http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/susan-rice-chuck-hagel-team-of-bumblers-112208_full.html?print#.VE5Gaxb62dwTeam of Bumblers?
Are Susan Rice and Chuck Hagel equal to today’s new national-security challenges?
By MICHAEL HIRSH
October 26, 2014
When President Obama, after months of equivocation over how to respond to the takeover of parts of Iraq and Syria by radical militants, announced in September that the United States would “lead a broad coalition to roll back this terrorist threat,” the White House swung quickly into action, sending proposed legislation to train and equip Syrian rebels to Capitol Hill that same day.
Unfortunately, the White House failed to consult with the Pentagon—which would be doing most of the rolling back—on the timing or details of the announcement.
According to multiple sources, behind the scenes a few things went badly awry in the launch of Obama’s new policy. First, the Pentagon was surprised by the president’s timing, according to a senior defense official. “We didn’t know it was going to be in the speech,” he said, referring to Obama’s Sept. 10 address to the nation. Second, the White House neglected to give Pentagon lawyers a chance to revise and approve the proposed legislative language before it went to the Hill, which is considered standard practice. Staffers working for Rep. Buck McKeon, the Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said they were appalled by what they saw: language so sloppy that it failed to mention adequate protections against so-called “green-on-blue” attacks by trainees on American troops, and effectively left the Defense Department liable for funding the mission against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)—even though the president was telling members of Congress he didn’t need money for this new mission, since the Saudis were putting it up. “What came over would have not have been a mission the DoD could have executed,” says a senior Republican committee staffer.
The Armed Services Committee later went directly to the Pentagon and worked out new language, the White House approved it, and Obama signed the legislation as part of a new Continuing Resolution on Sept. 19. But that was hardly the first instance in recent months when the White House failed to consult with the Pentagon. The office of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was taken by surprise as well last July, when national security adviser Susan Rice sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner requesting a withdrawal of the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed in 2002 to enable U.S. military action in Iraq. This letter came after Mosul, a key northern Iraqi city, had already fallen to ISIL and the scale of the threat was becoming clear. The letter was never acted on, and in fact the AUMF that Rice wanted withdrawn is now part of the very authority the administration says it is operating under, along with the 2001 AUMF against al Qaeda. The Pentagon was not given a heads-up about that letter either, according to multiple sources. “We didn’t know it was going over there, and there were significant concerns about it,” said the senior defense official. “We had these authorities to go into Iraq under the 2002 AUMF, which is what she wanted repealed. We believed the authorities were still needed.”
National Security Council spokesman Patrick Ventrell said the Pentagon was informed of the new plan against ISIL before it went to Congress, and that in fact Hagel and Dempsey were with the president the morning of the speech. Although he indicated it was not clear exactly what details of the new strategy were shared with the Pentagon and when, Ventrell said that coordination between the NSC and other agencies is ongoing and extensive, that Rice regularly hosts lunches with Hagel and Secretary of State John Kerry. They “have a good, solid working relationship,” Ventrell said.
But it’s clear the finger-pointing between the White House and Pentagon reflects no mere technicality. Both examples cited to me by well-placed sources close to the Defense Department offer new evidence of a criticism that has dogged this administration for most of its six and a half years: that Barack Obama’s White House is so insular and tightly controlled it often avoids “outside” consultation—including with its own cabinet secretaries and agencies. That’s especially true when the issue is one of this president’s least favorite things: opening up new hostilities in foreign lands. To his critics—and I spoke with several for this article inside Obama’s administration as well as recent veterans of it—it’s all a reflection of the slapdash way a president so vested in “ending wars” has embraced his new one.
Indeed, the Syrian-rebel incident recalled a more famous instance of White House surprise tactics a year earlier, when after a stroll on the White House lawn with chief of staff Denis McDonough, Obama embarrassed Kerry by abruptly deciding to ask for congressional approval for bombing the regime of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad—only hours after Kerry had publicly declared that Assad was facing imminent action. (Ironically, after Congress quickly balked at approval, humiliating Obama, it was Kerry who rescued the president by securing an agreement with Russian help to force Assad to dismantle the chemical weapons that had prompted the threatened U.S. strike in the first place.)
In their recent memoirs, former defense secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta also have described the White House-centric foreign policy of the Obama administration—in Panetta’s case, a White House that he said was so “eager to rid itself of Iraq” it rejected Pentagon advice about the need for residual troops in Iraq after 2011, opening the way for ISIL. Gates was even more pointed, writing that “suspicion and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House officials—including the president and vice president—became a big problem for me.”
“I think this is the most insular White House national security team in recent history,” says Jim Thomas, vice president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a former senior Pentagon official, who added that the president’s most recent big decision, picking an “Ebola czar,” was “symptomatic of the problem.” The choice: former Joe Biden chief of staff Ron Klain, picked by a White House seemingly unconcerned over the dubious optics of naming a Beltway politico to battle a deadly international disease.
The Ebola crisis has underscored what many of Obama’s critics—including those in his party—have been saying with increasing urgency in recent months, that the White House’s approach to national security does not instill confidence and seems more questionable than ever in the face of the muscular new challenges on the scene. Tongues wagged in Washington after David Ignatius, who is generally simpatico with Obama’s restrained foreign policy, called gently in an Oct. 7 Washington Post column for “new blood” on the president’s national-security team.
But others are less gentle with their criticism. “It’s a pathetically weak team,” says one retired general who was in a senior command position, and who faults Hagel as much as Rice for some of the problems. The general said that military professionals were buzzing over Hagel’s absence from the recent public exchange between the White House and Dempsey, who in congressional testimony on Sept. 16 appeared to undercut the president’s vow to put no boots on the ground in Iraq by suggesting that “close combat advisers” might be needed. Hagel, a Vietnam-warrior-turned-dove known to be extremely reluctant to send any new troops abroad, stayed silent in the dispute. “Guys like Dempsey saying the things they do—they wouldn’t get away with it with other secretaries,” the general said. Mostly what critics remark upon is Hagel’s low visibility at a time of high-visibility threats, whether from ISIL or from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has invaded Ukraine and remains defiant in the face of Western-imposed sanctions, warning Washington last week to “remember the risks that a spat between major nuclear powers incurs for strategic stability.” “There’s no energy, no sense that the OSD stands for anything,” says one administration official, referring to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. “It’s all coming out of the Joint Chiefs.”
Hagel is by nature self-effacing, and many other observers I spoke with—including some congressional Republicans who once opposed him, like McKeon—praised his performance as SecDef. “He’s got an untenable job because I don’t think he gets much support out of the White House,” said McKeon. “I have very strong admiration for Hagel. He’s a good soldier. He never complains. He never says anything negative about the president; he’s trying to carry out policy.”
Part of the problem facing Obama’s national security team, perhaps, is that so much in the international environment has changed for the worse in the two years since the president, in a surprise move, nominated Hagel. At the start of his second term in January 2013, before the rise of ISIL and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, it was clear the president was looking for a peacetime consigliere at the Pentagon, having declared more than once that he “was elected to end wars, not start them” and was “doing everything” he could “to reduce our reliance on military power.” The retired Nebraska senator, who appeared even more leery than the president of putting new boots on the ground abroad—he opposed not only George W. Bush’s invasion and “surge” in Iraq, but Obama’s own 2009 surge in Afghanistan—seemed just the choice to reduce the Pentagon’s profile to a vanishing point.
The following June, when Obama made Rice his national security adviser, it came across more or less as a consolation prize—one handed to her as much for her loyalty as for any widespread belief in Washington that she would make a great national security chief. Rice had mainly been an Africa expert and diplomat, working her way up in Democratic national security circles after a stint in the Clinton administration NSC and State Department and serving for four years as Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations. She took a bullet for the president over her jumbled explanation of the 2012 Benghazi attacks that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, and after Republicans jumped on that TV debacle she withdrew her name as secretary of state—the job Obama said he wanted her to do.
But in the last eight months or so, a new array of fast-moving threats has arisen, from the advance of ISIL to Putin’s martial moves in Eastern Europe to the Ebola contagion in West Africa, raising ever-mounting questions about whether the administration could do with less caution and a little more forward leaning. Although Hagel has proved, by many accounts, extremely effective in pushing internal reform at the Pentagon, reassuring allies in Asia and elsewhere—as well reaching out to Capitol Hill—some question whether he has become too quietly vested in not sending troops abroad over the course of his career, despite his frank acknowledgement that the United States is now engaged in a new “war” against ISIL. With ISIL still on the move in Iraq and Syria, and the air strikes that Obama announced on Sept. 10 proving to be of dubious effectiveness, many military experts say this is the moment to beef up the U.S. presence with close combat advisers and spotters on the ground who can guide in heavier and more precise airstrikes, as well to provide more U.S. trainers. But the president’s “no boots on the ground” pledge has paralyzed discussion, despite Dempsey’s lonely effort to open the door slightly to the possibility of bringing in such advisers.
“An unlikely consensus is emerging across the ideological spectrum about the war against the Islamic State: President Obama’s strategy to ‘degrade and eventually destroy’ the terrorist entity is unworkable,” the Washington Post wrote in an editorial on Sunday. The most that can be achieved with the limited military means Obama has supplied so far is some kind of containment, but the Post editors said that won’t work because “the infection of the Islamic State is spreading. Militant groups around the region are rallying to its cause, volunteers continue to travel to Syria, and popular support for it is dangerously evident in countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.” Or as House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., put it Sunday on “Face the Nation,” the U.S. effort now amounts to mere “pecks at a big problem,” and allies remain baffled by the lack of a larger U.S. strategy.
Hagel, nonetheless, has reaffirmed the administration’s restrained approach. “We’re not changing our policy,” he said last week. “We think it’s working.” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, in a telephone interview on Sunday, said that the administration believes that Iraqi security forces and Kurdish peshmerga fighters are beginning to make headway against ISIL. “It is slow, and it is not steady, but they have an offensive plan,” he said. “They are advancing on Baiji [an oil refinery town held by ISIL], they have pushed out in Anbar [Province], and they are stiffening their defenses around Baghdad.” The peshmerga, he said, “have taken back more than 20 towns and villages.” Still, Kirby acknowledged, ISIL has aggressively retaliated with IEDs and other tactics, and retaking “Mosul is a long way away.”
While Hagel defends the status quo, Rice continues to stumble in her infrequent TV appearances and to alienate potential Hill allies – as well as the Pentagon—with what critics describe as poor outreach to Republicans and coordination of policy with the Defense Department. “Our experience has been that the DoD and Capitol Hill are often taken by surprise at same time and on same issues” by the White House, says the senior Armed Services Committee staffer.
McKeon himself says he was astonished when Rice found no time to sit down with him after he returned from a trip to the Middle East and meetings with key foreign pleaders, and later when he realized that the White House had sent the administration’s request to arm the Syrian rebels to his committee without getting prior input from the Pentagon on the legislative language. Rice is rarely heard in public except when she very occasionally appears on the Sunday talk shows—and then more times than not, it seems, in a bumbling way. (Most recently, by saying Turkey would supply bases for strikes against ISIL, only to be undercut by Ankara’s denial hours later; that followed a much-criticized performance describing former Taliban captive Bowe Bergdahl’s Army service as “honorable” despite the murky circumstances of his disappearance and capture; and her now-infamous explanation of the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, after which she was blasted by Republicans for appearing to play down terrorism links.)
Despite an NSC staff that’s grown from 50 under George H.W. Bush to more than 300 under Obama—in part because White House support and Homeland Security staffs have been folded into the NSC—“there is a sense that the NSC is run a little like beehive ball soccer, where everyone storms to wherever the ball is moving around the field,” according to another recently departed senior administration official. “They are managing by crisis rather than strategy.… It’s Syria one day, Iraq the next, North Korea the next, and so on. The NSC is finding multitasking very hard these days.
“In her defense some of that was there before, and I would say probably no president in recent times has faced the variety of threats that confront the United States right now, and the speed with which they’re emerging,” this former official said. “But she certainly hasn’t cured that problem. … There has always been centralization inside the White House in this administration, but in the first term there was more consultation across the inter-agency [process] and more decisiveness. Now there appears to be less consultation and less decisiveness.”
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In the end, of course, it’s the president who must do the deciding. Hagel’s defenders say that, as secretary of defense, he can only be expected to step up to the podium and become the voice of the administration when the president decides to threaten or use force – the implementation of which then becomes the job of the Pentagon —and that’s been infrequent at best in this administration. Hagel’s supporters also say that he has shown his toughness when necessary, for example pushing the White House to send two B-52s over disputed islands in the East China Sea after Beijing unilaterally declared it was imposing an air-identification zone there in late 2013. Hagel was, in addition, a key voice arguing for last week’s drop of arms and supplies to Kurdish rebels fighting near the Syrian border town of Kobane, the senior defense official says.
“Chuck is superlatively qualified,” says Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, who will take over the Senate Armed Services Committee chairmanship from the retiring Carl Levin if the Democrats manage to hang on in November. “He’s one of the few secretaries who’s actually been an infantryman in combat. He’s established great credibility with the troops. The rapport is genuine and obvious.” And it was Hagel, says Reed, who at an April conference with Gulf defense ministers “laid the foundation for collaboration we’re seeing in last several weeks against ISIL. For the first time they’re sending aircraft up with our aircraft.”
Hagel has drawn a tough hand: He is the first secretary in recent years to deal with a declining budget, as Reed notes—and even Republicans like McKeon told me they appreciate the defense secretary’s willingness to hear out their concerns. Recently, Hagel pressured Congress to reverse the $500 billion in Pentagon budget cuts over 10 years mandated under sequestration, saying they put soldiers’ lives at risk at a time of growing threats, and he has sought to preserve combat readiness by taking on traditional “third rails” in DoD budgeting like base and housing allowances.
“He’s a reformer over here. And the record bears that out,” says the senior defense official, noting initiatives such as Hagel’s reviews of the military health-care system in the wake of the Veterans Affairs scandal, his intense focus on sexual assault within the military and his “holistic review” of America’s aging nuclear weapons complex. Hagel has surprised even some skeptics about his long-term defensive vision, most recently calling for a new generation of game-changing “offset” technologies—like the smart bombs developed in the late ‘70s—to outpace nations such as China and Russia; he’s pushing hard for progress in robotics, advanced computing, miniaturization and 3-D printing.
Even so, according to the federal government’s 2014 personnel survey, civilian defense employees have grown increasingly dissatisfied with their jobs, with ratings dropping in 47 of 84 categories from last year. And the larger question is whether Hagel’s mostly inward focus on budget and morale issues at the Pentagon is the right focus now—instead of helping to project American power abroad amidst spiraling global crises.
As for Rice and the NSC, Reed says that the criticism one hears “is almost kind of ritualistic.” With a few exceptions like Brent Scowcroft, George H.W. Bush’s much-admired national security adviser, few people in that position over recent decades have escaped criticism, including Rice’s predecessors, Jim Jones and Tom Donilon, who were both faulted at various times for poor coordination and inadequate strategic vision.
Asked to comment on the criticism of Rice, White House Chief of Staff McDonough said the president was totally behind her. “At a time when we are confronting complex challenges on the global stage, Susan is leading a disciplined, rigorous, and effective foreign policy process to tee up the best options for the president, and then implement and deliver on his decisions,” McDonough said in an email. “The president values Susan’s counsel because she always offers unvarnished facts and advice. He appreciates her frank, no-nonsense style, unmatched work ethic, and sharp intellect.”
But what might be missing most from the administration—at least according to its critics—is a forceful strategist who is able to push the president (who remains, for the most part, his own No. 1 strategist) to be more decisive. It is not unreasonable to suppose that Rice feels somewhat snake-bit by her long and traumatic public trial over Benghazi, and the difficulties she has long had in her dealings with Capitol Hill. After her TV appearance on Benghazi, she sought to preserve her candidacy for secretary of state with a series of strikingly unsuccessful meetings on Capitol Hill in which she failed to impress even moderate Republicans such as Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. She also found herself facing resistance from foreign-policy elites who questioned her temperament and her record, including her past close relations with African dictators such as Paul Kagame of Rwanda.
Of course, no one knows Obama’s thinking on national security better than Rice, who has been with him longer than any senior official in the administration with the exception of McDonough, his chief of staff. And as we’ve discovered during six-plus years of studying Obama’s MO, that counts for a lot with this president. Keeping America out of any more disastrous wars is his mission, and it may well be that his allegedly bumbling team is doing nothing more than implementing his desires. Whether that is any longer a policy appropriate to the times, given the resilience of ISIL—and whether he’s getting the kind of advice he needs to hear, rather than the kind he wants to hear—is another question, one for the pundits to debate.
But as one former senior Pentagon official puts it, “When you select for personal loyalty, that may be all you get.”
