Proceedings: Where were you, and what was your reaction, on 11 September?
Lehman: I was in Washington for [former Commandant of the Marine Corps General] P. X. Kelley's 50th anniversary party on the evening of the 10th. My wife, Barbara, and I were staying with friends in Washington and having coffee in the morning, when somebody called and told us to turn on the television.
At first, we thought it must have been some kind of accident. But it was such a clear day. Then, when we saw a second plane coming at the other tower, right away we thought: "My God, it's a terrorist attack."
My first reaction was amazement that the terrorists could have pulled off such a coordinated operation. I did think it was just a matter of time before we got hit here in the United States. But I never thought they had progressed with the kind of infrastructure here, and the kind of training and coordination that enabled them to pull it off.
Like everybody else, I didn't have any clear thoughts that entire day. But in the days following, it certainly began to look like a wake-up call, finally, to "drain the swamp," as [Secretary of Defense] Don Rumsfeld put it so well. This is not going to incite the same reaction we have seen in the 20 years we've been ignoring these situations. With the exception of the attack on Libya, there has been no real effective retaliation or even an attempt to retaliate. The worst approach to this growing terrorist network was the [President Bill] Clinton approach, of poking the rattlesnake nest and not killing any rattlesnakes. That just proved to the terrorists, in their fevered view, that we would never really fight them when it meant paying any price in blood. And this emboldened them further to proceed.
They learned—from attacks like the one on U.S. Marines in Beirut in 1983—that terrorism works. They drove us out of Lebanon. And even though we hit [Moammar] Gadhafi, which really put a major crimp in Libya's support of the terrorist effort, the network grew and continued to grow with increasing protection payments from the moderate Arab world. Six or seven major organizations have been funded at a handsome level, which has guaranteed training and access to weapons of mass destruction and sophisticated intelligence and communication equipment. This is now a very formidable threat.
But I think this latest attack will have the same effect as the attack on Pearl Harbor. It has awakened the American people in a way that is not going to fade quickly.
Proceedings: The TV networks have been grasping for labels. One of them calls this a New War. How do you see it?
Lehman: Yes, it's a new war. In a way, it's a shame the President hasn't called for a formal declaration of war, because I think people should have that concept in mind. This is going to be a sustained, multi-theater effort. It should be.
And that's why I think the President and the administration have been so effective in broadening the explanation of the current situation. It's not going to end with Osama bin Laden, and it's not going to end with the Taliban. They are merely the perpetrators of this particular act. The source of the greatest terrorist network threat is in Baghdad, particularly Saddam Hussein. He is the one who has been weaponizing anthrax and chemical agents and toxins, and who has been training terrorists from a variety of these groups—including Hezbollah and al Qaeda—in how to use them, how to transport them, and how to deliver them. It is Saddam who has been making a concerted effort to achieve a deliverable nuclear capability. And for three years we've allowed him to go unchallenged. We acquiesced to his refusal to allow inspections of his chemical and biological labs and his nuclear facilities.
I think we will remove the Taliban before the end of this calendar year, and one of these days, somebody's going to emerge with Osama bin Laden's head in a bag to claim the reward. I have no doubt of that. But then if everybody breathes a sigh of relief and goes back to business as usual, it's just a guarantee that we're going to see a nuclear event down the road. The black market in nuclear materials is very real. We have good reason to believe that Iran has been able to obtain some tactical warheads from the former Soviet Union, through illicit sources. That doesn't mean they're going to arrive on our doorstep tomorrow. But they have the will, they now have the sophisticated network, they have the funding, and they have the nuclear materials. So it is only a matter of time before those are combined in New York Harbor or Baltimore Harbor or some other highly populated place. And then the casualties will be in the hundreds of thousands, not just the thousands.
Proceedings: If Iraq and Saddam Hussein are at the root of the problem, why do you think we didn't go there first?
Lehman: Clearly bin Laden is the perpetrator here. And it's logical to go after the clearest and most present danger. You need to root out the most active state sponsor of this aggressive terrorism, and right now, that is the Taliban.
But far more important, in my judgment, is Saddam, because he has a real state apparatus. The Taliban are just a bunch of thugs and extremists. And Afghanistan isn't really a nation-state, as we know it; it's kind of between nation-states, with a lot of tribes and tough geography. Iraq has all the power of a nation-state. It has oil, it has a well-organized military, it has access to high-technology weapons and the means to buy them, and it has the capability to develop and manufacture chemical and biological weapons. We have to assume that Saddam is supplying whoever is delivering anthrax in the United States. In my judgment, if we leave him in place, it is going to result in far more loss of life here in the months and years ahead.
Proceedings: Would you go into more detail about how bureaucracy derailed retribution for the Beirut bombing?
Lehman: That terrible tragedy has two dimensions. I've read a lot of government commission reports in my day, but I've never read one as good as the Long Report, which details how that tragedy happened. The short answer is that when President [Ronald] Reagan put the Marines into Beirut, he said he wanted them to do whatever it took to protect themselves. That was a top priority. He wanted rules of engagement that made it clear they were in the middle of a war zone, and they should shoot first and ask questions later. Those were his very words, before the National Security Council. When that order went down, it went through seven staffs, four of which were joint, before it got to the colonel on the ground in Beirut.
That instruction, which is in the Long Report, says the highest priority was to avoid civilian incidents and the Marines were not to load their rifles. It was 180 from what the President and the National Security Council had directed.
The conventional wisdom in the military—the Colin Powell Doctrine—is that civilian micromanagement screwed up the Vietnam War. The reality is that bureaucracy screwed up every war we've been in since World War II. And most of that has been uniformed, military bureaucracy.
We've created too many joint staffs—1,700 people on the Joint Staff, another 1,800 or so in Norfolk, another 2,000 in Stuttgart. We have the requirement now that to be considered for flag rank, you must have four years of staff duty. You don't need to have flown a plane or led a platoon, but you must have four years of staff duty even before you can go before a selection board. Now, what does that tell you about the culture of bureaucracy we are building?
When I was there, the Navy had 4,000 captains, and 400 of them were in sea billets. The rest were in staff billets. The Air Force today has more nonrated staff officers than the Navy has officers. I'm sure the plague is even worse today in carrying out these Afghanistan operations, because the forces have shrunk by 40% since my day, but the staffs have increased. It's pretty hard to make major reforms while you have a war going on, but what you do is what every good war leader does. You just ignore and cut through parts of the bureaucracy and find the decision modes to get the job done.
Proceedings: We all know John Lehman is an advocate of the Iowa (BB-61)-class battleships. How would you employ battleships in an operation such as this?
Lehman: First, I've always been a fan of the battleships. But that doesn't mean they are universally applicable to every military situation. They're great platforms for cruise-missile attacks. And they're particularly good for areas where suicide boats and suicide bombers are a threat. Because they're so well protected, you could never have a USS Cole (DDG-67)-type of incident with a battleship. Battleships can absorb much greater weapon hits than any other surface combatant, except aircraft carriers.
I believe in a high-low mix in the fleet. Ironically, I think the current Navy has too many high-value capital ships. We need to get back to a low mix. In the 600ship Navy, we had a 100 frigates. And we had PGs and PHMs (patrol gunboats and missile hydrofoil combatants). We need to get back to a sensible mix. The same idea goes for submarines. The Virginia (SSN-774) is a capital submarine; it's not one that can be built in high enough numbers at low enough cost to deal with future crises.
The battleship has a place, I believe, for naval gunfire. I'm not a believer in putting all our eggs in the development of a new high-tech, precision-guided gun. There may well be a useful role for such a gun, but it does not replace the 800 tons of accurate munitions a battleship can generate in a half hour. If you look at the role battleships have played in all the wars they've participated in—most recently, Desert Storm—the ability to pulverize any concentration of forces near the coast is invaluable.
Obviously, the battleships are very old. And the technology in them today is what we used when we reactivated them 20 years ago. Reactivating them today would present a different set of considerations. Large platforms are simply moveable pieces of American power, however, and you can equip them with the latest technology. Wright Patterson Air Force Base is 100 years old. That doesn't mean it's obsolete.
I guess if I were in charge today, I'd reactivate two battleships. I'd equip them with many more cruise missiles than just the armored box launchers that we put on them 20 years ago. And I would deploy them as major crisis-management tools. Those 16-inch guns have a kind of power that no airborne or other precision-guided weapon can produce.
Proceedings: What about the carriers? Some are saying that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and cruise missiles eventually will take—or should take—the place of carrier aviation. What do you think about that?
Lehman: I think that's a very ill-informed view. The carriers can do many more missions than just hitting a point target. Yes, a Tomahawk cruise missile can take out an antiaircraft site or a fixed position, perhaps as well as a precision-guided bomb dropped from a carrier aircraft. But a UAV or a cruise missile cannot provide air superiority over the battlefield or close-air support over SEAL teams and Army commando units that are inserted into Afghanistan, for instance.
We're seeing unfold in Afghanistan the myriad uses of a carrier that have nothing to do with precision strike. And even in the area of precision strike, the ability to have eyes and brains of the human type on board before a bomb is dropped, and getting instant intelligence and target analysis, can't be replaced by a UAV or a missile.
The operation in Haiti, while it was a silly political mission, illustrated the versatility of the carrier. It was a very imaginative and effective naval operation, because [Admiral] Paul Miller used two aircraft carriers to put ashore two full Army divisions with all of their equipment and operating helicopters—Army helicopters—from the flight decks.
We're seeing in Afghanistan a repeat of what we've seen in so many past crises. I remember how [Admiral] Jim Holloway used aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean. When the king of Jordan was about to be overthrown in 1970, Admiral Holloway dumped off all the attack and antisubmarine warfare airplanes at Rota, Spain, and transplanted fighters from the East Coast. He loaded every deck with fighters and E-2s and maintained 24-hour-a-day fighter CAP [combat air patrol] over the king's forces for three months. The Air Force could not operate anywhere near there from a land base. The only way it could have been done was from the carriers.
Similarly, in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, when I was on [Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger's staff, the Israelis had all their A-4s [attack aircraft] being shot down by the first SA-7 hand-held missiles. And they were starting to lose the war. They wanted A-4s, and we had them. Again, because our "allies" refused to give us landing rights—and you can't get an A-4 from Norfolk to Israel nonstop—Jim Holloway figured out the only way we could deliver them. He lined up four aircraft carriers and hopscotched the A-4s across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean without once touching land, and they arrived to the Israelis in time to turn the tide.
To those who say it's more cost-effective to use a B-2, I say a B-2 can't carry many A-4s. And it's not very good at providing air superiority against MiG-29s. Nor does it carry too many divisions, if you want to put them ashore. So I've never felt there was a serious intellectual debate concerning whether we should have carriers.
Proceedings: Do you think the Zumwalt (DD-21)-class destroyer is really the way of the future?
Lehman: I think the Navy made a huge mistake putting all its eggs in that platform, and then calling it a destroyer. Whatever 16,000-ton ships are, they're not destroyers. The DD-21 has great technology. But I have never believed in trying to make revolutionary jumps in platforms. Trying to cram electric-drive, plus this new and really neat kind of side protection, and distributed processing and automation into one platform guarantees that the price is going to be sky high. And if you're going to do it on a 16,000-ton ship, it's going to be 16 times more expensive than a 1,000-ton ship.
Something has gone badly wrong here. Numbers do count. I think a huge case can be made for something in the 3,000ton range. We need ships we can produce in numbers, with a lot of automation, and that are not expensive. And we need them to be built in two or three yards to maintain competition, which is the only way you can keep costs to a manageable level. That's more important than cramming all the latest technology into a few high-cost platforms. This has many implications. My very unscientific sampling of the young kids I know—who either want to go into the Navy or are junior officers in the Navy—see a very daunting prospect, particularly in surface warfare. When are they ever going to get anything exciting to command?
Proceedings: Since the Vietnam War, it seems as though the cultural elites have distanced themselves from the naval services. If this is a war we're experiencing now, do you see the Ivy League institutions getting back into supporting the naval services?
Lehman: The cultural elites did not distance themselves from the services. It was the reverse, in my judgment. I'm a fellow at Timothy Dwight College at Yale. It has the reputation of being the jock college, but there are an awful lot of kids in it who really want to go Navy. As you know, naval aviation began at Yale. Yale has a great naval tradition. It's produced more admirals than any other Ivy League university. But I have hell's own time getting these kids into the Navy. The Navy bureaucracy doesn't want them. Only the Army and the Marines pursue them actively. In the Navy, we've let the programmers and the regression analysis personnel specialists take over Navy recruiting, in my judgment. My son just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and I asked members of his fraternity how many were planning to enter military service. Not one out of 65 answered yes. Why? For one thing, it's a ten-year obligation for aviators. Nobody's going to sign up for that. So there is a real separation, and I think it's a disturbing one.
Proceedings: If you were called back to public service by the President, how would you respond?
Lehman: You mean if I didn't seek political asylum somewhere first? (Laughter) Of course, when the nation is at war, every American citizen would respond to whatever a President asked. There's no question about that. But unlike when I sought actively to be Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, I believe that the team in the Pentagon today is absolutely first-class.
I don't worry that the right people aren't making decisions in the Pentagon. This is just a superb team. We've got three first-class service secretaries. We've got a Secretary of Defense who could not be better prepared. We've got Paul Wolfowitz, who is probably the best-prepared Deputy Secretary in history. He's been through crises and wars, and he's a brilliant intellectual as well as a tough bureaucratic in-fighter.
So I don't feel that we're going to lose the war if I don't go to Washington.
Proceedings: In your new book, On Seas of Glory, you describe the situation in 1979: "Even more disturbing was the collapse of self-confidence in the naval officer corps itself. There was a fragmentation and a narrow parochialism ... squabbling among themselves for the shrinking budget, and paying little attention to larger issues: mission, purpose, and strategy." Some have said that a similar situation played out after Tailhook. How do you feel about that?
Lehman: I agree. I think it was a very difficult period for the Navy. This happened during a presidential campaign in which the women's vote was a big swing factor, viewed as such by both sides. Tailhook became a hot issue during the campaign, and the Navy became the scapegoat. All the normal defenders of the Navy in Congress dove under the table, politically. Nobody wanted to get tarred with the brush of trying to defend what was alleged to have happened and the beastly conduct that was being portrayed.
So disillusion was high in the ranks, particularly among the middle-grade officers. I think a great many—particularly aviators, but not just aviators—felt they were abandoned by the senior leaders in the Pentagon and in the Navy. The few admirals who did stand up were cashiered, and the rest seemed to be quiet. Whether that was an accurate perception or not, it became the sort of lieutenant-to-commander kind of view of what was happening. On top of all the political correctness and gender sensitivity that followed, the President [Clinton] made an ill-considered decision, right after he was elected and at the height of the Tailhook flap. The campaign to have active, avowed gays serving in the military was the straw that broke a lot of camels' backs. Good people decided to vote with their feet, saying this wasn't the organization they signed up to join.
The Navy always has difficulty in peacetime, in crises of confidence. It's natural, because resources are cut. In peacetime, the public perception is that the military is a backwater, and we don't need it. So that part is natural. But the political witch-hunt against the Navy after Tailhook and during the Clinton years created, I think, a crisis of self-confidence and morale similar to what happened during the [President Jimmy] Carter years.
Proceedings: Some people think you handled the press very well when you were Secretary of the Navy. What do you think of the way the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the administration are disseminating information today, to the press and to the Congress?
Lehman: Well, it's early. And I think it's hard to judge overall, because we have a war going on. My approach was to deal with the press actively. You have to make the assumption that the large majority of them are working professionals who will give you a fair shake if you give them a fair shake. And you've got to give them something to write about. I tried not to feed them flakkery and propaganda, and I tried to answer their questions as much as possible. I got in trouble more than once, as you may recall, with the Secretary of Defense and with the White House on going perhaps a little further than I should have.
But you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. And I think the Navy cannot be cashiering a fleet commander because he happens to say the wrong thing and then say, from now on, nobody can say anything without clearing it though 50 layers of the bureaucracy. The Navy has to explain to the press and the media what it is doing and why it's being done—why it needs this particular kind of airplane or ship, as well as what's going on now in military operations.
That has to be balanced against real security. The way [Vice Admiral] Joe Metcalf handled the press in Grenada was sort of like [Fleet Admiral] Ernie King's approach: tell them nothing and tell them who won when it's over. In wartime, in specific battles, you have to impose that kind of security, because it is very helpful to the enemy, obviously, if the media promulgate what is militarily sensitive.
Proceedings: I'm sure you agree with everything you've ever read in Proceedings. (Laughter) How important is the Naval Institute?
Lehman: My perspective on the Naval Institute has gone up and down like the stock market. My Dad was a big fan of the Naval Institute, so the Proceedings was always around my house when I was growing up. And I loved it. I read it steadily from that time, all through the time I was working for Kissinger. It was just the period when I was Secretary of the Navy that I had a problem with it. I thought, how can these people be disagreeing with what I was saying? (Laughter) But it's a great institution.
What has always struck me is how worldwide the Naval Institute is. When I was invited to China by the Chinese Navy about five years ago, Proceedings was all over the place. And that's true all over the world. It's a must for anyone with a naval interest, as is the booklist. It's just a fabulous resource, and it's done a lot more than people, even within the Institute, realize. It is really the intellectual forum for naval and national security policy thinking. It is the only place where you find thoughtful ensigns, civilians, doctors, admirals, and other people who are not afraid to tell the SecNav to go soak his head, in print. That's all right for some SecNavs, but certainly not all. (Laughter)