Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (74 page)

During the meeting, the president’s voice had been raspy. On the way out of the Oval Office, I unwisely asked him if he was catching cold. He made a dismissive gesture that said,
Don’t even try to be friendly with me because I am really angry
. He was as angry with me as I had ever seen him. He felt deeply that the DADT law was wrong, and he was enormously frustrated by his inability to do anything about it. I was a major obstacle, but he was clearly not prepared to order me to do something I thought was wrong.

That same day, October 20, the Ninth Circuit granted the government’s
appeal for a stay of the lower court’s decision, and the DADT law was reinstated. The next day I signed a directive that separations of service members could be approved only by the service secretaries, after coordination with the general counsel and the undersecretary for personnel and readiness. For all practical purposes, it was a suspension of separations, but it upheld the principle that as long as the law was in effect, we would continue to enforce it.

Admiral Mullen and I publicly reported the results of the Pentagon review process on November 30. I summarized it by saying that “for large segments of the military, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, though potentially disruptive in the short term, would not be the wrenching, traumatic change that many have feared and predicted.… The key to success, as with most things military, is training, education, and above all, strong and principled leadership up and down the chain of command.”

I concluded by strongly urging the Senate to pass repeal legislation and to send it to the president for signature before the end of the year. Now that we had consulted the troops, my position on DADT repeal was in line with the White House as far as moving forward with legislation. I ended with a warning meant for Senator McCain and other opponents of repeal: “Those that choose not to act legislatively are rolling the dice that this policy will not be abruptly overturned by the courts.” The bottom line of Admiral Mullen’s corresponding statement was “This is a policy change we can make.”

Mike and I testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on December 2 on the results of the review. The testiest exchange was when I was asked whether it was a good idea to push for repeal when the survey showed substantial resistance among combat forces. I replied rather brusquely: “I can’t think of a single precedent in American history of doing a referendum of the American armed forces on a policy issue. Are you going to ask them if they want fifteen-month tours? Are you going to ask them if they want to be a part of the surge in Iraq? That’s not the way our civilian-led military has ever worked in our entire history.”

The votes of several undecided senators were influenced by the results of the Pentagon review, and contrary to most expectations even that fall, on December 18 the Senate voted to repeal DADT, and the president signed it into law on December 22. In a not-so-subtle spike of the football, the stage planners at the White House made sure the Marine Corps flag
was prominently displayed behind the president as he signed. The massive bureaucratic wheels of the Pentagon began to move with uncommon speed in conforming Defense policies and regulations to the new law and in preparing training materials for the forces. By late February, training was under way for commanders and leaders and then was extended to all two million men and women in uniform. The service chiefs, after all their concern and skepticism, led this massive effort effectively and positively. The new commandant of the Marine Corps, James Amos, who had been, like his predecessor, the most negative toward repeal among the service chiefs, was hell-bent on the Marines being trained best and first.

The training went smoothly, but the certification process was not complete before I left office. The president signed the third and final certification required to bring repeal into effect—Secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman Mike Mullen had already certified—on July 22, 2011, three weeks and two days after I retired. Under the terms of the repeal law, DADT was abolished in the American armed forces on September 22, 2011. The transition went as smoothly as anyone could have hoped. We had turned a page in history, and there was barely a ripple.

Some might argue the transition went so smoothly that our fears and concerns had been greatly overdrawn and that implementation could have taken place much faster. I will always believe implementation proceeded with so few incidents and issues because of the planning and preparation that preceded it.

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Getting the troops in the fight what they needed continued to be a challenge in 2010. In Afghanistan, the all-terrain MRAPs began flowing in early in the year, providing much better—and much needed—protection for the troops when they were in vehicles. We were making considerable progress in getting more aircraft and drones into the theater for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. But as the strategy changed to emphasize protecting the Afghan people, more troops were moving into hostile terrain on foot. Casualties from IEDs were increasing and the wounds becoming more grievous. When a soldier stepped on an IED, all too often the result was legs and arms blown off, with further blast damage to the groin, pelvis, and abdomen. Dirt and debris was blown into these wounds, further complicating medical treatment. Because of
improvements in medevac times and battlefield medicine, most of those so horribly wounded lived and would face years of surgeries and rehabilitation, years of struggle and pain.

I earlier described meeting in the spring of 2009 the wars’ first quadruple amputee, Private Brendan Marrocco, wounded in Iraq by an IED. Nearly a year later at Walter Reed, I met the second quadruple amputee, a Marine injured by an IED in Afghanistan. Marrocco, by then with prosthetic arms and legs, was the Marine’s hero and role model, giving him hope that he, too, could become functional again. I had signed the orders sending them both into combat, and while it broke my heart to see them like this, their courage and determination to move on with their lives left me in awe.

Months later the cost of war came close to home when my great-nephew e-mailed me that a high school friend of his, Jonathan Blank, from the little town of Augusta, Kansas, had lost both legs in Afghanistan. I visited Jonathan at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He, like Marrocco and so many others I saw, was so young, so vulnerable. And so amazingly tough.

Each visit to a hospital steeled my resolve to drive the Pentagon bureaucracy to do more to protect these kids. The MRAP–all terrain vehicles and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets were important but not enough. As we began the Afghan surge, 75 percent of all casualties were due to IEDs, 90 percent of them in the south. And the bombs were getting bigger. In 2008, the average size of an IED was ten kilograms; by early 2010, it was three times that; in 2008, 10 percent had been over seventy-five kilograms, and that number too had nearly tripled by 2010. A growing source of explosives for the IEDs was a common fertilizer, ammonium nitrate, which was trucked in from Pakistan. We had to slow that flow.

There were many technologies and much equipment that could help troops find IEDs before they injured or killed someone, as well as provide more protection for our most exposed outposts. These included handheld mine and explosive detectors, and large tethered airships (aerostats) providing eyes in the sky over outposts and operations. The wide diversity of the equipment meant that multiple organizations and bureaucratic layers were involved in acquisition and fielding, and that cost time. I wanted these additional capabilities deployed fast enough to match the surge of 30,000 more troops going to Afghanistan in the spring of 2010.

In November 2009, I was made aware of the problems we faced: there was no master integrator of all the capabilities being pushed into the theater; our intelligence analysis was sufficiently focused neither on the enemy’s IED tactics and techniques nor on our own approach to disrupting and destroying the IED networks; we had to figure out how better to use the dozens of Liberty surveillance aircraft we had in Afghanistan—especially deciding whether to use them to develop information about the IED networks or to provide coverage for road and troop protection; we needed to get all the Pentagon task forces fused together to focus on the top priorities; we required more analysts and for them to develop targets faster; information about IED detection had to be shared more effectively among the different regional commands in Afghanistan; and we needed to move counter-IED assets faster from Iraq to Afghanistan. The briefing proved, yet again, that the Pentagon was not properly structured to support a constantly changing battlefield or to fight an agile and adaptable enemy.

Once again I went outside the regular bureaucracy to tackle these issues and to do so urgently. On December 4, 2009, I established the Counter-IED Task Force, cochaired by the undersecretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics, Ash Carter, and Marine Lieutenant General Jay Paxton, director of operations for the Joint Staff. Like the MRAP and ISR task forces, this one was to focus on what could be delivered to the theater within weeks and months. Carter and Paxton seized the opportunity with real passion.

Others, however, still needed to have a fire lit under them. I met with the leadership of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO)—the organization formed in 2004 to lead department-wide efforts to deal with IEDs—on January 8, 2010, and told them, “Your agency has lost its sense of urgency. Money is no object. Tell me what you need.” We still had two wars going on, one of them about to get significantly bigger. Three years into the job, I just couldn’t figure out why I still needed to be exhorting people on the urgency of taking care of the troops.

By the end of January, Carter and Paxton had developed plans to disrupt the fertilizer supply chain—now designated HMEs, homemade explosives, including the deployment of nearly 90,000 handheld explosive detectors. They proposed increasing the number of aerostats from thirty to sixty-four by September, growing the number of tower-based
sensors at our forward bases from 300 to 420, accelerating the production of MRAP-ATVs, and surging mine detectors and ground penetrating radars; they even had developed plans to fulfill my commitment to our allies that we would provide them with counter-IED training and equipment. Because the kind of detectors needed for a patrol might vary depending on the nature of the mission, instead of every unit getting a standard set of detection equipment, I thought we should have a kind of warehouse at the local level holding every kind of counter-IED kit available so that troops could draw whatever detection or protective devices were most appropriate to that day’s mission or a unit’s operational environment. Carter and Paxton even figured out a way to do that.

By the end of March 2010, arrangements were in place to buy significantly more minirobots, handheld command-wire detection devices, electronic warfare kits, mine rollers, and explosive trace detectors. No idea for a new technology, technique, or approach was considered out of bounds. But for all the technology, there was common agreement that one sensor worked better at detecting IEDs than anything else: a dog’s nose. And so acquiring and training many more dogs became a high priority. New counter-IED capabilities of all kinds just for the surge troops would cost $3.5 billion, and much more for the entire deployed force in Afghanistan. I thought it was worth every cent. The task force continued its efforts into 2011, developing and deploying whatever capabilities might provide better detection and warning of IEDs but also better personal protection for the troops, including developing protective underwear to diminish IED damage to the groin, genitals, and abdomen.

Despite the achievements of this and the other task forces I established, I was still troubled that it was all so ad hoc. I was not fixing the bureaucratic problem, I was bypassing it in the interest of speeding matériel to the battlefield. Ash Carter and I discussed this repeatedly. I asked him to think about how to institutionalize what we were doing. If my successors were unwilling to breach the bureaucratic wall, how could we ensure that future war fighters could get what they needed in a hurry? We needed an acquisition “express lane” at the departmental level to ensure that urgent needs were met. The biggest challenge with the existing system—the Joint Urgent Operational Needs process—was finding the money for those needs. When approved, any such “need” was sent to the most appropriate military service, which was asked to pay for it. All too often the service lacked the money or decided its own priorities were
higher and failed to produce the funding. We needed to have a system whereby unfunded battlefield needs would be brought to the attention of the secretary or deputy secretary, who could then direct that funding be found from any source within the entire department. We had not yet formalized this approach when I retired, but I left confident that Carter, who shared my passion for protecting the troops, would make it happen, especially when he was elevated to deputy secretary a few months later.

In dealing with America’s vulnerability to cyber attacks on the computers so vital to our critical infrastructure, business, and government, we were in uncharted waters both bureaucratically and legally. There was a deep division within the government—in both the executive branch and Congress—over who should be in charge of our domestic cyber defense: government or business, the Defense Department’s National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, or some other entity. There was a split between those whose priority was national security and those whose priority was the protection of privacy and civil liberties. The result was paralysis. Soon after my arrival in office, I asked the department’s deputy general counsel for a memo on what kind of cyber attack—by us or on us—would constitute an act of war justifying a response in kind or conventional military retaliation. I was still waiting for a good answer to that question three years later.