“Sir, why did you leave the meeting?” he asked, visibly concerned. “We still need to make a number of big decisions… I think you should come back to the Situation Room.”
“I know that the President is losing patience with the generals, but we have a war going on right now,” thought Ishaan. “I need him to get his head back in the game. There are lives on the line.”
The President looked at his Chief of Staff, who was a good man by all accounts. Then he hung his head down and turned his chair to face the window. As soon as he looked outside, he saw crowds of protesters outside the fence. “It just doesn’t seem to even matter what I do,” he lamented. “Every decision I make is ridiculed, every action is attacked… Why did I give up my life to do this? I was so crazy to think that somehow I could fix this country.”
After not saying anything for a moment, he turned around and looked his Chief of Staff in the eye. “Ishaan, I’ve lost confidence in them. The generals have been wrong from the beginning, and so were Leibowitz, McGregor and Grandy. I trusted these men’s judgment. I believed them when they said NATO would hold together. I had confidence in the DIA, CIA, and NSA when they said Russia did not have the capability to attack us and push our forces out of Ukraine. They were all wrong.”
The President let out a long sigh before continuing, “They either lied to us, or they are just incompetent. In either case Ishaan, I just don’t trust their judgment any more.”
Ishaan sat down at the chair in front of his boss’s desk. This was a very serious thing that the President had just said. “Sir… I cannot say that I am completely surprised to hear you say this. I feel like we have been misled by some of them as well. However, right now, we are in the middle of a war, and lives are on the line. We need to figure out what we are going to do, and then, we can focus on righting the ship.”
There was silence as the two men thought. Ishaan decided on a different approach. “Mr. President, if I may, I recommend that Steve and Jonathan come in and we discuss this. We need to get this resolved now, so we can move forward. If we need to fire some people and get new ones in place, then that needs to happen ASAP. We have soldiers dying and we need to make sure we are doing our best to help them.”
The President nodded in agreement. “Make it happen, Ishaan. Tell the generals in the Situation Room to continue with their existing plans for now, fighting the war with the current strategy and orders in place. We will have a meeting tomorrow morning at 0700 to discuss the next steps.”
An hour later, Stephen Saunders and Jonathan Rosenblatt walked into the Oval Office with Ishaan Patel to discuss a major military shake up.
The President opened the meeting by saying, “As Ishaan has most likely hinted, I have lost confidence in a number of our military leaders, along with the broader intelligence community. We must replace some of them immediately and get the situation in Europe under control. What I need to know from you three is who do you think should absolutely stay in place?”
Stephen nodded to himself. “I have been arguing to clean house for a while now,” he thought. “It’s too bad I met so much resistance from Ishaan and other administration members — they said I shouldn’t shake the system too hard or else we might break it. Well, now that we have this horrible military disaster in Europe, at least we can finally make some changes.”
“Mr. President,” he began, “the men I believe we should leave in place are the National Security Advisor, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of State. For reasons I will explain later, I do think it is time to let go of the Director of the NSA though.”
Gates shifted in his chair. He wanted to know what that last sentence meant, but he decided not to interrupt and let Stephen continue. “Sir, for now, we should leave in place the Director of the CIA and Director of National Intelligence. Even though the intelligence community as a whole has failed you, these leaders are our new appointees and need to be in place to help us right the ship. This may sound severe, but honestly, we need to completely wipe the slate clean when it comes to the vast majority of the intelligence appointees at the SES and GS15 level. This is the level where the bureaucracy has been truly hamstringing us, setting us up for failure from day one. Our Secretaries have done as well as they can with the people the Senate has been appointing, but the continual delay in confirmations has left us operating with far too many holdovers from the previous administration. The red tape (and the failure of the system as a whole) have allowed the poor performers to float to the top, and the country is paying for it in a bad way right now,” Stephen said emphatically.
The President nodded. He had heard the saying floating around the government, “failing upwards.” Because it was nearly impossible to fire a government civilian, most organizations would promote the poor performers out of their organization. This would get rid of the person and made them someone else’s problem. Unfortunately, this often meant that the worst government employees ended up becoming some of the most senior leaders in the government civilian ranks.
“Does everyone else agree with Stephen’s assessment?” asked the President.
Ishaan nodded his head. “I have been against a complete house cleaning until we had more of our folks in place, but obviously, with the military catastrophe that is unfolding in Europe, something needs to change. I would add that I recommend we fire most of the generals in charge as well. They supremely misled us, and our soldiers, sailors, and airmen have been paying the price for it.” His tone was very solemn, as if speaking at a funeral.
The President’s son-in-law nodded his head in agreement. “The intelligence community has continued to provide us with intelligence that is either false or misleading since the day you were sworn into office. They insisted that Russia did not have the military ability to effectively attack NATO; we were told time and time again that the Russians’ military was old and outdated. Yet, we all sat in that briefing detailing the 1st Armored Division’s engagement against those T-14 Armatas. How in the world did the CIA and DIA not know about the tanks’ defensive systems? Our anti-tank missiles are not even hitting the tanks, and the rounds that do hit, bounce off. This is a complete disaster, and thousands of Americans are dead because of it. I agree with Stephen, we need to completely start over when it comes to the upper level intelligence appointees,” he said as he made an impassioned case for a major shakeup.
The President took in a deep breath and then let it out. “OK, here is what we are going to do. Tomorrow, we are going to fire the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the EUCOM Commander, the Director of the NSA, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Chief of Staff for both the Army and Air Force, along with the Navy Europe Commander. If the Commander of the Bush Carrier Group hadn’t been killed in that last naval engagement, I would have fired him as well. How was his battle group not ready to deal with a possible submarine attack and then subsequent air attack? I mean, he should have at least put his Marines ashore in Romania until we figured out what to do with them. Now most of them are dead.” The President felt horrible about how many sailors and marines had died in this war so far. It was appalling, and the public was rightfully outraged and in mourning.
Looking at his Chief of Staff, the President continued, “I want the base commanders at Ramstein and Spangdahlem both fired for allowing their bases to be hit.” He paused for a second, weighing the gravity of what he was about to say. “I know that it will not be popular, but I want every appointee from the previous administration who is still in the government to be fired. I want all of these people replaced with their deputies for the time-being, until we either find a replacement or determine if the deputy should stay in charge.” Ishaan was frantically writing everything down. It was going to be a long night crafting all these letters. They would have to bring the press secretary into the loop and make sure she was ready for the morning brief. The media was going to have a field day.