Inside the Five-Sided Box: Lessons from a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon (Carter, Ash)

Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.

Photo by Bao Menglong on Unsplash

Carter, Ash. Inside the Five-Sided Box: Lessons from a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon. Penguin Publishing Group, 2019.

These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!

Prologue: Welcome to My World

The DOD also employs more men and women than Amazon, McDonald’s, FedEx, Target, and General Electric—combined. It conducts more research and development than Apple, Google, and Microsoft—again, combined. And it manages more than half the U.S. federal budget, excluding entitlements and interest on the national debt—a budget of more than $ 700 billion, a sum larger than the GDP of Sweden.

Part 1: A User’s Guide to the Military-Industrial Complex

Chapter 1: How Not to Waste $700 Billion

During the Reagan defense buildup of the 1980s, defense spending exceeded 6 percent of GDP, about double today’s figure.

At the height of the Cold War, the United States regularly spent close to 9 percent of GDP on defense. And the highest figure in history, unsurprisingly, came during the all-out effort of World War II, when the military gobbled up fully 41 percent of GDP.

“Our defense experts have never successfully predicted where our next war would be fought.”

we find it necessary to maintain eleven aircraft carrier strike groups while no other nation has more than one.

“military-industrial complex.” There are about ten million such separate contracts awarded every year.

The number of Americans employed by defense contractors exceeds the nearly three million uniformed military and civilian personnel of the Defense Department. This makes DOD the largest employer in the economy by far.

I got the strong sense that the company officials were basically unconcerned about the delays and cost overruns, feeling that their profits were assured no matter what happened.

make sure that defense work is attractive enough that good companies are willing to do it, but not so lucrative that it becomes an embarrassment to and drain on the taxpayer.

in the development phase of new and technologically complex systems like JSF, no one really knows what a successful design will cost. So to be fair and to get contractors to bid, DOD needs to agree to reimburse costs as they are incurred and add profit to that.

Chapter 2: Working at War Speed

As Gates told me, “The troops are at war, but the Pentagon is not.”

The office of the acquisition czar included no one with a specific assignment to keep track of the needs associated with our ongoing wars.

most people who work in the vast and sprawling defense system are understandably wrapped up in its day-to-day affairs. The urgency of fighting wars gets lost in the bureaucratic scrum.

need for gear that could protect the private parts of our soldiers from the devastating impact of an IED.

British were providing special undergarments—so-called ballistic underwear—

Despite the various adjustments we had to make to the MRAP program, we were able to ramp it up exceptionally quickly. In just sixteen months, we built and fielded more than eight thousand MATVs for Afghanistan. It was the biggest, fastest industrial defense procurement program since World War II.

One problem was that, in the early years of this century, the Pentagon was prepared almost exclusively for traditional military-versus-military conflict, of the kind our country’s forces have fought throughout U.S. history.

This pattern of pendulum swings leading to overcorrections—and, ultimately, the need to swing back to achieve a better strategic balance—is a common problem at the Pentagon, as it is in many other organizations that grapple with continually shifting challenges. Hence the familiar warning against the mistake of “fighting the last war,” which applies not just to military strategists

The second big strategic mistake we made was believing that the new wars we’d embarked on in Afghanistan and Iraq would be over in a matter of months.

The Vietnam conflict offered a major challenge to that philosophy.

After the Vietnam War ended, our focus changed again. During the decade and a half from 1975 to 1989, the Russian threat returned to center stage.

The 1990s were a decade when defense spending fell sharply (thanks to the “peace dividend” made possible by the end of the Cold War) and Pentagon strategists struggled to define a new mission for which our still-massive military should prepare.

Pentagon was a bit like a successful corporate giant confronted by a nimble start-up armed with a disruptive new technology.

As I like to say, we had to learn how to “acquire, then require.”

I need some kind of gadget that can solve the following problem—let me tell you about it.” And together we would figure out how to define what the troops required.

We came up with a simple solution: balloons equipped with video cameras.

For example, in Afghanistan, the amount of money the Pentagon spent in 2010 was equal to the Afghan national GDP.

“The gunny says that, in the Marine Corps, you never get what you expect, but you always get what you inspect”—

The SIG had two informal mottos: “Nothing is too small” and “We work for you.”

Spin a globe, and you’ll find no place more forbidding than Afghanistan when it comes to waging war. Afghanistan is landlocked and surrounded by countries with which the United States has difficult relations at best.

Each of the many brigade combat teams that rotated into and out of Afghanistan every year would bring in their own equipment—armored vehicles, weapons, radios, and so on. A needless expense? Not really. Troops love their own equipment and fight much better when using the same equipment they’ve trained on. So we took it all in and took it all out with every change of rotation.

Chapter 3: A Scientist in the Pentagon

employing a system for making and implementing decisions that are driven by facts—

the makings of some 150,000 Hiroshimas—supplies of highly enriched uranium and plutonium, along with fully assembled bombs of all types—had been deployed by the Soviet state.

We argued that Nunn-Lugar was “defense by other means.”

Part 2: Many Hands on the Tiller

Chapter 4: The White House Is on the Line: Serving the President While Serving the Nation

I gave a version of the three commitments I would subsequently include in virtually all my speeches as SecDef—

·      to protect and support the troops;

·      to provide the president with candid advice and with “excellence in execution” of hisdecisions;

·      and to be a Secretary of Defense for the future as well as the present.

Come to me for help when you need it, but I’m going to count on you to run the building while I am paying more attention in this role to the world outside.”

getting to know as much as possible about the working style and the decision-making practices of my new boss, President Barack Obama.

The deft management of the complications related to the breakup of the Soviet Union by President Bush and his team is one of the foremost examples of the phenomenon I mentioned earlier in this book—the potential disaster that doesn’t happen, which therefore tends to be unrecognized and underappreciated

But Obama did sometimes exhibit a bit of the overconfidence, even arrogance, that can come from being both very smart and comparatively young.

disdain for what he called “the Washington playbook”—the supposed set of unwritten guidelines for U.S. foreign policy dictated by “the establishment” and often parroted by mainstream pundits in the media and elsewhere.

A popular joke in Washington foreign policy circles used to be that “Obama’s foreign policy is better than it sounds.”

disasters that are averted through foresighted planning usually get ignored, until history is written years later.

Obama also has a number of gifts that make him an exceptional leader.

·      His thinking is not only smart but orderly:

·      in meetings, he is decisive and communicates his intentions clearly.

·      remarkable degree of openness and respect for varied opinions.

·      Above all, President Obama did not play games.

When it comes to presidential leadership, it doesn’t get much better than that.

complained publicly about having their battlefield decisions “micromanaged” by President Obama.

This simplistic notion reflects the unfortunate culture gap between the military and civilian sides of our country; and by exalting one side and denigrating the other, it also contributes to widening that gap.

I was intimately familiar with capture/ kill operations of this kind.

Unauthorized leaks are often used by administration officials to force the president’s hand by mobilizing public opposition or support for a proposed policy before a decision is ripe. Presidents resent getting boxed in like that—and rightly so. That’s one of the little-understood reasons why controlling leaks becomes such an obsession for so many administrations.

The story illustrates one of my strongly held beliefs about leadership: that sweating the details on crucial operations is part of the job of a leader. I personally worked over CONOPs, usually multiple times, until they met the standard I thought a president would reasonably demand. It’s striking how the issue of micromanagement seems to disappear when leaders do their jobs at the granular level needed to guarantee quality.

“microstrategy,” the term I used with my staff when characterizing many White House meetings.

while DOD was required to prepare and present CONOPs about military actions we were planning, other departments were never asked to make comparable presentations. That actually would have been a useful exercise—for example, to ask the State Department to craft a diplomatic CONOP to accompany the conduct of freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea.

“You folks are sure taking a lot of notes for your memoirs.” To set his mind at ease in my own case, at the first NSC meeting I attended, I conspicuously closed the notepad before me and folded my hands atop it, a practice I followed at later meetings as well. This wasn’t solely a courtesy to the president: I find it easier to concentrate on a conversation when I’m not trying to write at the same time.

“Give praise in public but criticism in private.”

Of course, DOD employees tend to resent having to pass every plan by a State Department counterpart.

Taking a cue from Bill, I began having weekly brown-bag lunches with other assistant secretaries around town, including officials in both the White House and the State Department. I also made a point of taking them on trips with me when I had a military airplane at my disposal. The result was excellent interagency teamwork on issues ranging from relations with the former Soviet Union to nuclear nonproliferation.

John’s involvement in the Syrian civil war was one area in which we saw things differently. Neither I nor any of my predecessors as SecDef had advocated involving the U.S. military in the Syrian civil war. Had we chosen to interpose American might, we could have deposed Bashar al-Assad, but Iraq had just reminded all of us—and particularly President Obama—about the difficulties of governing places you have conquered. Still, John Kerry desperately wanted some military card he could play at the diplomatic table.

John and I also had very different working styles. I tended to be deliberate and methodical, two tendencies driven in part by my personality and in part by the burden of managing a vast, complex bureaucracy with enormous day-to-day responsibilities. As Secretary of State, running a much leaner operation, John retained something of the style of a senator, alighting briefly on many issues and never dwelling long on any one. In addition, John was an enthusiastic phone talker, while I found face-to-face meetings and written missives more effective.

The members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, though they serve as leaders of the five branches of America’s military, are not officially in the chain of command—the hierarchy that connects the president of the United States, through the Secretary of Defense, down to individual troops on the ground.

SecDef is prepared to give him access to professional military advice even if it is contrary to the views of the secretary himself.

The Art of Advising

The only proviso is that the advisor must provide loyal implementation of policy when his own recommendations are overruled. That happened to me many times

I found that being a truly helpful advisor to a president involves three elements.

·      First, in any given situation, it’s essential to understand what the president’s intent truly is. A wise advisor tries to get inside the boss’s head to understand what his thought process is.

·      Second, it’s important to distinguish the president’s intent from any specific idea he has for realizing that intent. “Another way to get where you want to go would be . . .”

·      Third, it’s crucial to offer the president whole solutions rather than partial ones.

This tactic of springing a document on people without warning or vetting—known as “table dropping”—had always been offensive to me.

The truth is that it’s just not so. In my thirty-five years in and around the DOD, I never witnessed a military action being initiated purely for political purposes. The closest thing I’ve seen to a wag-the-dog war is the kind of small-scale military attacks—often derided as “pinpricks”—that presidents choose to launch as a way of demonstrating moral principle or issuing a warning to an adversary without making a major, risky commitment of U.S. troops.

Chapter 5: A Board of Directors with 535 Members: The Arts of Dealing with Congress

Few realize how new it is—and what serious consequences real gridlock in Congress can produce.

popular notion that many of our nation’s problems could be solved if only we ran government “more like a business.”

A vast number of stakeholders powerfully impact the work of the Pentagon, from others in government to opinion shapers in the media, our international allies, and, of course, the American people themselves. Businesses, too, and especially public companies, have multiple stakeholders. But they have nowhere near the same requirements for transparency and public accountability. Moreover, some of the stakeholders to whom the Pentagon must respond are unusually demanding. I don’t think the average corporate board of directors writes a list of 3,500 guidelines for the CEO to follow every year. But that’s a fair description of what Congress does.

the Defense Department is unlike virtually any business in that it has little or no choice about the tasks it undertakes.

Nor does the DOD get graded on a quarter-by-quarter basis, the way Wall Street tends to measure the effectiveness of corporate CEOs. The SecDef is given command of an organization that has been in existence for over 240 years, and, if worthy of the job, he makes decisions based on the knowledge that it will continue to operate for centuries to come. So planning with a long time horizon is essential.

It’s true, then, that running the Pentagon requires the organizational, strategic, and financial acumen that it takes to guide a giant global corporation. But the job also involves subtle and complex demands that are far more difficult than those of business, which is why calls to “run the government like a company” are naive and simplistic. These demands are particularly galling when they come from politicians and pundits with no business experience themselves.

The third and final responsibility of Congress that’s closely related to the work of DOD is the power “to declare War,” as stated in Clause 11 of Article I, Section 8. Note that, in practice, the power to declare war has become separate and different from the power “to authorize the use of military force.”

Your goal as a witness in a hearing is to seize and retain control as fully as possible right from the very beginning.

“murder board” that I did scrupulously before every hearing, even after I’d had years of experience.

Finally, get a piece of white cardboard (my favorite writing surface) and write down all the key facts and phrases you may want to cite during your testimony. (I am able to print neatly and rather small, which helps.) The process of creating this tool will help solidify the items in your memory, and having it in front of you on the table as you testify will greatly enhance your confidence.

2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) related to terrorism had been cited thirty-seven times in connection with actions in fourteen countries and on the high seas. The direct connections to the needs associated with the original AUMF had become increasingly tenuous.

Chapter 6: Communicating with the Press and the Public

“If you hold on running anything for the moment,” Cook offered the AP team, “you can be the first to report the full story,

When a major announcement was in the offing, I would often devote most of a weekend to composing a first draft, since it was impossible to fit the job into busy workweek. Then I’d send the draft to my speechwriting team and others on my staff. After they’d had a chance to study it, we’d all get together and critique it, a process a little like the murder boards I’d engage in before a congressional hearing. This would help me to anticipate likely questions, as well as fine-tune the structure, tone, and choice of words used in my statement.

power of repetition

insistence on using such catchphrases

“Ash Carter Bingo,” earning points every time they heard me use one of my favorite lines.

you have something to tell me, come and see me. I don’t want to read about it in the newspaper. Don’t jam me.” Obama and his close aides had become convinced that certain people in DOD had repeatedly leaked their military recommendations to the press before the president had decided whether or not to follow those recommendations.

Part 3: Troops in Action

Chapter 7: Chain of Command: How Military Plans and Orders Are Developed and Executed

The U.S. Constitution makes it clear that the chain of command begins with the president. But where it goes from there is not really understood by many.

In today’s chain of command, orders for the armed forces flow from the president to the Secretary of Defense, and then to the combatant commander (COCOM) whose forces carry out the orders. The current military structure includes ten combatant commands.

the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Chiefs as a body are not part of the legally mandated chain of command. Neither are members of the National Security Council, such as the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Homeland Security.

single most important responsibility of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is to provide professional military advice to the SecDef and the president.

Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986,

The first and most fundamental impact of Goldwater-Nichols was to introduce and insist upon the concept of “jointness” in the armed forces. This meant that separate wars would no longer be waged by the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, as in effect they had been in Vietnam. Instead, forces from all the services operating in a given theater would report to a single commander, making coordination of their efforts far easier and more effective.

required all officers to serve in joint assignments, where there would be a mixture of service components fighting a war or running a command post for a theater working side by side.

system for joint procurement, enabling technological advances to be spread and shared more rapidly and efficiently among the services,

strengthened the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and created a vice chairman to aid him,

in practice, matters are often more complicated,

According to the chain of command, the CONOP was to be formulated not by a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or even the chairman but by the relevant COCOM

most military operations have complex nonmilitary dimensions—diplomatic, political, and economic.

NATO mission has been so successful that many Americans take it for granted.

Provided the United States is careful not to allow its partners to drag it into conflicts that do not directly affect our vital interests—for example, Saudi Arabia asking us to join its war in Yemen—these relationships are force multipliers.

When we are party to a formal alliance, our allies are built into a command structure that is always led by an American.

However, national governments reserve the right to issue what they call “caveats,” which limit what they will allow their forces to do.

there are times when Americans fighting in NATO operations are commanded by foreign officers.

distinction between “operational control” (OPCON) and “tactical control” (TACON).

Most war plans unfold like the script for a six-act play,

·      Phase 0, “Shape”—

·      Phase I, “Deter”—

·      Phase II, “Seize Initiative”—

·      Phase III, “Dominate”—

·      Phase IV, “Stabilize”—

·      Phase V, “Enable Civil Authority”—

History shows that no conflict ever unfolds precisely as planners had imagined.

As Eisenhower famously remarked, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

responsible for maintaining the war plans

elaborate, formal process by which each war plan is developed, updated, and finally approved by the SecDef, all on a cycle that generally takes about two years.

“time-phased force deployment document”

the SIOP contains the usual categories of strategic targets. Each carries a number of specific consequences in terms of escalation of nuclear war and the annihilation of populations and cities.

half an hour for Russian missiles to arrive at U.S. targets, and about ten to fifteen minutes for submarine-launched missiles to arrive in Washington.

They say that the office of president passes first to the vice president, then to the Speaker of the House, then to the president pro tem of the Senate, and thence to the cabinet secretaries in chronological order of the creation of their offices. This means that the first cabinet office to assume the presidency would be the Secretary of State, followed by the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, and then on down the line to the Secretary of Education, the Secretary of Energy, and, newest of all, the Secretary of Homeland Security.

find the highest-ranking member in the chain of succession, inform him or her, “You are now the president of the United States,” and request orders.

distinction to be made regarding the powers of the president is between the chain of succession and a possible chain of delegation.

That includes the specially equipped 747 jumbo jet that the SecDef uses for global travel, known as the E4-B—an interesting airplane with an interesting history. Its most important purpose is to serve as an aerial command center in the event of a nuclear war.

The military code of justice requires troops to refuse to follow orders they know are illegal.

Chapter 8: Combat Readiness in a Crisis-Prone World

U.S. military today is engaged in combat much more frequently than it ever was during the post-Vietnam years

SIOP exercises that simulate the ultra-tense moments when a decision regarding the use of nuclear weapons would need to be made.

When we talk about the readiness of military forces, we mostly mean whether they have exercised enough to do what they’re supposed to do, meaning that they’re fit to send to war. There’s an elaborate system for ranking this readiness,

level of training accomplished by the unit, the commonly used readiness metrics also take into account such considerations as whether each slot in the unit is actually filled by a service member, whether aircraft are ready to go or undergoing maintenance, and whether all the equipment the unit needs is in its possession.

The CONOP proceeds up the chain of command until it reaches the SecDef,

The second type of employment order is one that would be quickly issued in response to an unanticipated incident—for example, an attack on U.S. forces or a diplomatic facility.

The purpose wasn’t to exchange information, because the commanders on both sides would have kept us both fully informed. The real purpose was to enable my South Korean counterpart to tell his president and the Korean press, “I have been in touch with the U.S. Secretary of Defense and we are addressing this matter together.” Being able to make such a statement has important symbolic meaning in Korean culture and politics—

One of the most challenging elements in dealing with an emerging crisis is the lack of clear information. Here are some of the rules of thumb I’ve developed over the years for handling such situations:

·      First, I force myself to remember that, in the early hours of a developing situation, at least 20 percent of what I am hearing is probably false—and at least one time in four, the level of false information is more like 90 percent.

·      Take a deep breath and refrain from making any hasty decisions.

·      stop and ask when a decision is actually required, and why.

Once you turn down the temperature in the room, you’ll find that, quite often, what your team members really need from you is not an immediate decision but simply a sense of clarity and an orderly process.

Let hem know that you are examining options, and that a decision will be made when one is needed.

·      give your team members tasks to handle in the meantime—

·      Buying time to make the right decisions is doubly difficult when the crisis has already been publicly reported.

·      It also helps to “feed the beast” with whatever morsels of information and policy background you can safely provide. After all, as the saying goes, “You can’t beat something with nothing,” so it is better to fill the news vacuum with content that reflects your perspective and your values

·      Thus, I described actions under way, rather than asking people to just “wait and see.”

There are three kinds of crisis scenarios that unfold on very rapid and predictable timelines. These require different kinds of action and authorities. In escalating order of risk, they are authorizing the launch of missile defense interceptors against a foreign rocket; shooting down a civilian airliner that appears to have been hijacked and is heading for a high-value target like the Capitol or the White House; and responding to a massive nuclear attack from an adversary like Russia or China.

one of the F-16s maneuvered itself right in front of the airliner so that a blast from its jet engine would shake the aircraft. This is called bumping. It’s a dangerous maneuver, but it’s authorized in a situation like this.

Chapter 9: Clarity of Purpose: Defeating Isis

State Department declared that it intended to “normalize” its embassy in Baghdad, making it more like embassies in India or Saudi Arabia, where our major national security focus was arms sales.

gradually concluded that the United States and its coalition partners lacked a comprehensive, achievable plan for success.

The coalition lacked both useful tools to fight ISIS and a realistic assessment of the tools at our disposal, and was almost totally bereft of accurate intelligence about the enemy. It lacked clearly articulated objectives and a coherent chain of command for the operation.

get a handle both on the operation and on how to talk about it with confidence.

introducing “accelerants” to the campaign that increased the pressure on ISIS and helped shape the events to come.

detailed military campaign plan before the president that offered a clear path to retaking Mosul and Raqqa.

change the way we talked about it. Officials spoke of the need to “degrade, and ultimately defeat” our enemy.

describing our goal as a “lasting defeat”

But the avoidance of the word “combat” risked minimizing the risk and sacrifice of U.S. and coalition forces.

anodyne messaging I inherited revolved around nine “lines of effort.”

was a list, not a strategy.

position for a special State Department envoy on ISIS issues.

blurred the responsibilities of the Defense Department, State Department, and White House, and was a nuisance to the chain of command. As the expression goes, the Allen role “filled a much-needed gap.”

overwhelming impression was that the State Department was running the show and sidelining the military just to prove a point.

Compounding our problems was the fact that intelligence on ISIS was almost entirely lacking. We did not understand who our enemy was, where he was, or what he would do next.

the error was “more in conception than execution,” which was another way of saying that Nagata’s most able efforts hadn’t stood a chance.

We needed to build a military campaign, and a campaign needs a single commander.

In May, when ISIS seized Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s al-Anbar province, I caused a stir when I told CNN’s Barbara Starr that Iraqi forces defending the city had “just showed no will to fight. . . . They were not outnumbered. In fact, they vastly outnumbered the opposing force, and yet they failed to fight.

encouraged DOD to present him with broader and more creative options for accelerating the fight.

It annoyed me when people who didn’t understand how things really worked misunderstood the real pacing factors and consequently dismissed our approach as “incremental.”

“human terrain”: the tribal relationships and political rivalries that drove so much of what happened there.

We had gone from vague “lines of effort” to specific steps, and had buy-in from the president for those steps. But we didn’t have a way of showing how the steps would get us to our destination. And I didn’t have the full backing of the president for an integrated, specific campaign. Both would come in December.

go from concrete steps to a clear path toward an end state.

World War II newsreels that represented the relentless march of the Allies across Europe and the Pacific with big, sweeping arrows. I showed Obama a map with two

bright red arrows pointing to Mosul and Raqqa.

three strategic goals:

·      dealing ISIS a lasting defeat in its homeland of Iraq and Syria, thereby eliminating the cancer’s parent tumor;

·      combating metastases in places like Libya and Afghanistan;

·      and protecting our homeland from ISIS terror.

I have attended many international meetings, and often, the signal-to-noise ratio is extremely low.

we needed a productive session, not a gabfest. One of the tools she used to ensure this was the “Chiclet chart,” which Elissa created with the military planners from CENTCOM. It was a grid listing the categories of assistance required for the campaign—say, trainers for Iraqi police forces or logistics support—and the contributions of each coalition member, shown on squares marked in green, yellow, or red, like pieces of Chiclet gum.

Pedro Morenés of Spain.

sequenced accelerants amounted to “incrementalism,” smacking of Vietnam-era mission creep. This characterization missed the point. The “increments” largely represented requirements that we foresaw, and planned for, well ahead of time, now being deployed as they became tactically relevant.

He told me that they were there not to preserve Assad “as a person,” but to save Syria as a country—to preserve its “state structures,” he told me in a Soviet-style locution.

insisted that these talks be purely professional and characterized accurately as “deconfliction,” not “cooperation.”

In the end, it was a NATO ally that caused the most complications for the campaign. Turkey’s internal politics and its obsession with suppressing Kurdish power—born out of hard experience—were recurring distractions.

Turkey was less interested in fighting ISIS than in preventing Kurds in eastern Syria from linking up with those in the town of Afrin, less than one hundred miles away from Manbij, which would give the Kurds control of a continuous stretch along the Syria-Turkey border.

weeks after an attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in July 2016.

President Obama and allies such as Italy, with the most at stake, felt strongly that we needed Libyan government support before we took action in Libya.

today’s military is captured in the word quagmire.

long-term struggles in distant countries in pursuit of elusive goals against hard-to-define enemies.

definition of victory that Americans recall from the two world wars—ending with a joyous homecoming, a triumphant ticker-tape parade, and a nationwide return to peacetime pursuits—no longer seems to apply.

Part 4: He Big Picture: Defense Strategy in a Time of Transition

Chapter 10: Strategic Transition: Major Adversaries on the Global Chessboard

United States faced no fewer than five major strategic challenges: Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and the threat of terrorism.

A reader might get the impression that actually naming these governments would violate some unwritten rule of diplomatic etiquette.

name the joint staff has come up with for your five challenges: CRIKT.”

To defend America successfully in the twenty-first century, the giant battleship that is DOD must somehow learn to maneuver as swiftly and flexibly as our multifarious adversaries can.

The two-wars strategy, then, is inherently self-contradictory. It owes its existence to an accident of history.

U.S. military able to beat the Soviets would also be able to beat the Chinese, the Iranians, the Iraqis, the North Koreans, or other regional powers. (In strategy-speak, all these other rest-of-the-world threats were described as “lesser included cases.”) So our strategy was “Prepare to beat the Russkies,” and this would take care of everything else.

So the two-wars concept was developed as a way to forestall a total collapse of the defense budget.

purpose of the two-wars concept was never to guide strategy formulation for the real world. It was to serve as a tool and a cudgel for political and bureaucratic battles. And unfortunately, much the same can be said about a lot of what passes for strategic thinking about national defense.

The joke that Obama’s strategic thinking was “better than it sounded” contained some truth. Obama’s instincts regarding foreign policy and security issues were largely sound. But his strategic attention seemed to be focused more on avoiding the kinds of mistakes made by some of his predecessors, such as the disastrous war in Iraq, than on enunciating an overarching strategic vision of his own.

Many have said that the closest thing to an “Obama doctrine” was the president’s own admonition, “Don’t do stupid stuff” (using a cruder four-letter term in place of “stuff”).

biggest need from my point of view was to devise and convey clear defense strategies for Russia and China.

We stood watching as a landscaping crew began planting sunflowers in a field where a Soviet missile silo had previously stood. It was a profound moment, because it demonstrated that the world could change for the better—

nations can willingly give up the awesome destructive power of nuclear weapons, placing their trust instead in a world order dedicated to peace and a powerful America dedicated to international partnerships.

Bill and I believed that this period of “B-list” and “C-list” crises would not last forever—that the time would come when frictions among great nations like the United States, Russia, and China would again seize the spotlight.

world’s defense capabilities could play an important geostrategic role—not just by deterring aggression, but also by preventing conflicts through the development of communication channels and cooperative projects among potential adversaries. Programs of this kind, we believed, could help build an international environment in which trust might flourish. Perry and I further theorized that joint exercises, scenario planning, and sharing of technology could help focus potential antagonists on common interests and allow them to join forces in mutually beneficial operations when the opportunity arose. This, in a nutshell, was the concept we dubbed preventive defense.

Track II dialogues

While assistant secretary in the 1990s, I attended a number of U.S. summits with Boris Yeltsin, during which I noticed a young Russian staff member sitting with his back to the wall, taking detailed notes of everything that was said and done—a then-little-known security officer named Vladimir Putin.

explore cooperative efforts for European security against the backdrop of the expansion of NATO, which the Russians hated and feared.

The positive legacy of Nunn-Lugar has given way to a new era of renewed tension between our two countries, driven largely by the vision of one man: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin is a man consumed by three bitter beliefs:

·      that the end of the Cold War was not a rebirth for Russia and its people but a humiliation;

·      that the United States had made a mess of things by destabilizing countries and unhorsing their leaders, and would do the same to Russia and him if it could;

·      and that, therefore, thwarting the United States around the world must be a central objective of Russian foreign policy.

reminiscent of nineteenth-century great-power rivalries, rather than one befitting a responsible member of the modern international community.

reintroducing large-scale no-notice, or “snap,” exercises designed to sow fear and intimidation on the continent.

built up its nuclear arsenal, investing in new ballistic missile submarines, heavy bombers, and the development of a new intercontinental ballistic missile. Russian leaders have also made dangerous statements about using nuclear weapons in a potential war to deter or prevent us from coming to the aid of our European allies. And they have pulled out of the Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement without warning and violated their obligations under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Thankfully, the president himself shared my concerns over the threat Putin posed, and he supported the moves I took at DOD to respond to that threat. Those moves started with a unilateral buildup of capability.

we also developed formal war plans for a European conflict for the first time since the end of the Cold War. We created what I called a “new playbook” for the United States and NATO that took into account Russian hybrid and information warfare capabilities, NATO’s expanded (and exposed) flanks, particularly in the Baltics, and all of Russia’s own vulnerabilities.

in fall 2014, NATO’s leaders agreed to establish the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force.

Doing so required us to admit that the relationship with Russia had become largely antagonistic rather than cooperative.

Russia sent forces into Syria on the pretext of fighting terrorism. Instead, its purpose was to back Assad and to help him suppress the moderate opposition to his regime.

John Kerry. I admired his efforts to get Russia on a more constructive path,

Unchecked, friction over the Paracels, or over the disputed Spratly Islands to the south, risks jeopardizing decades of security and prosperity in Asia.

United States had no objection to China’s rise. What the United States should not accept, and should strenuously work against, is the growing Chinese tendency to undermine the pillars of peace and stability that have made possible its rise and that of its Asian neighbors.

Perry and I therefore usually made it a point to visit Taiwan at the same time we were visiting China.

Chinese have now begun conducting similar preventive defense activities with partner countries in various regions.

second Chinese tendency was to stress China’s pre-Mao “century of humiliation” at the hands of the West.

its growing power as a “peaceful rise.”

Washington has often backed down in the face of Chinese bullying.

we give up skilled jobs in the United States in exchange for cheap goods made in China—which we buy with money borrowed from China.

Our economic policies tend to treat China as a big version of France rather than the communist monolith it

American economists have yet to give us a credible policy playbook

we have as yet no trade playbook for China—which makes dealing with China on the diplomatic and military fronts even more difficult.

For seventy years, since the end of World War II, the Asia-Pacific region has enjoyed great stability and peace. In this climate, first Japan rose and prospered; then Taiwan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia. And today, China and India rise and prosper, too.

“rebalance” to the Asia-Pacific region.

shifting combat power from the western hemisphere and the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific area. Henceforth, 60 percent of the U.S. Navy would be dedicated to the Pacific, upending the historic preference given to the Atlantic. The newest resources of air power, like the F-22, F-35, P-8, and Global Hawk, would be stationed there, too.

new stealth B-21 bomber, undersea and anti-ship weapons, lasers, and hypersonics; new capabilities for electronic warfare, space warfare, and cyber warfare; and naval technologies aimed to check high-end military capabilities of the kind China is building.

military-to-military linkages,

“Principled and Inclusive Security Network.”

principal objective set for those discussions was usually to secure what the Chinese most valued—a “successful meeting” free of rancor.

I didn’t go to Beijing, since the president always added that, when I went there, I should be sure to avoid “banging pots and pans.”

China risked erecting a “Great Wall of self-isolation”

The strategic transition we’re now making, from an era dominated by concerns over terrorism and insurgencies in failed states to a new era of great-power competition,

The world has changed in too many dramatic ways to expect a simple reprise of the pre-1991 era. But one aspect of the Cold War era that remains important and that, indeed, has taken on renewed urgency is the value of nuclear weapons

Warsaw Pact nations, in combination, boasted greater military manpower than the NATO alliance. In addition, the Soviet bloc countries were right on the border of the nations of Western Europe,

Part of our answer was nuclear weapons. Our advantage in this technology served as an “offset” against the Soviet Union’s capabilities—

outcompete the USSR in new technological areas.

As I’ve noted, Russia has recently been engaged in building new nuclear weapons systems.

The administration’s 2017 defense budget began a process of correcting decades of underinvestment in nuclear deterrence by targeting $ 19 billion for weapons upgrades—part of a five-year, $ 108 billion plan. These funds have gone to sustain

These aren’t aggressive moves. They’re defensive moves

If we don’t replace these systems, they will continue to age and become unsafe, unreliable, and ineffective.

funding for the nuclear enterprise is and will remain a relatively small percentage of total defense funding.

nuclear weapons are a bargain, in that they provide a big dose of deterrence at a relatively small economic price.

Chapter 11: The World’s Hottest Hot Spots: Iran, Korea, and Beyond

on the day after the announcement of the treaty, my message to him was, “There should be zero change in our policy toward Iran.” We would continue to update our finely honed plans for the so-called military option—a strike designed to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

consider the three goals of our successful anti-ISIS campaign as crafted in 2015: to hand ISIS a lasting defeat in the territories it held in Iraq and Syria; to crush its metastases into other regions in the Middle East and Africa; and to protect the U.S. homeland from terror attacks sponsored, guided, or inspired by ISIS and ISIS affiliates. All

“We don’t have to make Iraq and Syria perfect. We don’t have to put order in the Middle East. We understand it’s a complicated place. But we’re clear about what our interests are. We need to protect our people.”

“fixing the Middle East” is not an American strategic objective,

three countries in the region that are particularly important for us: Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.

consider the neighborhood in which Afghanistan sits. The United States has few close friends in the region.

“That part of the world is a mess. Why don’t we just get the hell out?” The correct response is, “Yes, it is a mess—and that’s the very reason that we need a presence there. Not to try to fix the mess, but to protect our interests from the bad guys who want to turn the neighborhood into an anti-American stronghold.”

Saudi Arabia—time to rebalance.

what seems to be the growing conviction among many U.S. foreign policy experts: that while Saudi Arabia remains an important partner of ours in the Middle East, it’s long past time that we rebalanced our relationship. In fact, this is a position I’ve long held.

Despite continual requests from me and continual promises by them, the Saudis made essentially no contribution to the victory against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

announced that his country had formed a coalition of Muslim countries to stand against ISIS. Immediately, a host of other important Islamic countries informed reporters that they had no idea what this coalition was, had not been consulted about it, and had not agreed to join it. It was a typical Saudi military initiative—an idea without a plan.

Their few really capable ground forces are dedicated to protecting the monarchy, not fighting their external wars, for which they tend to rely on hired mercenaries.

But we must be realistic about the extent of their importance to us, and not be swayed by their skills as propagandists and lobbyists (the

MBS was obsessed with the threat from Iran almost to the exclusion of anything else, including ISIS.

Israel—an enduring friendship with occasional rough spots.

Israel a rare example of shared values, overlapping security interests, and admirable military competence in a region where all three are in short supply.

Israel is smaller than the potentially antagonistic states that surround it, its ability to defend itself cannot rely on a quantitative military edge, such as a larger army. Instead, the United States has undertaken to guarantee that Israel will retain a qualitative military edge,

What passes for conventional wisdom on North Korea—a forced choice between option A (diplomacy) and option B (war)—is the wrong way to think about the threat. A better approach—one that is, frankly, the least-bad option from a menu of unappealing choices—is what I call “coercive diplomacy.” This approach, which combines elements of option A and option B, would involve tough measures (such as intensified international sanctions) that inflict noticeable pain on the regime of Kim Jong-un, combined with hard-nosed talks aimed at strictly limiting his ability to further develop and deploy nuclear weapons.

Terrorism is a “forever problem.”

This led to further work with John Deutch, who had been CIA director, and with Philip Zelikow, a former member of the NSC staff. The three of us published an article in the November–December 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs in which we urged the creation of a national terrorism intelligence center and warned of the possible impact of a major attack on U.S. soil:

Chapter 12: Maintaining America’s High-Tech Edge: A Necessity for Strategic Success

Hack the Pentagon, the first-ever “bug bounty” project conducted by a federal department or agency.

U.S. post–World War II history in terms of three eras,

·      The first of these eras was the early Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s. It was characterized by an overwhelming reliance by the United States on nuclear weapons to deter a possible attack by the Soviet Union and to “offset” the Soviet superiority in troop strength and other conventional military measures.

·      The 1970s and 1980s brought a second era dominated by the application of superior U.S. computers, sensors, and advanced design to neutralize the vast numbers of Soviet troops and tanks in Europe, rather than forcing NATO to rely on the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons alone. The new technologies powering this “second offset”

·      Now, as Bob puts it, a “third offset” is needed for the era of CRIKT and a return to the focus on big-power competition. This era requires a special emphasis on the high-end, high-tech tools of warfare—tools for cyber-warfare, biological defense, space-based weaponry, and more.

In between the eras of the second and third offsets lies the period from the end of the Cold War to the beginning of my most recent stint in the Pentagon, roughly 1990 to 2010. This was a strategic and technological interregnum, in which grand strategy took a backseat to other concerns.

peacekeeping in the Balkans and elsewhere; then, after 9/ 11, the focus shifted to counterterrorism and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq.

low-tech dangers called for ingenuity and persistence, but not a transformation of the military itself.

72 billion in research and development spending, more than double what Apple, Intel, and Google were spending on R& D combined.

tendency of the Pentagon’s R& D system to focus on meeting specified requirements defined by the warfighters in the services. These are important, but they leave no space for brand-new, revolutionary technologies or concepts that today’s warriors are unlikely to envision on their own.

DARPA is not a laboratory or a testing facility;

it’s just an office building in suburban Washington. And DARPA doesn’t do scientific work; it gives out grants to scientists. What makes it special is the program managers, themselves scientists at the top of their game, who decide where the funding goes and how it will be used. They typically join DARPA to contribute their unique expertise for a few years, then return to the laboratory bench.

The “valley of death” that separates R& D from production is an age-old problem in technology,

Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) was an innovation I founded in 2012 during my time as undersecretary to meet urgent near-term needs for faster solutions to immediate battlefield problems.

the techies would say, it was time to declare a “fast failure.”

The new stealth bomber, currently designated the B-21 Raider, is expected to be ready by 2025. It will have a useful lifetime of a few decades; and as technology evolves, it may end up being the last generation of stealth bomber—just as the Joint Strike Fighter I worked on may end up being the last generation of tactical aircraft.

Given the importance of the digital connections that make the new stealth bomber so powerful, it might better be described as a node in a network rather than a traditional airplane.

I divided the cyber issue into three parts:

·      defense, which focused on making sure that DOD networks were not penetrated and DOD information was not compromised;

·      offense, which referred to using cyber as a weapon, especially against military and command-and-control targets;

·      and homeland defense, which was about supporting civil authorities in their efforts to provide cybersecurity for the United States as a whole, including businesses, critical infrastructure, other government agencies, and ordinary citizens.

To drive this home, I used one of the tactics I’ve relied on to get people’s attention: namely, calling everyone together on a Saturday. This is a pain in the neck for everyone, and I did it deliberately to underscore that I was deadly serious about the issue.

second approach to reducing vulnerability besides hygiene is to train forces to operate through a cyberattack on warfighting networks.

This is easily done by creating some attractively titled files that contain information contaminated in subtle ways—for example, by changing occasional digits in numbers, moving decimal points, or mixing up miles and kilometers in a list of distances. When our adversaries realize that some of the information has been tampered with, they cometo doubt the accuracy of all the information they’ve stolen.

The last element of defense is the problem of the insider threat, exemplified most spectacularly by Edward Snowden,

People sometimes ask me whether a cyberattack on the United States is a “real” attack or not. My answer is simple: An attack is an attack. If harm is done to this country,

As for the nature of the retaliation, that shouldn’t be limited to the same methods used in the attack. After all, the 9/ 11 terrorists flew airliners into our buildings, but we didn’t respond by flying airliners into their buildings.

Probably the most outrageous cyberattack the United States has suffered from overseas is the 2016 Russian assault on the security of the presidential election.

In the military lexicon, a command and an armed service are completely different things. While a COCOM writes plans for and commands wars and other operations, a service recruits, trains, and equips forces and then supplies them to COCOMs. For example, the Army supplies ground units for service in Iraq to CENTCOM. Turning SPACECOM into Space Force would turn a “force user” into a “force supplier.”

Part 5: People Matter Most

Chapter 13: Choosing Leaders

our nation’s senior military leaders. There are sixteen crucial positions on that list,

I have recommended you for the job of X. Let me tell you the reasons I gave the president for why he should approve you. You can expect a call from him. Be yourself and tell him what you think. Call me afterward.”

This so-called up-or-out process for weeding out talent is not a bad thing, because the departure of some candidates opens spaces in the hierarchy for others and so ventilates the entire system.

When a high-ranking slot opens up, there is often a widespread understanding that “it’s Officer So-and-So’s turn to get the next promotion.” This sense of inevitability can sometimes overshadow the importance of selecting the right person for a key job, not just the next one in line. So occasionally, an unconventional, outside-the-box appointment is needed.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive thing I did in her case was refrain from focusing on her gender, either when I proposed her to President Obama or when I made the official announcement of her nomination.

The obvious downside is that a whole raft of novices come into the government with each change of administration. Speaking in general terms, I’d estimate that, in most cases, about half of these newcomers know what they’re doing at first. Another quarter are capable and dedicated people who quickly master their jobs. But another quarter never “get it” and remain an embarrassment to the department.

Henry Kissinger once remarked that all the ideas he used in government were ideas he’d brought with him—because while he was in office, he was too busy to generate any new ones.

distinguish leadership from reinforcement—

·      Leadership in the sense I mean is required in circumstances in which you are taking your mission and your subordinates in a direction they need to go but that they don’t understand or don’t want to take.

·      By contrast, what I call reinforcement is less widely recognized and heralded, but it, too, is deserving of respect. Reinforcement means bringing out the best in your subordinates—

In my view, Trump represents reinforcement without leadership.