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LTGEN T. W. Kelly, USA (Ret.)
Proceedings editors John Miller and Fred Schultz traveled to Washington, D.C., recently to conduct the Mother of all Interviews with General Kelly, who in his closing years of active duty served as Director of Operations (J-3) on the Joint Staff, JCS, and a leading Pentagon spokesman during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
PROCEEDINGS: Now that 20/20 hindsight has had time to set in, we have seen criticism of the way the Gulf War was conducted. You’ve been on the road a lot. What is your take on the mood of the nation, based on the groups you’ve addressed? KELLY: I’ve talked to a lot of people directly, where you can see their reaction to what you say. And the mood I see everywhere is one of relief. The feeling is broad and it is deep—and those who think it’s not are just misreading the American people. Our success in the Gulf seems to have lifted a heavy burden off the shoulders of the people.
1 don’t think that Americans lost their sense of patriotism during the Vietnam years, but they did become disenchanted with that war and just didn’t know what to do. The veterans were not coming home in units, but in dribs and drabs—and how do you say “Thank you!” with a parade or ceremony when that happens? To make things worse, a number of the Vietnam veterans— just looking around for somebody to listen to them—got captured by some biased people and turned into a so-called “movement,” wandering around, doing their thing. I think this added to the feeling of guilt in the population as a whole.
But Desert Storm has washed the slate clean. It’s allowed Americans to be proud of themselves again. It’s been a long time coming.
PROCEEDINGS: Some are saying that the Desert Storm celebrations are lasting longer than the war itself . . .
KELLY: I wouldn’t even listen to that. These are the same people who have been celebrating our non-victory in Vietnam for over 20 years. We were so damned good that the war didn’t last very long. That’s why the celebration lasts longer.
PROCEEDINGS: Not long ago. Marine Brigadier General Butch [R.I.] Neal talked to a newspaper editors’ conference in Boston and told them that the reporters in Riyadh didn’t lay a glove on him—they never asked the hard questions he spent four to five hours a day preparing to answer. Did the same thing hold true in the Pentagon, in terms of preparation for the briefings or quality of the questions?
KELLY: Butch’s experience and my experience were different. He’s already addressed his, so I’ll just address mine.
I happen to believe strongly in the freedom of the press. On a day-to-day basis, the media can make you very angry—but their contribution to our democracy is unparalleled anywhere in the world. That’s all there is to it. If you want a stark contrast, just look at what Saddam Hussein had.
So let’s start with the First Amendment, which says that Congress will pass no law that interferes with freedom of the press. The First Amendment talks about passing laws. It does not say that you must spoon-feed every bit of information that the press would like to get.
The Constitution also states that the President is the Commander-in-Chief. As such, he is accountable to the American people for two important things: the protection of our troops, as they move into combat; and the ultimate success of our troops in battle. So as we moved our forces far to the west of Kuwait, for the Left Hook or Hail-Mary maneuver, we didn’t want to let the Iraqis know what we were doing—and the President had a right to withhold that information. At the same time, the press had a right to pursue it. In a free society, it is inevitable that legitimate rights will come into conflict. The press will reach for more, and the government will say, “No, that’s enough.” That’s a healthy balance. It tends to keep the government straight and the people informed. Was the press satisfied? No—but they never will be, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Were the American people adequately informed? Yes—a resounding, thumping yes! The administration managed to keep its military secrets while dealing forthrightly with the press, who in turn did a great job in telling the people what was going on.
You hear some grumbling about “managed news.” But look closely at who’s talking. It’s not the working journalists—it’s their bosses, the editors and publishers. The working press were pretty well satisfied with what they were getting.
You have to keep in mind the logistical burden of dealing with a free press. At the peak of the Vietnam War, there were anywhere from 120 to 500 reporters in-country. Well, we had 1,600 reporters in Saudi Arabia, most of them writing their stories from Riyadh, because getting them all into the field was physically impossible—if all of them really wanted to go, that is. In Vietnam, during the 1968 Tet Offensive, my armored cavalry squadron took heavy casualties. During that entire period, I never saw one member of the press in the field.
Anyway, in the Gulf War the press briefing became all-important, which did the government a great big favor. We had a half-hour in Riyadh with Butch Neal and an hour in Washington, split between [Rear Admiral] Mike McConnell and [Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs] Pete Williams and me. So we had an hour and a half every day to talk directly to the American people and make our case—with the press trying every day to challenge that case, a valid role for them. But the bottom line was that we did a much better job of making the case than they did of attacking it, because we had a good story to tell.
I’ve read some nonsense in the papers about my being selected to manage the press. The fact is that we gave an operations briefing every day, and I was the Operations Officer [J-3]. On the first day, the director of the Joint Staff walked in sometime around noon and said, “Hey, Kelly—there’s going to be a briefing at 1530 today, and you’re doing it.”
As usual, I got in the last word—“Yessir”—and did it.
Not that we didn’t prepare. We were careful. Anyone who goes before the press without preparing is foolish.
Here’s a typical day: I’d arrive at the Pentagon at 0700 (earlier was dumb, because the troops needed overnight time to sift through all the material). Brief [Secretary of Defense] Dick Cheney and [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] General Colin Powell between 0830 and 0930. Work JCS actions until noon—improving communications, things like that. Lunch was a bowl of popcorn. At 1220 or so, I’d receive the results of the morning press conference in Riyadh and study them, along with other statistical data. At 1300, I’d work for a half-hour with a special team from the J-3 (operations), mostly on the current statistics—aircraft shot down, things like that. Then 1 d have a half hour of solitary study until 1400, when Pete Williams and a couple of his people would come in. My J-3 team would return. They would have worked up a list of 30—50 questions that would likely be asked by the press, and we’d go over them. The public affairs folks—especially from the Joint Staff—played hard in this phase, and predicted most of the questions accurately.
We’d break up at 1430. Most of the press briefings went at 1500. About ten minutes before the brief, 1 d walk down to Pete’s office, just across the hall from the television studio. We d go over last-minute information, then go lace the lights, cameras, and questioners. I have to say right here that Pete Williams is one of the finest human beings I have ever met—with moral courage and absolute integrity. On bad-news days, he would use his preamble to deflect a lot of the heat that would otherwise come down on my operational briefing, trying to keep relations with the press as congenial and non-confrontational as possible. But no matter how bad the news, the cardinal rule was never to lie to the press. As my mother told me when I was a little boy, “Don’t ever be a liar, Thomas; you’re not smart enough—you always have to remember what you said.” And there is another old saying, “You can never tell just one lie.” Sooner or later, the press will ferret out a lie, in the hurly-burly of the press conference. A standard trick is to repeat a probing question, day after day: “General, the other day you said . . .”—then they’d give you 95% of what you actually said, with a 5% hooker. If you Weren’t sure about the truth of what you said in the beginning, this ploy could catch you in a contradiction sooner or later.
The happy fact was that I had three bosses who would not countenance lying—Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, and President George Bush. I had a lot of helpers and I was surrounded by People in positions of authority, but I answered to nobody but those three. Colin Powell called me in only twice, with regard to the press briefings: just before the first one, and one other time, after I had begun to get a little brisk with the press. He said. “Keep in mind that you are talking to the American people. That’s what you have to concentrate on. Answer the question, But never lose sight of the fact that you are actually talking to the American people.”
PROCEEDINGS: Didn’t all this preparation for the press briefings detract from your primary job as Director of Operations? KELLY: Not really. The things I had to do to keep the press informed were the same things I had to do to keep my three bosses informed. We tried to keep the tactical questioning focused on Riyadh, where the theater commander had the best information, so I had no need to be the duty expert on everything.
Coming from a newspaper family, I have a lot of respect for the press—but like any institution that has to expand rapidly in time of crisis, they had to press into service some inexperienced people. At the Pentagon press conferences, there were three levels of media expertise, layered from front to back. The first two rows were filled by the real pros—television and broadcast media in front; print media on the second row. They didn’t ask many questions but they asked the best questions, which always had probing followups.
The middle rows were filled with neophytes and the back rows contained the amateurs, some of whom asked the dumb questions that eventually got parodied on Saturday Night Live—for example, “What is your scheme of maneuver?”
PROCEEDINGS: How did you keep the lines between the Pentagon and Riyadh from getting tangled?
KELLY: They’d submit a daily wrapup—a situation report—to us, which came in around 0100 each morning. We’d build the Pentagon briefing on that, always being careful to remind the Secretary and the Chairman that the information they had was 24 hours old. Just before each of our briefings, we would call the Central Command J-3 and ask for anything hot that we needed to get to the boss right away. One thing we tried to get across—and thank God our bosses understood this—was that when you work at World Headquarters you don’t have to know all the details of what happened 20 minutes ago to the second platoon of whatever unit. That sort of raw information is useless until it is placed in context—into the total mosaic of activity. If you try to act on it prematurely, you wind up doing something dumb, as happened too often in Vietnam. And all the time I was working with the CentCom J-3 operators to get the complete picture, Mike McConnell was working with the CentCom J-2 and other intelligence agencies in Washington and around the world.
We had great communications, which helped us stay on the same sheet of music. We kept two hot lines open between the war rooms at all times, for a two-way flow of information. We’d make sure that Butch Neal and the other key J-3 people in Riyadh were getting the straight story out of Washington, and at the same time we’d be feeding the straight in-theater information to the Chairman and the Secretary. I’ve been a soldier a long time, and I’ve seen how badly things can get fouled up when people at higher headquarters start getting creative, usually for lack of timely information. We didn’t want that to happen.
As I said earlier, the Chairman only called me to his office twice, but I had the authority to walk in unannounced and I used that a lot—maybe three or four times a day. Not that I tried to play commander. I remained within the J-3 operational sphere, worldwide. I didn’t have a lot of sway with the commanders, and there was no reason for me to have any. Powell and Schwarzkopf had direct communications, which they used several times each day. The Chairman could remain aware of the theater commander’s estimate of the situation, while feeding in his own ideas.
A Navy pilot on loan from the Defense Communications Agency—Commander Pete Batchelor, a true genius—did a great job of turning the National Military Command Center into a first-rate Tactical Operations Center. On the surface, it was not impressive. Instead of the huge wall-to-wall screens you see in the science-fiction movies, we had some 30-inch screens in eight or nine different locations. The operators could reach into a large database and pull out any information they needed—quickly. They had a computer in there that could scan every book of the Bible in six-and-a-half seconds and list every reference to Joshua, or Joshua and Levi, or whatever you wanted. This capability enabled us to sort through the tidal wave of incoming and outgoing messages each day, and tell us which ones we really needed to see.
But the most outstanding thing about the Tactical Operations Center was the people who worked there, from all services. Maybe this is fallout from the Goldwater-Nichols Act, but on the Joint Staff these days you get your pick—and the people we get are so damned smart they give you an inferiority complex. You d walk in there at the height of the war, and all would be quiet and calm. Everybody knew what to do, and they were doing it superbly. Two of the naval officers from the Joint Staff Commanders John Morgan and John Kelly—are slated for command of Arleigh Burke [DDG-51]-class destroyers. That s the kind of officer we were getting from all the services.
PROCEEDINGS: Speaking of the Navy, they didn’t seem to have much visibility at the briefings. About the only naval officer on camera was functioning as a joint intelligence specialist, and not as a spokesman for naval forces . . .
KELLY: The Navy probably was underrepresented, despite the fact that their contribution to the war was crucial. That s one of the disadvantages of being out at sea and out of sight. They didn’t have a flag officer on the Central Command staff the CentCom chief of staff was a Marine; the J-3 was an Air Force two-star; the assistant J-3 was a Marine one-star. So maybe the Navy needs to think about getting into that. On the other hand, I felt very strongly that we should not have component-level briefings from all the armed forces; we needed just one briefing a day from Riyadh. In fact, if I d had my way we would have had a combined briefing, instead of separate ones by other Coalition forces.
PROCEEDINGS: During the war, the television screens were full of armchair strategists—including some retired military officers—who produced a lot of analysis, some on the mark and some way off. What was your reaction to all this talking-head commentary at the time? And now that you’re on the other side of the fence, what ground rules have you set for yourself? KELLY: Let me tell you who I think did very well. The Cable News Network—Peter Arnett notwithstanding—did a far better job than anyone else in covering the war. And CNN s military analysts—especially retired Major General Perry Smith and former Major Jim Blackwell—were the best, by a wide, wide margin. And the reason they were the best is that they explained to the American people what was going on at the time, rather than trying to predict the future. Retired military people make a bad mistake when they make predictions, because they are usually relying on dated information. Nothing is more perishable than military knowledge, and nobody should try to comment on possible future courses of action without a full bag of information to back up that commentary. As a case in point—some military analysts said that we should give the sanctions more time to work. They didn’t have the same information we had; we knew that the sanctions would take years—maybe as many as ten years—and may never have been completely effective because the Iraqis are experts at smuggling. Sooner or later, the stuff would start getting in. The President’s decision was based on careful analysis of a lot more information than the television commentators had. In my own case, I tell my audiences not to ask me about anything that happened after 18 March, when I retired—because I don’t know, and I won’t prognosticate. If I go on NBC News—I have a contract with them as a consultant—I will try to emulate Smith and Blackwell. They explained unclassified things about tactics and hardware to the American people, and had a calming effect on their audience. Our hour-and-a-half of being able to talk directly to the people each day had much the same effect. The main comment 1 hear all around the country is, “We really like you because you made us believe that everything was going to turn out okay. It was surprising to see that the military had very capable people, because we didn’t know that before.’’ By withdrawing from the press after Vietnam, we had been cutting ourselves off from our strongest supporters. There is a lesson in that.
PROCEEDINGS: You have the last word, General. Is there any question we did not ask that you would like to answer? KELLY: You didn’t ask me why we won that war. I see three reasons:
First was fine leadership, up and down the chain of command. The President began by selecting objectives that could be achieved: to get the Iraqis out of Kuwait; to destroy their offensive military capability; and to end the instability caused by Iraq’s threats to the region. And we did that. The President also stopped the war at exactly the right time, because we were on the verge of a massacre at that point.
The second reason we won the war was the outstanding performance of the men and women who fought it for us. After we pulled out of the jungles of Vietnam, we could have come home and licked our wounds and felt sorry for ourselves. But we didn’t do that. The mid-level leadership of all our armed services—- which is the senior leadership today—made up their minds that the Vietnam experience was not going to happen again. We would prepare better. And the Marines started their airground combat center in the Mojave Desert; the Army started their own national training center nearby; the Air Force fast-burners started their Red Flag competitions; and the Navy had Topgun and Strike U for its aviators, while revolutionizing its surface forces at sea. And the net result was that we sent the most professional military forces in our history to the Gulf. They may or may not have been better warriors than those who went before, but they were most certainly better trained and equipped.
The third reason for victory was the support of the American people, which was nothing short of superb. Our mail system had to work twice as hard because every little kid in America was writing to “Any Service Person” in the Gulf. Without that kind of strong support, any service person—overseas, with combat imminent—begins to ask, “What the hell am I doing here?” It’s tough, especially on the borderline guys. I’ve had those feelings myself. But with support from home, you can overcome those anxieties and get on with the job.
The American people can be truly proud of what happened. Not proud that we killed Iraqis in a decisive military victory, but proud that our country pulled together all of its institutions, after appropriate debate, and gathered support in the United Nations for the passage of 12 historic resolutions, and put together a 32-nation coalition to do what had to be done. And when you put everything together, you find that American technology is not as good as anyone else’s—it’s much better. And you find that America’s youth, the most-maligned group in the country, could go to the Gulf and operate the most sophisticated equipment devised by man—and do it flawlessly—after all the naysayers kept crying that it would break down.
I think the world is coming to a situation where it no longer has to countenance tinhorn dictators who present regional threats today and who could present a global threat five years or so down the line. That’s the reason we went to war now, instead of waiting for an uncertain future.
Finally, I believe that we were immersed in so much self-criticism after Vietnam that we had begun to lose our self-confidence as a nation. The war was a catalyst to get us moving again, and I would only say to the other industrial nations of the world— “Watch out, because we’re coming back!”