Does Obama’s choice to succeed Hagel matter to Europe? Yes, it does. Russian President Vladimir Putin signals every intention to regain at least political sway over the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact satellite nations in central Europe. Few European leaders would acknowledge that their boldness in confronting Putin will depend, in large measure, on their confidence in America’s robustness. But that is the case. It matters to Europe that Obama choose as his new Secretary of Defense a figure embodying American robustness against Putin’s ambitions.
Chuck Hagel’s credentials were always political, rather than anchored in achievements that would suggest he had the chops for what is, after the presidency itself, the toughest job in Washington. For Obama, Hagel’s recommendations were his stint as a centrist-leaning senator from Nebraska from 1997 to the start of 2009, plus two Purple Hearts as an infantry squad leader in Vietnam. His management experience was the founding of a successful cell-phone company and a stint as president of a modestly-sized investment banking firm.
Gallantly, Hagel saluted and accepted the burden of Secretary when Obama more or less dragooned him into it in the first days of 2013. But he never fitted comfortably into the job.
To succeed, a Secretary of Defense must dominate five arenas: the media, the Congress, the military, the Pentagon’s vast civilian bureaucracy, and the White House. The last poses the toughest challenge: success there is, however, influenced by success in the previous four, especially the media.
Only two recent Secretaries --- Donald Rumsfeld under President George W. Bush and Robert Gates, Obama’s holdover from those last Bush years --- have achieved that range of dominance. Rumsfeld cultivated a flamboyant public and Congressional persona, delegated well inside the Pentagon, bullied the military into imaginative ideas, and within the White House signaled his fealty to Vice-President Dick Cheney by giving wide latitude to Cheney’s neocon acolytes in the topmost tiers of the Pentagon bureaucracy. Even when he thought they were talking nonsense. (That rift is an under-examined factor in America’s debacle in Iraq post-Saddam .)
Gates, by far the most adept, quietly ruthless and successful SecDef of recent years, achieved his dominance through the skills his track record indicated: mastery of a bureaucracy (and its institutional politics) from years at the CIA; experience in the jungle of the White House as deputy national security adviser to Brent Scowcroft under President George H.W. Bush. From their West Wing offices --- the deputy’s is minuscule, a closet --- the pair divided tasks. Scowcroft was Bush’s daily consigliere on foreign and defense matters. Gates commanded the day-to-day running of the National Security Council --- an apparat tiny in comparison to the CIA, but staffed by ravenously ambitious apparatchiks, all anxious to have the President adopt their foreign policy prescriptions. This division of tasks was eased by the fact that Scowcroft had been an Air Force four-star general before coming into the White House. He knew how to prioritize and delegate. Gates knew well how to ride herd on inner-directed staffers.
Appointees from a primarily Congressional background have had a mixed record at the Pentagon. The big problem is that, while they are steeped in the politics of the job, they mostly have little experience managing any enterprise larger than their Congressional staffs. Mel Laird (under Nixon) and Bill Cohen (under Clinton) are reckoned successes. Dick Cheney (under Bush 41) and Donald Rumsfeld (under Bush 43) were also successes –- but, crucially, each also had extensive prior experience at the heart of the Executive Branch. They knew their way around.
Les Aspin (under Clinton) was a signal failure, surviving only a year. Much of the blame lay with Clinton. Accepting the job, Aspin took the precaution of clearing with Clinton personally a slate of names Aspin believed could handle the Pentagon’s top jobs. Aspin once confirmed, the White House reneged on the agreement --- insisting that all choices had to satisfy their EGG criteria: ethnicity, gender, geography. Aspin found himself trying for months to run the place virtually alone. Inevitably, he failed --- though his utter lack of big-business management skills didn’t help him. (Aspin’s family were so embittered by the White House betrayal that they refused to invite Clinton to Aspin’s memorial service in St John’s, opposite the White House’s north lawn. Clinton turned up anyway.)
What links all SecDefs is their realization how difficult are relations with the White House. Whatever the President has promised, the White House national security rules --- and fights against all challenges, especially from the Pentagon.
This is true in Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Caspar Weinberger brandished his relationship with President Reagan from their California years together to steamroller White House officials. In the quasi-intimacy of one long night flight, Weinberger voiced the forlorn reality: “It’s a strange feeling to have worked so many years for one man, only to realize he doesn’t even know your name”. His tone was reflective, not aggrieved.
Les Aspin once remarked that going to the White House was “like peering through the window to see a party going on inside to which you haven’t been invited”. Gates, in his memoirs published last New Year, was withering about a White House dominated by, as TIME summarized, “a detached Obama, a cabal of power-hungry aides, and a vice-president who kept warning the commander-in-chief that those in uniform couldn’t be trusted”. That verdict was mild compared to Gates’ contemptuous view of Congress: “…best viewed from a distance --- the further the better --- because up close it is truly ugly.” Gates elaborates on the ugliness in some detail. Washington’s mind-set is indicated by the fact that comment on Gates’ memoir focused more on the propriety of his commenting so soon after leaving office than on the substance of what he said.
Against that unpromising background, who might be a plausible candidate to succeed Hagel ? Who might be persuaded to accept a back-breaking job serving a President in his lame-duck years, confronting a Congress dominated, from January, by Republican majorities in both houses ?
Obama’s safe choice would be Ashton (“Ash” to all) Carter. Now just 60 years old, Carter is a physicist by training and early career; but his CV records a man industriously apprenticing upward through the defense establishment’s network of study groups, advisory panels and think-tank studies. He has twenty years’ experience in successively more senior Pentagon jobs, peaking as Deputy Secretary of Defense --- the Pentagon’s chief operating officer --- through 2011-2013. He is an able administrator, though not renowned in the corridors of the Pentagon for imagination. His nomination would likely sail through a Republican-controlled Congress.
The question about Carter is whether he is the right choice --- presentationally, as much as anything --- as the Pentagon’s public face at a time of clearly growing military challenges.
Consider the list. The U.S. faces in Europe an expanding challenge from Vladimir Putin, a Russian leader evidently intent on reversing the West’s encroachments into Russia’s Warsaw Pact dominions after the collapse of the Soviet Union. European members of NATO --- their defense budget slashed for two decades on the assurance of eternal European peace --- fluster like chickens in a coop suddenly threatened by a fox roaming outside. In Afghanistan, as the New York Times has just revealed, Obama --- confronting the Taliban’s clear superiority over local defenders --- has secretly abandoned his declared goal of pulling American troops out of combat roles in 2015. Pakistan, back-base of the Taliban insurgents, continues its spiral towards disintegration. In Asia, a resurgent China boasts --- and increasingly deploys military muscle to enforce --- its aim to re-establish its historical ‘sphere of influence’ across the region. The Arab world is threatened in so many dimensions its challenges are tough to prioritize: the ascendancy of ISIL (militarily and, increasingly, ideologically); a Syrian civil war without foreseeable end; the impending break-up of Iraq into Shia/Sunni/Kurdish protectorates; accumulating portents of another intifada by Palestinians against an increasingly expansionist Israel; Iran’s rise as a regional heavyweight determined to attain nuclear weapons capability; the multiplying hints of internal stability within Saudi Arabia; the destabilizing of Yemen by a local affiliate of Al Qaeda. And, oh yes, the challenges across north Africa to the hopes of the ‘Arab Spring’.
Confronting this daunting catalog of challenges, the only certainty for the United States is that the American military is going to get involved. Somewhere, sometime, inevitably. Some conflicts already engage U.S. forces: the fight against ISIL in Iraq and Syria; the struggle to preserve Yemen as a nation state; the effort to salvage Afghanistan. Further deployments are in the cards. It looks increasingly likely, for instance, that ground forces will be needed to crush ISIL.
The next Secretary of Defense thus has two overriding tasks. One is to look and sound impressive standing on an armored vehicle to give an ‘impromptu address’ reassuring American kids in uniform, wherever they may be, that their mission is worthwhile and that the folks back home support them. The other essential is that he must persuade the White House, the Congress and the media of the same.