Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (75 page)

The Defense Department was not well organized internally to deal with cyber issues. The director of national intelligence under President Bush, Mike McConnell, had urged me in 2008 to create a separate combatant command to deal with cyber threats. We were just then establishing Africa Command, and I thought the president and Congress would balk at yet another major command. But I made some organizational changes in the fall of 2008 and in June 2009 established Cyber Command as a subordinate component of Strategic Command. I recommended that the president nominate Army Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, to run this “subunified” command as well. Its purpose would be to better organize Defense operations in cyberspace, to ensure our freedom of access to cyberspace, and to oversee investments in people, resources, and technology to prevent disruptions of service to the military.

On May 21, 2010, I took the step suggested two years before by McConnell and established an independent Cyber Command with now-General Alexander in command. (Part of my motivation for creating the
independent command was to get a fourth star for Alexander, whom I considered one of the smartest, best officers I ever met. Without such a command and promotion, I feared we would lose him to retirement.) I also created a new civilian office to lead policy development and provide oversight to the new command. Overall, thanks to the NSA and other components in Defense devoted to information and cyber security, and with these organizational changes, I felt reasonably comfortable that Defense Department cyber networks were protected, even though they were attacked by hackers many times a day. A major initiative, led by Deputy Secretary Lynn, to get key defense industries to come voluntarily under our cyber umbrella for protection, was also enjoying considerable success. By mid-2010, I thought we had made considerable progress.

Not so in the rest of government. A major issue was the role of the NSA. Specifically, privacy advocates and civil libertarians were loath to use this military intelligence agency to protect cyber networks at home. The real-world implication of their position was creation of some kind of domestic counterpart to the NSA. I thought that was sheer idiocy. Time and again I argued that there wasn’t enough money, time, or human talent to create a domestic clone. When we got warning in the summer of 2010 that a major cyber attack was being planned on the United States in the fall, I saw an opportunity to break the stalemate.

I devised a politically risky but potentially successful way to bypass the entire bureaucracy, including the White House staff, and present the president with a solution. To somewhat oversimplify, as secretary of defense I had responsibility for national-security-related cyber matters outside the United States, and under the law, the secretary of homeland security—Janet Napolitano—had responsibility for network protection inside the United States. I invited Janet to lunch. We met on July 7, and I proposed that we assign several of our top people to work together urgently on a plan for her department to be able to use the NSA to defend U.S. domestic cyber networks. My idea was that I would appoint a senior homeland security person—recommended by Napolitano—as an additional deputy director of the NSA, with the authority to use the agency’s unique capabilities to protect domestic computer networks. This homeland security appointee would have his or her own general counsel inside the NSA, and together we would build firewalls to protect privacy and civil liberties, to ensure that the wide authority that the NSA had for operating abroad was limited at home.

We met again for lunch a week later to review a preliminary draft proposal. We made some adjustments, and the two of us presented the proposal to the president in the Oval Office on July 27 (unheard-of speed in Washington). We had bypassed everyone else in government—but we told the president the two of us were the ones with operational responsibility, and we could make this work. We told him he could have John Brennan quickly run it through the interagency coordination process (especially the Justice Department) to make sure we hadn’t missed something, but that he ought to be able to approve our signing a memorandum of understanding by August 15. Napolitano and I met on August 5 with Brennan in his West Wing basement office, a large but low-ceilinged and cluttered room. With his support in moving the proposal quickly, within three weeks of our meeting with him, the president signed off on the proposal.

Napolitano and I had briefly been able—with the president’s support—to part the bureaucratic Red Sea, but the waters soon came crashing back together. Although we fairly quickly made the organizational and personnel decisions and changes at NSA to implement our plan, months later General Alexander told me that Homeland Security wasn’t much using the new authority. I don’t know why to this day. But because of the failure to make this or something like it work—along with political paralysis in Congress on how to deal with the cyber challenge—the country remains dangerously vulnerable, as my successor starkly pointed out in a speech in 2012.

The process by which the secretary of defense formally conveys presidential authority to use military force to combatant commanders is through the preparation and signature of “execution orders,” and they apply to the use of force outside war theaters such as Iraq and Afghanistan. These orders, called EXORDs, usually are quite specific, but there were some on the books from the Bush administration, particularly in the counterterrorism arena, that provided combatant commanders broad authority to launch operations without further authorization—particularly when the opportunity to hit a target might require a very fast decision. In every case, the president had broadly authorized the use of lethal force, but I was uncomfortable with any arrangement where use of that force would catch the president by surprise. Under President Bush, I made clear that
whatever the EXORD said, I wanted to be informed of any action beforehand so I could inform the president.

In 2010, I decided we should review all the EXORDs to bring the language in them into conformity with my practice of informing the president in advance. Neither Obama nor his advisers had reviewed the EXORDs approved by President Bush in detail. What I had envisioned as a largely mechanical effort to ensure that the president was properly informed became a broad, time-consuming interagency effort led by an NSS always eager to micromanage the Pentagon. The effort on our side was led by Michèle Flournoy and the assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict, Mike Vickers. We often had to push back hard to keep the White House and State Department from getting too far into our military knickers, but at the end of a year’s work, we had updated the EXORDs, ensured that except in the most extraordinary circumstances the secretary and president would know about operations prior to launch, and had Obama administration buy-in. When we were finished, there didn’t seem to be too much unhappiness on the part of the combatant commanders about the curtailment of their unilateral authority to launch military operations.

In a place as big as the Defense Department, something is always going wrong. Most of the time, it’s just a bureaucratic screwup. But when our nuclear forces are involved, it can quicken your pulse. The first two such incidents on my watch, as I’ve described, had led to my firing of the secretary and chief of staff of the Air Force in 2008. In October 2010, at F. E. Warren Air Force Base near Cheyenne, Wyoming, all communications were lost with a squadron of fifty Minuteman III nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. While alternative communications were soon reestablished, no one had informed the secretary of defense or the president when we lost contact with a launch control capsule and fifty ICBMs. And of course, when the communications went down, no one at the base, or at its higher headquarters at Strategic Command, knew at that moment how long they might be down or whether they had been lost due to a technical malfunction, terrorist act, sabotage, or some other scary scenario—or even whether one or more of the missiles might somehow be at risk. In a masterpiece of understatement, Obama allowed as how he would have liked to have known about it. It was a sentiment I shared.

After a massive investigation, a technical problem was found to be the cause and quickly remedied. The missiles had never been outside our control or at risk. I told the president in early November that new regulations were in place providing that in the event of any future problem involving the nuclear force, the national military command center at the Pentagon would be informed within ten minutes, and both the chairman and secretary notified within fifteen minutes of the event. It would be my decision whether to inform the president. It was a sure bet I’d make the call.

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Two wars and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” notwithstanding, I spent more time on the defense budget in 2010 than on any other subject. For all the bleating from Congress about defense acquisition reform, tighter management, reducing waste, and auditable accounting, they made it nearly impossible to manage the Pentagon efficiently. I oversaw the execution or preparation of six defense budgets, and not one was enacted by Congress before the beginning of the fiscal year. Every year we had to operate for anywhere from a few months to an entire calendar year under a “continuing resolution,” which, in the absence of an enacted appropriations bill, meant we received exactly the same amount of money as the previous fiscal year, without authority to start any new program. Such madness played havoc with acquisition programs. We were left in a state of near-perpetual financial uncertainty.

On several occasions, political fights over the continuing resolutions led us to the precipice of government shutdowns. Warnings of civilian furloughs had to be issued, and we had to interrupt countless programs and initiatives. Under these ridiculous circumstances, when we had to move money from one account to another to cover a dire shortfall, regardless of the amount, we had to get the approval of four congressional committees; a single hostile staff member could gum up the works for weeks. Congress had no problem expeditiously voting in favor of National Pickle Week, but one task it had to do under the Constitution—appropriate money in a timely way—seemed beyond its grasp. Even eliminating wasteful or obsolete programs was almost always a monumental political lift on the Hill, as I learned in 2009. And each year we would get a defense authorization bill from the Armed
Services Committees that contained about a thousand pages of nearly paralyzing direction, micromanagement, restrictions, and demands for reports. You can imagine why congressional complaints about inefficient management at the Pentagon rang very hollow with me. The legislature played its own significant part in making it so.

For three years, I had endured this congressional incompetence with public equanimity and patience. But I was coming to the end of my tether. Because of the growing effort it took to maintain self-discipline, I increasingly resisted going to the Hill to testify or even to meet with members. Throughout my tenure, before every hearing I held meetings with my staff ostensibly to work through answers to likely questions from members of Congress. Actually, the meetings were more an opportunity for me to cathartically vent, to answer the anticipated questions the way I really wanted to, barking and cursing and getting the anger and frustration out of my system so that my public testimony could be dispassionate and respectful. New members of my staff were sometimes shocked by these sessions, fearful that I would repeat in the hearing what I had just said privately. By 2010, the effectiveness of even these sessions was wearing off. Cuffed and shackled, my heel marks visible in the hallway, I would be dragged to the car and hauled before the people’s elected representatives. At least that’s how I felt. Robert Rangel warned another member of my team, “You need to give hard counsel to the secretary—that is, telling him to do things when he doesn’t want to.” He had to be referring to visiting Capitol Hill.

During the first months of 2010, as usual for a secretary, I was dealing with three annual budgets simultaneously—executing the FY2010 budget; defending the proposed FY2011 budget, presented in February; and preparing the FY2012 budget. Beginning with the significant program cuts and caps I announced in April 2009 for the 2010 budget, I was determined to use my remaining time in office to try to shape these budgets to create the versatile military I thought we would need. I also wanted to build on our 2009 success in cutting wasteful and unnecessary programs and activities. However, as I looked at the ever more complex and turbulent world beyond our borders, and remembered history, I had no intention of cutting the defense budget. I readily admit it. As I looked to FY2011 and 2012, what I very much wanted to do was cut bureaucratic overhead and invest the money thus saved in additional and new military capabilities. I continued to hope, as pressures to cut the federal budget
deficit built, that if the department operated in this manner, we could avoid the kind of drastic reductions in defense spending that had followed the Vietnam War and the end of the Cold War.

When Congress got around to passing a defense appropriations bill for FY2010 in December 2009 (two and a half months into the fiscal year), they gave us a base budget of $530 billion, $5 billion less than the president’s request but still about a 4 percent increase, including inflation. (When asked at one point by a reporter whether I was “gutting defense,” I retorted, “In what parallel universe are you living where a four percent increase in the defense budget is a cut?”)

For everyone in the executive branch except the president, the Office of Management and Budget is the villain. It recommends to the president how much each agency and department should spend, and it’s always lower than the request, sometimes a lot lower in the case of the State Department. Of course, if everyone got what he wanted, we would have a deficit far bigger than the one we have. Defense was no exception. As we worked on the FY2011 budget, OMB director Peter Orszag was telling us to plan for no budget growth beyond the rate of inflation for 2011 and several years beyond that. OMB and I were, shall we say, far apart.