During the summer, Berkson and McCarthy launched themselves into the field, visiting Creech as well as Iraq and Afghanistan. They were not welcomed. As they counted the number of Predators in hangars at Creech, one Air Force officer there complained to the Pentagon about my micromanagers telling him what he did and did not need. But Berkson and McCarthy found two to three caps’ worth of capability in their visit to Creech and reported that the pilots there were “flying” only sixty hours a month. They could do more and subsequently did. Command staffs in Baghdad and Kabul were equally sore at having someone from Washington “grading their homework.” But what was important was that they found more capability.
The congressional appropriations committees were uneasy with the ISR task force because the funding did not go through the traditional budgetary process. They almost always ultimately approved, but it took too long, and they continued to press for dissolution of the task force and a return to regular procedures. I changed the structure of the task force a couple of times—and renamed it in the Obama administration—which amounted to a bit of a shell game with the Hill for more than three years, to ensure I had a mechanism at my disposal in Washington that could effectively serve the commanders in the field.
We would focus on getting more ISR capabilities to Iraq and Afghanistan for the remainder of my time as secretary. By June 2008 the Air Force was able to tell me it was dramatically increasing the number of patrols by armed drones. The following month I approved reallocating $1.2 billion within Defense to buy fifty MC-12 planes—dubbed “Liberty” aircraft—equipped to provide full-motion video and collect other intelligence, primarily in Afghanistan. These relatively low-cost, low-tech, twin-propeller aircraft—the kind traditionally despised by the Air Force—were more than capable of getting the job done. Allocating ISR assets between Iraq and Afghanistan was an ongoing challenge for Central Command, but one simple reality helped guide decisions: Predators were man hunters, whereas the Liberty aircraft were a superb asset in the counter-IED world. We would develop and deploy many other kinds of cameras and platforms, both airborne and at fixed sites on the ground, to provide our troops with intelligence that supported combat operations but that also protected their bases and outposts, especially in Afghanistan. There were almost sixty drone caps when I left office.
The difficulty in getting the Pentagon to focus on the wars we were in and to support the commanders and the troops in the fight left a very bad taste in my mouth. People at lower levels had good ideas, but they had an impossible task in breaking through the bureaucracy, being heard, and being taken seriously. The military too often stifled younger officers, and sometimes more senior ones, who challenged current practices. In a speech I gave to Air Force personnel a few days after I established the ISR task force, I made it clear that I encouraged cultural change in the services, unorthodox thinking, and respectful dissent. I spoke of earlier Air Force reformers and the institutional hostility and bureaucratic resistance they had faced. I asked the midlevel officers in the audience to rethink how their service was organized, manned, and equipped. I repeated my concern that “our services are still not moving aggressively in wartime to provide resources needed now on the battlefield.” In a line about ISR that I penciled in on my way to the speech, I said, “Because people were stuck in old ways of doing business, it’s been like pulling teeth.”
At West Point the same day, I delivered a lecture to the entire corps of cadets with a similar message about military leadership, knowing that my remarks there would be read throughout the Army. I told the cadets,
In order to succeed in the asymmetric battlefields of the twenty-first century—the dominant combat environment in the decades to come, in my view—our Army will require leaders of uncommon agility, resourcefulness, and imagination; leaders willing and able to think and act creatively and decisively in a different kind of world, in a different kind of conflict than we have prepared for for the last six decades…. One thing will remain the same. We will still need men and women in uniform to call things as they see them and tell their subordinates and superiors alike what they need to hear, not what they want to hear…. If as an officer—listen to me very carefully—if as an officer you don’t tell blunt truths or create an environment where candor is encouraged, then you’ve done yourself and the institution a disservice.
Mindful of an article published earlier by an Army lieutenant colonel that was highly critical of senior officers, I added: “I encourage you to take on the mantle of fearless, thoughtful, but loyal dissent when the situation calls for it.”
Because of the ISR issue and other concerns I had with the Air Force (more later), my speech to them was generally seen as a broadside against its leadership. At a press conference soon afterward, I was asked if that was my intention. I said there had been a lot of praise for the Air Force in my speech and that I had criticized the military bureaucracy across the board, particularly with regard to getting more help to the war fighter now. Everyone recognized that both speeches represented my first public assertion that supporting the wars we were already in and those fighting those wars, as well as preparing for future conflicts, would require cultural change in all the services. It was only the opening salvo.
WOUNDED WARRIORS
I believe that exposure of the scandalous problems in the outpatient treatment of wounded troops at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center mortified the senior military leadership of the services and the whole Department of Defense. I was always convinced they had been unaware of the bureaucratic and administrative nightmare that too often confronted our outpatient wounded, as well as the organizational, financial, and quality-of-life difficulties that faced our wounded troops and their families. The scandal prompted numerous reviews and studies of the entire wounded warrior experience, while the department and the services simultaneously began remedial actions.
During my entire tenure as secretary, I never saw the military services—across the board—bring to a problem as much zeal, passion, and urgency once they realized that these men and women who had sacrificed so much were not being treated properly after they left the hospitals. Senior generals and admirals jumped on the problem. I don’t think that was because I had fired senior people. I was always convinced that once the military leadership knew they had let down these heroes, they were determined to make things right for them. The established bureaucracies, military and civilian, in the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, however, were a different story.
The Army was the service, along with the Marine Corps, that had suffered the overwhelming preponderance of casualties, physical and psychological, in the post-9/11 wars. I met with Army Chief of Staff Casey in early March and told him not to wait on the reviews or studies but to act right away to fix Walter Reed and look at the rest of the Army’s treatment of wounded warriors. With respect to evaluating soldiers for disability, I told him, “When in doubt, err on the side of the soldier.” Casey and Army Vice Chief of Staff Dick Cody leaped on the problem without further urging from me. On March 8, I was briefed on the Army’s action plan. Under Cody’s supervision, other personnel changes had already been made at Walter Reed, a Wounded Warrior Transition Brigade was created (to give wounded soldiers an institutional unit to look after them while in outpatient status), a “one-stop soldier and family assistance center” was established, and all outpatient soldiers were moved into proper quarters. The Army was establishing a wounded warrior and family hotline, organizing teams to examine circumstances at the Army’s twelve key medical centers, and looking into how to improve the Army’s physical disability evaluation system. General Casey took the lead in aggressively tackling the problem of traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress. In June, Casey briefed me on a program to train every soldier in the Army on the causes and symptoms of post-traumatic stress in an effort not only to help them cope but also to begin to remove the stigma of mental illness. As he told me, “We’ve got to get rid of the mentality that if there are no holes in you, then you’re ready for duty.” The other services were not far behind the Army’s lead.