Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (53 page)

All these meetings were a critical part of my strategy. One of the principal reasons previous secretaries—from Robert McNamara on—had failed to get Congress to go along with their recommended program changes was their exclusion of the military services from the decision-making process and the consequent opposition of the chiefs to their initiatives. I wanted the services intimately involved in the process, and I was prepared to give each service chief and secretary all the time he wanted to explain his views. Knowing that the services would often include programs in their budgets they didn’t want but were sure Congress would insist on, I told the chiefs that this time around they should include only programs they really wanted “and leave the politics to me.” I met at least four times with Army chief of staff George Casey and several times each with the other chiefs. Everyone had a chance to weigh in, not just on his own program but those of others as well. I wanted this to be a team effort, because when we were finished, I expected the chiefs, in particular, to support whatever decisions I made.

As I had told the president, previous efforts to cut programs had been leaked to Congress and the press early in the process, usually from the military service whose program was at risk. So at sensitive points in the debates, I prohibited circulation of briefing books and instead created limited access reading rooms where senior Defense officials had to go to prepare for the meetings. The huge staffs previously involved in the process were cut out. At the suggestion of Mike Mullen, I made everyone sign a nondisclosure statement. I signed the document and ultimately so did everyone else, after some grumbling. In other organizations, those agreements might not have meant much. But Mike and I knew what an oath and honor meant to military men and women—there was not a single leak during the entire process. I told no one except a small core group any of my final decisions until the day I announced them publicly. All of this drove the media and Congress nuts. Members of Congress would later complain about the use of “gag orders” and the lack of “transparency,” and I shot back that previous “transparency” had been the result of a flood of leaks, not official briefings.

As grandiose as it sounds, the magnitude of what I intended to do was unprecedented. Other secretaries had tried to cut or cap a handful of defense programs. We were looking at more than sixty possibilities.

Ultimately I settled on nearly three dozen major programs that, if executed, would have cost about $330 billion over their lifetimes. Given my strategy to announce together all the changes I had in mind ahead of the regular budget process, we were lucky that by the time I was ready to go public, Congress was in recess. (In the hope of securing the neutrality, if not the support, of the leadership of the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees, we briefed them a few days before the announcement on the broad strategic context as well as the specifics. All those leaders supported most of my recommendations.) I believed the response of most media and pundits would be positive, so when Congress reconvened, those members attacking my decisions would be on the defensive. I thought announcing the changes all at once would “divide and conquer” members on the Hill. Previously, when only a few programs were proposed for elimination, affected members could build opposition coalitions by promising those who had no dog in the fight their vote on another issue in exchange. Going after dozens of programs made forming those coalitions much harder.

As for the larger defense industry companies, most of which have multiple contracts with the department, while many would lose in some areas, they would gain in areas where we would be increasing investments. This by and large minimized contractors’ opposition to my decisions.

It was important to make sure the president not only was supportive in principle but would stand behind me with a veto threat if necessary. On March 30, I told the president, Rahm Emanuel, Jim Jones, and OMB director Peter Orszag about each of the major recommendations. The president approved them all. Rahm, thinking of the political challenge ahead, asked me for a list of states and districts that would be most affected by the cuts and how many jobs were affected by each decision. The advantage for the president in all this was that it fit nicely into his theme of Defense reform. And, if it went badly, he could disown one or more of my proposals.

I went public on April 6. I talked about reshaping priorities for Defense on their merits, not to balance the books. I announced we would spend $11 billion to protect and fund the growth of the Army and Marine Corps and halt manpower reductions in the Air Force and Navy; add $400 million for medical research and development; institutionalize and increase funding in the base budget by $2.1 billion for programs to take
care of the wounded and those suffering from traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress; and increase funding by $200 million for improvements in child care, spousal support, housing, and education. All together, funding for taking care of our troops and their families was increased by $3 billion.

I said we would increase base budget funding for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance by $2 billion to deploy fifty Predator-class drone orbits, increase the number of turboprop Liberty aircraft to go after IED networks, and fund a number of ISR enhancements and developmental platforms “optimized for today’s battlefield”; $500 million more for acquiring and sustaining more helicopters and crews, “a capability in urgent demand in Afghanistan”; $500 million more for training and funding foreign militaries’ counterterrorism and stability operations; add more money for expanding our special operations capabilities, both in terms of people and specialized equipment; and add money for more littoral combat ships, a key capability for presence, stability, and counterinsurgency operations in coastal regions.

For conventional and strategic forces, I said we would accelerate the purchase of F-35 fifth-generation stealth fighters and buy more F/A-18 fighters to keep the Navy’s carrier wings fully equipped until the F-35s came on line; add $700 million to field more of our most capable theater missile defense systems; add $200 million to fund conversion of six additional Aegis ships to enhance ballistic missile defense capabilities; fund additional DDG-51 “Arleigh Burke” destroyers, a ship first built in the Reagan years but with additional modernization still best in class; add money to triple the number of students in our cyber warfare schools; proceed with the next generation Air Force tanker; and begin a replacement program for our ballistic missile submarines. I said we would also examine the need for a new Air Force bomber.

I realized that for the press and others, this was mostly ho-hum stuff. The real headlines were about the major programs to be cut or capped. The most significant was probably my decision to cap the F-22 stealth fighter at 187 aircraft. Ironically, I got tagged as the one who “killed” the F-22, but the program had had a long slide since the original proposal in 1986 for 750 aircraft. Over nearly twenty-five years, the F-22 program suffered almost as many cuts from as many hands as Julius Caesar had. Virtually every defense secretary except me wielded a knife. The manufacturers of the plane were very clever—the plane had suppliers
in forty-four states, which made it important for eighty-eight senators. That made capping the number a battle royal.

Apart from cost, I had other problems with the F-22. It was an exquisite aircraft designed primarily to take on other fifth-generation aircraft (presumably Chinese) in air-to-air combat and penetrate and suppress sophisticated air defenses. But we had been at war for ten years, and the plane had not flown a single combat mission. I would ask the F-22’s defenders, even in the event of a conflict with China, where we were going to base a short-range aircraft like the F-22. Did its defenders think the Chinese wouldn’t destroy bases in Japan and elsewhere launching U.S. warplanes against them? All that said, one couldn’t quarrel when pilots said it was the best fighter in the world. After a hard fight, and with a presidential veto threatened, the Senate voted 58–40 in July to accede to our proposal to end production at 187 aircraft. The House of Representatives ultimately went along.

My cancellation of the new VH-71 presidential helicopter drew considerable attention. This program was a poster child for acquisition going off the rails. Over the years, the White House had added more and more important requirements—like added survivability, range, and passenger load—but also trivial ones such as more than six feet of interior clearance so the president wouldn’t have to stoop when he got on board, and a galley with a microwave oven. The Navy acquisition bureaucracy had also made expensive engineering changes that moved the helicopter further away from a commercial design intended to keep costs down. The development program for the helicopter had fallen six years behind schedule, and the cost had doubled to $13 billion. The five helicopters in the initial buy would have had half the range the White House wanted and just over half the range of the existing helicopters. I told President Obama he was about to buy a helicopter that in several respects was not as good as what he already had, that each would cost between $500 million and $1 billion—but that he could microwave a meal on it in the middle of a nuclear attack. As I expected, he thought the whole thing was a pretty bad idea. The concern on the Hill—especially from Jack Murtha and Bill Young—with the cancellation was that we had already spent $3.5 billion of the taxpayers’ money, and it would just be wasted. They were right. The blame belonged squarely on the White House, the Defense Department, the Navy (managing the contract), and the contractor.

I also canceled a couple of big parts of the missile defense program
that simply couldn’t pass the giggle test. I guess they had survived until then because for some members of Congress, there was no such thing as a dollar wasted on missile defense. The first was the “kinetic energy interceptor,” intended to shoot down enemy missiles (for example, from China and Russia) right after launch. It had been canceled a year earlier by the Ballistic Missile Development Office but restored by Congress. Its five-year development program had stretched to fourteen, there had been no flight tests, and there had been little work on the third stage and none on the kill vehicle itself. The weapon had to be deployed in very close proximity to enemy launch sites, a real problem with respect to large countries such as Russia, China, or even Iran. And the missile was so large and heavy, it would have to be deployed either on a future ship specifically designed for it or as a ground-based launcher. The program’s cost had already increased from $4.6 billion to $8.9 billion. I put a stake through its heart.

The so-called airborne laser, also designed to shoot down ballistic missiles right after launch, met the same fate. This chemical laser was to be deployed aboard a Boeing 747, but the laser had a range of only about fifty miles, and so the 747 would have to orbit close to enemy launch sites (usually deep inside their territory), a huge, lumbering sitting duck for air defense systems. To maintain constant coverage, a fleet of some ten to twenty of the aircraft would have been needed at a cost of $1.5 billion each, along with an estimated annual operating cost per airplane of about $100 million.

I also killed the Army’s Future Combat System, a highly sophisticated combination of vehicles, electronics, and communications with a projected cost in the range of $100 billion to $200 billion. The program, like so many in Defense, was designed for a clash of conventional armies. It was highly ambitious technologically, and there were serious doubts it would ever come to fruition at an acceptable cost. My major concern, though, was that the vehicle design did not take into account all we had learned in Iraq and Afghanistan about IEDs and other threats. I killed the vehicle part of the program, seeking a new approach, and the Army was able to use a number of the other technologies that had been developed.

General Cartwright patiently sat beside me through the entire presentation in the Pentagon press room, added his own remarks in support,
and then helped me in answering questions. His technical understanding of the issues and problems affecting many of the programs was invaluable at that moment, as it had been in the decision-making process itself.

In the days following my press conference, I traveled to the war colleges of all four services—Quantico, Virginia, for the Marines; Maxwell AFB, Alabama, for the Air Force; Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania for the Army; and Newport, Rhode Island, for the Navy—to talk about what I was trying to do and to discuss decisions specific to each service. The middle-grade officers I addressed were the future of each of the services, and I hoped by engaging them directly I might be able to plant some ideas and perspectives that would have long-term impact. We’ll see.

We fought Congress all summer and fall of 2009 over the 2010 budget and over all the program changes that I had recommended and the president had embraced. To stay on the offensive, Geoff Morrell, my press spokesman, suggested I give a major speech before the Economic Club of Chicago in mid-July, which Rahm Emanuel arranged with the help of William Daley, a member of the club’s board (and Rahm’s subsequent successor as Obama’s chief of staff). Given that it was midsummer, I was amazed at the size of the crowd they assembled, its enthusiastic response to what we were trying to do, and the widespread press coverage we received. The event symbolized the full support of the White House.

When I had reviewed with the president at the end of March the specifics of what I was going to propose, both Biden and Emanuel said we’d be lucky to get half or 60 percent of what we wanted. When the dust settled, of the thirty-three major program changes I had recommended to the president, Congress ultimately acquiesced in 2009 to all but two. A year later we were successful in getting our way on those. It was unprecedented.

From some quarters, I received harsh criticism. One retired general said that I had “ripped the heart out of the future of the Army.” Others said I had gutted missile defense. According to one retired Air Force general, “He has decimated the Air Force for the future.” Former secretary of the Air Force Mike Wynne, not a member of my fan club, wrote, “I am sure … the Iranians are cringing in their boots about the threat from our stability forces. Our national interests are being reduced to becoming the armed custodians of two nations, Afghanistan and Iraq.” At the same time, a significant number of members of Congress of both parties
were supportive, as were most of the media, who were amazed that a secretary of defense was able to kill even one military program, much less thirty or so.