In My Time - Dick Cheney [85]
ONE OF THE FIRST things I did at the Pentagon was ask to see an organizational chart of the Department of Defense. When I received it, I unrolled it and watched it fall off both sides of the Pershing desk. I rolled it back up and never looked at it again. I decided then and there that if I spent time trying to reorganize the Pentagon, I wouldn’t get anything done.
I wanted to address questions of grand strategy. We couldn’t yet be sure of the end result of glasnost and perestroika, the “openness” and “restructuring” that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was advocating, but we needed to address the matter of what changes in the Soviet Union might mean for our force structure and our strategy, from what we would need to fight an all-out global nuclear war to how to defeat anyone trying to dominate a region of the world vital to us.
I also wanted to focus on the operational command of the forces, the wartime system. When you go to the Department of Defense, you don’t know if you’re going to have to use the force, but it’s something I wanted to be prepared for. Early on, I asked for the after-action reports from major uses of force since the end of the Vietnam War. They laid out our successes and failures in those previous engagements, and I spent time studying them. I’ve always been convinced that we don’t do enough during the transition to a new administration to prepare those coming in for the possible use of the force. We spend a lot of time briefing on the SIOP—the Single Integrated Operational Plan—for launching our nuclear weapons, but any president is much more likely to have to use conventional or special operations forces, and we do little to prepare them for that.
I also wanted to spend significant time on intelligence matters, which had been a special interest of mine since my time on the House Intelligence Committee. As secretary of defense, I was in charge of a larger portion of the government’s intelligence assets than the director of the CIA.
Finally, I had learned from long experience that nothing was more important than personnel. I could make the best possible policy decisions, but unless I had the people on board to execute those decisions, the policies wouldn’t succeed. When I took over the Pentagon, there were forty-four presidential-level appointments requiring Senate confirmation in DOD. Ultimately I put new people into thirty-nine of those positions.
Perhaps the single most important personnel decision I would make during my first six months was for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I began to think about it the first night I was secretary. I was well aware that if I made a mistake, I would have to live with it for two years and maybe four. Brent Scowcroft had already indicated his preference for reappointing Admiral Bill Crowe, who would be completing his second two-year term as chairman on October 1, 1989, but I wanted to make my own selection for the chairman’s job—a task that became easier when Crowe indicated to me that he wasn’t all that enthusiastic about serving another term.
I was leaning toward Colin Powell, whom I had met when I was on an Intelligence Committee trip in 1986. We had stopped in Germany, where Powell was commander of the U.S. Army’s V Corps. I subsequently had the opportunity to watch him work when he served as national security advisor in the aftermath of Iran-Contra at the end of the Reagan administration. I had been impressed enough with his abilities that I called him during the Reagan-Bush presidential transition and expressed the hope that we would have the opportunity to work together at some point in the future. I had no idea that that opportunity was just months away.
The weekend after the president had announced that I would be the secretary of defense, I paid a visit to an old friend, Frank Carlucci, who also happened to be my predecessor at the Pentagon. I sought Frank’s advice about running the department,