the world, we were starting with thirteen preexisting war plans, an exceptionally large number for a unified command. These come out of taskings from the Secretary of Defense to prepare to counter either a specific threat or sometimes more generic situations, like what we call “consequence management.” Let’s say somebody explodes a nuclear device or uses other WMD. We had operational plans to police up these situations. Other plans dealt with Iraq or Iran. Others were aimed at generic missions such as “keeping the Gulf open for the free flow of oil.” And so on. Each plan had a real possibility of execution, given the nature of the region.
These plans gave us a war-fighting orientation that we were well postured to deal with, thanks to the work of General Peay. We now needed to expand and broaden the strategy beyond that dimension.
In order to get a better fix on all the issues, I talked first to my commanders, then sought input from friendly leaders of the nations in our AOR and from U.S. diplomats with expertise in the area, to ensure that we were all working in sync.
For the bigger picture, we turned to President Clinton’s emerging National Security Strategy, with its stress on engagement and multilateral-ism. The military implementation of this strategy is the job of the Secretary of Defense, whose National Military Strategy looks at the National Security Strategy from a specifically military point of view. Every four years, the Secretary of Defense presents to Congress and the President what is called “the Quadrennial Defense Review,” which offers still more specifics about how the military side of defense is going to execute the National Security Strategy. It directs the Unified Commands to build new strategies for our assigned regions based on these concepts. The QDR directed the CINCs to “shape, respond, and prepare.” This reflected not only the war-fighting responsibilities (respond, prepare), but the new charge to “shape” our areas of responsibility.
The Secretary of Defense also directed the CINCs to prepare Theater Engagement Plans for our AORs. This is our strategy for engaging with the countries with whom we have relations on a day-to-day basis. Specifically, it is our plan for helping friendly countries build their militaries, for cultivating and building coalitions for security cooperation, and for welding together viable multilateral teams to deal collectively with the chronic problems we face and to better stabilize the region. In other words, it is the “friendly” side of our overall strategy.
The first problem CENTCOM had to fix was the near-total focus on the Persian Gulf. To that end, I decided to “subregionalize” our strategy, by breaking the AOR into four subregions — East Africa, the Persian Gulf, Central and Southwest Asia, and Egypt and Jordan — and developing a strategy and programs for each. This approach would ensure that our Gulf-centric tendency did not detract from the programs and relationships we developed in other areas. Though I knew this would not be a clean separation — many interests overlapped — I felt we could accommodate that.
Because the nations of each subregion had their own problems, we also had an articulated strategy for each country. In addition, I assigned each of our military components “focus” countries that fit their capabilities and their compatibility with the militaries of these nations. This spread the burden and balanced the span of control in managing our various engagement programs and crisis response requirements.
I then broke down our strategic goals into three areas: war fighting, engagement, and development.
The war-fighting goals were designed to have in place the right plans, forces, and basing options for any possible crisis. We also built a basis for responding to crises cooperatively with regional allies through training, exercises, military assistance, intelligence sharing, military schooling, and the like.
Three more practical war-fighting issues also had to be dealt with.
The first was agreement on a Joint Fires standing operating procedure (SOP) to coordinate fires on the battlefield. Up to this point, the services had been unable to agree on a joint doctrine for battlefield coordination, direction, and procedures for our air and ground-based fires systems. This may have seemed to be a mere intellectual issue back in the States, but for us it was life or death. In our AOR, war was always a near possibility. If war broke out, without coordination of fires we could expect serious friendly fire casualties or even battlefield failures. We couldn’t wait for the services to work through their bickering and rivalries. I therefore directed my component commanders to work together to produce the CENTCOM Joint Fires SOP (if they hit issues they couldn’t resolve, I told them I would make the call). These superb professionals delivered, providing an SOP that their services and service chiefs accepted (although only for the CENTCOM AOR).
My second objective was to finish work already started under General Peay to set up a command element, or small forward headquarters, in the AOR for each of my components, providing them command facilities they could rapidly fall into if the balloon went up. When I became CINC, the Navy already had its full headquarters in the region, and the Air Force had its air operations center there. But I also wanted the Army and Marine Corps to establish a forward element for the Joint Force Land Component Command (JFLCC), which would run the coordinated ground battle in Kuwait. As a result, we established Joint Task Force (JTF) Kuwait; and I had the CENTCOM Special Operations Command establish a forward command element in Qatar. This gave me a base to build on for all the functional component headquarters (air, ground, naval, and special operations) if we had to quickly respond to a crisis. Though this was controversial and caused grumblings among rear echelon doctrinal purists, who didn’t understand the purpose of these JTFs forward, we ignored their criticisms.
My third objective — never fully accomplished during my tenure — was to create one logistics command for the theater, to control and coordinate the massive logistics effort we would have to undertake in a major crisis. The system of separate and competing service and coalition systems, all putting stress on the limited lines of communications and infrastructure in the region, would really cause us problems if we didn’t have one umbrella organization to pull all the support needs together and ensure security for our rear area networks.
Though the components developed a basic design before I left command, and the U.S. Army was chosen to be the core of this joint/combined Theater Support Command for CENTCOM, the plan drew criticism and resistance again from doctrinal traditionalists, who didn’t understand the realities of the battlefield; and I was unable to accomplish this innovation before I left.
Our engagement goals were designed to build strong security relationships and allied capabilities, and to enhance the education of military leaders and familiarize them with principles and values that drove our military system. Though much of this area was related to war fighting, it went beyond that to work in cooperative areas that were not strictly military, such as environmental security issues and natural disaster responses. This built the day-to-day military relationships and capabilities needed to respond to crises and work as a combined team.
Our development goals were objectives for establishing new relationships, improving regional stability, and countering emerging threats. They were also related to the development of CENTCOM itself as it evolved to meet future challenges and a changing defense environment. These were the primary “shaping” efforts directed by the QDR.
In designing this ambitious strategy, we cooperated closely with the Joint Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and our State Department partners at embassies in the AOR and at the regional bureaus in State’s Washington headquarters. Our strategy also reflected ideas contained in the Clinton administration’s new global strategy… and from my own lifetime experience in the military, in conflict resolution, and in peacemaking.
The Clinton strategy represented a significant shift in the way the United States related to the rest of the world. Though the administration did not always handle this shift as effectively as they could have, their overall approach was, in my view, correct. Unfortunately, the Clinton strategy lacked the resources to be fully and effectively implemented.
In America, we look at the world from two powerfully opposed angles of vision. We are either “engaged” or “isolationist.”
The engaged — people like Wilson, Marshall, and Truman — believe we can prevent conflicts by actively shaping the environment that produces them, by directly involving our military, diplomatic, and economic capabilities in the world to make conditions better, to stabilize the various regions, to build partnerships, and to do it collectively — by using the UN and regional (or larger) multilateral coalitions and institutions. In the long run, they see engagement as less costly than any of the alternatives.
The isolationists fight this view. They see the world as so big, so messy, so out of control, that nobody can fix it. And even if we could help a little here or there, dozens of other hopeless cases lie festering. And besides, who says we have any responsibility for the rest of the world anyway? Who made us the policemen of the world? We should be bringing troops home, not committing them to useless foreign “engagements.” Who said we have to
