An Autonomous SecDef?

Aaron Stein 0:00

It could look like R-2-D2. Star Wars 7. We've gone off the rails. Hello and welcome to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the only and therefore leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. My name is Aaron Stein. I'm the co-host of the podcast. I'm a contributor to the Arms Control Wonk blog, and I'm also an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:32

And I'm Jeffrey Lewis. I am the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. So Aaron, we're going to talk about secretaries of defense this week.

Aaron 0:45

Yep, if we still have one.

Jeffrey 0:49

So for a long time now, it was clear that Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and President Barack Obama did not like one another very much. There have been all kinds of indications that that relationship was not working in late October 2020. Hagel apparently wrote a memo to Susan Rice, the National Security Advisor, that basically dumped the dysfunction in our Syria policy in her lap.

It leaked on October 30th. When Secretary of Defense nasty grams to National Security Advisors start leaking, that's usually a sign that things are about to go badly. And then on Monday, November 24th, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced his resignation. That triggered all kinds of unpleasant things. The administration immediately leaked that, well, it wasn't really a resignation.

He was fired. People said nasty things, some stupid nasty things like don't send a sergeant to do a secretary's job. Hagel leaked all kinds of information about the administration being micromanaging and about decision making being concentrated in the white house and not being listened to. And the administration fired back. Fred Kaplan has a, has a column in which a former senior official tells him that at every NSC meeting Susan Rice and I would ask Hagel for his views.

And Hagel would only say, I agree with John Kerry or I agree with Martin Dempsey. I don't know if any of this is true. But it does seem like it triggered a whole bunch of chaos. I guess the White House had asked Hagel to stay or at least hold off on announcing his resignation for a week while they lined up a replacement.

He refused. And so then the administration went through this very ugly public period where several candidates, including Carl Levin, Jack Reed, Michelle Flournoy, all indicated that if asked, they would not serve.

Aaron 2:46

Thanks, but no thanks.

Jeffrey 2:47

Thanks, but no thanks for two years of garbage time. And so the fickle finger of fate is pointing at Ash Carter, who I think would make an excellent secretary of defense. But the administration still hasn't announced his nomination with officials leaking to CNN that they're still looking for someone, quote unquote, higher profile. So, Aaron, there's a technical term for this.

What's that? It's a goat rodeo. It's a goat rodeo.

Aaron 3:12

Do you know what I'm going to miss most about Chuck Hagel?

Jeffrey 3:15

What?

Aaron 3:16

His socks.

Jeffrey 3:18

Do listeners know how much I hate his socks?

Aaron 3:21

Yeah. For listeners who don't know, Jeff and I had a debate on Facebook about Hagel's socks. I'm in favor of them.

Jeffrey 3:27

You are not. I do not believe that the United States can credibly extend security assurances to its allies around the world if the Secretary of Defense is wearing novelty socks.

Aaron 3:39

Anyways, doesn't this just point to a much larger issue? I mean, we talk about arms control. We talk about nonproliferation. We talk about disarmament. These are all policy issues. And our policy-making process is entirely screwed up. I wish I could use stronger language, but this is a kid's show. And I just find this to be absolutely absurd, Jeffrey.

We are fighting three wars. I mean, we are currently engaged in military activity in Syria. We are currently engaged in military activity in Iraq. We are still fighting a war in Afghanistan that was extended for a year, by the way, to which the Afghan parliament voted and ours didn't. And we have no secretary of defense.

Jeffrey 4:18

What's wrong with this picture? We have a secretary of defense. I think he still shows up to work every day.

Aaron 4:23

He shows up to work in his socks and he picks up a paycheck. What is he doing all day? Fuming. Obviously, he's doing something.

Jeffrey 4:30

Leaking.

Aaron 4:32

Leaking stuff, nasty stuff. We have an Obama White House that's still looking for somebody, quote, unquote, more high profile. I just want somebody in the seat. Well, somebody who can make a decision. Yeah.

Jeffrey 4:44

Well, I think this I mean, this is one of my frustrations with the president is it is it seems that after six years, he doesn't understand what the president does. You know that that early on, there was this idiotic idea of filling a cabinet with a team of rivals as though, you know, this was 1861 and the government worked the same way.

Yeah. And I don't know if you remember this, but early on, the president picked James Jones as his national security advisor.

Other voice 5:13

Yes.

Jeffrey 5:14

And it was a baffling decision at the time because James Jones, despite being a very distinguished person with a very strong background. Had none of the requisite skills necessary to be a national security advisor, which mostly is about making sure that pay moves and riding herd on the bureaucracy and working the interagency process, and didn't have the temperament, and frankly, didn't have the interest in doing that job.

I mean, he thought that the job, as far as I can tell, Would be advising the president about national security, which is not what it is. It really is a staff job in terms of making sure that the interagency process puts the president in the best position to succeed. And it just seems to me that ever since that nomination, there have been this series of puzzling decisions that the president makes when he appoints someone, whether it's in a staff spot or as a cabinet secretary, and it's like he doesn't understand what they do.

I just – I find it baffling.

Aaron 6:16

No, I mean I do too. I mean it would be one thing if this was a time of peace. But again, as I said, we're sort of in a state of perpetual war, and it would be nice if the president could get this correct from the outset. But I want to go back to the memo that you talked about in the beginning.

When I saw that memo, first of all, red flags immediately went up. Because the memo was leaked. And the memo was a clear shot across Susan Rice's bow about the Syria policy. And honestly, in hindsight, I feel as if it was written for his memoir. So when history looks back at his time in Secretary of Defense, his complaint will have been on record.

You understand what I'm saying? I do. I do. It wasn't even really a – it wasn't a policy decision. It was sort of a political, I need to prepare my legacy type issue. And This is the question I want to pose for you because I'm so angry about it. What does this say about actually the state of our policymaking in D.C.?

I mean is the system broken? Well, yeah, of course it's broken.

Jeffrey 7:13

I mean I think that when you – the way that I interpret the leak of that memo – When you have leaks in Washington, it's because someone has lost an argument. And the way that one appeals losing an argument when the president isn't on your side or you can't get access to the president is that you go to the press, right?

And so you basically force the president to deal with your objections. So it's one thing for him to say, thanks for your advice, Chuck. I'm going to do something different. It's another thing to then make him get beat up in the press. And so... The best administrations, ones that are functional, don't suffer those kinds of problems because people have faith in the process.

They believe that their voice is going to be heard. They believe that they're going to have a role in shaping the policy. And so as a consequence, you win some, you lose some, but generally you don't air the dirty laundry in public. So I think as soon as that starts happening, as soon as you have a secretary of defense who's telling everyone who will listen, I want to do something different and they won't listen to me.

He's asking to be fired, right? Because he wants to go down in such a way that he's not going to have the stink of this administration on him, right? He is going to say, well, if it had been up to me, we would have done something different. So, but that, that to me, that's broken process, right? That's not just a disagreement.

That's a, an administration that doesn't work.

Aaron 8:50

Right. I mean, I think it's been pretty clear that the administration hasn't worked for a while now. I mean. Okay, wait, Aaron, I'm going to stop you.

Jeffrey 8:57

At what point did you think they worked? I have optimism at the beginning. Oh man. As soon as he picked Jones, I was, I slapped my head like, oh no, it's, you know, he's Jimmy Carter. I was fooled.

Aaron 9:14

I voted for him twice. So I like to have optimism about where my leaders are going. I only voted for him once. OK. But you can see it's just become – well, it's just become a poop show to keep it – Goat rodeo. Let's stay with goat rodeo. It's become a goat rodeo. And I actually think it's starting to fundamentally affect the way in which – We are being perceived in this world.

I think it's actually starting to have bigger policy implications that are far bigger than leaks to the Washington Post, leaks to the New York Times.

Jeffrey 9:47

Did you see Susan Rice got asked about that?

Aaron 9:49

I didn't.

Jeffrey 9:52

The person was making the argument that when – now I don't remember who asked her – But the question was, when I travel abroad, I encounter real frustration and disappointment with how the Obama presidency has turned out.

Other voice 10:10

Which, you know, like, I traveled abroad.

Jeffrey 10:15

I hear that. And her response, which is a very Susan Rice response, is, well, you must be traveling in a different world than I am. It's like, uh-huh. Yeah.

Aaron 10:26

I remember this. I think it was in the Washington Post. By all accounts, from everybody I hear in the nonproliferation community, Ash Carter gets high marks. Yeah, he'd be great. He's a guy I thought of as well. I'm going to be completely honest. I don't know that much about him. Although I hear he's a good wonk, I hear he's good on nuclear issues.

Do you think that he could come into the Pentagon, let's assume he'll be coming, and sort of fix some of the problems that we're That we're having both the nuclear arsenal perhaps with the way the Pentagon is being run. I have no hope that he'll actually be able to crack the inner circle of Rice, Rhodes, and Obama, and McDonough.

Jeffrey 11:04

But there are other things he could do, right? Right. I think to a first approximation, you have to set your expectations appropriately. And so every administration is going to succeed or fail based on – The wisdom and character and strength of the president, right? And so if the president wants to have a tight inner circle that micromanages and makes decisions in a kind of opaque fashion, then, you know, the greatest secretary of defense in the world is probably not going to be able to fix that.

Might be able to manage that, might be able to limit the impact of that a little bit. But that's, you know, like... Making the president better is not something I think many cabinet secretaries can reasonably expect to do. Carter is very competent. I worked with Ash when I was at Harvard. My office was not very far from this.

Other voice 12:00

He has some personality quirks.

Jeffrey 12:03

He can be a challenging personality like a lot of talented people. And I think one of the reasons that they've held off is you've seen leaks that there are, you know, allegedly White House officials threatening to resign if Ash is picked.

Other voice 12:17

Because, you know, he can be rough.

Jeffrey 12:24

But having said all of that, you know, any person you put in that job is going to have a healthy amount of self-respect and is going to have been careful about his or her career. And, you know, you're already seeing so many people look at these last two years and think, I think two years of garbage time is maybe not as good as the chance I'll get down the road if Hillary Clinton or somebody else wins.

And so, you know, I think the president should be like, you know, kissing Ash Carter's posterior for even considering taking this job. So I think it's frankly... That they're not just delighted that he's willing to say yes. So yeah, I think he would run the building well. He knows his way around. He's got pretty sensible policy views.

We can talk about some of the debates about things he said that bother people. Yeah, that's actually what I was hinting at. But on the whole, yeah. On the whole, he's good. Yeah, I mean – It's that op-ed, isn't it? It's the op-ed.

Aaron 13:31

You hate that op-ed? I'm pushing towards the op-ed. I was prompting you to talk about it. But there is something I want to bring up. I don't actually expect him to fix this policy, as I was saying, because – There's no signs of a major course correction coming with the Obama administration. There's only two years left. But what I do find is what you said earlier, is that people are still raising a big stink over the fact that he's a little rough around the edges, that they should be happy he's taking the job.

This is a thankless task for two years. No kidding. I mean, this is absolutely thankless. And with the way everybody's gone out, they should just be happy that they have a warm body to fill. And again, it would be fine if – it would be bad enough if the country was just in a state of peace. But we're fighting three wars and we have a guy who's showing up, Hegel, just cashing them checks and a guy who some White House officials are uncomfortable with because he's a rough around the edges.

That's just bizarre. That's absurd. That's a broken process. Just going back, I'm a broken record.

Jeffrey 14:30

No, it's fine. It's one of these things where you just kind of go over and over and over again because it doesn't make any sense. Makes no sense. You want to look at the people who are so sensitive that they're easily offended by the fact that maybe Ash has not been very nice to them.

Other voice 14:48

And it's like, really? Really?

Jeffrey 14:51

So what you're saying is, you know, you've climbed to this exalted position where, you know, you're hovering around the president of the United States and, you know, you are fighting three wars and you are desperate for a secretary of defense and you have a supremely qualified human being. And your complaint is what he was mean to you once.

Aaron 15:10

Right, and he can manage a $600 billion budget. Do you know what I mean? That gets overlooked a lot. I have nothing wrong with Secretary Hagel. I supported him during the confirmation hearings because of all that bizarro Israeli lobby type BS that was flying around. But if Ash Carter can manage $600 billion, by all accounts, he's pretty good at it.

If he's a smart dude, by all accounts, he is a smart dude. And if his one personality quirk is he makes some people feel bad because he's harsh to them and he's willing to take a thankless job – Would you just effing take him?

Jeffrey 15:43

Give him the darn job. Give him the darn job. I don't know how to say this, but there is always the possibility that maybe Ash was a little bit mean and dismissive because they weren't right or they weren't very smart.

Aaron 16:04

He said some silly things before. I think we could take a knock at him.

Jeffrey 16:09

Well, no, but I mean, my point being, no, of course we can't. But what I mean is, the very people who are, well, it's hard to know if they're the same people, but I suspect the very people who are expressing all kinds of concerns about how Carter may have treated him, those are the people who are responsible for how screwed up things are.

Do they really expect that people throughout this entire time would have never pointed out that policies are not going so well? Is this really about Ash, or is it about the fact that they're maybe too sensitive to criticism?

Aaron 16:46

Yeah, to be honest, in a sort of very morbid way, I'm actually looking forward to some of the president's closest confidants' memoirs when they come out in two or three years. I'm curious what they think of all this. We've seen the leaks, but I'm actually curious to see it all written, sort of ghostwritten out with full rationales for the decisions they've made in recent years.

Jeffrey 17:09

Yeah, by the way, I should say for the record before we transition to this op-ed, I would – I am more bothered, I think, than many people were about many of Chuck Hagel's previous statements. Although I'm not convinced that, I don't know that they reflect a consistent worldview, but boy, he did say some dumb things that I found offensive and I don't know.

I was not wild about a universe of things that Chuck Hagel said in the 1990s, but I suspect that's because he was careless with language rather than probably any sort of deeper-seated resentment against groups of people.

Aaron 17:58

No, I agree. Yeah, and some of the stuff he said while Secretary of Defense were hard to comprehend, let's put it that way. They weren't clearly articulated in public, particularly when he was making policy announcements. It should have been sharp and on message. It had a chance to be a bit watery, I'll call it. Loose around the edges.

Fuzzy. Do we want to talk about the op-ed? Yeah, let's talk about the op-ed and we'll wrap up there because there's some fuzzy and loose language in that one too. Well, I think we talk about – we'll talk about the op-ed and maybe –

Jeffrey 18:33

Sort of ponder if the White House doesn't come to its senses and pick Ash, who will they pick? Right. So once upon a time, North Korea was thinking about launching a Taepodong-2 missile rocket. They say it's a space launcher. We said it was a missile. You say potato. I say potato. Let's call it a launch off. And Bill Perry said, Who we all adore, was a wonderful Secretary of Defense.

Ash Carter's mentor is one of the four statesmen who now call for a world without nuclear weapons. Bill Perry and Ash Carter wrote an article in Time magazine called The Case for a Preemptive Strike on North Korea's Missiles, in which they argued that the value of the engineering data from a Taepodong-2 test would be so valuable that That they would conduct a very small conventional strike using a single cruise missile or a single precision bomb to destroy the, the launcher on the pad.

This was July 2006. There is there have been, been Well, how would we say this? There have been a lot of speculations about why Perry and Carter wrote this thing, what their goal was. As it turned out, the Bush administration did not attack North Koreans. North Koreans launched it. It didn't work. Eventually, the North Koreans got around to doing a nuclear test.

They've now launched the thing a couple of more times. It's only worked once. We haven't attacked the North Koreans. Life moves on. Life has moved on. Right. Yeah. So I don't know, Aaron, what do you think? I don't, I will say this. I don't think it's a, I don't think it's a, I don't think one op ed that I find peculiar is not a reason to disqualify someone who, as I've already said, I think is supremely qualified for this position.

Aaron 20:45

No, I agree. I mean, I'm younger and I'm starting in this business. I, I feel like it would be a disservice to everybody if you have to go back in time and account for maybe some of the stupid things you said in an op-ed or a flippant remark that you make. Because I think you should be encouraged to think out of the box all the time.

And if the standard with which you judge somebody is that they maybe made a stupid policy decision in 2006 that was never acted upon, I don't think that disqualifies you from any job. Otherwise, I don't think you or I would ever have a job, because you can say some silly things. So no, I think he's fine. Because at that time, that was a very valid argument.

It wasn't as if he was the only person saying it. There was a whole chorus of people who were making the similar argument, if I'm remembering back to that correctly, although North Korea is far more in your area of expertise than mine.

Jeffrey 21:34

Yeah, well, what I would say, and I pulled up the thing now, and I realized it actually was an op-ed in the Washington Post, but then they had another piece in Time magazine where they kind of made more explicit some of the things that were not very clear in the original piece. You know, you have to remember that in 2006...

There had been a process with the North Koreans called the Perry Process. They also named after Bill Perry, who as a former secretary of defense had advised the Clinton administration to try to shore up the 1994 agreed framework, which was kind of starting to fall apart in the late 1990s. He's told Obama he's not interested. He's unavailable.

Perry is like 85 years old now and – It was a joke. Yeah. You know what though? I think again, if Perry would say yes, like really, it's – We'd bring him out. Yeah. I think if Sam Nunn wants this job, give it to him.

Other voice 22:38

Whatever. Just really, there are enough qualified people out there.

Jeffrey 22:42

If they – If they're willing to put up with your micromanaging nonsense for two years you know, as, as we see how many how many wars we can lose simultaneously. Right. Be green. But Perry had always made this argument that we needed to, and I don't agree with this from a policy matter, but everybody else did. So like people taking pot shots at Ash should sort of own up to the fact that they all bought into this Perry process idea that we should sharpen the choice for the North Koreans.

So that on the one hand, we should offer more in terms of negotiations. But when negotiations didn't work, we should apply more pressure than we do. And so, you know, it was, I think, tremendously consistent with what Perry had been arguing. You know, he would have made more concessions to the North Koreans in negotiations. And if those negotiations didn't work and they were going to do a missile test, he'd blow the thing up on the pad.

It's not how I approached the problem. But it is the logical extension of what the Clinton administration's policy was and what people were arguing. And so I think to somehow flash forward and suggest that that would disqualify Ash Carter as being Secretary of Defense is... I don't buy it, even though I didn't agree with the op-ed at the time.

Aaron 24:14

No, I think it's a symbol of further dysfunction, if you ask me. One comment in the op-ed that's keyword searchable from 2006 that was in line, as you said, with the policy that was put forward, which I didn't agree with, nevertheless should not put smart people out of business. I think it's the bottom line.

Other voice 24:32

I think it's down there with Ash Carter was mean to me. I don't want him to be – like whoever is in the White House who thinks he was mean to him or whatever, it's like really?

Aaron 24:41

Grasping at straws. Frankly, I think it's – not to go there again. It's effing nonsense if you ask me because I'm in that type of mood to swear. But one thing I would say is the president makes decisions. And so if we're worried about a comment about the SecDef, I mean, one thing I will say throughout this is that I think the Syria nonsense, the Hagel nonsense, is we talked about the negative.

I'm going to say one thing positive I've seen after this is that I've yet to find anybody happy with the current status quo, but everybody's still doing their job. You understand what I'm saying? So civil-military relations in the U.S. continue, regardless of our dysfunction. So whether Ash Carter, let's say, would want to Preemptively strike or preventatively strike North Korean missile launch in the future.

It's still The president who makes the decisions, and I think we have a clear sense about how this president thinks about things. So I don't think we have to worry too much about that.

Other voice 25:44

Aaron, if I understand you correctly, you're saying that maybe just the little slightest touch of crazy would be a good thing.

Aaron 25:54

Yeah, shake it up a little bit. Maybe he'll speak up at meetings.

Jeffrey 26:01

Hey, one thing I want to say before we go. If they can't get somebody like Sam Nunn and they're insisting on someone high profile, fine. If they're so foolish as to pass up Ash Carter, who, again, I've said repeatedly, I think is supremely qualified. Or if Ash comes to his senses and says, you know, like, I don't need to wait around while you see if you can do better.

Hang me out to dry hair. Well, I mean, so the joke I made on Twitter is it's like, you know, it's like Barry says, hey, Ash, you want to go to the prom?

Other voice 26:39

And he's like, no, I think I'm going to go with Hillary.

Jeffrey 26:43

Well, no, no, she's gonna, she's gonna go with Michelle, and he's like, oh, okay. And, and then you know, it's like okay, well, great. I'm gonna ask three or four other people, and then I'll let you know, keeping my options open. Yeah, right, you know, it's like actually, why don't you go do something anatomically difficult to yourself? but you know, I, I, I always add into this conversation.

We never mentioned Walt Slocum. And Walt Slocum was Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the Clinton administration, right? He had the job that Michelle Flournoy had. He was a great undersecretary. He was asked by President Bush to go to Iraq in order to help with the Helped with the reconstruction of Iraq, and has had the disbanding of the Iraqi army pinned on him.

And so he is another supremely qualified Democrat who has been seemingly forever excommunicated from the Democratic Party because the president asked him to do a terrible job at which no one could succeed. And out of patriotism, he said yes.

Aaron 27:59

It takes something extraordinary like two years and a terrible job to say no to the president, if you ask me.

Jeffrey 28:04

Right. So, I mean, my observation is if Carter comes to his senses and decides that, like, two years of garbage time being micromanaged is not what he wants, I, you know, if they can't get Nunn, they can't get Carter, they've already missed out on Levin, Reid, and Flournoy, you know, Slocum's the kind of guy who would say yes and I think would do a good job.

Yeah. You know, maybe we'll have to revisit the whole Iraq thing, but I think it's probably time to bury it.

Aaron 28:37

Maybe we could just go unmanned like our aircraft. We could have two years of autonomous systems, see if the Pentagon can run. It'll be like Belgium. We could have no government for like two years.

Other voice 28:48

No, no, no. I think you actually nominate a drone.

Aaron 28:52

Yeah, we could nominate a drone, an autonomous system.

Jeffrey 28:54

Physical drone and you just sort of – you park the drone in the SecDef's office.

Aaron 28:59

Right, with the auto pen. And you can decide stuff. Sorry. You can decide stuff.

Other voice 29:13

Can we put novelty socks on the little landing wheels?

Aaron 29:18

Yeah. Because Susan Rice will just send a memo and the drone can just go, yes, ma'am. That will actually be its signature, yes, ma'am.

Other voice 29:27

You know what she'll do, though? She'll probably complain about the tone of the drone and the way that he agreed with her.

Aaron 29:34

Well, he really would be living in a separate universe.

Other voice 29:37

You don't sound like you mean it.

Aaron 29:40

He'd be living in a separate universe just like Hegel when he traveled. Oh, golly. Yeah. So this is a positive note. We're endorsing autonomous systems to run the U.S. government because it couldn't get any worse, right?

Jeffrey 29:52

You know, I just think, look, if you want somebody higher profile than Ash Carter, you're fundamentally interested in the photo op. And what would be more freaking awesome than forcing world leaders and foreign ministers of defense to pose with a drone?

Aaron 30:08

It could look like R-2-D2. Star Wars 7. We've gone off the rails. Star Wars, you know, Star Wars episode eight, two years. But anyways, with that, a positive note, two years at the Pentagon with the drone to run three wars and a completely dysfunctional process in Washington. Welcome to the world's last superpower. Jeffrey, this was a good one, huh?

Other voice 30:37

Yeah. Where's my violin? Things are burning.

Aaron 30:40

Yeah. Things are burning. We'll talk next week, hopefully about something better.

Other voice 30:45

Take care.

Aaron 30:45

More uplifting. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Thanks, Jeffrey, for joining again. Thanks, everybody.