of the NATO-Russia Council and in bilateral meetings with all senior U.S. officials. The Iranian threat simply did not outweigh concerns over their own long-term security. How ironic that U.S. critics of the new approach had portrayed it as a big concession to the Russians. It would have been nice to hear a critic in Washington—just once in my career—say,
Well, I got that wrong
.

With one exception, I played a minor role in the U.S.-Russian relationship during my time in the Obama administration. Where Condi Rice and I had traveled to Russia on several occasions for “two plus two” meetings with our counterparts and to meet with Putin and Medvedev, I visited Russia only once during my two and a half years working for Obama, and that was near the end of my tenure in 2011. There was not a single “two plus two” meeting during that period. I had regular bilateral discussions with Russian minister of defense Serdyukov at NATO sessions when the NATO-Russia Council met, but these rarely lasted more
than half an hour and, with translation, provided little opportunity for serious dialogue; he usually had only enough time to poke a stick in my eye over missile defense.

The one exception was negotiation of a new treaty imposing further reductions on the strategic nuclear delivery systems of both countries. I had a personal history with this decades-long endeavor. I had been a junior intelligence adviser to the U.S. delegation negotiating the first such treaty with the Soviets in the early 1970s (SALT I—Strategic Arms Limitation Talks I), and a junior member of the U.S. delegation present in Vienna when President Carter signed the second such treaty in 1979 (SALT II), which was never ratified by the U.S. Senate because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Negotiations for additional limits on both sides’ nuclear arsenals continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty—START—talks), but not much was actually accomplished. Under Bush 43, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT, also known as the Moscow Treaty), reducing the nuclear arsenals of both sides to between 1,700 and 2,200 operational deployed warheads, was signed in 2002, to expire at the end of 2012 if not superseded by a new treaty.

In early 2009, SALT, START, and SORT—acronym hell—gave way to “New Start,” an Obama administration effort to negotiate the next strategic arms limitations treaty. Medvedev signed on that spring. All the presidents I worked for except Carter found the details of arms control negotiations mind-numbing and excruciatingly boring. Most of the hard work was done by the negotiators and the sub–cabinet level experts in Washington, with only major issues or obstacles put before the principals. The broad outlines of an agreement emerged within a matter of weeks, limiting the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550 and the number of strategic missile launchers and bombers to 800. Included were very important provisions for satellite and remote monitoring—for the first time, monitoring tags would be on each bomber and missile—and for eighteen on-site inspections each year. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commander of Strategic Command were supportive of the provisions, as was I. General Cartwright and Jim Miller, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, were expert in the strategic nuclear world and played a prominent role in shaping the views of senior leaders in the Pentagon, including mine.

Agreement was reached on the terms of the treaty on March 26, 2010,
and Presidents Obama and Medvedev signed it in Prague on April 8. I informed the president a few days later that at the exact moment of the signing ceremony, the Russian military had been conducting a nuclear attack exercise against the United States. A nice Putin touch, I thought.

Critics of the treaty in the United States wasted no time in describing its purported shortcomings. It was said the treaty would inhibit our ability to deploy missile defenses, to modernize our strategic systems, and to develop capabilities for conventional global strike (using ICBMs with conventional warheads for long-range precision targeting).

Because the treaty limited the number of U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads, the viability of our aging nuclear warheads and production facilities became a growing concern during the ratification process. (A number of our nuclear weapons production facilities had been built for the Manhattan Project during World War II.) Principals had met on several occasions to discuss modernization, not new capabilities. The cost of replacement and upgraded facilities would be significant—$80 billion over ten years. Given Obama’s ultimate goal of zero nuclear weapons, the idea of modernization met with stiff resistance at the subcabinet level and in the White House and NSS.