Page 4 of
4 GATES' WAY FORWARD, Part
1 After
Rumsfeld, a new dawn? By Mark Perry
been given to a number of
reporters and then aired. The information came
from a "high-ranking US commander", the reports
said. Some military officers in the Pentagon
identified the leakers as Caldwell - and were
enraged.
The officers thought it was
inappropriate for a senior officer to give out
that kind of information, whether true or not.
Pace, in particular, was privately angered by
Caldwell's leak and implied as
much
in a number of press interviews. The heads of
press organizations were also beginning to
question Caldwell's intentions. Was it appropriate
for a high-ranking military officer to be playing
politics with sensitive information of the kind
that was so inflammatory that it might be used for
political purpose to start a war?
It is
not known whether Gates talked to Petraeus about
Caldwell, or to anyone. But Petraeus wanted his
own man in Caldwell's job, and believed strongly
that the US military needed to be more open, and
blunt, about its operations. In May, Caldwell was
replaced. There was no blood on the floor.
There were only a few steps left before
Gates completed his clean sweep of the upper
reaches of the American high command. But before
moving any further, the secretary of defense
decided that he would check in with the network of
retired military four-star generals that comprise
a powerful, if unofficial, lobbying force in
Washington.
Through May and into early
June, Gates had lunch with a large number of some
of the most eminent of these former commanders.
Among the most prominent was General George
Joulwan - as respected a former commander as any.
Gates called Joulwan into the secretary's dining
room in mid-May, just prior to the naming of a
"war czar" to seek his advice on what to do about
Iraq.
"They would clear out everyone and
George would come in and the secretary and George
would sit for an hour or two and Gates and Joulwan
would sit and have a discussion," a senior officer
says. "And Gates would listen and smile and nod.
And mostly he agreed." Joulwan is a decorated
Vietnam veteran (he was even called "general" by
his classmates at West Point) and a former
commander in Bosnia. Even in retirement, Joulwan
spends time shuttling back and forth to eastern
Europe, where he has maintained ties to senior
commanders in the new NATO states of Poland and
Romania. He is a constant presence on American
television. He is most comfortable at an easel,
telling audiences about how he designed strategies
that brought down the Cali cartel in South America
and integrated Eastern European militaries into
NATO. "He does go on," a colleague says.
Joulwan may well be the most connected
retired military man in Washington. With his shock
of black hair, he falls forward on his feet and
buttonholes anyone who will listen to his liturgy
about the "proper way to get things done". He
stabs the air with his finger: "There are only two
things that matter when it comes to running
operations like Bosnia or Iraq or I don't care
where it is," Joulwan says. "And that is absolute
unity of command and absolute clarity of
instructions. These commanders have got to demand
of the civilians that the mission be laid out.
That's what I did in Bosnia. I said, 'Well you
write it right down here and you say what you want
and then we can get it done'. Otherwise it is
never clear.
According to Pentagon
officials, Joulwan focused on that - rather than
personnel - in his talks with Gates. "George could
see the chaos, because he lived through it in
Bosnia and in Vietnam," a colleague says, "and it
just scared the bejesus out of him. And so he
insisted on that with Gates. And he told him, 'No
matter what you do with the White House, you
insist that they make it clear to you what they
want'."
For the US military, unity of
command is nearly liturgical - a commandment that
dates from George Washington. The principle is so
deeply rooted that a leading military think-tank
recently conducted a day-long simulation that
stipulated two teams (a "red" enemy team and a
"blue" US team), in which the military US team was
saddled with a number of nearly insurmountable
premises: a weak president, an unengaged secretary
of state, and a broken national security
establishment. The task of the blue military team
was to find ways to compensate for the broken
national security establishment. One of the ways
to do that is to make certain that the top-down
command structure of the US military remains
intact - that orders are obeyed exactly, and
"by-the-book" - a command structure that many
senior officers now believe was nearly
catastrophically missing during the Rumsfeld
years.
With major shifts underway in Iraq
and in the region, and with the network of retired
officers now firmly behind him in advocating that
the "war czar" be picked from among the crop of
currently serving officers, Gates recommended to
the president that he appoint the Joint Chief of
Staff's director of operations as the assistant to
the president and deputy national security advisor
for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bush checked
Lute's record and noted that he had opposed the
"surge", so he had his doubts, but after he and
Hadley had interviewed him he agreed with Gates'
assessment and Lute's appointment was announced on
May 15. As always, the soft-spoken Gates explained
the appointment in terms that were far more blunt
than perhaps Bush would have liked: "One of the
arguments that we hear frequently - and frankly
are very sympathetic with - is that we and the
State Department are about the only parts of the
government that are at war," Gates said. "This
kind of position is intended to ensure that where
other parts of the government can play a
contributing role, that in fact they understand
what the president's priorities are and make sure
that the commanders in the field, the ambassador
in the field, gets what he needs."
For his
part, Lute was unapologetic for opposing the
"surge", saying simply that he agreed with the
president's policy. Even so, like Petraeus and
Fallon, Lute is convinced that a military victory
in Iraq is impossible without political
reconciliation. He has broad support in this from
all parts of the high command.
"He's not
afraid to get tough with the bureaucracy," a
uniformed colleague says. "He will run the war. He
won't be a supreme commander, of course, but he'll
be a supreme coordinator - and we desperately need
one." Lute is also one of the ablest political
generals in the Pentagon, having served ably with
both Abizaid and Petraeus and was apparently blunt
with Bush and Hadley, telling them about his
doubts about their policies. "He told them he
didn't agree with a lot of what they were doing,"
a colleague related, "and said, 'so take it or
leave it', and they were shook by that. But they
took it."
Tomorrow, PART 2: The
clean sweep
Mark Perry is
co-director of Conflicts Forum and the
author of the recently released Partners in
Command, George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in
War and Peace (Penguin Press, 2007).
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