In August, I visited the Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, watched new recruits in training, and spoke to several hundred brand-new enlisted Marines at their graduation ceremony. I was amazed how many of their parents were present. I then visited the Naval Special Warfare Center in San Diego, where sailors undergo the toughest training imaginable in the hope of becoming Navy SEALs. Only 67 out of the previous entering class of 180 graduated. The fifth week of training—“Hell Week”—is the toughest. I arrived at the end of that week and had the pleasure of telling the sailors that it was over and they had survived to continue their training. These aspiring SEALs were a mess: having gone days without food or sleep, they were hollow-eyed, freezing, and barely able to stand. Formed up on the beach, they were covered head to toe in sand, unshaven, a little drool here and there, snot running out of their noses. I was proud to shake every filthy hand. These young men, like the Ranger trainees and so many others in uniform, are the best our country can produce. Being able to thank them personally was, for me, one of the greatest honors of being secretary of defense.
In the spring of 2010 I began a speaking campaign to impart to young people in uniform my views on how they should think about their military careers and what kind of officers they should become. I wanted to talk with them about the military challenges I thought they would face, the same challenges I was trying to get their four-star leaders and Congress to address. I began in April with visits to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and West Point. At each academy, I spent nearly an hour in each of two classrooms, taking questions from the cadets and midshipmen and talking about the future.
My main messages were delivered in lectures to the entire student body of cadets and middies. At each academy, I talked about the great officers of the past in their branch of service who had the “vision and insight to see that the world and technology had changed,” understood the implications of that change, and then pressed ahead at the risk of their careers in the face of “incredible fierce institutional resistance.” I spoke about how each of these officers had put his career on the line “to speak truth to power,” and I said they must be willing to do so as well. I also warned them: “In most of these cases, integrity and courage were ultimately rewarded professionally. In a perfect world, that should always happen. But sadly, in the real world it does not, and I will not pretend there is no risk. You will, at some point or another, work for a jackass. We all have. That is why speaking up often requires courage. But that does not make taking a stand any less necessary for the sake of our country.”
I told the aspiring young officers at the academies that the complexity of the twenty-first-century battlefield would require leaders of great flexibility, agility, resourcefulness, and imagination, leaders willing to think and act creatively and decisively in different kinds of conflict than we had prepared for during the previous six decades—precisely the qualities I had found in Petraeus, Odierno, McChrystal, Dempsey, Austin, Rodriguez, Chiarelli, and others. I urged them to reject service parochialism, convention, and careerism and instead “to be principled, creative, and reform-minded” on and off the battlefield.
I believe the ever-changing complexity of the world in the years ahead and the agility and adaptability of our adversaries make the willingness of our officer corps to challenge orthodoxy and conventional thinking essential to our success, and that is the message I wanted to convey to the cadets and midshipmen. I would tell both cadets and generals that we must not stifle the young officers and NCOs coming back from the wars. They had been forced to be innovative, adaptable, independent, and entrepreneurial and to take responsibility. Our future depended on keeping them in the services and sustaining those same characteristics at home that we had so valued on the battlefield. All these were messages I would continue to preach until I left office, and I would damn sure make certain the officers I recommended to the president to lead the military in the years to come understood and shared those same views.
At the end of my remarks, I always thanked the young officers-to-be for their service. And then, my voice breaking each time, I said, “I consider myself personally responsible for each and every one of you as though you were my own sons and daughters. And when I send you in harm’s way, as I will, I will do everything in my power to see that you have what you need to accomplish your mission—and come home safely.”
Perhaps my voice broke because I knew that on my return to Washington, as always, I would have to turn again to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And send more of those kids in harm’s way.
CHAPTER 13
War, War… and Revolution
December 2009 marked the end of the third year of my deployment to the Washington combat zone. It began with the president’s announcement at West Point that the United States would surge 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, followed by my spending two full days of hearings on his announcement before the House and Senate with Hillary and Mike. The president had made a tough call on Afghanistan knowing there would be heavy political fallout. Hardly anyone in Congress was happy with his decisions. Republicans, led by McCain, disliked the deadlines—that troop drawdowns would begin in July 2011 and that our combat operations would end by 2014. A few of the president’s fellow Democrats were guardedly supportive, but most were critical and some were downright hostile. At our hearings, the antiwar protesters were out in full force, sitting both at the dais and in the audience. As difficult as I found the House Armed Services Committee, its members were model statesmen compared to those of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a number of whose members from both parties I again found extraordinarily rude and nasty; as a committee, I thought, it had more than its fair share of crackpots on both the left and the right. I didn’t envy Hillary having to deal with them routinely. The day after the hearings, opponents of the war fingered me as responsible for the president’s decisions and decided, according to the magazine The Nation, “It’s time to fire Robert Gates.”
It was with great relief that a few days later I flew to Afghanistan and Iraq. We had a full contingent of press on the plane, and as usual, I met with them during the flight. There, for the first and only time I was secretary, I said with respect to Afghanistan, “We’re in it to win it.” I had always been careful to avoid using terms like winning or victory because in the case of both wars, I knew such terms had become politically loaded, and that even the best possible outcome would not look to most Americans like winning or a victory. I preferred to use less politically fraught terms like success or accomplishing the mission. There would be nothing like the German or Japanese unconditional surrenders at the end of World War II, or even the Iraqi capitulation in 1991. But on that plane trip to Afghanistan after the president’s speech at West Point, I just felt the troops needed to hear someone say that they weren’t putting their lives on the line for some kind of “reconciliation.”