Gates, the un-Rumsfeld

Back in December 2008, I thought I saw a subtext in one of the core themes in Gates' writings about Pentagon procurement:

Gates: Have the army you'll go to war with

Defense Secretary Robert Gates' precis of the Pentagon's new National Defense Strategy in Foreign Affairs, A Balanced Strategy, can be read as an extended inversion of Donald Rumsfeld's fatalistic "you go to war with the army you have." Gates' mantra: have the army you'll go to war with. Here as in many speeches, he spotlights the imperative to reform the Pentagon bureaucracy so that it responds more swiftly to the immediate needs of soldiers in the field -- and can think past ingrained assumptions about what kinds of conflict the U.S. needs to prepare for in the future. Hence his subtitle: "Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age."

Five years later, no sooner did I crack open (okay, conjure on-screen) Gates' new memoir when I came across the same inversion of Rumsfeld's infamous mantra, this time in Gates' own voice. At the outset, elaborating on his book's title, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, Gates enumerates several "wars" he had to fight in office, ending with this:

And finally, there was my bureaucratic war with the Department of Defense and the military services, aimed at transforming a department organized to plan for war into one that could wage war, changing the military forces we had into the military forces we needed to succeed (Kindle locations 52-54).

That "war," in Gates telling, emanated from what seems to be the book's core autobiographical claim: that Gates was driven by, indeed obsessed with, safeguarding the welfare of the troops that Bush's bungling (he doesn't put it that way, but the substantive indictment is clear) put and kept in harm's way.  Some of what he did on the troops' behalf is compressed by Fred Kaplan in a remarkable review of Gates' book:

The empire pares back

In occasional posts about Robert Gates' speeches, I've noted that he takes a risk management approach to military spending.  In Pentagon debates regarding how to much focus on building conventional military capabilities to counter strong rival nation-states (i.e., China in 10-20 years) versus asymmetric conflict in failed and failing states, he has worked to weight the scales in favor of the latter, arguing that "the most likely catastrophic threats to the U.S. homeland -- for example, that of a U.S. city being poisoned or reduced to rubble by a terrorist attack -- are more likely to emanate from failing states than from aggressor states." He has served as a kind of antidote to Rumsfeld's "you go to war with the army you have"; his mantra might be have the army you're going to war with. And war, for the foreseeable future, is asymmetric conflict in failed/failing states.

Last week, in his final testimony before Congress, Gates adjusted this approach to deal with the new reality of long-term deficit reduction pressure -- in particular, Obama's proposal to save $400 billion from currently projected military spending over twelve years.  Since personnel costs account for the bulk of military spending, cuts of that magnitude mean reductions in troop levels, which in turn means reduced ability to fight Iraq/Afghanistan-type wars -- which from a certain (probably wrong) perspective means reduced focus on the risks Gates has defined as primary.

The new budgetary pressure requires a different kind of triage from the counterinsurgency-versus-big-ticket-weapons emphasis Gates has pushed for in recent years. The budget-cutting imperative means doing less (military) counterinsurgency -- which means, according to Gates, accepting additional risk. That means that the U.S. must be prepared to do less militarily -- and focus on doing it well:

"Known known": Rumsfeld fixated on Iraq from 9/12/01?

In a well-documented take-down of Donald Rumsfeld's memoir Known Unknowns, Bob Woodward uses records from his own interviews and George W. Bush's Decision Points to dispute Rumsfeld's claim that Bush asked him to look at  then-current military plans for invading Iraq shortly after 9/11 -- on 9/26/01, to be exact. Woodward, offended that Rumsfeld "tries to push so much off on Bush", is at pains to demonstrate that Rumsfeld himself was floating the idea of invading Iraq on 9/11 and 9/12 -- and that "the record shows that it was Rumsfeld stoking the Iraq fires" before Bush did indeed ask for plans in late November. 

Woodward's evidence is from his own Plan of Attack and from the 9/11 Commission Report.  Former counterterrorism director Richard A. Clarke's Against All Enemies provides corroboration that Rumsfeld was fixated on Iraq from the beginning. Clarke implies that driving Rumsfeld's focus was Wolfowitz:

On the morning of the 12th DOD's focus was already beginning to shift from al Qaeda. CIA was explicit now that al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, was not yet persuaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, he said, for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself, without a state sponsor--Iraq must have been helping them...

By the afternoon on Wednesday, Secretary Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and "getting Iraq."  Secretary Powell pushed back, urging a focus on al Qaeda...

What we should talk about when we talk to Donald Rumsfeld

The estimable Gideon Rachman left out the most important thing, IMO, as recorded in today's Financial Times:

Sir, I love Gideon Rachman’s regular column, but his lunchtime interview with Donald Rumsfeld (“Are we better off now? You bet”, Life & Arts, February 12-13) was noteworthy chiefly for its lacuna. There was no mention of Mr Rumsfeld’s role in approving a systematic programme of torture for US detainees, first at Guantánamo Bay and then at Abu Ghraib.

The rest is here.  FT content is available after a free, brief signup that entitles you to access a set number of articles per month.  Worth the trouble: the FT has the best columnist roster that I  know of anywhere. (A print subscription is a bargain; I've never had to pay over $150 for a year.)

My full FT file letter file back to 2006 is here.

Casus belli? Whatever....

Swampland links to a recently-declassified set of talking points drafted for Donald Rumsfeld in preparation for a November 27, 2001 meeting with Tommy Franks -- to plan the invasion of Iraq, less than three months after 9/11.  "Focus on WMD" it begins helpfully, before moving into a skeletal battle plan. Then comes the interesting part:

How start?

• Saddam moves against Kurds in north?
• U.S. discovers Saddam connection to Sept. 11 attack or to anthrax attacks?
• Dispute over WMD inspections?
• Start thinking now about inspection demands.

The ensuing inspection demands were largely met, and no WMD were found. I wonder how the memos read at that point.

Training in torture

Atul Gawande's long look at solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, Hellhole, asks, "is solitary confinement torture?" and provides overwhelming empirical evidence that the answer is yes. Solitary confinement brings on psychosis and hallucination; it makes the mind effectively disintegrate; it causes lasting psychological damage.

In addition to documenting this torture's effects, Gawande also chronicles its explosion in the U.S. prison system since the early eighties, the same period in which the prison population as a whole has exploded:

The number of prisoners in these facilities has since risen to extraordinary levels. America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in isolation in supermax prisons. An additional fifty to eighty thousand are kept in restrictive segregation units, many of them in isolation, too, although the government does not release these figures. By 1999, the practice had grown to the point that Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Virginia kept between five and eight per cent of their prison population in isolation, and, by 2003, New York had joined them as well. Mississippi alone held eighteen hundred prisoners in supermax—twelve per cent of its prisoners over all.

Reading this made me think that like most disasters, the Bush Administration's embrace of more physically abusive forms of torture in its treatment of hundreds if not thousands of detainees from Bagram to Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib had no single simple cause -- say, a rogue Vice President and Secretary of State -- but came at the end of a chain of systemic failures. In some sense that needs to be explored further, we have trained ourselves to accept brutal treatment of those we deem to have forfeited their rights. A politics and society that embraces ever more punitive measures against prisoners and illegal immigrants is part and parcel with one that removes regulatory restraint from elites, from Wall Street to the executive branch, that gleefuly redistributes wealth upwards, and that plots to privatize and eviscerate our common measures for sharing risk.

We have changed course. How successful, lasting and thoroughgoing will Obama's counterrevolution be? For better and worse, we're living in interesting times..

Gates: Have the army you'll go to war with

Defense Secretary Robert Gates' precis of the Pentagon's new National Defense Strategy in Foreign Affairs, A Balanced Strategy, can be read as an extended inversion of Donald Rumsfeld's fatalistic "you go to war with the army you have." Gates' mantra: have the army you'll go to war with. Here as in many speeches, he spotlights the imperative to reform the Pentagon bureaucracy so that it responds more swiftly to the immediate needs of soldiers in the field -- and can think past ingrained assumptions about what kinds of conflict the U.S. needs to prepare for in the future. Hence his subtitle: "Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age."

Like Obama, Gates presents his case for strong action against the status quo as a quest to create "balance," which he identifies as a need on three closely related fronts:

The strategy strives for balance in three areas: between trying to prevail in current conflicts and preparing for other contingencies, between institutionalizing capabilities such as counterinsurgency and foreign military assistance and maintaining the United States' existing conventional and strategic technological edge against other military forces, and between retaining those cultural traits that have made the U.S. armed forces successful and shedding those that hamper their ability to do what needs to be done.

For Gates, creating this "balance" requires pushing hard in one direction against decades-old institutional biases. He wants the Pentagon to place more emphasis on current than on future conflict, more on counterinsurgency than on conventional weaponry, and more on shedding harmful cultural traits than on retaining useful ones.

Gates' three rebalancings mesh, of course. Working harder to get soldiers in Aghanistan what they need today also tips the balance of future planning toward counterinsurgency. Doing so means breaking through the Pentagon's institutional bias toward preparing for major-power conflict.

"Balance" is a multi-valanced term for Gates. It entails triage -- distinguishing the essential from the important; risk management -- accepting less likely risks (e.g. the need to fight a major land war tomorrow) so as to cope effectively with likely dangers, such as newly failed states turning into terrorist breeding grounds; leverage -- i.e., learning to effectively train forces of order and governance in weak or developing states, and re-learning how to gain effective support from allies -- and ultimately, transformation (gradually and mainly be indirect means) of societies in which autocracy, anarchy, extremism and poverty prevail.

Triage: Three decades' experience should have taught us that asymmetrical conflict is the military's primary order of business for the foreseeable future:

Think of where U.S. forces have been sent and have been engaged over the last 40-plus years: Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa, and more. In fact, the first Gulf War stands alone in over two generations of constant military engagement as a more or less traditional conventional conflict from beginning to end. As General Charles Krulak, then the Marine Corps commandant, predicted a decade ago, instead of the beloved "Son of Desert Storm," Western militaries are confronted with the unwanted "Stepchild of Chechnya."

Risk Management:

The most likely catastrophic threats to the U.S. homeland -- for example, that of a U.S. city being poisoned or reduced to rubble by a terrorist attack -- are more likely to emanate from failing states than from aggressor states...It is true that the United States would be hard-pressed to fight a major conventional ground war elsewhere on short notice, but as I have asked before, where on earth would we do that? U.S. air and sea forces have ample untapped striking power should the need arise to deter or punish aggression -- whether on the Korean Peninsula, in the Persian Gulf, or across the Taiwan Strait. So although current strategy knowingly assumes some additional risk in this area, that risk is a prudent and manageable one.

Leverage:

Where possible, U.S. strategy is to employ indirect approaches -- primarily through building the capacity of partner governments and their security forces -- to prevent festering problems from turning into crises that require costly and controversial direct military intervention. In this kind of effort, the capabilities of the United States' allies and partners may be as important as its own, and building their capacity is arguably as important as, if not more so than, the fighting the United States does itself.

Transformation: On this front, Gates sounds very like Obama, portraying the multi-dimensional struggle to reduce the conditions that breed terrorism:

What is dubbed the war on terror is, in grim reality, a prolonged, worldwide irregular campaign -- a struggle between the forces of violent extremism and those of moderation. Direct military force will continue to play a role in the long-term effort against terrorists and other extremists. But over the long term, the United States cannot kill or capture its way to victory. Where possible, what the military calls kinetic operations should be subordinated to measures aimed at promoting better governance, economic programs that spur development, and efforts to address the grievances among the discontented, from whom the terrorists recruit. It will take the patient accumulation of quiet successes over a long time to discredit and defeat extremist movements and their ideologies.

Compare that stalwart prose with a rather remarkable flight of Obama's rhetoric, deployed as preamble to outlining the tools of soft power:

What lies in the heart of a child in Pakistan matters as much as the airplanes we sell her government. What's in the head of a scientist from Russia can be as lethal as a plutonium reactor in Yongbyon. What's whispered in refugee camps in Chad can be as dangerous as a dictator's bluster. These are the neglected landscapes of the 21st century, where technology and extremism empower individuals just as they give governments the ability to repress them; where the ancient divides of region and religion wash into the swift currents of globalization.

For Gates as for Obama, the imperative to combat chaos, poverty and oppressive ideology springs not from grandiose ambition but from humility. In a world where the technology of mass destruction is ever more accessible, there can be no true security anywhere until the poverty and oppression that breed terror are drastically reduced. His focus is largely on soft power because hard power is never enough:

I have learned many things in my 42 years of service in the national security arena. Two of the most important are an appreciation of limits and a sense of humility. The United States is the strongest and greatest nation on earth, but there are still limits on what it can do.

That sense of limitation leads Gates to emphasize diplomacy, to lament the shrinking of the organs of U.S. soft power through the Clinton years, and to seek to build the foreign service, foreign aid, and U.S. information agencies. His sense of how to build and wield hard and soft power in concert is very much in sync with that of his new boss.

Gates repudiates Rumsfeld's "army you have" doctrine

As noted in a prior post, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' May 15 speech to defense contractors situated his immediate tactical and spending priorities within his broader strategic outlook. In brief: in a debate within the military between those who want to focus military spending and planning primarily on counterinsurgency and asymmetric warfare and those who believe that in the long term, we will face more substantial threats from emerging major powers (e.g., China, China, and China), Gates comes down strongly on the counterinsurgents' side. He cast the question as one of risk management: for the foreseeable future, we will likely face multiple challenges from "Smaller, irregular forces - insurgents, guerrillas, terrorists," whereas it's highly unlikely that we'll face a conventional military challenge from powerful nation state."

In the short term, those priorities, as well as a personal commitment to support of U.S. troops, translate into placing top priority on what troops need now - to avoid getting killed, to detect insurgent activity as it happens, and to care for wounded and psychologically damaged solders when they return. And his progress report on these fronts included a devastating if implicit indictment of Rumsfeld's leadership.

Politely, here as elsewhere Gates cast the Pentagon's "leadership shortcomings" as a product of decades of bureaucratic inertia. Nonetheless, the failures he addressed were recent and acute:

My priorities are focused on better supporting our troops in combat and include:

• Sending more intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets to Iraq and Afghanistan;
• Providing troops the best possible protection on dangerous roads in Iraq and Afghanistan; and
• Improving outpatient care and support for our wounded.
  

These are issues I take seriously – and very personally.

Each goes directly to our profound, even sacred, obligation to do everything we can to support the men and women currently fighting on the front lines – people like the four we recognized tonight - to see that they are successful on the battlefield and properly cared for at home. These needs require the Department to focus on the reality that we are in the midst of two wars and that what we can provide our soldiers and commanders three or four years hence isn’t nearly as important as what we can provide them today or next month. In each case, there was some sort of leadership shortcoming:

• A lack of vision or sense of urgency;
• An unwillingness or hesitancy to upend assumptions and practices that have accumulated in a largely peacetime military establishment; and
• An assumption that the war would soon be over and therefore we shouldn’t impinge on programs that produce the kinds of equipment and capabilities that probably would not be needed in today’s combat.
  

A common mantra at Defense is that the rest of the government isn't at war. Well, a lesson I learned fairly early on was that important elements of the Defense Department weren't at war. Preoccupied with future capabilities and procurement programs, wedded to lumbering peacetime process and procedures, stuck in bureaucratic low-gear. The needs of those in combat too often were not addressed urgently or creatively.

True, Rumsfeld also cast himself as a scourge of Pentagon's hide-bound thinking and bureaucratic inertia. True, too, that Rumsfeld preceded Gates in advocating increased reliance on UAVs. More broadly, though, Rumsfeld was focused on developing new IT capabilities and concentrating firepower in the hands of ever-fewer troops achieving ever-quicker victories -- as seemed at first to happen in Afghanistan. Once mired in protracted conflict, it was 'you go to war with the army you have' -- a comment that bespoke a lack of commitment to improving the capabilities of those troops mired in conflict. That lack of responsiveness to conditions on the ground is what Gates is trying to redress now.