Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (24 page)

I felt a great sense of urgency in addressing these issues, in no small part because I assumed I had only six months remaining as secretary. I knew that if I didn’t make progress in these areas, and if my successor was not as committed as I to fixing these problems, very little would happen. I knew one of the chief obstacles to proper treatment of wounded troops and veterans was the bureaucratic territoriality of both the Defense and Veterans Affairs Departments. A wounded soldier had to go through two separate disability evaluations, and getting health records from one department to the other was always a challenge. The secretaries of veterans affairs whom I worked through most of the Bush and Obama administrations (respectively, James Peake and Eric Shinseki) were committed to working out these problems. Unfortunately, if there is one bureaucracy in Washington more intractable than Defense, it is VA. Only when
the VA secretary and I personally directed an outcome was any progress made at all. Unless successor secretaries are equally committed to change, whatever progress we made will be lost. And again, as far as I was concerned, a big part of the problem was the system’s unwillingness to differentiate in the process between someone wounded in combat and someone retiring with a hearing problem or hemorrhoids.

Wounded warriors and their families would often mention how difficult it was to get information on what benefits were available to them. When I raised this at the Pentagon, I was sent a two-page list of Web sites where wounded warriors could go to find all they wanted to know about support and benefits. But the effort required to access and read all that material—and the assumption that every wounded warrior family had a computer, especially when assigned to medical facilities away from home—seemed to me symptomatic of what was wrong with the system. In January 2008, I formally asked the personnel and readiness organization in the Pentagon to prepare a paper booklet for wounded warriors that could serve as a ready reference for benefits and care. I received a response a month later in the form of multiple brochures and handouts, a list of more Web sites and 1-800 call centers, all developed to address the needs of the wounded warrior community. I wrote back, “This is
precisely
the problem. We need
one
, easy to read, tabbed and indexed comprehensive guide. Like I originally asked for months ago.” Two weeks later I received a memo laying out plans for the handbook and all that would need to be included in it, and I was informed that it would be available on October 1. I hit the ceiling. I wrote back on the memo, “Strikes me that if it takes six months to pull all this together, we have a bigger problem than even I thought.” And we did.

Many of these matters came under the purview of the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness (P&R). For that office, it seemed the status quo was satisfactory. Virtually every issue I wanted to tackle with regard to health affairs (including the deficiencies in Tricare, the military health insurance program, which I heard about continuously from those in uniform at every rank), wounded warriors, and disability evaluations encountered active opposition, passive resistance, or just plain bureaucratic obduracy from P&R. It makes me angry even now. My failure to fix this inert, massive, but vitally important organization will, I fear, have long-range implications for troops and their families.

Beyond the Defense and Veterans Affairs bureaucracies, there were
two other obstacles to reforming the disability system for wounded warriors. The first was Congress, which has over the years micromanaged anything dealing with veterans and responds with Pavlovian reliability to lobbying by the veterans service organizations (VSOs, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion). Nearly any change of consequence requires new law—a huge challenge. In October 2008, I directed development of a “stand-alone” legislative proposal that would give us the authority to create an express lane for catastrophically and severely wounded warriors.

In December, Mullen and I met again with the people in Defense working on the wounded warrior problem to discuss what initiatives we might suggest to the new presidential administration. I said that I had reached out to the new veterans affairs secretary, Eric Shinseki, who was eager to work with us on the disability evaluation issue. There were two choices: either Defense and VA worked this problem out together or we would go the legislative route. Mullen noted that we needed to improve support for families of the wounded, and I responded that we needed legislative relief to reduce their financial burden. Finally, I said we needed to make sure the National Guard and Reserves were provided for in any legislation. We knew that the legislative path would be tough because of the veterans organizations.

I greatly admire the VSOs for their work on behalf of veterans, for their patriotic and educational endeavors, and for their extraordinary efforts to help military families. That said, again and again they were a major problem whenever I tried to do something to help those still on active duty—for example, my attempt to bring about the changes in the disability evaluation system as described above. The organizations were focused on doing everything possible to advantage veterans, so much so that those still on active duty seemed to be of secondary importance, especially if any new benefits or procedures might affect veterans. The best example of this was their opposition to legislation implementing some of the excellent recommendations of the Dole-Shalala commission. That was unforgivable.

Another example: Senator Jim Webb authored a new GI Bill that was immensely generous in its educational benefits for veterans. I felt the benefits were so generous they might significantly affect retention of those on active duty. I wanted Congress to require five years of service to qualify for the benefits so we could get at least two enlistments
out of troops before they left the service. When I called House Speaker Pelosi to press for this change, she told me, “On matters such as this, we always defer to the VSOs.” (When I visited Fort Hood in the fall of 2007, a soldier’s wife suggested to me that a service member ought to be able to share his or her GI Bill education benefits with a spouse or children. I thought it was a great idea and suggested it to President Bush, who included it in his 2008 State of the Union Address. There was little enthusiasm for it on Capitol Hill, but we were able, ultimately, to get it included in the final GI Bill—a benefit I saw as somewhat offsetting our inability to require five years of service to qualify for the education benefit.)

I found it very difficult to get accurate (and credible) information from inside Defense about whether we were making progress in helping wounded warriors and their families. The bureaucrats in the personnel and readiness office would regularly tell me how well we were doing and how pleased our troops and families were. Meanwhile I was hearing the opposite directly from the wounded. I insisted that we get more comprehensive and accurate feedback from the wounded, other troops, spouses, and parents. “I want an independent evaluation of soldiers and families and a list of programs where you need money,” I said.

I would never succeed in cracking the obduracy and resistance to change of the department’s personnel and health care bureaucracy, both military and civilian. It was one of my biggest failures as secretary.

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In the spring of 2008, the vital issue of the military services’ preoccupation with planning, equipping, and training for future major wars with other nation-states, while assigning lesser priority to current conflicts and all other forms of conflict, such as irregular or asymmetric war, came to a head. It went to the heart of every other fight with the Pentagon I have described. In my four and a half years as secretary, this was one of the few issues where I had to take on the chairman and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Their approach, it seemed to me, ignored the reality that virtually every American use of military force since Vietnam—with the sole exceptions of the Gulf War and the first weeks of the Iraq War—had involved unconventional conflicts against smaller states or nonstate entities, such as al Qaeda or Hizballah. The military’s approach seemed
to be that if you train and equip to defeat big countries, you can defeat any lesser threat. I thought our lack of success in dealing with the Iraqi insurgency after 2003 disproved that notion. I didn’t disagree with the importance of preparing for war against other nations. While that kind of conflict was the least likely, it would have the most significant consequences if we were not prepared. However, I thought we also needed explicitly to budget, train, and equip for a wide range of other possible adversaries. It was never my purpose to relegate state-to-state conflicts and the sophisticated weapons to fight them to second-level status compared to the wars we were currently fighting, but rather to ensure that we maintained our nontraditional capabilities. I wanted them to have a place in the budget and in the Defense culture that they had never had.

In short, I sought to balance our capabilities. I wanted to institutionalize the lessons learned and capabilities developed in Iraq and Afghanistan. I didn’t want the Army, in particular, to forget how to do counterinsurgency—as it had done after Vietnam. I did not want us to forget how we had revolutionized special operations, counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency through an unprecedented fusion of intelligence and combat operations. I did not want us to forget that training and equipping the security forces of other nations, especially developing nations, might be an important means of avoiding deployment of our own forces. My fights with the Pentagon all through 2007 on MRAPs, ISR, wounded warriors, and more made me realize the extraordinary power of the conventional war DNA in the military services, and of the bureaucratic and political power of those in the military, industry, and Congress who wanted to retain the big procurement programs initiated during the Cold War, as well as the predominance of “big war” thinking.

As mandated by law in 1986, the president must produce a National Security Strategy, a document that describes the world as the president sees it and his goals and priorities in the conduct of foreign affairs and national security. The secretary of defense then prepares the National Defense Strategy, describing how Defense will support the president’s objectives through its programs. The NDS provides a framework for campaign and contingency planning, force development, and intelligence. Given finite resources, the NDS also addresses how Defense would assess, mitigate, and respond to risk, risk defined in terms of “the potential for damage to national security combined with the probability of occurrence and a measurement of the consequences should the underlying
risk remain unaddressed.” Finally, drawing on the NDS, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff prepares his own document, the National Military Strategy, providing even more specific guidance to the military services and combatant commands in terms of achieving the president’s goals.

Each of these three documents takes many months to write, in part to ensure that every relevant component of the government and the Defense Department can weigh in with its own views on the drafts. There is a high premium on achieving consensus, and countless hours are spent wrangling over the texts. The disputes are occasionally genuinely substantive, but more often they reflect efforts by each bureaucratic entity to ensure that its priorities and programs are protected. Ironically, and not atypically, the practical effect of the content of these documents is limited at the most senior levels of government. Personally, I don’t recall ever reading the president’s National Security Strategy when preparing to become secretary of defense. Nor did I read any of the previous National Defense Strategy documents when I became secretary. I never felt disadvantaged by not having read these scriptures.

The NDS became important to me in the spring of 2008 in part because my name would go on it, but also because I wanted it to reflect my strongly held views on the importance of greater balance between conventional and unconventional war in our planning and programs. The key passage in the draft concerned the assessment of risk:

U.S. predominance in traditional warfare is not unchallenged, but is sustainable for the medium term given current trends.… We will continue to focus our investments on building capabilities to address these other [nontraditional] challenges.
This will require assuming some measure of additional, but acceptable, risk in the traditional sphere
[emphasis added]. We do not anticipate this leading to a loss of dominance or significant erosion in these capabilities.

This passage, and especially the italicized sentence, led to a rebellion; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the secretaries of the Navy and Air Force, and the chief of staff of the Army all refused to agree to that language. There was “no margin to accept additional risk in traditional capabilities to invest in other capability areas,” they argued.

I met with the Joint Chiefs and combatant commanders in mid-May.
I asked how they differentiated between “risk” associated with current wars and “risk” associated with our ability to respond to future threats. “Why do you assume that state competitors will rely on traditional capabilities to challenge us?” I asked. I did not disagree with them on the need to prepare for large-scale, state-to-state conflict, but I was not talking about moving significant resources away from future conventional capabilities. I just wanted the defense budget and the services formally to acknowledge the need to provide for nontraditional capabilities and ensure that the resources necessary for the conflicts we were most likely to fight were also included in our budgeting, planning, training, and procurement. I was moving the needle very little. But even that was too much, given the threat it posed to the institutional military’s modernization priorities.