Роберт Гейтс - Duty - Memoirs of a Secretary at War

I saw firsthand some of the challenges when I visited Creech Air Force Base in Nevada very early in 2008. Creech is the headquarters of the 432nd Reconnaissance Wing and the 15th and 17th Reconnaissance Squadrons, and it was the control center where pilots actually flew many of the drones based in Iraq and Afghanistan. The base is in the middle of nowhere and, when I first visited, quite spartan. In the operations building, there were multiple cubicles, each with an Air Force pilot at a work station. The whole enterprise resembled a very sophisticated video arcade—except these men and women were playing for keeps. On screens in front of them, the pilots in Nevada could see exactly and simultaneously what the Predator or Reaper was seeing in Iraq or Afghanistan. Each pilot had a joy stick and an instrumentation panel for remotely flying a vehicle thousands of miles away. It was one of the most astonishing—and lethal—displays of technological prowess I have ever seen.

I was taken to a new hangar to see both a Predator and a Reaper. They both look like giant bugs, with long spindly legs, a broad wingspan, and a camera pod that looks like a huge, distended eyeball. The Reaper is quite a bit larger than the Predator and, when armed, can carry a weapons load comparable to some of our fighters. Looking at those aircraft, I could not understand why I was having such a hard time persuading the Air Force leadership that these “remotely piloted vehicles” were an integral part of the Air Force’s future and should become a significant and enduring part of its combat capability.

I spent some time with the drone pilots, who had a number of gripes. They had a two-hour round-trip commute every day from their homes at Nellis Air Force Base after a grueling day of flying multiple missions. There was no place where you’d want to eat at Creech. There was no physical fitness facility. There was no promising career path for the airmen who flew the drones without going back to flying airplanes—they weren’t being promoted, and they were ineligible for the kind of air combat recognition and medals that airplane pilots could receive. Within months of my visit, the Air Force extended the hours of the child care center at Nellis, funded a medical and dental clinic at Creech, and began construction of a new food outlet and dining facility.

As the need for more ISR kept growing through the winter of 2007–8, it was clear my haranguing wasn’t working. On April 4, 2008, I sent a memo to Admiral Mullen, a strong supporter and valuable ally in what I was trying to do with ISR, expressing my determination to press aggressively on all fronts necessary to get ISR support to Iraq and Afghanistan. I asked him for a briefing on initiatives under way and for his thoughts on any additional opportunities to increase ISR support over the ensuing thirty to ninety days. Ten days later I told Mullen that we needed a more comprehensive approach addressing how to maximize capabilities in the short term.

I soon established the ISR task force, led by the director of program evaluation Brad Berkson and Marine Lieutenant General Emo Gardner. I asked them for options for additional ISR capability in 30-, 60-, 90-, and 120-day phases. Each major Defense component with a stake in the outcome would have a senior representative on the task force, which would report to me directly once a month, beginning in two weeks.

Mullen, Undersecretary for Intelligence Clapper, Berkson, and I also agreed we needed to find more ISR resources in the United States and in other commands—for example, did we need as many pilots and drones in the training program instead of deployed in the field?—and that we had to look hard at whether the commands in Iraq and Afghanistan could more efficiently use the ISR resources they already had. For me, these bureaucratic fights always came back to my obsession to protect the troops currently in the fight and to do so urgently.

My first briefing by the task force soon thereafter underscored the problem and fed my frustration. Of nearly 4,500 U.S. drones worldwide, only a little more than half were in Iraq and Afghanistan. We needed to change that. We also needed to increase the number of translators for intercepted communications, unattended ground sensors to provide early warning of approaching insurgents, and people and hardware for quickly processing the information we collected and getting it to the commanders and troops who needed it. In August, I approved seventy-three new initiatives at a cost of $2.6 billion. On occasion, I would overreach. At one briefing when I was told we would soon have twenty-four “caps” (each with enough drones and crews to provide twenty-four-hour coverage), I asked whether the theater could manage ninety-two caps. I was told, “No, that would eclipse the sun.”

During the summer, Berkson and McCarthy launched themselves into the field, visiting Creech as well as Iraq and Afghanistan. They were not welcomed. As they counted the number of Predators in hangars at Creech, one Air Force officer there complained to the Pentagon about my micromanagers telling him what he did and did not need. But Berkson and McCarthy found two to three caps’ worth of capability in their visit to Creech and reported that the pilots there were “flying” only sixty hours a month. They could do more and subsequently did. Command staffs in Baghdad and Kabul were equally sore at having someone from Washington “grading their homework.” But what was important was that they found more capability.

The congressional appropriations committees were uneasy with the ISR task force because the funding did not go through the traditional budgetary process. They almost always ultimately approved, but it took too long, and they continued to press for dissolution of the task force and a return to regular procedures. I changed the structure of the task force a couple of times—and renamed it in the Obama administration—which amounted to a bit of a shell game with the Hill for more than three years, to ensure I had a mechanism at my disposal in Washington that could effectively serve the commanders in the field.

We would focus on getting more ISR capabilities to Iraq and Afghanistan for the remainder of my time as secretary. By June 2008 the Air Force was able to tell me it was dramatically increasing the number of patrols by armed drones. The following month I approved reallocating $1.2 billion within Defense to buy fifty MC-12 planes—dubbed “Liberty” aircraft—equipped to provide full-motion video and collect other intelligence, primarily in Afghanistan. These relatively low-cost, low-tech, twin-propeller aircraft—the kind traditionally despised by the Air Force—were more than capable of getting the job done. Allocating ISR assets between Iraq and Afghanistan was an ongoing challenge for Central Command, but one simple reality helped guide decisions: Predators were man hunters, whereas the Liberty aircraft were a superb asset in the counter-IED world. We would develop and deploy many other kinds of cameras and platforms, both airborne and at fixed sites on the ground, to provide our troops with intelligence that supported combat operations but that also protected their bases and outposts, especially in Afghanistan. There were almost sixty drone caps when I left office.

The difficulty in getting the Pentagon to focus on the wars we were in and to support the commanders and the troops in the fight left a very bad taste in my mouth. People at lower levels had good ideas, but they had an impossible task in breaking through the bureaucracy, being heard, and being taken seriously. The military too often stifled younger officers, and sometimes more senior ones, who challenged current practices. In a speech I gave to Air Force personnel a few days after I established the ISR task force, I made it clear that I encouraged cultural change in the services, unorthodox thinking, and respectful dissent. I spoke of earlier Air Force reformers and the institutional hostility and bureaucratic resistance they had faced. I asked the midlevel officers in the audience to rethink how their service was organized, manned, and equipped. I repeated my concern that “our services are still not moving aggressively in wartime to provide resources needed now on the battlefield.” In a line about ISR that I penciled in on my way to the speech, I said, “Because people were stuck in old ways of doing business, it’s been like pulling teeth.”