Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (51 page)

Working for Obama, I was determined to use the additional time I had been given to shape forces, budgets, and programs along these lines. As the full extent of the country’s economic crisis became apparent, I knew the defense budget was too fat a target for Congress and the president to ignore. I decided to try to preempt a crude, counterproductive,
and potentially dangerous grab for defense dollars by showing that we could clean up our own budgetary and programmatic stable. My hope was that if the Pentagon could boldly demonstrate a willingness to reduce bureaucratic overhead and waste while enhancing military capabilities, we might suffer only a glancing blow from the coming budgetary train wreck. I was, shall we say, overly optimistic.

My priorities were clear: to continue taking care of the troops and their families; to achieve greater balance between preparing for future large-scale conflicts and supporting the fights we were already in and most likely to face in coming years, using the budget process to effect that rebalancing; to tackle the military acquisition process and weed out long-overdue, over-budget programs and those that were no longer needed; and to do all I could to enhance our prospects for success in Afghanistan. The first three priorities meant continuing my war on the Pentagon itself, the second and third meant more war with Congress, and the fourth would involve war with the White House. It was clear that every day of my entire tenure as secretary would involve multifront conflict. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Like both Obama and Bush, I bore easily.

With regard to taking care of the troops, during the fall of 2008 I had heard of a considerable disparity in the time required for medical evacuation from the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan—the standard in Iraq was one hour, in Afghanistan it was two hours. As I addressed the matter, I learned that non-U.S. NATO medevac helicopters didn’t fly in “low illumination”—dusk or dark—or in bad weather or into “unsecured” landing zones. Of course, these were most of the times, places, and situations in which medevac would be needed most. Just as troubling, I learned that when U.S. Air Force helicopters in Afghanistan were needed for medevac, the request had to be approved by a senior commander, which caused added delay when every minute counted.

On November 12, I sent the chairman of the Joint Chiefs a memo asking for “a concerted effort” to get the medevac standard in Afghanistan down to one hour, carrying out “this task with a sense of urgency and priority.” Much to my surprise, Mike Mullen, the Joint Staff, and both civilian and military medical bureaucrats pushed back hard that this capability was not needed. Given that the survivability rate of the wounded exceeded 95 percent and that Iraq and Afghanistan shared similar medevac death rates of 4 to 5 percent, they saw no need to take
measures to speed up medevac in Afghanistan. The Joint Staff surgeon, a one-star admiral, argued that with improvements in battlefield medicine, the two-hour standard was sufficient, and the chairman supported him. The Air Force was also opposed to a sixty-minute standard; the Navy was ambivalent. Only the Army and my own staff supported the change I was pushing. The bureaucrats had crunched the numbers, and that was that.

Their response really pissed me off. I told the senior military officers and civilians in one meeting that I didn’t care what their statistics showed, that if I were a soldier who had just been shot or blown up, I’d want to see that medevac helicopter as fast as possible. I told them that if a soldier had been deployed to Iraq, he expected the wounded to be picked up within an hour. Why would he accept something less in Afghanistan? I said this medevac problem was about the troops’ expectations and their morale, and by God, we were going to fix it.

The interim solution was to immediately add ten helicopters and three forward surgical hospitals in the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan, where our troops were most heavily engaged in combat. By late spring, another fifteen helicopters and three more hospitals had been added. In January 2009, 76 percent of medevac missions in Afghanistan took longer than an hour; by July, that was down to 18 percent.

In May 2009, I visited the surgical hospital and helicopter medevac unit at Forward Operating Base Bastion in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. One of the surgeons there told me that prior to the additional medevac assets, they often could not save the life of a soldier or Marine who had lost both legs; now they did so routinely. Those doctors are very special people, and the medevac crews are unsung heroes who fly into places and in conditions that would take your breath away to rescue their comrades-in-arms. We had just needed another little war inside the Pentagon to give them the tools to do their jobs most effectively.

About the same time the medevac issue emerged, the need for an MRAP-like vehicle designed for the unique conditions of Afghanistan became clear. With a casualty rate less than half that of the M1A1 tank and about one-fourth that of the Humvee, the MRAPs had proven their value on the flat terrain and relatively decent roads in Iraq. But these same vehicles were too heavy, hard to maneuver in a rugged landscape—they had virtually no off-road capability—and too wide for the narrow and
usually primitive roads of Afghanistan. So again, under constant pressure from my office (and me), the MRAP task force—and industry—quickly designed a lighter, more maneuverable vehicle, the MRAP-ATV (all-terrain vehicle). We signed the initial production contract at the end of June 2009. The first MRAP-ATVs were delivered to the troops in Afghanistan in early November. The speed with which all this took place—less than a year—as with the original MRAPs, simply could not have been achieved through the regular bureaucratic process. And once again Congress had come through with the money.

A controversial issue affecting troops and their families arose early in the Obama administration. Since the Gulf War in 1991, the press had been prohibited from being present and photographing the flag-draped caskets of service members killed abroad when they arrived at the military mortuary facility at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The military services felt very strongly that these “dignified transfers” should be private, and they even discouraged families from traveling to Dover to witness the rite. Some of the media, on the other hand, argued that this policy was a politically inspired effort to prevent the American people from seeing the “real cost” of our wars abroad. Others contended that these returning heroes should be publicly recognized and honored. I disagreed with the no-media policy, but when I looked into changing it in early 2008, the resistance inside the Pentagon from both military and civilians was so strong, I dropped the idea.

Then on February 9, 2009, at a press conference, the new president said he wanted the matter to be reviewed. The next day, based solely on reading what he had said, I again directed a review of media access to the transfer of fallen service members at Dover and told a press conference of my own that I had done so. I said I thought a change made sense if the needs of the families could be met and privacy concerns satisfied. I imposed a two-week deadline for the review.

The review evoked a wide range of responses. Several groups representing military families and families of the fallen were opposed to any change in policy, I think fearing a media circus. The Marine Corps adamantly opposed any change. The Air Force and the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness—the civilian component of the department responsible for such matters—thought no action should be taken until data on family and service members’ views was gathered. The Army and the Navy supported a change but with complete deference to
the wishes of the families: if a family wanted no press coverage, that was final; if they were agreeable to media coverage, then it would be allowed at a respectful distance. Those opposed to a change were, I believed, sincere in their concern that asking the families about media coverage only added another tough decision at an incredibly difficult moment in their lives. The formal recommendation that came to me on February 19, reflecting a “universal consensus,” was to delay any decision until service members, family members, support groups, and other interested parties had been heard from. I gave them a week to do so.

Political scientists, historians, and reporters are often completely unaware of events or experiences unseen by the public eye that influence important decisions. I often reminded colleagues that presidents and other senior officials listen to a wide array of voices other than those in official government channels. In the case of my decision on Dover, an HBO movie,
Taking Chance
, released that February, had an important impact. The story follows a Marine lieutenant colonel (played by Kevin Bacon) as he escorts the remains of Marine Lance Corporal Chance Phelps from Dover to his hometown in Wyoming, ordinary Americans making gestures of respect all along the way. After seeing the film, I was resolved that we should publicly honor as many of our fallen warriors as possible, beginning at Dover.

On February 24, Mullen and I briefed the president on the results of the review and outreach, and with his strong support, two days later I announced at a press conference that, having heard from the services and organizations representing military families, I had directed that “the decision regarding media coverage of the transfer process at Dover should be made by those most directly affected—on an individual basis by the families of the fallen. We ought not presume to make that decision in their place.” For families wanting media coverage, it would be allowed at a respectful distance. For other families, the transfer would be private. The person designated by the fallen service member as the primary next of kin would speak for the family, although our long-term plan was to offer service members the opportunity to choose for themselves whether they would want media present for their return should they be killed. The transfer of Air Force Staff Sergeant Phillip Myers of Hopewell, Virginia, on April 6 was the first to be photographed by the media under the new policy. I attended Myers’s funeral at Arlington on April 27.

It seemed to me that some families would want to greet their fallen
child or spouse when he or she first returned to American soil at Dover. Defense Department policy was to discourage families from doing so, although some families made their way to Dover anyway, paying for their own plane reservations and hotel accommodations. I decided we should make the arrangements and assume the cost for the families who wanted to go. The Air Force outdid itself in implementing this decision. In January 2010, a new Center for the Families of the Fallen, a six-thousand-square-foot space with a comforting, serene environment, opened at Dover. That spring construction began on a small hotel as well as a meditation center and adjoining garden for the families. By 2010, some 75 percent of the families of returning fallen service members were going to Dover to be present when their hero returned to America, and about 55 percent allowed media coverage.

I made my first visit to Dover on March 16, in the middle of the decision process. As was often the case, the chartered Boeing 747 carrying the remains arrived at night. As we were waiting for the transfer to take place, I asked my staff how the four service members had been killed. I was emotional that night, and when I was told that the soldiers had been in a Humvee that was hit by an IED, I turned on my staff and through clenched teeth angrily demanded, “Find out why they didn’t have their goddamned MRAPs yet.”

Uniformed in fatigues and white gloves, the Air Force honor guard that would carry out the transfer marched by us, and we fell into line and cadence with them to move planeside. The night was cold, with wind and rain. The plane was bathed in floodlights, and the side cargo door was open high above the ground, allowing us to glimpse the first two plain aluminum flag-draped transfer cases. I had told my staff to arrange for me to be alone with the four, so I climbed the front steps of the plane and was escorted to the rear cargo area and the four fallen. They were Army Sergeant Christopher Abeyta, Specialist Robert Weiner, Private First Class Norman Cain, all from the 178th Infantry Regiment, and Air Force Staff Sergeant Timothy Bowles from Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska. Alone with them, I was overwhelmed. I knelt beside each for a moment, placing my hand on the flag covering each case. Tears flooded my eyes. I did not want to leave them, but I finally sensed the chaplain move close behind me, and so I rose, returned to the tarmac, and saluted as, one by one, with extraordinary precision, respect, and care—even
tenderness—the honor guard transferred each case to a waiting vehicle. There was complete silence on the plane back to Washington.

A month later I was visiting wounded at Walter Reed. I walked into one room where a young soldier was sitting on his bed holding a copy of that day’s
Washington Post
with a story about my March visit to Dover, including my intemperate question about why those four service members had not been in an MRAP. He read aloud from the story what I had demanded of my staff, and then he began to cry as he told me, “Your MRAP saved my life.” I managed to keep my composure—barely. I didn’t fully appreciate at the time the emotional toll my duties were taking on me.

Another issue I had tried to resolve early in my tenure was stop-loss, the practice of keeping soldiers on active duty after their scheduled service was completed. I knew that the practice was allowed by the contracts soldiers signed, but I considered it a breach of faith. Stop-loss was obviously unpopular among the troops, but it was also unpopular in Congress. Jack Murtha, chairman of the Defense Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, pushed through legislation providing special compensation of $500 a month for the time any soldier was stop-lossed, retroactive to September 11, 2001. Ultimately we estimated there were some 174,000 eligible claimants, and Congress appropriated over $500 million for the retroactive pay.

A significant number of those stop-lossed were sergeants. Senior Army officers argued that their mustering out would deprive units of their experienced enlisted leadership. More than 14,000 soldiers were stop-lossed at one point. The surge in Iraq made ending the practice impossible in 2007 and 2008, but it remained on my to-do list. I returned to the issue early in the Obama administration. Thanks to the drawdowns in Iraq, Army chief of staff General George Casey and Pete Chiarelli came up with a plan to end stop-loss, which I announced on March 18, 2009, two days after my visit to Dover. Units of the Army Reserve would begin mobilizing and deploying without using stop-loss in August, the National Guard in September, and active duty units in January 2010. The goal was to reduce the number of those in stop-loss by 40 percent by March 2010, 50 percent by June, and to end the practice altogether by March 2011. The Army met these goals, and I was very proud of that.