Several weeks earlier I had asked our four committees of jurisdiction in Congress for approval to transfer about $1.2 billion from several accounts in order to pay for significant additional ISR capabilities requested by Petraeus for Afghanistan. Three of the four committees had approved, but HAC-D, chaired by Bill Young, a Republican from Florida, had not. I learned that Young had blocked approval because the bulk of the transferred funding was to come from the Army’s Humvee budget. (The Army neither wanted nor needed more of those vehicles.) Young had told me the problem would be worked out before the hearing, but it had not been. I couldn’t understand his actions, so I entered the hearing room prepared to do something I had never done: publicly and directly criticize the chairman of one of my most important oversight committees.
At the end of my prepared statement on the budget, I noted that the reprogramming request for ISR had been submitted a month earlier. “Mr. Chairman, our troops need this force protection equipment and they need it now…. Every day that goes by without this equipment, the lives of our troops are at greater risk. I urgently want to get these items under contract so that I can get these important capabilities to Afghanistan.” I said that cuts Congress was proposing to our FY2011 budget and uncertainty over another continuing resolution left us no source of money for the reprogramming other than the Humvee program. I concluded, “We should not put American lives at risk to protect specific programs or contractors.” Young and the committee staff were infuriated by the public criticism. One staffer subsequently said, “Gates was pretty unprofessional at our hearing…. It is outrageous. I think it was unacceptable. He was out of line.” Another called my comments “a cheap shot.” Young said in an interview later that day that he had “no back-home interest in Humvee production.” But Washington Post writer Dana Milbank wrote the next day that AM General—the manufacturer of the Humvee—“happens to be Young’s third-largest campaign contributor. Its executives have funneled him more than $80,000.”
I disliked going after Young like that. He was an old-school gentleman, was always gracious toward me, and had long been a strong supporter of the military and especially the troops; he and his wife often visited our wounded in the hospitals. But after more than four years as secretary, I was fed up with the usual forelock-tugging deference to special interests and pet projects among members of Congress, especially when they got in the way of providing urgently needed help to our commanders and troops. Within a couple of days, Young and I talked on the telephone, and then our staffs worked out a deal—the usual course of action in getting something done with Congress. In the end, $614 million of the $864 million I had requested was transferred from the Humvee program.
As the conflict inside Libya heated up, so did the internal debate inside the administration. The most immediate challenge was the exodus from Libya of tens of thousands of foreign workers of many nationalities—mostly Egyptian—to Tunisia because of the fighting. For a new and weak Tunisian government, 90,000 refugees posed a growing problem. The State Department wanted the U.S. military to establish an “air bridge” to fly these people to Egypt. The size of the undertaking was daunting and, to be effective, would require a number of U.S. aircraft that were already supporting two wars, as well as a lot of Americans on the ground in both Tunisia and Egypt to support the effort. Pointing out these challenges once again made Mullen and me the skunks at the garden party. At a principals’ meeting on Libya the evening of March 2, Donilon told me the president wanted me to provide an air bridge from Tunisia to Egypt to move the Egyptian refugees. Biden then jumped in and said, “No, the president orders you to do the bridge.” I’d had enough of Biden’s “orders.” “The last time I checked, neither of you are in the chain of command,” I said. If the president wanted to deploy U.S. military assets, I made clear, I needed to hear it from him directly, not through the two of them. At the Pentagon, I went further, telling Mullen and Robert Rangel that no military options were to be provided to White House or NSS staff without my approval, “especially any options to take out Qaddafi.” Ultimately, many nations were involved in sending aircraft to evacuate the refugees, including several from us.
Although Obama stated in a press conference on March 3 that Qaddafi “must go” and, as the days passed, the pressure to act militarily grew, it was clear that the president was not going to act alone or without international sanction. He wanted any military operations to be under NATO auspices. At a NATO defense ministers meeting on March 10 in Brussels, where the first subject we discussed was Libya, I told Secretary General Anders Rasmussen privately that we supported planning for a no-fly zone but would need a UN Security Council resolution and explicit regional participation: “This can’t be seen as a bunch of Americans and Europeans intervening in a sovereign Arab state without sanction.” I told him we needed to be able to answer such questions as: Why were we intervening in Libya and not in other civil wars? Was it because of oil? Rasmussen asked me if a no-fly zone would be effective. Keeping his planes down shouldn’t be a problem, I said, but it was tough to keep helicopters down with a no-fly zone. Rasmussen shared with me his concern that Germany would not agree to any NATO action on Libya, mainly because it wanted the European Union to be in the lead. Admiral Jim Stavridis, supreme allied commander Europe, told me that a no-fly zone had to be limited to the coastal area of Libya, but that would cover 80 percent of the population. He said it would require a couple of days of bombing to destroy the air defense system and then, to sustain a nofly zone, at least forty fighters, twenty tanker aircraft, and other support aircraft. (In the event, we needed a lot more.)
Most ministers were supportive of creating a no-fly zone. Still, they spoke about the importance of keeping Afghanistan as the first priority, the need for Arab League support and participation vis-à-vis Libya, and the need to be ready to act by moving planes and ships into position. As Rasmussen had predicted, Germany was not helpful and even opposed relocating some ships, though Stavridis could do that on his own authority. For all the talk, though, the allies were not yet prepared to act.
I flew from Brussels to Bahrain, the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. Violence there had begun with a “Day of Rage” demonstration in the capital, Manama, on February 14, during which two were killed. Before the protest, the king (a Sunni) had offered economic concessions, but the Shia—70 percent of the population of Bahrain—wanted political reform. On the seventeenth, the government launched a crackdown at the Pearl Roundabout in Manama, a big traffic circle somewhat akin to Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Six protesters were killed. I called the crown prince, Salman, who told me that Arab rulers in the Gulf saw Bahrain as a proxy in the struggle with Iran and that the lesson they took from events in Tunisia and Egypt was that those governments had erred by showing weakness. Salman nonetheless believed the royal family had to be the voice of moderation. He had met with the Shia al-Wifaq opposition leaders the night before the violence, and they demanded constitutional changes, removal of the prime minister, and political reform. Salman said he was ready to become prime minister if asked and that the road map forward must include Shia representatives in the government. Salman was, I thought, the voice of reason. Unfortunately, he was powerless.
I arrived in Manama late on March 11, aware that there had been widespread demonstrations and clashes between antigovernment Shia protesters and pro-government loyalists that day that reportedly had left hundreds injured. My visit had been intended as a show of support for the kingdom’s royal family, but the message I delivered was hardly welcome. Separately, I told the crown prince and the king that as their strategic partner for more than sixty years, we were deeply concerned about Bahrain’s stability. I told them that they needed to take credible steps toward genuine political reform and to empower moderate voices for change, if they were going to avoid being overtaken by events. I told them that “baby steps won’t do.” Mubarak had finally embraced change, I said, but he was two weeks too late: “Time is not on your side.”