Joint Chiefs Chairman ‘Very Positive’ After Meeting With Obama
Nov 30, 2008 Industry News, World Events
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went unarmed into his first meeting with the new commander in chief — no aides, no PowerPoint presentation, no briefing books. Summoned nine days ago to President-elect Barack Obama’s Chicago transition office, Mullen showed up with just a pad, a pen and a desire to take the measure of his incoming boss.
There was little talk of exiting Iraq or beefing up the U.S. force in Afghanistan; the one-on-one, 45-minute conversation ranged from the personal to the philosophical. Mullen came away with what he wanted: a view of the next president as a non-ideological pragmatist who was willing to both listen and lead. After the meeting, the chairman “felt very good, very positive,” according to Mullen spokesman Capt. John Kirby.
As Obama prepares to announce his national security team tomorrow, he faces a military that has long mistrusted Democrats and is particularly wary of a young, intellectual leader with no experience in uniform, who once called Iraq a “dumb” war. Military leaders have all heard his pledge to withdraw most combat forces from Iraq within 16 months — sooner than commanders on the ground have recommended — and his implied criticism of the Afghanistan war effort during the Bush administration.
But so far, Obama appears to be going out of his way to reassure them that he will do nothing rash and will seek their advice, even while making clear that he may not always take it. He has demonstrated an ability to speak the lingo, talk about “mission plans” and “tasking,” and to differentiate between strategy and tactics, a distinction Republican nominee John McCain accused him of misunderstanding during the campaign.
Obama has been careful to separate his criticism of Bush policy from his praise of the military’s valor and performance, while Michelle Obama’s public expressions of concern for military families have gone over well. But most important, according to several senior officers and civilian Pentagon officials who would speak about their incoming leader only on the condition of anonymity, is the expectation of renewed respect for the chain of command and greater realism about U.S. military goals and capabilities, which many found lacking during the Bush years.
“Open and serious debate versus ideological certitude will be a great relief to the military leaders,” said retired Maj. Gen. William L. Nash of the Council on Foreign Relations. Senior officers are aware that few in their ranks voiced misgivings over the Iraq war, but they counter that they were not encouraged to do so by the Bush White House or the Pentagon under Donald H. Rumsfeld.
“The joke was that when you leave a meeting, everybody is supposed to drink the Kool-Aid,” Nash said. “In the Bush administration, you had to drink the Kool-Aid before you got to go to the meeting.”
Obama’s expected retention of Robert M. Gates as defense secretary and expected appointment of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state and retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones as national security adviser have been greeted with relief at the Pentagon.
Clinton is respected at the Pentagon and is considered a defense moderate, at times bordering on hawkish. Through her membership on the Senate Armed Services Committee — sought early in her congressional career to add gravitas to her presidential aspirations — she has developed close ties with senior military figures.
Some in the military are suspicious of “flagpole” officers such as Jones, whose assignments included Supreme Allied Commander at NATO, Marine commandant and other headquarters service, and who grew up in France and is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. But Jones also saw combat in Vietnam and served in Bosnia.
“His reputation is pretty good,” one Pentagon official said. “He’s savvy about Washington, worked the Hill,” and at a lean 6-foot-4, the former Georgetown basketball player “looks great in a suit.”
Although Jones occasionally and privately briefed candidate Obama on foreign policy matters — on Afghanistan, in particular, as did current deputy NATO commander Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry — he is not considered an intimate of the president-elect.
But as Obama’s closest national security adviser, or at least the one who will spend the most time with him, Jones is expected to follow the pattern of two military predecessors in the job, Brent Scowcroft and Colin L. Powell, who injected order and discipline to a National Security Council full of strong personalities with independent power bases.
Although exit polls did not break out active-duty voters, it is virtually certain that McCain won the military vote.
In an October survey by the Military Times, nearly 70 percent of more than 4,000 officers and enlisted respondents said they favored McCain, while about 23 percent preferred Obama. Only African American service members gave Obama a majority.
In exit polls, those who said they had “ever served in the U.S. military” made up 15 percent of voters and broke 54 percent for McCain to 44 percent for Obama. “As a culture, we are more conservative and Republican,” a senior officer said.
Obama has said he will meet with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs as well as the service chiefs during his first week in office. At the top of his agenda for that meeting will be what he has called the military’s “new mission” of planning the 16-month withdrawal timeline for Iraq. Senior officers have publicly grumbled about the risk involved.
“Moving forward in a measured way, tied to conditions as they continue to evolve, over time, is important,” Mullen said at a media briefing four days before his Nov. 21 meeting with Obama. “I’m certainly aware of what has been said” prior to the election, he said.
The last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, clashed with the chiefs during his first sit-down with them when they opposed his campaign pledge to end the ban on gays in the military. The chiefs, some of whom held the commander in chief in thinly veiled contempt as a supposed Vietnam draft dodger, won the battle, and Clinton spent much of his two terms seen as an adversary.
But Mullen came away from the Chicago talk reassured that Obama will engage in a discussion with them, balancing risks and “asking tough questions . . . but not in a combative, finger-pointing way,” one official said.
The president-elect’s invitation to Mullen, whom Obama previously had met only in passing on Capitol Hill and whose first two-year term as chairman does not expire until the end of September, was seen as an attempt to establish a relationship and avoid early conflict. While some Pentagon officials believe an Iraq withdrawal order could become Obama’s equivalent of the Clinton controversy over gays, several senior Defense Department sources said that Gates, Mullen and Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of the military’s Central Command, are untroubled by the 16-month plan and feel it can be accomplished with a month or two of wiggle room.
These sources noted that Obama himself has said he would not be “careless” about withdrawal and would retain a “residual” force of unspecified size to fight terrorists and protect U.S. diplomats and civilians. The officer most concerned about untimely withdrawal, sources said, is the Iraq commander, Gen. Ray Odierno.
Even as the Iraq war continues, defense officials are far more worried about Afghanistan, where they see policy drift and an unfocused mission. With strategy reviews now being completed at the White House and by the chairman’s office, an internal Pentagon debate is well underway over whether goals should be lowered.
Although Gen. David McKiernan, the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has requested four more U.S. combat brigades, some Pentagon strategists believe a smaller presence of Special Forces and trainers for Afghan forces — and more attention to Pakistan — is advisable.
Bush’s ideological objective of a modern Afghan democracy, several officials said, is unattainable with current U.S. resources, and there is optimism that Obama will have a more realistic view.
A number of senior officers also look with favor on Obama’s call for talks with Iran over Iraq and Afghanistan, separating those issues from U.S. demands over Tehran’s nuclear program.
One of the biggest long-term military issues on Obama’s plate will be the defense budget, currently topping 4.3 percent of gross domestic product once war expenditures are included.
Obama has said he will increase the size of the Army and the Marine Corps, finding savings in the Iraq drawdown and in new scrutiny of spending, including on contractors, weapons programs and missile defense.
“They know the money is coming down,” a Pentagon official said of the uniformed services, and many welcome increased discipline.
But it’s neither the military’s nature nor its role to volunteer the cuts, the official said. “It’s for Congress and the administration to say ‘Stop it.’ “
Polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.
Tags: Joint Chiefs, Mullen, Obama
My Husband Was a Blackwater Hero
Nov 30, 2008 Commentary
By Marybeth Laguna
Published in the Washington Post
Sunday, November 30, 2008
My husband, Art Laguna, was a hero. He was a man of honor — he kept his word and he valued truth and honesty, and he expected no less from anyone else. His life was spent in service to his country and his family.
Here at home, Art served as a sheriff’s reserve deputy. He was a volunteer helicopter pilot and flew medical evacuation missions with the California National Guard out of Sacramento ’s Mather Field. He was the father of four and grandfather of six.
Art was proud of his three-decade career with the U.S. Army and the National Guard. He served in Iraq three times and he deployed once to Bosnia. In 1998, he was awarded a medal of valor from the California Department of Corrections for piloting a National Guard helicopter that helped save a California man who’d been stranded by floodwaters on the roof of his car. And last June, the military awarded him the Legion of Merit for exceptional conduct in the performance of outstanding services and achievements. I accepted this most recent honor on his behalf.
And this past week, as our family gathered around the table to give thanks for our blessings, one very important blessing was missing. Art was killed last year in Iraq when the helicopter he was piloting was shot down while assisting a U.S. Embassy convoy that had come under fire in a violent Sunni neighborhood in central Baghdad.
Art could have chosen a safer profession. He knew that — and so did I. But from the time he was a child, all he’d ever wanted to do was to fly and to help people. At the time of his death, he was flying rescue missions into Iraq’s most dangerous areas to help evacuate teams of U.S. government employees who had come under attack.
Since the horrible day in January 2007 when the telephone rang with the news that Art had been killed, I’ve experienced the breadth of emotions that anyone feels when they lose a loved one. There’s intense pain, loss and grief. There’s pride in his accomplishments, the choices he made and the way he lived his life. And, yes, there’s anger.
My anger, however, doesn’t come from the direction you might expect. I’m not angry at Art for the risks he took in life, or at the war that took that precious life. Instead, I too often find myself operating at a slow boil, sometimes exasperated and sometimes irate at those who never knew my husband or his colleagues, yet who insist on tarnishing their memories each day.
Because when Art died, he wasn’t working for the military. He was working for Blackwater.
Art considered his job with the private security firm that protects U.S. diplomats in Iraq a continuation of his service to this country. He told me that he believed in the job and respected the mission. But somehow, this one word — Blackwater — gets in the way of a lucid, reasoned discussion.
Art first went to work for Blackwater in August 2006 and was on his second deployment with the company when he was killed. When I tell people these facts, they rarely express appreciation for his services. Instead, most suggest that he was crazy to go back. I’ve had people repeat the ridiculous urban legend that Blackwater instituted martial law in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and ask me whether Art had been a part of that. At a recent social event, someone asked me whether Blackwater was the same company that “goes around shooting people.” I’ve heard the news media and even elected officials casually throw around words such as “cowboy” and “mercenary” to describe men and women who voluntarily go into harm’s way to protect others. Those caricatures are wrong. They might describe someone’s antiwar agenda, but they don’t describe my husband or his colleagues.
This public relations spin on contractors by antiwar activists has unfortunately gained traction, and the smearing got worse after an incident in September 2007, when a Blackwater team found itself in trouble and opened fire, tragically causing the deaths of several Iraqi civilians. What I know about this comes only from the media; the company said the security guards were responding to an ambush. But when this newspaper reported that federal prosecutors had sent letters to six Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in that incident, there was a resurgence of unfair mischaracterizations of the company and its contractors.
I don’t know the Blackwater men involved or the details of that day. But as the wife of someone who was deployed to a war zone four times, I do know that whether you’re a member of the military or a private security contractor, if you think you’re in trouble, you’re going to protect yourself. I also know that, in addition to his prior extensive military experience, Blackwater required Art to go through rigorous training before sending him to Iraq. The same was true of all his colleagues.
Our all-volunteer military is overwhelmed and doesn’t have enough soldiers with the experience it takes to guard the kinds of high-profile and highly targeted Americans who must travel around Iraq. That’s why veterans working for contractors such as Blackwater, DynCorp, Triple Canopy and others are stepping up to serve their country again.
My husband and his fellow contractors answered a call. Art didn’t do it for the money. He wanted to contribute in any way possible so that his kids and grandkids could continue to enjoy the American dream. He wanted to test himself and give back to his country using the training he’d received throughout his life.
Just like soldiers, security contractors based in Iraq face daily threats to their lives. Rather than demonizing these men and women, we should be thanking them for the essential service they provide. Whether they are working for Blackwater or directly for the U.S. military, they are all risking their lives to work for the United States. And they deserve our respect.
Marybeth Laguna lives in Sacramento.
Tags: Blackwater, contractors, Iraq, Laguna
