The crippling and pervasive defects in us national-security policy—costly exertions that, time and again, fail to yield the promised results—are patently obvious, consistently bemoaned, and yet effectively tolerated. To say that the apparatus principally responsible for implementing those policies is an underperforming behemoth qualifies as a considerable understatement. The kindest verdict one can offer regarding the Pentagon is that it marginally outperforms its first cousin, the Department of Veterans Affairs.
To illustrate the point, consider the case of Ashton Carter, now a year in office as secretary of defense. The 25th person to hold that position since its inception just 69 years ago, Carter is seasoned, able, and undoubtedly well-intentioned. Yet he is as much a creature of the Pentagon as he is its CEO. He embodies the culture of national security, having absorbed its assumptions, worldview, habits, and language.
According to his official biography, “Secretary Carter has spent more than three decades leveraging his knowledge of science and technology, global strategy and policy as well as his deep dedication to the men and women of the Department of Defense to make our nation and the world a safer place.” Along the way, he acquired a bushel of impressive credentials. After graduating from Yale, Carter won a Rhodes scholarship and eventually returned from Oxford with a PhD in theoretical physics. His current Pentagon tour of duty is his fourth, and follows earlier stints as deputy secretary; undersecretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics; and assistant secretary for international-security policy. As they say in Washington, Carter “knows the building.” When not in government service, “Ash” contemplates ways of making the world a safer place at prestigious universities like Harvard and Stanford, while sitting on boards and commissions that provide venues for out-of-office members of the national-security elite to audition while talking shop. Depending on your point of view, Carter arrived in his present post either exceedingly well-prepared or thoroughly vetted.
Upon assuming office in February 2015, Carter wasted no time in identifying his three priorities: first, helping the commander in chief to make sound decisions and then implementing those decisions “with our department’s long-admired excellence”; second, caring for all the members—military and civilian alike—of “the greatest fighting force the world has ever known”; and third, building “the force of the future.” This last priority means “embracing the future” while simultaneously finding ways to economize through “a leaner organization, less overhead, and reforming our business and acquisition practices.”
Although offering little that is novel or distinctive, Carter’s agenda qualifies as unobjectionable. Devoid of specifics, his goals are those of a technocrat, charged with presiding over a system that he knows well and accepts. Reduced to its essence, Carter’s message to “the building” at the outset of his tenure was this: “We’re terrific! And I know how to make us better still!”
Since taking office, Carter has spent his time doing what defense secretaries do. He flies around the world visiting the troops and consulting with field commanders. He presides at ceremonies, hosts visiting dignitaries, testifies before Congress, makes speeches, holds press conferences, and appears on TV. He manages—or pretends to manage—a sprawling bureaucracy. He makes decisions, sometimes dressed up for the occasion as “historic,” but typically representing an incremental departure from past practice—lifting the ban on women serving in combat, for example. And by no means least of all, he facilitates the expenditure of money in staggeringly large quantities.
What Carter has not done is pose first-order questions related to national-security policy and practice. Instead, he has deferred to and thereby protected existing routines and arrangements. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Averting change while pretending to foster it represents the defense secretary’s foremost, even if unacknowledged, function. In the history of that office, only two of Carter’s predecessors have had the temerity to challenge that proposition. The first was Robert McNamara in the period from 1961 to ’68; the second was Donald Rumsfeld from 2001 to ’06.
McNamara showed up for work intent on imposing a management system imported from the postwar corporate world. He aimed to align the Pentagon with fads and fashions straight out of Harvard Business School, as implemented in the Detroit auto industry. Precisely 40 years later, Rumsfeld sought to impose an entirely new approach to waging war. With information technology all the rage among the military intelligentsia, Rumsfeld believed that fads and fashions pioneered by Silicon Valley could enable the US military to revolutionize the way it fights.
Each project deservedly and ignominiously failed. Yet in both cases, the implications of failure went well beyond the rejection of a particular reform agenda. McNamara and Rumsfeld, each in his own way, had attempted a radical assertion of civilian control. Each in turn had insisted that someone should be in charge, not merely symbolically but substantively. Each had insisted that there be but a single hand on the Pentagon tiller: his own. Eventually, arrogance did them in, compounded by the ill-advised and mismanaged wars that destroyed their reputations. one further consequence of their respective failures was to gut the concept of civilian control. Although the principle remained, the practice became squishy.
The result was by no means a handing of authority to the brass. Neither McNamara’s downfall nor Rumsfeld’s several decades later meant that the generals now called the shots. Instead, the effect of their demise was to disperse authority, leaving no one really in charge and therefore no one accountable.
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Today, for public consumption, all hands sustain the pretense of loyally pulling together in response to the Pentagon coxswain’s calls. In reality, however, relentless intramural competition drives behavior. Inside the building, what passes for the formulation of strategy amounts to little more than apportioning budget share. Reconciling the contradictory demands made by rival services, commands, and programs supplants the national interest as the summum bonum.
As a consequence, in place of a coherent approach to the world, aimless forward momentum prevails. This defines our present situation, with Ash Carter nominally at the Pentagon’s helm.
It’s part of Carter’s job to prevent anyone from noticing. He does this by uttering with apparent sincerity reassuringly familiar platitudes, such as those he recited upon assuming office and has repeated since on several occasions. Yet platitudes amount to little more than a smoke screen. Behind that smoke screen, sound decisions competently implemented by a lean-and-mean organization that looks after the troops are the exception rather than the rule. The defense secretary may be more than a figurehead, but he is not the boss. There is no boss.
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To appreciate the implications, consider the conflict formerly known as the Global War on Terrorism. Today, nearly 15 years after it began, it continues with no end in sight. The inability of “the greatest fighting force the world has ever known” to bring that enterprise to a successful close would seem to require an explanation. Secretary Carter offers none. Nor does he even hazard a guess as to when, how, or at what cost the final victory will be gained. Instead, he gives such questions the widest possible berth. Indeed, he ignores them.
To be fair, on what has become the most pressing front of that larger struggle, the fight against the Islamic State, Carter has not been silent. Obama’s defense chief forthrightly defends an approach to dealing with ISIS that few outside the administration itself find defensible. Echoing the president, Secretary Carter vows to destroy the Islamic State. Yet the Pentagon’s evolving campaign, which he routinely endorses, combines the worst features of mission creep with gradual escalation. Operation Inherent Resolve, as it’s called, has been small ball all the way.
That Carter spends so much of his own time managing the campaign to defeat ISIS suggests a warped understanding of what a defense secretary exists to do. Yes, as an operational problem, ISIS poses real challenges. But those challenges are not overwhelming; we’re not talking about storming Festung Europa here. Given adequate resources, a reasonably competent staff-college graduate should be able to figure out how to prevail over an adversary that lacks an air force, possesses few modern weapons, and by relying on nihilistic violence alienates the population it presumes to govern.
Far more imposing than the operational challenge is the strategic one: addressing the conditions that give rise to entities like ISIS in the first place. Panicky Americans or demagogic presidential candidates may fancy that taking down this one organization is the key to restoring order in the Greater Middle East. Yet to nurse that fantasy is to ignore the lessons of the past 15 years, if not of the past century. Destroying ISIS is a worthy goal, but unless the underlying conditions are also addressed, doing so will merely pave the way for some successor group, likely to be just as vile. How to pre-empt the appearance of that successor—now that’s a conundrum worthy of a defense secretary’s attention.