The Civil Servant and the Insurgents

One hears that many people are reading the memoirs of Robert Gates. So they should. The book is a fascinating study in the role of a senior civil servant in a democratic state. Gates comes across as a consummate servant of the state and a very civil one: incisive, yet with a sense of modesty and proportion. More than any of the details in the book, it was the tone of Gates’s reflections that impressed me most. I found myself thinking of his book as a twenty-first-century counterpoint to Baldassare Castiglione’s celebrated treatise of 1528, The Book of the Courtier.

This is not the first memoir Gates has written. Being the Secretary of Defense, under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, was a kind of second coming for him. His first public life was as a career CIA analyst from 1968 until his retirement in 1993. That career spanned the last generation of the Cold War and gave Gates experience as an arms control analyst, an analyst of the Soviet Union in world affairs, the deputy director in charge of intelligence analysis more generally and finally, in the immediate wake of the end of the Cold War, as Director of the CIA.

His first memoir, From the Shadows (1996), was a reflection on that remarkable CIA experience. It remains an indispensable reference work on the Cold War and the final collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991. It is especially valuable at the present moment, as the former KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin, having preposterously declared the downfall of the USSR to have been “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”, is attempting to reverse some of the consequences of that collapse. There is, of course, a library of books on the subject; but the memoirs of “the ultimate insider” have a prominent place within it.

After ten years in “retirement”, which included some years as head of one of America’s largest and oldest universities, Texas A&M University, Gates was drawn back into the service of the state in 2006. President Bush needed to find a replacement for Donald Rumsfeld, whose management of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had left a lot to be desired. This plunged Gates into the attempt to chart a strategically coherent course in both wars, which he had played no part in starting. That fact alone makes his second memoir a crucial reference work.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, like the Cold War, have, of course, also generated a voluminous literature. I have attempted to stay in touch with both subjects over many years. And it is from the perspective of a scholar of the Cold War and a former defence intelligence analyst that I recommend Gates’s memoir as Secretary of Defense, alongside his CIA memoir. The new book is especially valuable, because it throws a clear light on the immense difficulties and complexities of running the Pentagon, dealing with the US Congress and its many cross-hatching agendas, dealing with the West Wing of the White House, with the press and with the numerous other agencies that constitute the US government in the early twenty-first century.

Not the least interesting aspect of the book is Gates’s account of his relationship with two successive presidents of different parties and strikingly different temperaments. As he remarks, he expected to serve for two years and then return to the quieter life of an academic administrator or retire to his lakeside residence in the Pacific Northwest. But such was the general respect and esteem he acquired while serving George W. Bush and seeing the controversial “surge” into operation in Iraq, that he was asked by Barack Obama to stay on. This had never happened with a Secretary of Defense before. He assumed and hoped that it would only be for a transitional year, but he ended up serving for another three years and his final retirement was met with regret and accepted with reluctance by President Obama.

This is striking, if only because, when the book was released in Australia, in mid-January, much was made of Gates’s alleged criticisms of Barack Obama. One review in the Wall Street Journal, reprinted in the Australian press, observed that Gates’s “views of Mr Obama are sure to draw the broadest national and international attention, especially coming from the highest-ranking cabinet member yet to write a book about his tenure”. Those views, it was implied, were negative. But when one reads the book, it is plain that Gates developed the highest respect for Obama, and for reasons that ought to give all of us food for thought.

Against his Bush administration background and his Kansas Republican upbringing, it is striking to find Gates writing what he did about Obama as a decision-maker and as a man. The crucial passage comes midway through the book. It reads:

Obama was the most deliberative president I worked for. His approach to problem solving reminded me of Lincoln’s comment on his approach to decision-making: “I am never easy when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it north, and bounded it south, and bounded it east and bounded it west.” As Obama would tell me on more than one occasion, “I can’t defend it unless I understand it.” I rarely saw him rush to a decision when circumstances allowed him time to gather information, analyse and reflect. He would sometimes be criticized for his “dilatory” decision-making, but I found it refreshing and reassuring, especially since so many pundits and critics seem to think a problem discovered in the morning should be solved by evening. As a participant in that decision-making process, I always felt more confident about the outcome after thorough deliberation. When the occasion demanded it, though, Obama could make a big decision—a life and death decision—very fast. He once told me that one reason he ran for president was because he was so bored in the Senate. I never saw anyone who had not previously been an executive—and especially someone who had been a legislator—take so quickly and easily to making decisions and so relish exercising authority. And like Bush, once Obama made a tough decision, I never knew him to have a second thought or look back.

The two men did not always agree. They had many debates about how to deal with the prolonged and bloody war in Iraq, the interminable and confused commitment in Afghanistan, the reform of the Pentagon and the size of the defence budget in the context of the financial crisis after 2008. But those debates took place between a very capable, dutiful and candid Secretary of Defense on the one hand and a very deliberative chief executive on the other. The relationship was at times tense, but it remained professional and cordial.

Moreover, Gates expresses a high regard for Obama’s personal qualities, in the immediately following paragraph:

I always thought Obama was “presidential”. He treated the office of the presidency with respect. I rarely saw him in the Oval Office without a coat and tie, and he always conducted himself with dignity. He was a man of personal integrity and, in his personal behaviour—at least to the extent that I could observe it—he was an excellent role model. We had a relaxed relationship and frequently in private I would tease him, occasionally asking him, when he was beset by big problems, “Tell me again why you wanted this job?” His broad smile is well known, and I saw it often; what is less well known is how fast it can disappear, giving way to a glacial look … I often wished both Bush and Obama would be less partisan, but clearly the political world had changed since I retired the first time, in 1993. I thought Obama was first rate in both intellect and temperament. You didn’t have to agree with all of his policies to acknowledge that.

What stands out in this assessment of Obama is Gates’s admirable commitment to non-partisan thinking, judgment and service to country. This is a virtue that is vital to the healthy functioning of any democratic state. It is called for not only on the part of civil servants, but of candidates for public office and of public intellectuals. In recent times, it has too often been lacking in public policy debates; being replaced by relentless ideological ranting and ad hominem attacks on the personalities or “credibility” of those who happen to hold a different view. Relentless and destructive personal attacks on successive US presidents, especially the last three, have not served America well. Gates, however, did serve America well and his memoir is a study in how that can be done and what it means.

This is particularly notable, because the concurrent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Obama’s determination to effect a strategic withdrawal from them placed the Secretary of Defense in a more than usually sensitive position. He makes no bones about this. The three biggest challenges confronting him, he states from the outset were: Iraq, Iraq and Iraq. And his geopolitical assessment was that, whatever the merits of the original war of choice to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2003, the stakes were now high and the outcome had to be shaped as carefully as possible in order to avoid potentially very serious “collateral damage” to America’s global standing. As he writes:

My views on how we could change the situation in Iraq for the better were evolving quickly. I knew for sure that whatever people had thought about the decision to go to war in Iraq, at this point [late 2006] we could not fail. A defeat of the US military and an Iraqi descent into a vicious civil war that likely would engage other countries in the region would be disastrous, destabilizing the region and dramatically boosting Iran’s power and prestige. In the months of furious criticism of Bush’s surge that would follow, I never heard the critics address the risk that their preferred approach of a precipitous withdrawal would, in fact, lead to these very consequences.

These were, of course, the words of a former CIA analyst, the early part of whose career had been the last seven years of the Vietnam War. His thinking seems to have been that precisely because the US had perhaps over-committed itself, it needed to conduct its strategic retreat with as much adroitness as possible.

If I have a criticism of the book, it might be that it devotes a great deal of time to the minutiae of Gates’s struggles in political and bureaucratic Washington (and even to his personal affairs and feelings), somewhat at the expense of a deeper reflection on this pivotal question of the use of American power and the costs of the American way of war. Time and again he expresses anguish at the fates of American military personnel killed or wounded in action. He recounts in considerable detail his efforts to ensure that they were better equipped and protected in the field and better cared for in hospitals and when invalided out.

But he does not provide an altogether satisfactory account of the specifically military or strategic aspects of the situation he inherited and that which he left to his successors. His predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, had sent the American military into Iraq with no coherent plan for what was to be done with the country after Saddam was overthrown and no serious thought about how to stabilise the country if it fell apart after liberation from decades of brutal dictatorship, or rose up in arms against its would-be liberators. The consequences were enormous expense and a need to try to rethink and re-equip the army for a kind of war the Pentagon had declared, after Vietnam, it would never fight again: counter-insurgency.

Gates championed the “surge” in Iraq, as the last roll of the dice by President Bush, and he recommended David Petraeus as the commander to lead the surge; but he fails to tell his reader enough about who Petraeus was and how he had spent his whole career preparing for this role. That story is well told by Fred Kaplan, in The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (2013). It is sometimes suggested that the need to equip military forces for “low intensity conflict” only rose to prominence after September 11, 2001, with the “global war on terrorism”. Kaplan shows that a small circle of soldier-scholars had been doing their best to advance such ideas since the 1980s.

Duty and The Insurgents thus complement one another. This is true at a number of levels, but primarily because, by Kaplan’s account, Gates became “the insurgent in the Pentagon” as Secretary of Defense. The “insurgents” as a group were a small number of military officers, chiefly graduates of West Point’s social sciences and humanities department, who took an interest in the theory of counter-insurgency in the 1980s and 1990s, then revived it—against strenuous mainstream resistance—for application in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2007. The way in which they resisted both orthodoxy and the career incentives that might have persuaded them to subscribe to it, makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the pathologies of defence bureaucracies and the art of war.

Both these things are long-standing interests of mine. My doctorate in international relations was researched and written in the mid-1980s. It centred on US counter-insurgency operations throughout the Cold War—in the Philippines, Vietnam and El Salvador, in particular. The Insurgents shows that the young David Petraeus and a number of others like Kalev Sepp, H.R. McMaster and John Nagl were immersing themselves in the same topic at the same time. It was an unsettling sensation to realise that, had I found my way to the United States in the late 1980s to do a post-doc and turn my dissertation into a book, I might well have found myself networked with this circle of thinkers.

I didn’t do that. The Cold War being over, I sought work in our own Department of Defence and was assigned to the analysis of East Asia as China began its vertiginous economic ascent. After some years, I exited, fed up with the pathologies of the defence and foreign affairs bureaucracies. But reading The Insurgents alongside Duty brought back countless insights and interests of my own from the 1980s. It showed, often to my astonishment, the extent to which the real lessons of the Vietnam War had been forgotten and had to be learned all over again. Chief among these was that stabilisation operations and counter-insurgency depend crucially on understanding the people you are working with and the sources of their insurgency.

The “insurgents” in the Pentagon reflected on this long before the war in Iraq, but then brought it to bear in Iraq from 2007, with significant effect. That they were able to do so at all was due in considerable measure to the capacity of the Bush White House and the Gates-led Pentagon to admit that the Rumsfeld strategy was broken and to commit to staying the course rather than simply withdrawing in disarray. Bush himself deserves more credit for this than he is commonly given. Gates deserves recognition for steering it through. Petraeus and his cohorts deserve accolades for both their tenacity in thinking about such matters and their achievements in the field.

Not long before he left Australia and went to the United States to join these insurgents in their work, then Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen sat next to me at a luncheon at Duntroon arranged by the Chief of Army. He turned to me at one point and asked my advice. “I’m contemplating getting out of the Army,” he confided, “because I want to be a thinker rather than a general.” I expressed dismay at the implication that he considered the term “thinking general” to be an oxymoron. After all, we have had and currently have a number of thinking generals, including the then and the current Chief of Army. Nonetheless, I encouraged him to look for a niche where he could set about thinking vigorously without regard to hidebound bureaucracies. After all, that is exactly what I had done. To his credit, he found John Nagl in the States and ended up playing an influential and active role in the counter-insurgency push in Iraq.

There is an entry in Gates’s index under “counter-insurgency”, but it has only a handful of page references against it. By comparison, “Congress” has scores of page references, giving some idea of where the Secretary of Defense had to fight many of his battles. His scorn for a number of members of Congress, for the incentives that drive Congress and for a number of Senate processes is visceral. He exhibits no comparably scathing criticism of either of the presidents he served with such distinction. The Insurgents, on the other hand, makes little reference to Congress, but tells, in gripping and fascinating detail, the story of a handful of thinking officers—the David Kilcullens of America—who doggedly refused to allow authority or mere ambition to suppress their critical thinking and intellectual curiosity.

We are currently at a point where a new Defence White Paper is being prepared, while the promised reviews of both the Department of Defence and the Defence Materiel Organisation have been put on hold, pending the report of the Commission of Audit. The White Paper was, for many months, slated to be written by an external specialist, Alan Dupont, at the instigation of the Minister, David Johnston. However, the Prime Minister’s National Security Adviser, Andrew Shearer, persuaded the leading mandarins in the Department of Defence, chiefly the redoubtable Dennis Richardson, that it should be written under departmental auspices. Together they engineered a political sleight of hand that shunted aside both the preferences of the minister and the role of Alan Dupont.

It may be that the new White Paper team, headed by Peter Baxter, will do an admirable job; though the machinations involved in undermining the minister’s clear preferences in the matter do not bode well for relations between the minister and the National Security Adviser, or the minister and the department—a long-standing problem. As for the further reviews, it remains unclear whether or on what terms they will take place. What is clear, however, is that a thorough review of both the department and its procurement arm, the DMO, as well as a thorough rethinking of Australia’s force structure and strategic policy, are all urgently needed; not least because of the shambles the Gillard government left behind in the Defence portfolio.

At such a juncture, it would be a good idea for as many people as possible, in Defence, in parliament and around the country, to read the Gates memoir and Kaplan’s bracing study of conceptual insurgency within the US defence establishment, egregious pork-barrelling on the part of Congress and procurement boondoggles in the Pentagon. Each book is a very stimulating read. The two taken together are beautifully instructive; and the analogies that might usefully be drawn for the purposes of serious debate in this country are many. How interesting it would be to participate in—I hardly dare write the word “conduct”—an intellectual retreat for senior defence personnel in which the two books and their implications for Australian defence reform would be discussed in detail over several days.

Let me conclude with a coda to all this, just as there is a brief postscript to The Insurgents. The postscript begins:

On November 9, 2012, the mystique that had shrouded David Petraeus for nearly a decade suddenly shattered. That afternoon, he resigned as Director of the CIA, admitting to an extra-marital affair—a firing offence in the military officers’ code and, though Petraeus had retired from the Army, he still felt bound by the code: at least after he’d been caught.

The affair had been with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, twenty years his junior, striking and athletic. Since then, Petraeus has retreated to quiet jobs in academia and business. Long before that, he had declared on a number of occasions (while still in the military) that he was not interested in running for public office. Yet, having read Kaplan’s book and Gates’s memoir, I find myself thinking that David Petraeus is a thinker and a leader who would potentially make as good an American President as any in living memory. He will be sixty-four by 2016. The Republican Party, I believe, should—if they are not already doing so—court him. Like Gates, he embodies the best of America, and his country needs him still.