Obama and National Security: A Team of Bumblers?

Obama and National Security:Team of Bumblers?

Are Susan Rice and Chuck Hagel capable for today’s new national-security challenges?

When President Obama, after months of equivocation over how to respond to the takeover of parts of Iraq and Syria by radical militants, announced in September that the United States would “lead a broad coalition to roll back this terrorist threat,” the White House swung quickly into action, sending proposed legislation to train and equip Syrian rebels to Capitol Hill that same day. Unfortunately, the White House failed to consult with the Pentagon—which would be doing most of the rolling back—on the timing or details of the announcement.

According to multiple sources, behind the scenes a few things went badly awry in the launch of Obama’s new policy. First, the Pentagon was surprised by the president’s timing, according to a senior defense official. “We didn’t know it was going to be in the speech,” he said, referring to Obama’s Sept. 10 address to the nation. Second, the White House neglected to give Pentagon lawyers a chance to revise and approve the proposed legislative language before it went to the Hill, which is considered standard practice. Staffers working for Rep. Buck McKeon, the Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said they were appalled by what they saw: language so sloppy that it failed to mention adequate protections against so-called “green-on-blue” attacks by trainees on American troops, and effectively left the Defense Department liable for funding the mission against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)—even though the president was telling members of Congress he didn’t need money for this new mission, since the Saudis were putting it up. “What came over would have not have been a mission the DoD could have executed,” says a senior Republican committee staffer.

The Armed Services Committee later went directly to the Pentagon and worked out new language, the White House approved it, and Obama signed the legislation as part of a new Continuing Resolution on Sept. 19. But that was hardly the first instance in recent months when the White House failed to consult with the Pentagon. The Pentagon was not given a heads-up about that letter either, according to multiple sources. “We didn’t know it was going over there, and there were significant concerns about it,” said the senior defense official. “We had these authorities to go into Iraq under the 2002 AUMF, which is what she wanted repealed. We believed the authorities were still needed.”

But it’s clear the finger-pointing between the White House and Pentagon reflects no mere technicality. Both examples cited to me by well-placed sources close to the Defense Department offer new evidence of a criticism that has dogged this administration for most of its six and a half years: that Barack Obama’s White House is so insular and tightly controlled it often avoids “outside” consultation—including with its own cabinet secretaries and agencies. That’s especially true when the issue is one of this president’s least favorite things: opening up new hostilities in foreign lands.

Indeed, the Syrian-rebel incident recalled a more famous instance of White House surprise tactics a year earlier, when after a stroll on the White House lawn with chief of staff Denis McDonough, Obama embarrassed Kerry by abruptly deciding to ask for congressional approval for bombing the regime of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad—only hours after Kerry had publicly declared that Assad was facing imminent action.

In their recent memoirs, former defense secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta also have described the White House-centric foreign policy of the Obama administration—in Panetta’s case, a White House that he said was so “eager to rid itself of Iraq” it rejected Pentagon advice about the need for residual troops in Iraq after 2011, opening the way for ISIL. 

Gates was even more pointed, writing that “suspicion and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House officials—including the president and vice president—became a big problem for me.”

“I think this is the most insular White House national security team in recent history,” says Jim Thomas, vice president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a former senior Pentagon official, who added that the president’s most recent big decision, picking an “Ebola czar,” was “symptomatic of the problem.”.

The Ebola crisis has underscored what many of Obama’s critics—including those in his party—have been saying with increasing urgency in recent months, that the White House’s approach to national security does not instill confidence and seems more questionable than ever in the face of the muscular new challenges on the scene.

“It’s a pathetically weak team,” says one retired general who was in a senior command position, and who faults Hagel as much as Rice for some of the problems. The general said that military professionals were buzzing over Hagel’s absence from the recent public exchange between the White House and Dempsey, who in congressional testimony on Sept. 16 appeared to undercut the president’s vow to put no boots on the ground in Iraq by suggesting that “close combat advisers” might be needed. “There’s no energy, no sense that the OSD stands for anything,” says one administration official, referring to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. “It’s all coming out of the Joint Chiefs.”

“An unlikely consensus is emerging across the ideological spectrum about the war against the Islamic State: President Obama’s strategy to ‘degrade and eventually destroy’ the terrorist entity is unworkable,” the Washington Post wrote in an editorial on Sunday. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., put it Sunday on “Face the Nation,” the U.S. effort now amounts to mere “pecks at a big problem,” and allies remain baffled by the lack of a larger U.S. strategy.

While Hagel defends the status quo, Rice continues to stumble in her infrequent TV appearances and to alienate potential Hill allies – as well as the Pentagon—with what critics describe as poor outreach to Republicans and coordination of policy with the Defense Department. “Our experience has been that the DoD and Capitol Hill are often taken by surprise at same time and on same issues” by the White House, says the senior Armed Services Committee staffer.

Rice is rarely heard in public except when she very occasionally appears on the Sunday talk shows—and then more times than not, it seems, in a bumbling way. (Most recently, by saying Turkey would supply bases for strikes against ISIL, only to be undercut by Ankara’s denial hours later; that followed a much-criticized performance describing former Taliban captive Bowe Bergdahl’s Army service as “honorable” despite the murky circumstances of his disappearance and capture; and her now-infamous explanation of the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, after which she was blasted by Republicans for appearing to play down terrorism links.)

"There is a sense that the NSC is run a little like beehive ball soccer, where everyone storms to wherever the ball is moving around the field,” according to another recently departed senior administration official. “They are managing by crisis rather than strategy.… It’s Syria one day, Iraq the next, North Korea the next, and so on. The NSC is finding multitasking very hard these days.

According to the federal government’s 2014 personnel survey, civilian defense employees have grown increasingly dissatisfied with their jobs, with ratings dropping in 47 of 84 categories from last year. And the larger question is whether Hagel’s mostly inward focus on budget and morale issues at the Pentagon is the right focus now—instead of helping to project American power abroad amidst spiraling global crises.

But what might be missing most from the administration—at least according to its critics—is a forceful strategist who is able to push the president (who remains, for the most part, his own No. 1 strategist) to be more decisive.

Of course, no one knows Obama’s thinking on national security better than Rice, who has been with him longer than any senior official in the administration with the exception of McDonough, his chief of staff. And as we’ve discovered during six-plus years of studying Obama’s MO, that counts for a lot with this president. Keeping America out of any more disastrous wars is his mission, and it may well be that his allegedly bumbling team is doing nothing more than implementing his desires. Whether that is any longer a policy appropriate to the times, given the resilience of ISIL—and whether he’s getting the kind of advice he needs to hear, rather than the kind he wants to hear—is another question, one for the pundits to debate.

But as one former senior Pentagon official puts it, “When you select for personal loyalty, that may be all you get.”