Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (91 page)

I shared with them my respect for the president’s courage in making the decision to go forward with the mission. I reminded them that President Carter had perhaps gambled his presidency on such a mission in 1980, and it had failed. Obama had taken a significant risk, and thanks to those in that room, he had succeeded. I said I knew they had just returned from a deployment to Afghanistan a few months before the raid and would be heading out again in the summer. I thanked them and asked them to thank their families for me for “supporting you and your service.” I concluded by saying that the SEALs in that room truly gave meaning to George Orwell’s observation that “people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

A final observation on the raid: its success was the result of decisions and investments made over the preceding thirty years. Lessons learned from the disaster in Iran in 1980 led to the creation of the Joint Special Operations Command and development of the training and equipment that undergirded the success at Abbottabad. In 1986, as deputy director in charge of analysis at CIA, I agreed to provide more than a dozen analysts to the new Counterterrorism Center in the clandestine service, an unprecedented and controversial assignment of analysts to help inform and plan counterterrorist operations. I had no idea then that we had laid the foundation for such a historic success by those analysts’ successors twenty-five years later.

C
UTTING THE
D
EFENSE
B
UDGET
: M
ATH
, N
OT
S
TRATEGY

Halfway through FY2011, Congress as usual had not passed an appropriations bill—we were still operating on a continuing resolution (CR), which meant a budget of about $530 billion instead of the $548 billion the president had requested. As I wrote earlier, that year we would have six different continuing resolutions and finally a yearlong CR representing an $18 billion cut that we would have to absorb in the last few months
of the fiscal year. The world’s largest and most complex organization was being funded hand to mouth, living paycheck to paycheck. It was also apparent that Congress would not jump our budget from $530 billion in FY2011 to $553 billion in FY2012, as we were requesting.

On March 15, 2011, I gathered the senior military and civilian leadership of the department to begin planning for the dire prospects ahead. I described a stark future:

I am of the view that the budget pressures we are facing are not because of a conscious political or policy decision to reduce our defense posture or withdraw from global obligations. I think it reflects a rather superficial view that the federal government is consuming too much of the taxpayer’s money and that as part of the government, we share an obligation to reduce that burden. The debate that is taking place is largely free of consequences and certainly from any informed discussion of policy choices. As I have said before, this is more about math, not strategic policy decisions.… If the nation decides to cut defense spending, then that is a decision we will honor and carry out to the best of our ability. But we have an obligation to do everything we can to inform that decision with consequences, choices, and clarity on how any such cuts should be done to protect the nation’s interests.

I added that I thought we would not be doing our job right if we obscured the consequences of big reductions by quietly making thousands of small cuts—“salami-slicing”—across the whole department. Significant choices and decisions needed to be made. We had to force the politicians, I said, to face up to the strategic military consequences of their budget math. For once, we had to abandon the military’s traditional “can do” culture and make clear what we “can’t do.”

On April 12, I was summoned to Bill Daley’s office for a meeting with him and OMB director Jack Lew. My budget people had learned from OMB that we were going to be hit with another major cut. Lew told me the president was going to make a speech on the budget and deficit reduction the next day and wanted to announce he would cut Defense by $400 billion over ten years. I was furious. I pointed my finger at Daley and said, “This White House’s word means nothing!” I reminded them that my December 2009 agreement with Emanuel and Orszag had been thrown out, and now the new agreement I had reached with Lew and
the president just four months earlier was being thrown out as well. I reminded Daley of his unfulfilled promise regarding funding for the Libyan operation. “You didn’t get us a fucking dime,” I told him.

Again, a decision with monumental consequences was being driven by a presidential speech of which I was given one day’s advance notice. I told Daley and Lew this was math, not strategy. It would have a big impact on the morale of the forces and send a big strategic message abroad: “The United States is going home, cut a deal with Iran and China while you still can.” The only way to cut that much, I continued, was to get rid of both people and equipment, at a time when we needed to refurbish worn-out equipment from two wars, replace aging Reagan-era ships and planes, and buy a new Air Force tanker. I proposed that the president should be vague in his speech. He should say something to the effect that Defense had cut nearly $400 billion in programs over the past two years and would be asked to do the same again over the next ten to twelve years. Have him ask us, I urged, to assess our strategy, mission, and force structure and make recommendations for his decisions based on that review.

That afternoon I met with the president. He described the desperate economic circumstances facing the country and said that, as he cut domestic spending, Medicare, and Medicaid (little or none of which he has done as of this writing), he couldn’t leave out defense. He said that the Republicans would be okay with that, but not the Democrats. The best politics, he said, would be for him to lie back and stay out of the budget fight. There was no gain in it politically for him. (How many times over the years had I heard presidents, beginning with Richard Nixon, say they were doing the politically hard thing for the good of the country, when in reality it was obvious they were doing the politically easy thing?) I made the same argument to Obama that I had made to Daley and Lew: What did he want us to stop doing? I advised him to keep in mind that the enemy always gets a vote. Suppose, I said, once you make these cuts, “Iran forces you into a real war”? I spoke from the heart: “The way we will compensate for force cuts today in the next war is with blood—more American kids will die because of our decisions.”

Obama told me that he was not asking Defense to match domestic cuts dollar for dollar, maybe one for ten. (Such a one-sided ratio was never in the cards.) Arguing further was pointless, so I shifted focus to how the defense budget would be cut. In the hours between my meetings
with Lew and Daley and the president, my staff and I had drafted a paragraph for the president to use in the speech that I thought made his points but mine as well. There was some jockeying over the language, but given where he was headed on our budget, what he said the next day came out as well as I might have hoped:

Just as we must find more savings in domestic programs, we must do the same in defense. Over the last two years, Secretary Gates has courageously taken on wasteful spending, saving $400 billion in current and future spending. I believe we can do that again. We need to not only eliminate waste and improve efficiency and effectiveness, but conduct a fundamental review of America’s missions, capabilities, and our role in a changing world. I intend to work with Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs on this review, and I will make specific decisions about spending after it’s complete.

As I walked out of the Oval Office, I thought to myself that I wouldn’t be around to complete this review, but I had to make the fight on the cuts. With defense spending at 15 percent of all federal expenditures (it had been over 50 percent when Eisenhower made his speech about the military-industrial complex), the lowest percentage since before World War II, I was convinced the defense budget was a very modest part of the nation’s fiscal problems. Political reality demanded that the military be cut, but at what cost to the troops and to our national security? Did those playing with the math ever consider that? Were they looking at what was going on in the rest of the world?

During my remaining weeks in office, I played both sides of the street. Internally, I organized the comprehensive review with a hoped-for completion by the end of summer. We structured the review to address four broad areas of possible reductions: more “efficiencies,” a combination of further reductions in overhead costs but also cutting programs that were not critical to the future; reducing or cutting capabilities for highly specialized but lower-priority purposes where generic capabilities could be made to work, and also cutting specialized missions such as counternarcotics and building security capacity in developing countries; changes in the size and composition of our forces, which would be the most difficult internally—could we accept reductions in forces that would make fighting two simultaneous conflicts tougher? Should we reduce our ground
forces?; and last, a bundle of possible changes in military compensation and benefits. While I told the department’s senior leadership that I was not comfortable with a defense budget that would grow at only the rate of inflation for ten years, I went on to ask, “With every other agency of government on the chopping block, can we credibly argue that a $400 billion cut (or 7 percent) from the over $6 trillion presently planned for defense over the next decade is catastrophic and not doable?” I began including Panetta in meetings on these issues in early June, since he would lead the effort as of July 1. Happily, Leon and I saw eye to eye on the comprehensive review.

While fulfilling my responsibilities to the president inside the Pentagon, I used my last public speeches to warn Americans about the consequences of significant reductions in defense capabilities. In a commencement speech at Notre Dame on May 22, I said that we must not diminish our ability or our determination to deal with the threats and challenges on the horizon because ultimately they must be confronted. “If history—and religion—teach us anything,” I warned, “it is that there will always be evil in the world, people bent on aggression, oppression, satisfying their greed for wealth and power and territory, or determined to impose an ideology based on the subjugation of others and the denial of liberty to men and women.” I noted my strong support of “soft” power, of diplomacy and development, but reminded the audience that “the ultimate guarantee against the success of aggressors, dictators, and terrorists in the twenty-first century, as in the twentieth, is hard power—the size, strength, and global reach of the United States military.”

Two days later I spoke at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank in Washington, where various scholars had been critical of the earlier program cuts I had made. Ironically, I was at AEI to warn against further cuts to defense. I told the audience I had spent the last two years trying to prepare our defense institutions for the inevitable decrease of the defense budget. When looking at our modernization programs, I said, “the proverbial ‘low-hanging fruit’—those weapons and other programs considered most questionable—have not only been plucked, they have been stomped on and crushed.” What remained was needed capabilities. Those programs, I warned, should be protected “unless our country’s political leadership envisions a dramatically diminished global security role for the United States.” I urged that across-the-board cuts—“the simplest and most politically expedient
approach both inside the Pentagon and outside of it”—be avoided and that future spending decisions be based on hard choices focused on priorities, strategy, and risks. The worst outcome would be to cut the budget deeply while leaving the existing force structure in place, an approach I said would lead to the kind of “hollowed-out” military of the late 1970s: ill trained, ill equipped, and ill prepared. The Pentagon had to be honest with the president, Congress, and the American people that a smaller military would be able to go fewer places and do fewer things. “To shirk this discussion of risks and consequences—and the hard decisions that must follow,” I asserted, “I would regard as managerial cowardice.”

The comprehensive review would be completed under Panetta and Dempsey’s leadership and provide a road map for further cuts. It would prove critically important because the Budget Control Act passed by Congress and signed by the president in August 2011 would reduce defense spending by $485 billion over the ensuing ten years and, through a “sequestration process,” expose the military to an additional potential cut of nearly $600 billion. Math, not strategy, had prevailed after all.

As I suggested earlier, the global security environment is becoming more complex, more turbulent, and in some instances, more dangerous—and the military challenges more diverse. The military capabilities of our longtime allies are shrinking fast, and those of potential adversaries are growing. Yet our security needs and responsibilities remain global. Earlier significant cuts in defense spending following major conflicts, including after the Cold War, were made because the world scene had changed significantly for the better, at least in the short term. But in 2011, neither the state of the world nor the state of our military justified significantly less spending on defense.

The problem with the defense budget, as I saw it, is not its size but how it gets spent. It’s not that we have too many planes, warships, submarines, tanks, and troops; rather, we load up every possible piece of equipment with every possible technology, and then they are so expensive, we can buy only a small number. Defense is not disciplined about eliminating programs that are in trouble, overdue, and over budget. The Pentagon spends far too much money on goods and services that make only a tangential (if any) contribution to military capabilities—overhead, or “tail.” Congress requires the military services to keep excess
bases and facilities and to buy equipment that is no longer needed or is obsolete. And the personnel costs of the all-volunteer force are skyrocketing: health care costs alone have risen in a decade from about $12 billion to nearly
$60
billion.