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I would never succeed in cracking the obduracy and resistance to change of the department’s personnel and health care bureaucracy, both military and civilian. It was one of my biggest failures as secretary.

THE WAR ABOUT WAR

In the spring of 2008, the vital issue of the military services’ preoccupation with planning, equipping, and training for future major wars with other nation-states, while assigning lesser priority to current conflicts and all other forms of conflict, such as irregular or asymmetric war, came to a head. It went to the heart of every other fight with the Pentagon I have described. In my four and a half years as secretary, this was one of the few issues where I had to take on the chairman and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Their approach, it seemed to me, ignored the reality that virtually every American use of military force since Vietnam—with the sole exceptions of the Gulf War and the first weeks of the Iraq War—had involved unconventional conflicts against smaller states or nonstate entities, such as al Qaeda or Hizballah. The military’s approach seemed to be that if you train and equip to defeat big countries, you can defeat any lesser threat. I thought our lack of success in dealing with the Iraqi insurgency after 2003 disproved that notion. I didn’t disagree with the importance of preparing for war against other nations. While that kind of conflict was the least likely, it would have the most significant consequences if we were not prepared. However, I thought we also needed explicitly to budget, train, and equip for a wide range of other possible adversaries. It was never my purpose to relegate state-to-state conflicts and the sophisticated weapons to fight them to second-level status compared to the wars we were currently fighting, but rather to ensure that we maintained our nontraditional capabilities. I wanted them to have a place in the budget and in the Defense culture that they had never had.

In short, I sought to balance our capabilities. I wanted to institutionalize the lessons learned and capabilities developed in Iraq and Afghanistan. I didn’t want the Army, in particular, to forget how to do counterinsurgency—as it had done after Vietnam. I did not want us to forget how we had revolutionized special operations, counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency through an unprecedented fusion of intelligence and combat operations. I did not want us to forget that training and equipping the security forces of other nations, especially developing nations, might be an important means of avoiding deployment of our own forces. My fights with the Pentagon all through 2007 on MRAPs, ISR, wounded warriors, and more made me realize the extraordinary power of the conventional war DNA in the military services, and of the bureaucratic and political power of those in the military, industry, and Congress who wanted to retain the big procurement programs initiated during the Cold War, as well as the predominance of “big war” thinking.

As mandated by law in 1986, the president must produce a National Security Strategy, a document that describes the world as the president sees it and his goals and priorities in the conduct of foreign affairs and national security. The secretary of defense then prepares the National Defense Strategy, describing how Defense will support the president’s objectives through its programs. The NDS provides a framework for campaign and contingency planning, force development, and intelligence. Given finite resources, the NDS also addresses how Defense would assess, mitigate, and respond to risk, risk defined in terms of “the potential for damage to national security combined with the probability of occurrence and a measurement of the consequences should the underlying risk remain unaddressed.” Finally, drawing on the NDS, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff prepares his own document, the National Military Strategy, providing even more specific guidance to the military services and combatant commands in terms of achieving the president’s goals.

Each of these three documents takes many months to write, in part to ensure that every relevant component of the government and the Defense Department can weigh in with its own views on the drafts. There is a high premium on achieving consensus, and countless hours are spent wrangling over the texts. The disputes are occasionally genuinely substantive, but more often they reflect efforts by each bureaucratic entity to ensure that its priorities and programs are protected. Ironically, and not atypically, the practical effect of the content of these documents is limited at the most senior levels of government. Personally, I don’t recall ever reading the president’s National Security Strategy when preparing to become secretary of defense. Nor did I read any of the previous National Defense Strategy documents when I became secretary. I never felt disadvantaged by not having read these scriptures.

The NDS became important to me in the spring of 2008 in part because my name would go on it, but also because I wanted it to reflect my strongly held views on the importance of greater balance between conventional and unconventional war in our planning and programs. The key passage in the draft concerned the assessment of risk:

U.S. predominance in traditional warfare is not unchallenged, but is sustainable for the medium term given current trends…. We will continue to focus our investments on building capabilities to address these other [nontraditional] challenges. This will require assuming some measure of additional, but acceptable, risk in the traditional sphere [emphasis added]. We do not anticipate this leading to a loss of dominance or significant erosion in these capabilities.

This passage, and especially the italicized sentence, led to a rebellion; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the secretaries of the Navy and Air Force, and the chief of staff of the Army all refused to agree to that language. There was “no margin to accept additional risk in traditional capabilities to invest in other capability areas,” they argued.

I met with the Joint Chiefs and combatant commanders in mid-May. I asked how they differentiated between “risk” associated with current wars and “risk” associated with our ability to respond to future threats. “Why do you assume that state competitors will rely on traditional capabilities to challenge us?” I asked. I did not disagree with them on the need to prepare for large-scale, state-to-state conflict, but I was not talking about moving significant resources away from future conventional capabilities. I just wanted the defense budget and the services formally to acknowledge the need to provide for nontraditional capabilities and ensure that the resources necessary for the conflicts we were most likely to fight were also included in our budgeting, planning, training, and procurement. I was moving the needle very little. But even that was too much, given the threat it posed to the institutional military’s modernization priorities.

Ultimately, I agreed to somewhat water down my language in the NDS, but I would continue to advocate publicly for more balance in our defense planning and procurement. This may seem abstract and like prosaic bureaucratic infighting, but these matters, which rarely engage the general public, have very real consequences for our men and women in uniform and for our national security, especially when budgets are tight and hard choices must be made.

At the end of September 2008, at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., I summarized the issues and concerns that had been at the root of my war with the Pentagon for nearly two years.

The balance we are striving for is:

• Between doing everything we can to prevail in the conflicts we are in, and being prepared for other contingencies that might arise elsewhere, or in the future;