My Share of the Task (14 page)

Afghanistan in the spring of 2002 had a slightly wild-west feel to it. Bearded Afghans and similarly groomed American and Coalition special operators mixed with conventional military made for an atmosphere of adventure and confusion. And Afghanistan was maddeningly difficult to understand. As CJTF 180 got oriented to our mission, it was rapidly apparent that a major task would be to develop an understanding of what was happening and what people and which forces were driving events.

For most Americans, Afghanistan was a colorful, distant place. Once a destination for free-spirited wanderers, we later knew it as a brutal, mountainous battlefield between the Soviets and heroic tribal resistance fighters—mujahideen, or “holy warriors.” We knew that the Soviets had been beaten, but most of us didn't know much else. Later the Taliban achieved dubious fame with their public executions and the demolition, in Bamyan Province, of ancient Buddhist statues. But until 9/11 few Americans ever contemplated fighting them.

Even for the Afghans the place was confusing. The 1978 coup that replaced President Daoud with a socialist regime and the subsequent twelve-year civil war between the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and the mujahideen opposition had begun a series of events, culminating in the post-9/11 defeat of the Taliban, that turned much of Afghan society upside down. For Western diplomats and military forces, Afghanistan was a maze of mirrors, and we too easily framed issues or interpreted actions through our own lenses. And for many Afghans, appearing to be what Westerners wanted them to be was at least polite and often expedient. Like many others, I had a nagging feeling that a whole world of Afghan power politics—with ethnic groups jostling and old and new characters posturing—was churning outside our view. I felt like we were high-school students who had wandered into a mafia-owned bar, dangerously unaware of the tensions that filled the room and the authorities who controlled it.

We launched an effort to understand and, where appropriate, influence. But we were poorly prepared to do so, tending to see the problem in military terms. We had Lieutenant General McNeill travel the country and engage various leaders. As he did, we leveraged the most effective tool at our disposal: Afghans imagined American power to be infinite. But our ability to develop the relationships that would produce long-term influence was limited. The strategy to help build Afghan institutions was well conceived, but the West's effort was poorly informed, organized, and executed.

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L
ater in the summer of 2002, I was recalled from Afghanistan to the Joint Staff. I wasn't happy to be pulled from CJTF 180, particularly for the first assignment of my career in Washington, D.C.—and at the Pentagon. I'd avoided both for the twenty-six years I'd served, and I was disappointed to leave Afghanistan. But I knew John Abizaid, now a lieutenant general and director of the Joint Staff, had been behind the move. I trusted he knew what he was doing.

Although my initial posting indicated I would serve as the J34, the joint staff director responsible for force-protection issues across the military, when announcement came of my selection for promotion to major general, Abizaid redirected me to be the vice director J3 (VDJ3). In that role, first under Marine lieutenant general Greg Newbold and later for an old friend, air force lieutenant general Norty Schwartz, I assisted the J3 with management of the large operations staff directorate.

Before I returned from Afghanistan, Annie began to prepare for our move to D.C. We knew my job would involve long, often unpredictable hours, so to avoid a commute she decided we'd rent an apartment that was only about eight hundred meters from the Pentagon. Once settled, we quickly established a routine. I'd run very early each morning, shower, then walk the short distance to my office, arriving about 5:15
A.M.

In the evening, I'd call Annie and she'd walk toward the Pentagon, meeting me halfway. As soon as we saw each other, we'd extend our arms out in distant greeting, a silly habit we'd taken from something Sam used to do when very young. We'd then walk back toward our apartment, normally stopping at the grocery store to buy premade salads for dinner. Once home, we'd talk while eating and soon go to bed. It was a life with distractions pared to a minimum.

Initially designed by
two army engineer officers in July 1941 in response to rising office-space requirements for military staffs, the Pentagon was envisioned to provide four million square feet of
air-conditioned office space in a four-story building with almost no elevators. The final result was a five-sided, five-story behemoth with
17.5 miles of corridors that held
thirty-three thousand workers at the height of World War II. It opened to its
first occupants in April 1942 and was completed by January 1943—less than
eighteen months from concept.

Although I claimed it as such, this wasn't my first “work experience” in the Pentagon. My father had served multiple tours there in the 1950s and 1960s and would periodically take my brothers and me along. I'd marvel at the huge hallways and the tradespeople who would pedal the hallways on large white tricycles. Usually our visits were short, but if my father had weekend work to do, he'd sit us at a desk with pencil and paper so that we could amuse ourselves.

One Saturday we became fascinated with a metal “tree” on the desk that held about fifteen rubber stamps. To keep us quiet, my father found an ink pad and paper—and we were in business. After a while we left, my father driving our sand-colored 1955 Chevrolet station wagon back to our Arlington, Virginia, home. My mother was waiting at the door.

“Mac, you need to go back to the Pentagon right away,” she told him. “Security called.”

He deposited us, climbed back in the car, and took off, no doubt a bit worried. He told us later that he'd forgotten the scrap papers we'd tried all the rubber stamps on, and a security guard doing routine checks had found papers marked “Top Secret” and other classifications strewn on the desk, unsecured. Years later the memory made me smile when reading articles about over-classification of government documents.

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A
bout forty years later, my next Pentagon experience began with some of the same wonder I'd felt as a boy. From outside, the enormous structure conveyed an imposing message of might, purpose, and a bit of intimidation. The Pentagon had an amazingly functional design and was in the midst of a long renovation when, at 9:37
A.M
. on September 11, 2001, Flight 77 slammed into the western face of the building, killing fifty-three passengers, six crew members, 125 Pentagon employees, and five hijackers. Aggressive repairs were under way when I arrived in August 2002, and a large American flag hung at the work site. Inside, the increased post–9/11 security reinforced the serious aura.

Unlike many officers, including Annie's father and mine, my first Pentagon tour was as a general officer, which came with advantages and disadvantages. It spared me some of the pain of working endless actions in rabbit-warren-like office space, but the hours and frustrations with bureaucracy seemed equally distributed. Reassuringly, the quality of the people was good, and many of the actions we worked on were clearly important.

Without question, my biggest surprise was Iraq. At XVIII Airborne Corps, we'd focused our attention on Afghanistan and to a lesser degree on Pakistan. But when I arrived to the Joint Staff in August 2002, the primary focus was on planning for potential operations against Saddam Hussein's regime. Couched as contingency planning against the possibility of hostilities, we conducted a war game soon after I arrived that served to identify and frame solutions for many of the challenges analysts predicted would arise in the event of war in Iraq.

At that point I judged the likelihood of war there to be remote. Although Saddam Hussein was an almost perfect caricature of an evil dictator, I didn't take Iraq's military prowess seriously after the first Gulf War. Further, it seemed to me in 2002 that the international response to 9/11 would further constrain Saddam's ability to act. Although the example of North Korea countered the theory that such regimes inevitably collapse, I suspected that would be Saddam's eventual fate.

As fall passed into winter, the probability of war rose steadily. The bill authorizing President Bush to use force against Iraq passed the House of Representatives on the afternoon of October 10 and cleared the Senate—by a vote of seventy-seven to twenty-three—just
after midnight on October 11. Saddam's seemingly illogical reactions to international pressure seemed to confirm assessments of WMD programs that ultimately proved incorrect. Our inexorable buildup of facilities and then combat power, which initially could be interpreted as necessary levers to pressure Saddam into compliance, increasingly looked like concrete steps toward war. Sometime shortly before Christmas of 2002, I remember assessing that our deployments and other preparations had passed the point of being designed to pressure Saddam. It seemed that a decision had been made to go to war.

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T
he VDJ3 position offered me a good vantage point to see how the Pentagon worked. Senior enough to be included in many key meetings but junior enough not to be consumed or constrained by them, I developed a feel for the general mood and trends in the place. I watched how guidance or questions from key leaders in the building were digested and acted on in the “engine rooms” where action officers worked.

Overall, morale at the Pentagon was not great, but I did not see nonstop internecine warfare. When I arrived in August, Secretary Rumsfeld and his team of appointees had been in place for about eighteen months. But many of his anticipated reforms had been postponed due to the tumultuous post-9/11 environment. Still, among the officers, some of the proposals produced angst, exacerbated by the secretary's famously abrasive style. I'd best describe the atmosphere as often tentative and sometimes anxious.

Early on, my duties involved working actions through the bureaucratic process. Many of those decisions could have been made in short conversations or video teleconferences. But many Pentagon decision makers liked the safety of process. There was little recognition that slavish adherence to rigid processes could create inflexible mind-sets across the organization.

Working with Donald Rumsfeld was an adventure, but also instructive. Law required the secretary of defense to authorize the overseas deployment of any forces, and his written approval was called a deployment order (DEPORD). Weekly, we would consolidate all the proposed DEPORDs and conduct a session with the secretary to seek his approval and signature. But the process began much earlier, when staff officers fielded requests from combatant commands—during this period they were mostly from Central Command—for forces. In the days, weeks, and occasionally months that followed, action officers would work long hours with the military services to identify potential sources for the forces, time lines for deployment, and other details. The proposed DEPORDs and supporting documentation were then compiled into a set of about twelve identical three-ring notebooks used to coordinate the actions with key Pentagon leaders in the days before the brief to the secretary of defense.

“DEPORD brief day” was often painful, although occasionally humorous. Secretary Rumsfeld would sit at one end of a conference table in his office, flanked by a briefing officer who was armed with encyclopedic knowledge of every DEPORD. Typically at the table were also the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a couple members of Rumsfeld's staff, and the J3 or VDJ3, the position I then held.

The notebooks were exquisitely organized, with a summary of each proposed deployment, a map showing where it would go, its purpose, and size. Page by page the secretary scrutinized each DEPORD, often asking pointed questions on its importance to the mission and the timing of deployment. In several cases I watched him dig into more detail on a two- or three-person detachment than he did on a fifteen-thousand-soldier combat division. I can't say it was fun, but the rigor of the process forced diligence and scrutiny on the critical decision to deploy service members.

As we postured for war in Iraq, the military's deployment process became an issue. Major military deployments were traditionally designed in support of existing war plans and involved force packages—combinations of forces with all the necessary capabilities for the mission. They were easiest to deploy when a single decision was made for the entire package and military logisticians and transportation planners could flow the force as efficiently as possible.

But Rumsfeld wasn't buying the traditional mindset. He believed military planning was unnecessarily inflexible in what forces would deploy and when they would flow. He felt that a scrub of both would produce a more tailored force and would avoid having to posture it before it was needed. His approach provided him and the president valuable flexibility and ambiguity in their intentions toward Iraq. But operational commanders were left concerned they might not have what they needed if and when fighting began. Logisticians became terrified they'd not be able to make such an ad hoc approach work.

It was an almost classic struggle of cultures and will. Both the secretary and the military were making their best efforts to accomplish the mission. Both were right on a number of points. All were good people. Without question, the secretary's intractability forced the military to be more flexible. But in the process we also experienced a painful period of uncertainty and doubt, which better communication among all the players could have ameliorated.

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O
ne of the actions I was involved with should have given us pause. In the fall of 2002, John Abizaid called me to his office and issued guidance to begin working with selected Rumsfeld staffers to build, train, and ultimately deploy a force of Iraqi expatriates. That force was to assume a role a bit like that of the Free French Army units that led the liberation of Paris.