In My Time - Dick Cheney [239]
The president was scheduled to see the chiefs at the Pentagon the next day, December 13, and I told him I thought it was important to have an in-depth discussion. We rode over together, along with Steve Hadley, went in through the River Entrance, and after a couple of left turns, were in the chiefs’ windowless conference room, the Tank.
General Pace opened the meeting, summarizing the chiefs’ recommendations. Their emphasis was on expanding the U.S. advisory effort, shifting the U.S. focus to developing the Iraqi Security Forces, and transitioning to Iraqi control. “The question is when do you shift to advising,” the president said. “You don’t want to do it too early.” Pace responded that General Casey did not believe that the Iraqi forces would fall apart if we shifted now. “We need to get the Iraqi Security Forces in charge,” he said.
Then I spoke. I emphasized the importance of winning in Iraq and said that the chiefs’ plan seemed to put the burden on the Iraqi people and the Iraqi Security Forces at a time when they weren’t ready. “We’re betting the farm on Iraqi Security Forces,” I said, and I wanted to know why, given the importance of prevailing in Iraq, we were willing to do that. “Wouldn’t it be better to make a major push with our own forces to get it done?” I also talked about the consequences of losing, the way it would destabilize the entire region and frighten off the moderates in countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan who had signed on with us. “Suddenly it will be very dangerous to be a friend of the United States,” I said. “There’s an awful lot riding on this.”
The resistance to a surge that the president and I heard that day was in part a product of the chiefs’ mission as mandated by the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. That legislation essentially took the chiefs out of the war-fighting business and put them in charge of raising and sustaining our military forces. The chiefs don’t take our forces to war, and they aren’t in the chain of command. They nurture, prepare, train, and equip the force, but then it gets turned over to a combatant commander to fight and win wars. So, when you go into the Tank and talk to the chiefs, they have responsibilities that go beyond what’s happening on the ground in Baghdad. They are also focused on supporting and sustaining our overall military readiness. Surging forces in Iraq could make that more difficult.
Of course, if the president gives a mission to the chiefs, they will salute smartly and get it done. But they have an obligation to point out consequences, and the president needs to hear the arguments so that he understands the trade-offs.
The most articulate spokesman of the chiefs’ viewpoint that day in the Tank was General Pete Schoomaker. A graduate of the University of Wyoming, where he played football and joined ROTC, Pete was involved in Desert One, the failed attempt in 1980 to rescue American hostages in Iran. He then became part of the original special operations teams that were formed in response to that failure. I’d had a hand in recruiting him from retirement to become army chief of staff, and he had done a terrific job.
By the end of 2006, Schoomaker’s concern was that we were putting huge stress on the force. On a daily basis he was dealing with long deployments, multiple deployments, and what that meant for soldiers and their families. He was facing recruiting and retention challenges, as well as a host of other problems that resulted from our ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, in these conflicts we’d deployed individual reservists and National Guard members to fill in where needed in Afghanistan and Iraq. This meant that when it was time to deploy these reserve and Guard units as a whole, key members had already been deployed and weren’t available. We no longer had the kind of reserve and Guard units we had anticipated having.
The pace of operations