Secretary Of Defense Quotes

In all, the future secretary of defense and wartime vice president[, Dick Cheney,] would receive five deferments during the Vietnam War, protecting him from service during his draft-eligible years.

Next, the secretary advised me to take a seat while she notified the headmaster of my arrival. During those dreadful moments I did everything I could to remain calm. Nervously, I kept patting my foot to the floor and heard each and every tap. Suddenly, shouts of extreme havoc rung out just like the other times! “Oh God no! Jesus, please help me Lawd! I got you, Sir, I got you,” were screams filling the airwaves. The door opened and a battered female raced rightpast me with her hands covering her face. She kept mumbling phrases that shouldn’t be repeated by innocent lips. I couldn’t believe those disgusting words coming out of her baby-sized mouth. Then damn, another nightmare was possibly moments away. I needed an out and fast. Fearing for my life, I formulated my plan of action. Right before Principal Shellshock steadies his paddle, I was going to blow out all the gas I reserved in my little butt. I was never a fan of the fart game, but I was scheming like a veteran. That’s all I had, and it was my “A game.” My intentions were to rip a good hard one that opens my belt, ruffles my pants, and sends my new shoes flyingacross the room. Then all options would be left to the principal. He could chance tearing into me and losing a lung or take cover and let me go. Punishing me will become a hazard to his health. For the moment, I felt really good about that notion. I didn’t have much else to cling to, but I was dangerously packing breakfast from Aunt Kathy. Yes, I was sure my stink bomb defense would win that day. According to past reports, I would be the first and only kid at Mitchell Memorial to get on the scoreboard against the headmaster. Make that, Hal “1” and Principal Shell Shock “0.

The president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense were lying to the American public—there was no evidence of any attack, and the American destroyers were not on “routine patrol” but on spying missions.

when both can’t be true. In 1946, in the days after World War II, presidential advisor Bernard Baruch said, “Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.” Variations have been uttered by U.S. Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and others. Today this seemingly indisputable truth no longer holds. Propaganda is indistinguishable from fact and we find ourselves living in the frightening pages of a George Orwell novel.

Not until Theodore Roosevelt resigned his prestigious position as assistant secretary of the navy in 1898 to fight with the Rough Riders in the Cuban dirt would there be a rich man as weirdly rabid to join American forces in combat as Lafayette was. The two shared a child’s ideal of manly military glory. Though in Lafayette’s defense, he was an actual teenager, unlike the thirty-nine-year-old TR.

Harry Truman, after all, in conjunction with Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, radically cut back American arms following the end of the Second World War. Johnson himself wished to dismantle the Marine Corps and felt nuclear weapons had made all such conventional arms unnecessary.

One of the most startling phenomena I ever witnessed occured in the South after the Arab- israelei Six-day war. I doubt if the world has ever seen such a rapid ceasefire in anti-semetism. I heard one Southern man after another say in tones that i can only describe as gleeful: 'by dern, those Jew boys sure can fight!' One man seriously recommended that Congress pass a special act making Moshe Dayan an American citizen so that he could become Secretary of Defense. He had obviously found a new hero;'as he put it 'That one-eyed bastid would wipe out anybody offin the map whut gave us any trouble.

Pearl Harbor Address to the Nation Delivered on December 8, 1941 Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Senate, and of the House of Representatives: Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack. It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time, the Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace. The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu. Yesterday, the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island. And this morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island. Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation. As commander in chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense. But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us. Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph -- so help us God. I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.

I had learned at Defense, a firm deadline was necessary to move the bureaucracy.

September 24, 1947, when President Truman signed a memo to the Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, authorizing the creation of “Operation Majestic Twelve.

He was quite possibly the least-qualified nominee to become secretary of defense since the position was created in 1947.

Secretary of Defense once said, “You go to the zombie apocalypse with the tech you have not the tech you want.” Of course Donald Rumsfeld didn’t say exactly that, but the meaning is similar.

Let's look at this rationally...We've got a doctor who may kill him, an Attorney General who wants to declare him bananas, and a Defense Secretary who wants me to start World War III...First, we ruled out starting World War III. We were down to killing the President or having him carted off by the men in white coats...

had never heard a president explicitly frame a decision as a direct order. With the American military, it is completely unnecessary. As secretary of defense, I had never issued an “order” to get something done; nor had I heard any commander do so. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, in his book It Worked for Me, writes, “In my thirty-five years of service, I don’t ever recall telling anyone, ‘That’s an order.’ And now that I think about it, I don’t think I ever heard anyone else say it.” Obama’s “order,” at Biden’s urging, demonstrated, in my view, the complete unfamiliarity of both men with the American military culture. That order

It was a feeling shared by most of the boys Ebright coached, among them Robert McNamara, later the U.S. secretary of defense, and the movie star Gregory Peck, who in 1997 donated twenty-five thousand dollars to the Cal crew in Ebright’s memory.

Even though he received the order to stand down—likely from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who may have been receiving his orders from Valerie Jarrett21—Ham went ahead with his rapid response plan. In order to stop him, one source says that the administration had the commanding general apprehended. Ham was informed that he was relieved of his command, which stopped his attempt to save American lives.

Remaining for a moment with the question of legality and illegality: United Nations Security Council Resolution 1368, unanimously passed, explicitly recognized the right of the United States to self-defense and further called upon all member states 'to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of the terrorist attacks. It added that 'those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of those acts will be held accountable.' In a speech the following month, the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan publicly acknowledged the right of self-defense as a legitimate basis for military action. The SEAL unit dispatched by President Obama to Abbottabad was large enough to allow for the contingency of bin-Laden's capture and detention. The naïve statement that he was 'unarmed' when shot is only loosely compatible with the fact that he was housed in a military garrison town, had a loaded automatic weapon in the room with him, could well have been wearing a suicide vest, had stated repeatedly that he would never be taken alive, was the commander of one of the most violent organizations in history, and had declared himself at war with the United States. It perhaps says something that not even the most casuistic apologist for al-Qaeda has ever even attempted to justify any of its 'operations' in terms that could be covered by any known law, with the possible exception of some sanguinary verses of the Koran.

Although Chris Miller had briefly been placed in charge of the National Counterterrorism Center, he had never managed anything close to the scale of DOD. He was quite possibly the least-qualified nominee to become secretary of defense since the position was created in 1947.

Many of Trump's former top cabinet officers and aides have said publicly that Trump should not be president again and should not even be on the ballot. Those include: former vice president MIke Pence; former secretary of defense Mark Esper; former chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley; former national security adviser John Bolton; former secretary of defense James Mattis; former director of national intelligence Dan Coats, former chief of staff John Kelley; former chief of staf Mick Mulvaney; and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.

so deep, “you could have brought the whole of ExxonMobil out there and they wouldn’t have been able to operate that thing worth a damn,” said Philip J. Carroll Jr., a former president of Shell U.S.A., who was appointed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to serve as Paul Bremer’s

Though now the secretary of defense, Owen Leahy had come up through intelligence, and it showed. His posture suggested that not only would he not comment on the quality of the morning, he would neither confirm nor deny that it was in fact the a.m. There weren’t many people who gave off so little to Cooper’s eyes.

The problem has become so acute that successive secretaries of defense have asked Congress to provide the necessary funds for the Department of State. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, before he took on that role, famously stated that “if you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.

There was also the matter of four dead Americans at the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya: Ambassador Chris Stevens, the first U.S. ambassador killed on duty since the Carter years; foreign service officer Sean Smith; and retired Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. The September 11, 2012, attack on the Benghazi compound was coordinated and carried out by radical Islamic terrorists. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta testified to the Senate that he knew “immediately” that it was a terrorist attack. And yet for weeks President Obama and Secretary Clinton insisted instead that it was a spontaneous protest over an Internet video.

I can’t help but quote the former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, who quite wisely said: “There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Obama was the fourth president I had worked for who said outright that he wanted to eliminate all nuclear weapons (Carter, Reagan, and Bush 41 were the others). Former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former defense secretary Bill Perry, and former senator Sam Nunn had also called for “going to zero.” The only problem, in my view, was that I hadn’t heard the leaders of any other nuclear country—Britain, France, Russia, China, India, or Pakistan—signal the same intent.

Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring. For example, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, resigned over principle, a concept so alien to Mr. Trump that it took days for the president to realize what had happened, before he could start lying about the man.

The first secretary of defense, General Henry Knox, said that what we’re doing to the native population is worse than what the conquistadors did in Peru and Mexico. He said future historians will look at the “destruction” of these people—what would nowadays be called genocide—and paint the acts with “sable colors” [in other words, darkly]. This was known all the way through. Long after John Quincy Adams, the intellectual father of Manifest Destiny, left power, he became an opponent of both slavery and the policy toward the Indians. He said he’d been involved—along with the rest of them—in a crime of “extermination” of such enormity that surely God would punish them for these “heinous sins.

Eager to defend the civilian control of nuclear weapons from military encroachment, John F. Kennedy and Robert McNamara had fought hard to ensure that only the president could make the ultimate decision. But they hadn’t considered the possibility that the president might be clinically depressed, emotionally unstable, and drinking heavily—like Richard Nixon, during his final weeks in office. Amid the deepening Watergate scandal, Secretary of Defense Schlesinger told the head of the Joint Chiefs to seek his approval before acting on “any emergency order coming from the president.” Although Schlesinger’s order raised questions about who was actually in command, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had grown alarmed over the first six months of the Trump administration by gaping holes in the president’s knowledge of history and of the alliances forged in the wake of World War II that served as the foundation of America’s strength in the world.

The Department of Defense is the largest, most complex organization on the planet: three million people, civilian and military, with a budget, the last year I was there, of over $700 billion.

According to Japanese scholar Yuki Tanaka, the United States firebombed over a hundred Japanese cities. Destruction reached 99.5 percent in the city of Toyama, driving Secretary of War Henry Stimson to tell Truman he "did not want to have the US get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities," though Stimson did almost nothing to halt the slaughter. He had managed to delude himself into believing Arnold's promise that he would limit "damage to civilians." Future Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who was on LeMay's staff in 1945, agreed with his boss's comment that of the United States lost the war, they'd all be tried as war criminals and deserved to be convicted. Hatred towards the Japanese ran so deep that almost no one objected to the mass slaughter of civilians.

I suppose I should have known better going in, but I was constantly amazed and infuriated at the hypocrisy of those who most stridently attacked the Defense Department for being inefficient and wasteful but would fight tooth and nail to prevent any reduction in defense activities in their home state or district no matter how inefficient or wasteful. However, behavior that was simply frustrating to me in 2009–10 will seriously impair our national security in the years ahead as the defense budget shrinks: failure to cut or close unneeded programs and facilities will drain precious dollars from the troops and our war-fighting capabilities.

I'm done doing this!' Obama said, finally erupting. 'We've all agreed on a plan. And we're all going to stick to that plan. I haven't agreed to anything beyond that.' The 30,000 was a 'hard cap,' he said forcefully. 'I don't want enablers to be used as wiggle room. The easy thing for me to do - politically - would actually be to say no' to the 30,000. Then he gestured out the Oval Office windows, across the Potomac, in the direction of the Pentagon. Referring to Gates and the uniformed military, he said. 'They think it's the opposite. I'd be perfectly happy -' He stopped mid-sentence. 'Nothing would make Rahm happier than if I said no to the 30,000.' There was some subdued laughter. 'Rahm would tell me it'd be much easier to do what I want to do by saying no,' the president said. He could then focus on the domestic agenda that he wanted to be the heart of his presidency. The military did not understand. 'Politically, what these guys don't get is it'd be a lot easier for me to go out and give a speech saying, 'You know what? The American people are sick of this war, and we're going to get out of there.

When Donald Trump arrived, he turned over control of the Iraqi theater to Secretary of Defense “Madman” Maddux and told him to do whatever he thought would win the war against ISIS. Less than a year later, coalition forces drove the terrorists out of their last stronghold in Iraq and surrounded them in small pockets within Syria. As of this writing, the group is, for all intents and purposes, destroyed, forever underscoring what a pathetic, feckless strategy Obama employed.

The possibility of any nuclear explosion occurring as a result of an accident involving either impact or fire is virtually non-existent,” Secretary of Defense Wilson assured the public. His press release about the Genie didn’t mention the risk of plutonium contamination. It did note, however, that someone standing on the ground directly beneath the high-altitude detonation of a Genie would be exposed to less radiation than “a hundredth of a dose received in a standard (medical) X-ray.” To prove the point, a Genie was set off 18,000 feet above the heads of five Air Force officers and a photographer at the Nevada test site. The officers wore summer uniforms and no protective gear. A photograph, taken at the moment of detonation, shows that two of the men instinctively ducked, two shielded their eyes, and one stared upward, looking straight at the blast. “It glowed for an instant like a newborn sun,” Time magazine reported, “then faded into a rosy, doughnut-shaped cloud.

By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Eisenhower’s test ban had failed, and the United States and the Soviet Union had both returned to nuclear weapons testing. Twice during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, on October 20 and October 26, 1962, the United States detonated two nuclear weapons—code-named Checkmate and Bluegill Triple Prime—in space. These tests, which sought to advance knowledge in ARPA’s pursuit of the Christofilos effect, are on the record and are known. What is not known outside Defense Department circles is that in response, on October 22 and October 28, 1962, the Soviets also detonated two nuclear weapons in space, also in pursuit of the Christofilos effect. In recently declassified film footage of an emergency meeting at the White House, Secretary of Defense McNamara can be heard discussing one of these two Soviet nuclear bomb tests with the president and his closest advisors. “The Soviets fired three eleven-hundred-mile missiles yesterday at Kapustin Yar,

The collaboration between secretaries of state, election officials and the voting system manufacturers on the matter of enforcing this black box proprietary code secrecy with election systems, is nothing less than the commoditization and monetization of American Democracy

The fears of militarization Holbrooke had expressed in his final, desperate memos, had come to pass on a scale he could have never anticipated. President Trump had concentrated ever more power in the Pentagon, granting it nearly unilateral authority in areas of policy once orchestrated across multiple agencies, including the State Department. In Iraq and Syria, the White House quietly delegated more decisions on troop deployments to the military. In Yemen and Somalia, field commanders were given authority to launch raids without White House approval. In Afghanistan, Trump granted the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, sweeping authority to set troop levels. In public statements, the White House downplayed the move, saying the Pentagon still had to adhere to the broad strokes of policies set by the White House. But in practice, the fate of thousands of troops in a diplomatic tinderbox of a conflict had, for the first time in recent history, been placed solely in military hands. Diplomats were no longer losing the argument on Afghanistan: they weren’t in it. In early 2018, the military began publicly rolling out a new surge: in the following months, up to a thousand new troops would join the fourteen thousand already in place. Back home, the White House itself was crowded with military voices. A few months into the Trump administration, at least ten of twenty-five senior leadership positions on the president’s National Security Council were held by current or retired military officials. As the churn of firings and hirings continued, that number grew to include the White House chief of staff, a position given to former general John Kelly. At the same time, the White House ended the practice of “detailing” State Department officers to the National Security Council. There would now be fewer diplomatic voices in the policy process, by design.

President Trump is a good listener, Mattis said, as long as you don’t hit one of his third rails—immigration and the press are the two big ones. If you hit one, he is liable to go off on a tangent and not come back for a long time. “Secretaries of Defense don’t always get to choose the president they work for.” Everyone laughed.

Among other steps, the Nunn-Cohen Amendment, passed as a rider to the 1987 Defense Authorization Act, created a four-star unified command—U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM—that would be the equal of the military’s geographic unified commands like European Command and Pacific Command, and would oversee JSOC. It also created an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict office in the Pentagon to oversee all special operations matters.21 These steps were taken despite bitter resistance from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who feared they would lead to the creation of a fifth service, but they laid the groundwork for JSOC’s journey over the next two decades from the margins of the U.S. military to the centerpiece of its campaigns.22

One of the imponderables in our system of government is how rapidly and easily secretaries of state, defense, and treasury, high-ranking military officers, congressmen, senators—indeed, even former presidents of the United States—are, upon departing office, able to transform their expertise, their experience, their contacts into extraordinarily high fees, contracts, and lucrative new businesses.

We should reinforce modern machining facilities with high performance in line with the global trend of machine industry development, press the production of products, high-speed drawings, and unmanned automation," he said. "We should set up test sites for comprehensive measurement in the factory and allow various load, interlock tests and impact tests depending on the characteristics of the products." 정품구입문의하는곳~☎위커메신저:PP444☎라인:PPPK44↔☎텔레:ppt89[☎?카톡↔rrs9] 정품구입문의하는곳~☎위커메신저:PP444☎라인:PPPK44↔☎텔레:ppt89[☎?카톡↔rrs9] 정품구입문의하는곳~☎위커메신저:PP444☎라인:PPPK44↔☎텔레:ppt89[☎?카톡↔rrs9] On the first day, Kim conducted field guidance on plants in Jagang Province, including the Kanggye Tracker General Factory, the Kanggye Precision Machinery General Factory, the Jangja Steel Manufacturing Machinery Plant and the February 8 Machine Complex. All of these factories are North Korea's leading munitions factories with decades of history. Defense ministers of South Korea, the U.S. and Japan gathered together to discuss ways to cooperate on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and strengthen defense cooperation among the three countries. South Korean Defense Minister Chung Kyung-doo was acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shannahan and Japanese Defense Minister Takeshi Iwaya at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore, where the 18th Asia Security Conference was held from 9 a.m. on Sunday.

He ran his hand across his forehead. His skin felt clammy. Fine time to be coming down with the flu, he thought, and he almost laughed at the absurdity of it. The president gets no sick days, he thought, because a president’s not supposed to be sick. He tried to focus on who at the oval table was speaking to him; they were all watching him—the vice-president, nervous and sly; Admiral Narramore, ramrod-straight in his uniform with a chestful of service decorations; General Sinclair, crusty and alert, his eyes like two bits of blue glass in his hard-seamed face; Secretary of Defense Hannan, who looked as kindly as anyone’s old grandfather but who was known as “Iron Hans” by both the press corps and his associates; General Chivington, the ranking authority on Soviet military strength; Chief of Staff Bergholz, crewcut and crisp in his ubiquitous dark blue pinstriped suit; and various other military officials and advisors

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited me to breakfast on the eighteenth. Five days before, she had issued a news release saying, “The president’s strategy in Iraq has failed,” and “The choice is between a Democratic plan for responsible redeployment and the president’s plan for an endless war in Iraq.” With those comments as backdrop, at the breakfast I urged her to pass the defense appropriations bill before October and to pass the War Supplemental in total, not to mete it out a few weeks or months at a time. I reminded her that the president had approved Petraeus’s recommendation for a change of mission in December and told her that Petraeus and Crocker had recommended a sustainable path forward that deserved broad bipartisan support. She politely made clear she wasn’t interested. I wasn’t surprised. After all, one wouldn’t want facts and reality—not to mention the national interest—to intrude upon partisan politics, would one?

On January 3, all ten living former defense secretaries signed an op-ed in The Washington Post warning that any “efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.” They also seemed to put colleagues on notice: “Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.”[5]

Managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talent are all necessary, but they can be applied only to goals that have already been defined by military policies, broad and narrow. And those policies can be only as good as strategy, operational art of war, tactical thought, and plain military craft that have gone into their making. At present, the defects of structure submerge or distort strategy and operational art, they out rightly suppress tactical ingenuity, and they displace the traditional insights and rules of military craft in favor of bureaucratic preferences, administrative convenience, and abstract notions of efficiency derived from the world of business management. First there is the defective structure for making of military decisions under the futile supervision of the civilian Defense Department; then come the deeply flawed defense policies and military choices, replete with unnecessary costs and hidden risks; finally there come the undoubted managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talents, all applied to achieve those flawed policies and to implement those flawed choices. By this same sequence was the fatally incomplete Maginot Line built, as were all the Maginot Lines of history, each made no better by good government, technical talent, careful accounting, or sheer hard work. Hence the futility of all the managerial innovations tried in the Pentagon over the years. In the purchasing of weapons, for example, “total package” procurement, cost plus incentive contracting, “firm fixed price” purchasing have all been introduced with much fanfare, only to be abandoned, retried, and repudiated once again. And each time a new Secretary of Defense arrives, with him come the latest batch of managerial innovations, many of them aimed at reducing fraud, waste, and mismanagement-the classic trio endlessly denounced in Congress, even though they account for mere percentage points in the total budget, and have no relevance at all to the failures of combat. The persistence of the Administrator’s Delusion has long kept the Pentagon on a treadmill of futile procedural “reforms” that have no impact at all on the military substance of our defense. It is through strategy, operational art, tactical ingenuity, and military craft that the large savings can be made, and the nation’s military strength greatly increased, but achieving long-overdue structural innovations, from the central headquarters to the combat forces, from the overhead of bases and installations to the current purchase of new weapons. Then, and only then, will it be useful to pursue fraud, waste, and mismanagement, if only to save a few dollars more after the billions have already been saved. At present, by contrast, the Defense Department administers ineffectively, while the public, Congress, and the media apply their energies to such petty matters as overpriced spare parts for a given device in a given weapon of a given ship, overlooking at the same time the multibillion dollar question of money spent for the Navy as a whole instead of the Army – whose weakness diminishes our diplomatic weight in peacetime, and which could one day cause us to resort to nuclear weapons in the face of imminent debacle. If we had a central military authority and a Defense Department capable of strategy, we should cheerfully tolerate much fraud, waste, and mismanagement; but so long as there are competing military bureaucracies organically incapable of strategic combat, neither safety nor economy will be ensured, even if we could totally eliminate every last cent of fraud, waste, and mismanagement.

President Nixon and Kissinger were joined for the promotion ceremony by CIA director Richard Helms and Defense Secretary Laird; all the men were in a good mood, even Nixon was smiling and laughing. They’d just pulled off one of the great nuclear scares of the Cold War—and only the Soviets had noticed, just as intended. Over the months ahead, though, it became clear the feint had done little either to move forward peace talks in Vietnam or alter the U.S. balance with the Soviet Union. The government never received a single inquiry from an allied nation, nor did any reporter ever ask about it; the feints would remain secret until the 1980s. •

Beginning in the fall of 2001, the U.S. military dropped flyers over Afghanistan offering bounties of between $5,000 and $25,000 for the names of men with ties to al Qaeda and the Taliban. “This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe, for the rest of your life,” one flyer read. (The average annual income in Afghanistan at the time was less than $300.) The flyers fell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “like snowflakes in December in Chicago.” (Unlike many in Bush’s inner circle, Rumsfeld was a veteran; he served as a navy pilot in the 1950s.)82 As hundreds of men were rounded up abroad, the Bush administration considered where to put them. Taking over the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, and reopening Alcatraz, closed since 1963, were both considered but rejected because, from Kansas or California, suspected terrorists would be able to appeal to American courts and under U.S. state and federal law. Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, was rejected because it happened to be a British territory, and therefore subject to British law. In the end, the administration chose Guantánamo, a U.S. naval base on the southeastern end of Cuba. No part of either the United States or of Cuba, Guantánamo was one of the known world’s last no-man’s-lands. Bush administration lawyer John Yoo called it the “legal equivalent of outer space.

When Libya fought against the Italian occupation, all the Arabs supported the Libyan mujahideen. We Arabs never occupied any country. Well, we occupied Andalusia unjustly, and they drove us out, but since then, we Arabs have not occupied any country. It is our countries that are occupied. Palestine is occupied, Iraq is occupied, and as for the UAE islands... It is not in the best interest of the Arabs for hostility to develop between them and Iran, Turkey, or any of these nations. By no means is it in our interest to turn Iran against us. If there really is a problem, we should decide here to refer this issue to the international court of Justice. This is the proper venue for the resolution of such problems. We should decide to refer the issue of the disputed UAE islands to the International Court of Justice, and we should accept whatever it rules. One time you say this is occupied Arab land, and then you say... This is not clear, and it causes confusion. 80% of the people of the Gulf are Iranians. The ruling families are Arab, but the rest are Iranian. The entire people is Iranian. This is a mess. Iran cannot be avoided. Iran is a Muslim neighbour, and it is not in our interes to become enemies. What is the reason for the invasion and destruction of Iraq, and for killing of one million Iraqis? Let our American friends answer this question: Why Iraq? What is the reason? Is Bin Laden an Iraqi? No he is not. Were those who attacked New York Iraqis? No, they were not. were those who attacked the Pentagon Iraqis? No, they were not. Were there WMDs in Iraq? No, there were not. Even if iraq did have WMDs - Pakistan and India have nuclear bombs, and so do China, Russia, Britain, France and America. Should all these countries be destroyed? Fine, let's destroy all the countries that have WMDs. Along comes a foreign power, occupies an Arab country, and hangs its president, and we all sit on the sidelines, laughing. Why didn't they investigate the hanging of Saddam Hussein? How can a POW be hanged - a president of an Arab country and a member of the Arab League no less! I'm not talking about the policies of Saddam Hussein, or the disagreements we had with him. We all had poitlical disagreements with him and we have such disagreements among ourselves here. We share nothing, beyond this hall. Why won't there be an investigation into the killing of Saddam Hussein? An entire Arab leadership was executed by hanging, yet we sit on the sidelines. Why? Any one of you might be next. Yes. America fought alongside Saddam Hussein against Khomeini. He was their friend. Cheney was a friend of Saddam Hussein. Rumsfeld, the US Defense Secretary at the time Iraq was destroyed, was a close friend of Saddam Hussein. Ultimately, they sold him out and hanged him. You are friends of America - let's say that ''we'' are, not ''you'' - but one of these days, America may hang us. Brother 'Amr Musa has an idea which he is enthusiastic. He mentioned it in his report. He says that the Arabs have the right to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes, and that there should be an Arab nuclear program. The Arabs have this right. They even have the right to have the right to have a nuclear program for other... But Allah prevails... But who are those Arabs whom you say should have united nuclear program? We are the enemies of one another, I'm sad to say. We all hate one another, we deceive one another, we gloat at the misfortune of one another, and we conspire against one another. Our intelligence agencies conspire against one another, instead of defending us against the enemy. We are the enemies of one another, and an Arab's enemy is another Arab's friend.

Partly at Rubel’s urging, Secretary of Defense McNamara later compelled the Minuteman developers, against great resistance, to install the equivalent of an electronic lock on the Minuteman, such that it couldn’t be fired without the receipt of a coded message from higher headquarters. Decades later, long after McNamara’s retirement, Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman launch control officer, informed the former secretary that the Air Force had ensured that the codes in the launch control centers were all set continuously at 00000000. According to Blair, McNamara responded, “I am shocked, absolutely shocked and outraged. Who the hell authorized that?” “What he had just learned from me,” Blair continues, was that the locks had been installed,52 but everyone knew the combination. The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the “locks” to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard. During the early to mid-1970s, during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at 00000000.

Matthews’s pursuit of this issue, like that of nearly every other interviewer, seemed to reflect the simple, widespread ignorance of the reality that Trump was taking the same position of every president since Truman, and of every major candidate in that long period, definitely including his rival Hillary Clinton. She would surely have given essentially the same answers to Matthews’s questions as Trump did if she had been in that same forum, consistent with her stand in 2007. No candidate or president has ever come close to adopting and proclaiming a no-first-use policy (with Barack Obama being the only president311 to encourage serious internal consideration of it, especially in his last year, before rejecting it in face of opposition from his secretaries of defense,

Back in America, Donald Trump had, as a candidate, preached the virtues of withdrawal. “We should leave Afghanistan immediately,” he had said. The war was “wasting our money,” “a total and complete disaster.” But, once in office, Donald Trump, and a national security team dominated by generals, pressed for escalation. Richard Holbrooke had spent his final days alarmed at the dominance of generals in Obama’s Afghanistan review, but Trump expanded this phenomenon almost to the point of parody. General Mattis as secretary of defense, General H. R. McMaster as national security advisor, and retired general John F. Kelly formed the backbone of the Trump administration’s Afghanistan review. In front of a room full of servicemen and women at Fort Myer Army Base, in Arlington, Virginia, backed by the flags of the branches of the US military, Trump announced that America would double down in Afghanistan. A month later, General Mattis ordered the first of thousands of new American troops into the country. It was a foregone conclusion: the year before Trump entered office, the military had already begun quietly testing public messaging, informing the public that America would be in Afghanistan for decades, not years. After the announcement, the same language cropped up again, this time from Trump surrogates who compared the commitment not to other counterterrorism operations, but to America’s troop commitments in Korea, Germany, and Japan. “We are with you in this fight,” the top general in Afghanistan, John Nicholson, Jr., told an audience of Afghans. “We will stay with you.

called in Boogie Yaalon, whom I had recently appointed as defense minister, to hear the American proposal with me. Allen laid out a presentation of US technological monitors that would be placed along the border. He said this would obviate the need for permanently stationed Israeli forces along the Jordan. As for the internal policing against terrorism within the Palestinian areas, the US would train the Palestinian security forces to do the job. I responded that shortly after Israel left Gaza, those same Palestinian Authority security forces caved to Hamas terrorists. “This is different,” Kerry said. “These forces would be trained by us.” He then made an extraordinary proposal. “Bibi, I want to arrange a clandestine visit for you to Afghanistan. You’ll see with your own eyes what a great job we did there to prepare the Afghan army to take over the country once we leave.” Yaalon and I looked at each other. Our glances said everything. “John,” I said, “the minute you leave Afghanistan the Taliban will mop up the force you trained in no time.” Boogie concurred completely. In 2021, that is exactly what happened. Once the US withdrew its last forces, the US-trained Afghan military crumbled into dust in a matter of days. I remembered a similar discussion with another secretary of state, George Shultz, who made the same argument to encourage our withdrawal from Lebanon. The US was training the Lebanese Army to take over the country. I argued that once we left Lebanon, radical forces would grab control. Lacking the cohesive zealotry of the radicals, the American-trained forces would collapse or become irrelevant. That’s exactly what happened when we withdrew from Lebanon in May 2000. Hezbollah took over the country in no time.

investigations and reported the completion of significant investigations without charges. Anytime a special prosecutor is named to look into the activities of a presidential administration it is big news, and, predictably, my decision was not popular at the Bush White House. A week after the announcement, I substituted for the attorney general at a cabinet meeting with the president. By tradition, the secretaries of state and defense sit flanking the president at the Cabinet Room table in the West Wing of the White House. The secretary of the treasury and the attorney general sit across the table, flanking the vice president. That meant that, as the substitute for the attorney general, I was at Vice President Dick Cheney’s left shoulder. Me, the man who had just appointed a special prosecutor to investigate his friend and most senior and trusted adviser, Scooter Libby. As we waited for the president, I figured I should be polite. I turned to Cheney and said, “Mr. Vice President, I’m Jim Comey from Justice.” Without turning to face me, he said, “I know. I’ve seen you on TV.” Cheney then locked his gaze ahead, as if I weren’t there. We waited in silence for the president. My view of the Brooklyn Bridge felt very far away. I had assured Fitzgerald at the outset that this was likely a five- or six-month assignment. There was some work to do, but it would be a piece of cake. He reminded me of that many times over the next four years, as he was savagely attacked by the Republicans and right-leaning media as some kind of maniacal Captain Ahab, pursuing a case that was a loser from the beginning. Fitzgerald had done exactly as I expected once he took over. He investigated to understand just who in government had spoken with the press about the CIA employee and what they were thinking when they did so. After careful examination, he ended in a place that didn’t surprise me on Armitage and Rove. But the Libby part—admittedly, a major loose end when I gave him the case—

Unlike during the previous Gaza operation in 2012, the Iron Dome supply did not run out. After Operation Pillar of Defense I had instructed the army to accelerate production of Iron Dome projectiles and batteries. We accomplished this with our own funds and with generous American financial support. I now asked the Obama administration for an additional $225 million package to continue the production line after Protective Edge. He agreed, and with the help of Tony Blinken, the deputy national security advisor who later became Biden’s secretary of state, the funding provision sailed through both houses of Congress. I deeply appreciated this support and said so publicly. I was therefore very disappointed when the administration held back on the IDF’s request for additional Hellfire rockets for our attack helicopters. Without offensive weapons we could not bring the Gaza operation to a quick and decisive end. Furthermore, as the air war lingered, the administration issued increasingly critical statements against Israel, calling some of our actions “appalling”2 and thereby opening the moral floodgates against us. Hamas took note. As long as it believed that we couldn’t deliver more aggressive punches, and that international support was waning, it would continue to rocket our cities. Unfortunately, it was aided in this belief by an international tug-of-war. On one side: Israel and Egypt. On the other: Turkey and Qatar, which fully supported Hamas. I worked in close collaboration with Egypt’s new leader, el-Sisi, who had deposed the Islamist Morsi a few months earlier. Our common goal was to achieve an unconditional cease-fire. The last thing el-Sisi wanted was a Hamas success in Gaza that would embolden their Islamist allies in the Sinai and beyond. Hamas’s exiled leader, Khaled Mashal, who escaped the Mossad action in Jordan, was now in Qatar. Supported by his Qatari hosts and Erdogan and ensconced in his lavish villa in Doha, Mashal egged Hamas to keep on fighting. To my astonishment, Kerry urged me to accept Qatar and Turkey as mediators instead of the Egyptians, who were negotiating with Hamas representatives in Cairo for a possible cease-fire. Hamas drew much encouragement from this American position. El-Sisi and I agreed to keep the Americans out of the negotiating loop. In the meantime the IDF would have to further degrade Hamas’s fighting and crush their expectations of achieving anything in the cease-fire negotiations.

Another obstacle was the stubbornness of the countries the pipeline had to cross, particularly Syria, all of which were demanding what seemed to be exorbitant transit fees. It was also the time when the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel were aggravating American relations with the Arab countries. But the emergence of a Jewish state, along with the American recognition that followed, threatened more than transit rights for the pipeline. Ibn Saud was as outspoken and adamant against Zionism and Israel as any Arab leader. He said that Jews had been the enemies of Arabs since the seventh century. American support of a Jewish state, he told Truman, would be a death blow to American interests in the Arab world, and should a Jewish state come into existence, the Arabs “will lay siege to it until it dies of famine.” When Ibn Saud paid a visit to Aramco’s Dhahran headquarters in 1947, he praised the oranges he was served but then pointedly asked if they were from Palestine—that is, from a Jewish kibbutz. He was reassured; the oranges were from California. In his opposition to a Jewish state, Ibn Saud held what a British official called a “trump card”: He could punish the United States by canceling the Aramco concession. That possibility greatly alarmed not only the interested companies, but also, of course, the U.S. State and Defense departments. Yet the creation of Israel had its own momentum. In 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended the partition of Palestine, which was accepted by the General Assembly and by the Jewish Agency, but rejected by the Arabs. An Arab “Liberation Army” seized the Galilee and attacked the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Violence gripped Palestine. In 1948, Britain, at wit’s end, gave up its mandate and withdrew its Army and administration, plunging Palestine into anarchy. On May 14, 1948, the Jewish National Council proclaimed the state of Israel. It was recognized almost instantly by the Soviet Union, followed quickly by the United States. The Arab League launched a full-scale attack. The first Arab-Israeli war had begun. A few days after Israel’s proclamation of statehood, James Terry Duce of Aramco passed word to Secretary of State Marshall that Ibn Saud had indicated that “he may be compelled, in certain circumstances, to apply sanctions against the American oil concessions… not because of his desire to do so but because the pressure upon him of Arab public opinion was so great that he could no longer resist it.” A hurriedly done State Department study, however, found that, despite the large reserves, the Middle East, excluding Iran, provided only 6 percent of free world oil supplies and that such a cut in consumption of that oil “could be achieved without substantial hardship to any group of consumers.

As Melvin Laird, his Defense Secretary, recalled, "Every effort was made to create an economic boom for the 1972 election. The Defense Department, for example, bought a two-year supply of toilet paper. We ordered enough trucks . . . for the next several years."48 Congress, too, propelled election-year spending by its approval of sharp hikes in Social Security benefits: some $8 billion in extra checks went out in October.

Bannon veered from “Mad Dog” Mattis—the retired four-star general whom Trump had nominated as secretary of defense—to a long riff on torture, the surprising liberalism of generals, and the stupidity of the civilian-military bureaucracy. Then it was on to the looming appointment of Michael Flynn—a favorite Trump general who’d been the opening act at many Trump rallies—as the National Security Advisor. “He’s fine. He’s not Jim Mattis and he’s not John Kelly … but he’s fine. He just needs the right staff around him.” Still, Bannon averred: “When you take out all the never-Trump guys who signed all those letters and all the neocons who got us in all these wars … it’s not a deep bench.

The vice president had also been present at an Oval Office meeting on Tuesday, January 7, 1986, when Secretary of State George Shultz “argued fiercely and with passion against any arms sales to Iran, especially arms sales connected to the release of the hostages,” Shultz recalled. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who was also there, agreed with Shultz, and said so. “No one else did,” Shultz recalled. Bush was silent as Reagan decided to proceed amid what Weinberger recalled as “talk of the hostages as one of the motivating factors.

None of the reporters covering the story could be bothered with addressing the substance. Repeatedly, I urged reporters, “for every ten stories you write repeating the personal attacks against me, could you maybe write one on substance? Namely that the nominee (1) absolutely refuses to disclose any of his income for three years, (2) has a long and extreme record of antagonism towards Israel and openness towards Iran’s acquiring nuclear weapons, and (3) has admitted in writing that he may have received $200,000 in cash from a foreign government.” Actual “news” reporters would want to know, at a minimum, whether our soon-to-be defense secretary had been paid directly by a foreign government. But no such news reporters could be found.

By some quirk of fate, I had been chosen—along with five others—as a candidate to be the next equerry to the Princess of Wales. I knew little about what an equerry actually did, but I did not greatly care. I already knew I wanted to do the job. Two years on loan to the royal household would surely be good for promotion, and even if it was not, it had to be better than slaving in the Ministry of Defense, which was the most likely alternative. I wondered what it would be like to work in a palace. Through friends and relatives I had an idea it was not all red carpets and footmen. Running the royal family must involve a lot of hard work for somebody, I realized, but not, surely, for the type of tiny cog that was all I expected to be. In the wardroom of the frigate, alongside in Loch Ewe, news of the signal summoning me to London for an interview had been greeted with predictable ribaldry and a swift expectation that I therefore owed everybody several free drinks. Doug, our quiet American on loan from the U.S. Navy, spoke for many. He observed me in skeptical silence for several minutes. Then he took a long pull at his beer, blew out his mustache, and said, “Let me get this straight. You are going to work for Princess Di?” I had to admit it sounded improbable. Anyway, I had not even been selected yet. I did not honestly think I would be. “Might work for her, Doug. Only might. There’re probably several smooth Army buggers ahead of me in the line. I’m just there to make it look democratic.” The First Lieutenant, thinking of duty rosters, was more practical. “Whatever about that, you’ve wangled a week ashore. Lucky bastard!” Everyone agreed with him, so I bought more drinks. While these were being poured, my eye fell on the portraits hanging on the bulkhead. There were the regulation official photographs of the Queen and Prince Philip, and there, surprisingly, was a distinctly nonregulation picture of the Princess of Wales, cut from an old magazine and lovingly framed by an officer long since appointed elsewhere. The picture had been hung so that it lay between the formality of the official portraits and the misty eroticism of some art prints we had never quite got around to throwing away. The symbolic link did not require the services of one of the notoriously sex-obsessed naval psychologists for interpretation. As she looked down at us in our off-duty moments the Princess represented youth, femininity, and a glamour beyond our gray steel world. She embodied the innocent vulnerability we were in extremis employed to defend. Also, being royal, she commanded the tribal loyalty our profession had valued above all else for more than a thousand years, since the days of King Alfred. In addition, as a matter of simple fact, this tasty-looking bird was our future Queen. Later, when that day in Loch Ewe felt like a relic from another lifetime, I often marveled at the Princess’s effect on military people. That unabashed loyalty symbolized by Arethusa’s portrait was typical of reactions in messhalls and barracks worldwide. Sometimes the men gave the impression that they would have died for her not because it was their duty, but because they wanted to. She really seemed worth it.

On August 1, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel granted the CIA’s request to begin water-boarding Abu Zubaydah. The technique, tantamount to torture, was designed to elicit confessions through the threat of imminent death by drowning. That same day John Yoo, now a deputy to Attorney General Ashcroft, advised the White House that the laws against torture did not apply to American interrogators. The president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, and the director of Central Intelligence approved. The

LIED-ABOUT WARS Advertising campaigns, marketing schemes. The target is public opinion. Wars are sold the same way cars are, by lying. In August 1964, President Lyndon Johnson accused the Vietnamese of attacking two U.S. warships in the Tonkin Gulf. Then the president invaded Vietnam, sending planes and troops. He was acclaimed by journalists and by politicians, and his popularity sky-rocketed. The Democrats in power and the Republicans out of power became a single party united against Communist aggression. After the war had slaughtered Vietnamese in vast numbers, most of them women and children, Johnson’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, confessed that the Tonkin Gulf attack had never occurred. The dead did not revive. In March 2003, President George W. Bush accused Iraq of being on the verge of destroying the world with its weapons of mass destruction, “the most lethal weapons ever devised.” Then the president invaded Iraq, sending planes and troops. He was acclaimed by journalists and by politicians, and his popularity sky-rocketed. The Republicans in power and the Democrats out of power became a single party united against terrorist aggression. After the war had slaughtered Iraqis in vast numbers, most of them women and children, Bush confessed that the weapons of mass destruction never existed. “The most lethal weapons ever devised” were his own speeches. In the following elections, he won a second term. In my childhood, my mother used to tell me that a lie has no feet. She was misinformed.

Now McElroy was the U.S. secretary of defense. He took office with a clear vision. “I conceive the role of the Secretary of Defense to be that of captain of President Eisenhower’s defense team,” he said. His first job as captain was to counter the threat of any future Soviet scientific surprise.

In “Flag Plot,” the naval operations room, Anderson became irritated with McNamara’s specific instructions on how to run the blockade. The admiral told McNamara that the Navy had been conducting blockades since the days of John Paul Jones and suggested that the defense secretary return to his office and let the Navy run the operation. McNamara rose from his chair and retorted that the operation was “not a blockade but a means of communication between Kennedy and Khrushchev,

approaches

Everyone stood when Hayes entered the room. The President walked over to the German ambassador, Gustav Koch, and shook his hand. He then grabbed one of the two chairs in front of the fireplace. Michael Haik took the other chair, and Kennedy sat on the couch next to General Flood, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Next to General Flood sat his boss, Secretary of Defense Rick Culbertson. Directly across from them sat Secretary of State Midleton and the German ambassador

it was in April, 1861, deemed a high crime to so use them: reference is here made to the published answers of the Governors of States, which had not seceded, to the requisition made upon them for troops to be employed against the States which had seceded. Governor Letcher, of Virginia, replied to the requisition of the United States Secretary of War as follows: "I am requested to detach from the militia of the State of Virginia the quota designated in a table which you append, to serve as infantry or riflemen, for the period of three months, unless sooner discharged. "In reply to this communication, I have only to say that the militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purpose as they have in view. Your object is to subjugate the Southern States, and a requisition made upon me for such an object—an object, in my judgment, not within the purview of the Constitution, or the Act of 1795—will not be complied with." Governor Magoffin, of Kentucky, replied: "Your dispatch is received. In answer, I say emphatically, Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States." Governor Harris, of Tennessee, replied: "Tennessee will not furnish a single man for coercion, but fifty thousand, if necessary, for the defense of our rights, or those of our Southern brothers." Governor Jackson, of Missouri, answered: "Requisition is illegal, unconstitutional, revolutionary, inhuman, diabolical, and can not be complied with.

The ax fell on programs that could not muster strong support from Congress, industry, international allies, or the secretary of defense and his staff. In short, political wheeling and dealing, hidden agendas, and turf battles determined the future Air Force, rather than carefully weighed visions.

Pentagon’s space research under a new civilian agency reporting directly to the secretary of defense. It would be called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA.

Former secretary of defense James Mattis told colleagues he would often get late-night calls from Trump, in which the president fulminated about an issue, often threatening to carry out wildly irresponsible actions. These included, according to a source close to Mattis, the belief that we should immediately attack North Korea (during the early days of his intemperate Twitter campaign against that country). In each of these instances, the cerebral, seasoned Mattis would adopt what became an approach emulated by many in Trump’s cabinet. He would hear out the president’s late-night rant and then, to defuse the issue, promise to think about it and ask to meet the next day to discuss it. Often by then Trump’s “temperature had gone down a few degrees,” said one very senior Trump Pentagon official. “Or at least you could invite other people into the room—the calls late at night were often one on one—and ideally some of them were more rational and would help talk the president off the ledge.

Although he was known as a scholarly and deeply reflective officer, Trump latched on to Mattis’s reputation and, uncomfortably for Mattis, a nickname that he deeply disliked: “Mad Dog.” When Mattis was introduced to a crowd for the first time as Trump’s nominee, Trump delighted in the fact that the crowd started chanting, “Mad Dog! Mad Dog!” Almost from that point forward, the mismatch—the oil-and-water personalities of the superficial, glib, impetuous Trump and that of his intellectual, measured, deeply principled secretary of defense—began to slowly fall apart. For Mattis “it was just a matter of time.” The split finally occurred in 2018, following President Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria and abandon America’s long-standing and courageous Kurdish allies.

Those present were in varying degrees of shock. But one close aide to Tillerson recalled that after the meeting the secretary of state said he was “disgusted by what” he saw. To his credit, Tillerson did not just mumble his concern under his breath. He spoke out in defense of the military. Then in the wake of the meeting, after the president had left, Tillerson uttered the line for which his tenure as secretary of state will likely be best remembered. He said of the commander in chief: “He’s a fucking moron.

McNamara’s attempt to gain supporters failed. “I do not think there is a military problem there,” argued the secretary of defense. As

AnyVision is shy about admitting its true role in the West Bank, but digging by NBC News uncovered a project, called Google Ayosh, targeting all Palestinians with the use of big data. AnyVision continues to use the occupation as a vital source to train its systems in the mass surveillance of Palestinians, focusing, it says, on attempts to stop any Palestinian attackers.43 AnyVision is a global company that operates in over forty countries, including Russia, China (Hong Kong), and the US, and in countless locations such as casinos, manufacturing, and even fitness centers. The company changed its name to Oosto in late 2021, and raised US$235 million that year to further develop its AI-enabled surveillance tools. The former head of Mossad, Tamir Pardo, is an advisor and it is staffed by Israel’s intelligence Unit 8200 veterans. It promotes itself as building a world “safer through visual intelligence.” AnyVision so impressed Microsoft that the Seattle software giant briefly invested US$74 million in the company in 2019 before facing a massive backlash. It cut its ties with AnyVision in 2020 due to pressure from the “Palestinian lobby on the Democratic Party,” according to the former head of Israel’s Defense Export Control Agency, though it continues to develop its own facial recognition technology.44 The former Biden administration press secretary Jen Psaki worked for AnyVision as a “crisis communications consultant” and earned at least US$5,000 at some point between leaving the Obama administration in 2017 and starting in the Biden White House.

2. In one of our visits, I met a fourth-year high school student, who was three months shy from graduation. Before Yolanda hit, he was studying for his exams with his girlfriend. It was supposed to be the last Christmas they would be dependent on their allowances. They dreamed of traveling together after college. It was going to be their first time. They never had money to spare before. But in three months, they thought, everything would be all right. They only had to wait a few more months. After all, they had already waited for four years. What he didn’t expect was the fact that the storm [Typhoon Haiyan] would be so strong he would have to choose between saving his girlfriend and her one-year-old niece. For months, he would stare longingly at the sea, at the exact same spot he found his girlfriend, with a piece of galvanized iron that was used for roofing pierced through her stomach. It was a relief that one of the first projects we started under DPWH Secretary Mark Villar was the Leyte Tide Embankment, a storm surge protection structure that would serve as the first line of defense for residents of Tacloban, Palo, and Tanauan in Leyte should another typhoon hit the region.” - Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo , Night Owl: A Nationbuilder’s Manual 2nd Edition (p. 226, Build, Build, Build Projects Eastern Visayas)

In one of our visits, I met a fourth-year high school student, who was three months shy from graduation. Before Yolanda hit, he was studying for his exams with his girlfriend. It was supposed to be the last Christmas they would be dependent on their allowances. They dreamed of traveling together after college. It was going to be their first time. They never had money to spare before. But in three months, they thought, everything would be all right. They only had to wait a few more months. After all, they had already waited for four years. What he didn’t expect was the fact that the storm [Typhoon Haiyan] would be so strong he would have to choose between saving his girlfriend and her one-year-old niece. For months, he would stare longingly at the sea, at the exact same spot he found his girlfriend, with a piece of galvanized iron that was used for roofing pierced through her stomach. It was a relief that one of the first projects we started under DPWH Secretary Mark Villar was the Leyte Tide Embankment, a storm surge protection structure that would serve as the first line of defense for residents of Tacloban, Palo, and Tanauan in Leyte should another typhoon hit the region.” - Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo , Night Owl: A Nationbuilder’s Manual 2nd Edition (p. 226, Build, Build, Build Projects Eastern Visayas)

No one spoke up to object to the indiscriminate killing of 600 million people in a U.S. government–led, preemptive, first-strike nuclear attack, Rubel wrote. Not any of the Joint Chiefs. Not the secretary of defense.

Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward. Many of Trump’s former top cabinet officers and aides have said publicly that Trump should not be president again and should not even be on the ballot. Those include: former vice president Mike Pence; former secretary of defense Mark Esper; former chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley; former national security adviser John Bolton; former secretary of defense James Mattis; former director of national intelligence Dan Coats; former chief of staff John Kelly; former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney; and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.

Admiral Whitworth was in Washington, D.C., standing beside Chairman Milley and Defense Secretary Austin when the last plane left Afghanistan. A trio who had served together in Afghanistan all those years before. “I’ll treasure forever our being there together

that in the Nixon era the United States was, in essence, a ‘rogue state.’ It had a ruthless, paranoid, and unstable leader who did not hesitate to break the laws of his own country in order to violate the neutrality, menace the territorial integrity, or destabilize the internal affairs of other nations. At the close of this man’s reign, in an episode more typical of a banana republic or a ‘peoples’ democracy,’ his own secretary of defense, James Schlesinger, had to instruct the Joint Chiefs of Staff to disregard any military order originating in the White House.”266

Therefore, since it was all but inevitable that there would be a power struggle of some kind between the two great power centers on earth, even without declared hostility, the intelligence community proponents said that it would be easier to begin our national defense posture by delineating the source of all concern and danger, i.e. world communism, and then to draw lines for a never-ending battle, sometimes called the Cold War. The line so constructed was, in the beginning, the Iron Curtain. Although one might expect that the battles would be waged by our forces on their side of the curtain, and the skirmishes by their forces would be on our side, it has not turned out that way. The battles that have been fought since 1947 for the most part have been fought on our side of the Iron Curtain. It had to happen this way because the intelligence community has gained the initiative, and the response technique will not work on the other side. This was the great contest and although the principals on both sides of the argument, which was of such vital concern to the foreign policy and defense posture of this country, might deny it, this was the basis for the contention that the Central Intelligence Group should be assigned to a position subordinate to the Secretaries of State and Defense and under their direction.

The preparations for and the writing of such influential reports as this one attributed to McNamara was a work of skill, perseverance, and high art. Whenever it was decided that McNamara would go to Saigon, select members of the ST sent special messages to Saigon on the ultra-secure CIA communications network, laying out a full scenario for his trip. The Secretary of Defense and his party would be shown “combat devastated villages” that had paths and ruts that had been caused by the hard work and repeated rehearsals—not battles—that had taken place in them between “natives,” “Vietnamese soldiers,” and Americans. McNamara would be taken on an itinerary planned in Washington, he would see “close-in combat” designed in Washington, and he would receive field data and statistics prepared for him in Washington. All during his visit he would be in the custody of skilled briefers who knew what he should see, whom he should see, and whom he should not see.

We will use nuclear weapons whenever we feel it necessary to protect our vital interests.” United States Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, September 25, 1961 Jeremiah 50:23 describes the nation in Chapter 50 and 51 that he labels the Daughter of Babylon as “the hammer of the whole earth

David Phillips, who was involved in the early stages of planning for a post-Hussein Iraq, notes that during the postwar reconstruction efforts, "Relations between the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the State Department became increasingly acrimonious. U.S. officials vied for control over the Iraq policy."32 Similarly, Larry Diamond, who was also involved in the reconstruction of Iraq, indicates that "A number of U.S. government agencies had a variety of visions of how political authority would be reestablished in Iraq.... In the bitter, relentless infighting among U.S. government agencies in advance of the war, none of these preferences clearly prevailed.

demanded that Israel pay for this crime against humanity, and began demanding that the United Nations place sanctions on the country , blockade its ports, and close the borders. Israel’s defense forces went on high alert and began to wait for a possible attack. The Secretary General of the United Nations, who was from Pakistan, held a press conference. “I am calling for an emergency meeting of the Security Council. I’m asking for the leaders of those countries, who are members of the Council, to come to New York to discuss the situation. I ask the countries affected by Israel’s questionable decision to launch nuclear weapons to hold off on any action that may lead to a war that could possibly drag the whole world in. Please, like I said earlier, let cooler heads prevail, and also know that justice will be done.

Representatives 1979-89, and as secretary of defense under President George H. W. Bush 1989-93 before assuming the duties of vice president under President George W. Bush. He was a major proponent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

One American political figure saw Russia for the growing menace that it was and was willing to call Putin out for his transgressions. During President Obama’s reelection campaign, Mitt Romney warned of a growing Russian strategic threat, highlighting their role as “our number one geopolitical foe.”[208] The response from President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and other Democrats was not to echo his sentiment, but actually to ridicule Romney and support the Russian government. President Obama hurled insults, saying Romney was “stuck in a Cold War mind warp” [209] and in a nationally televised debate mocked the former governor, saying “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back…” [210] When asked to respond to Romney’s comment, Secretary Clinton refused to rebuke the over-the-top and false Obama campaign attacks. Instead, she delivered a message that echoed campaign talking points arguing that skepticism of Russia was outdated: “I think it’s somewhat dated to be looking backwards,” she said, adding, “In many of the areas where we are working to solve problems, Russia has been an ally.”[211] A month after Secretary Clinton’s statement on Romney, Putin rejected Obama’s calls for a landmark summit.[212] He didn’t seem to share the secretary’s view that the two countries were working together. It was ironic that while Obama and Clinton were saying Romney was in a “Cold War mind warp,”[213] the Russian leader was waging a virulent, anti-America “election campaign” (that’s if you can call what they did in Russia an “election”). In fact, if anyone was in a Cold War mind warp, it was Putin, and his behavior demonstrated just how right Romney was about Russia’s intentions. “Putin has helped stoke anti-Americanism as part of his campaign emphasizing a strong Russia,” Reuters reported. “He has warned the West not to interfere in Syria or Iran, and accused the United States of ‘political engineering’ around the world.”[214] And his invective was aimed not just at the United States. He singled out Secretary Clinton for verbal assault. Putin unleashed the assault Nov. 27 [2011] in a nationally televised address as he accepted the presidential nomination, suggesting that the independent election monitor Golos, which gets financing from the United States and Europe, was a U.S. vehicle for influencing the elections here. Since then, Golos has been turned out of its Moscow office and its Samara branch has come under tax investigation. Duma deputies are considering banning all foreign grants to Russian organizations. Then Putin accused U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton of sending a signal to demonstrators to begin protesting the fairness of the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections.[215] [Emphasis added.] Despite all the evidence that the Russians had no interest in working with the U.S., President Obama and Secretary Clinton seemed to believe that we were just a Putin and Obama election victory away from making progress. In March 2012, President Obama was caught on a live microphone making a private pledge of flexibility on missile defense “after my election” to Dmitry Medvedev.[216] The episode lent credence to the notion that while the administration’s public unilateral concessions were bad enough, it might have been giving away even more in private. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Putin didn’t abandon his anti-American attitudes after he won the presidential “election.” In the last few weeks of Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, Putin signed a law banning American adoption of Russian children,[217] in a move that could be seen as nothing less than a slap in the face to the United States. Russia had been one of the leading sources of children for U.S. adoptions.[218] This disservice to Russian orphans in need of a home was the final offensive act in a long trail of human rights abuses for which Secretary Clinton failed to hold Russia accountable.

Avinash Kaushik, author and Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google, says former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld knew a thing or two about analytics. According to Rumsfeld: There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns — there are things we do not know, we don’t know.

The Secretary of Defense directed members of different services to “secure that building.” Navy personnel turned off the lights and locked the doors. The Army occupied the building and ensured no one could enter. The Marines attacked it, captured it, and set up defenses to hold it. The Air Force secured a two-year lease with an option to buy.

The challenge is to maintain a high-level, broad perspective, understand enough details to make sensible and executable decisions, and then delegate responsibility for implementation. “Microknowledge” must not become micromanagement, but it sure helps keep people on their toes when they know that the secretary knows what the hell he’s talking about. If the secretary of defense doesn’t

Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty and conflict.  US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, 2014.

American DEWAR FAMILY Cameron Dewar Ursula “Beep” Dewar, his sister Woody Dewar, his father Bella Dewar, his mother PESHKOV-JAKES FAMILY George Jakes Jacky Jakes, his mother Greg Peshkov, his father Lev Peshkov, his grandfather Marga, his grandmother MARQUAND FAMILY Verena Marquand Percy Marquand, her father Babe Lee, her mother CIA Florence Geary Tony Savino Tim Tedder, semiretired Keith Dorset OTHERS Maria Summers Joseph Hugo, FBI Larry Mawhinney, Pentagon Nelly Fordham, old flame of Greg Peshkov Dennis Wilson, aide to Bobby Kennedy Skip Dickerson, aide to Lyndon Johnson Leopold “Lee” Montgomery, reporter Herb Gould, television journalist on This Day Suzy Cannon, gossip reporter Frank Lindeman, television network owner REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth U.S. president Jackie, his wife Bobby Kennedy, his brother Dave Powers, assistant to President Kennedy Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press officer Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Lyndon B. Johnson, thirty-sixth U.S. president Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh U.S. president Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth U.S. president Ronald Reagan, fortieth U.S. president George H. W. Bush, forty-first U.S. president British LECKWITH-WILLIAMS FAMILY Dave Williams Evie Williams, his sister Daisy Williams, his mother Lloyd Williams, M.P., his father Eth Leckwith, Dave’s grandmother MURRAY FAMILY Jasper Murray Anna Murray, his sister Eva Murray, his mother MUSICIANS IN THE GUARDSMEN AND PLUM NELLIE Lenny, Dave Williams’s cousin Lew, drummer Buzz, bass player Geoffrey, lead guitarist OTHERS Earl Fitzherbert, called Fitz Sam Cakebread, friend of Jasper Murray Byron Chesterfield (real name Brian Chesnowitz), music agent Hank Remington (real name Harry Riley), pop star Eric Chapman, record company executive German FRANCK FAMILY Rebecca Hoffmann Carla Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive mother Werner Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive father Walli Franck, son of Carla Lili Franck, daughter of Werner and Carla Maud von Ulrich, née Fitzherbert, Carla’s mother Hans Hoffmann, Rebecca’s husband OTHERS Bernd Held, schoolteacher Karolin Koontz, folksinger Odo Vossler, clergyman REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (Communist) Erich Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor Egon Krenz, successor to Honecker Polish Stanislaw “Staz” Pawlak, army officer Lidka, girlfriend of Cam Dewar Danuta Gorski, Solidarity activist REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Anna Walentynowicz, crane driver Lech Wałesa, leader of the trade union Solidarity General Jaruzelski, prime minister Russian DVORKIN-PESHKOV FAMILY Tanya Dvorkin, journalist Dimka Dvorkin, Kremlin aide, Tanya’s twin brother Anya Dvorkin, their mother Grigori Peshkov, their grandfather Katerina Peshkov, their grandmother Vladimir, always called Volodya, their uncle Zoya, Volodya’s wife Nina, Dimka’s girlfriend OTHERS Daniil Antonov, features editor at TASS Pyotr Opotkin, features editor in chief Vasili Yenkov, dissident Natalya Smotrov, official in the Foreign Ministry Nik Smotrov, Natalya’s husband Yevgeny Filipov, aide to Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky Vera Pletner, Dimka’s secretary Valentin, Dimka’s friend Marshal Mikhail Pushnoy REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS Nikita Sergeyevitch Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Andrei Gromyko, foreign minister under Khrushchev Rodion Malinovsky, defense minister under Khrushchev Alexei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor Yuri Andropov, successor to Brezhnev Konstantin Chernenko, successor to Andropov Mikhail Gorbachev, successor to Chernenko Other Nations Paz Oliva, Cuban general Frederik Bíró, Hungarian politician Enok Andersen, Danish accountant

example, consider the opinions of Robert Gates, who served as director of the CIA before becoming secretary of defense for both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. During the cold war, he was a hard-liner; now he is in Gorbachev's corner on the 1991 controversy. “They [the Russians] believed they had a commitment that we wouldn't try and move NATO to the East,” Gates told the Council on Foreign Relations. And

World events do not occur by accident. They are made to happen, whether it is to do with national issues or commerce; and most of them are staged and managed by those who hold the purse strings.” — Dennis Healy, UK Secretary of State for Defense from 1964 to 1970 and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1974 to 1979

he never perceived U.S. foreign policy as a campaign for American hegemony. In a mid-1947 talk to the Women’s National Press Club he expressed indignation at the charge. “There could be no more malicious distortion of the truth,” he declaimed, “than the frequent propaganda assertions . . . that the United States has imperialist aims or that American aid has been offered in order to fasten upon the recipients some sort of political or economic dominion.”6 In their quest for mid-American support, Marshall and his internationalist Cold War colleagues were not averse to underscoring the economic advantages to American business and agriculture of generous public funding of defensive measures against the advance of foreign Communism. But the secretary of state himself had no ulterior capitalist motives.

President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), announced in 1983 and calling for a nationwide missile defense using very sophisticated technology, both angered and, I believe, terrified the Soviets. As I joked at the time, there appeared to be only two people on the planet who actually thought SDI would work—Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviets were under enormous economic pressure by that time and knew they could not compete with such a system.

During a security briefing at the White House, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld breaks some tragic news: “Mr President, three Brazilian soldiers were killed yesterday while supporting U.S. troops.” “My God!” shrieks President George W. Bush, and he buries his head in his hands. He remains stunned and silent for a full minute. Eventually, he looks up, takes a deep breath, and asks Rumsfeld: “How many is a brazillion?

What would those soldiers have thought if they were privy to a classified memo written in March 1965 by Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton? While outlining the “course of action” in Vietnam, McNaughton includes a brief, haunting breakdown of American objectives in Vietnam: US aims: 70%—To avoid a humiliating US defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor). 20%—To keep SVN (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands. 10%—To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life. ALSO—To emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used. NOT—To “help a friend,” although it would be hard to stay in if asked out.

Just three or four decades ago, if you wanted to access a thousand core processors, you’d need to be the chairman of MIT’s computer science department or the secretary of the US Defense Department. Today the average chip in your cell phone can perform about a billion calculations per second. Yet today has nothing on tomorrow. “By 2020, a chip with today’s processing power will cost about a penny,” CUNY theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explained in a recent article for Big Think,23 “which is the cost of scrap paper. . . . Children are going to look back and wonder how we could have possibly lived in such a meager world, much as when we think about how our own parents lacked the luxuries—cell phone, Internet—that we all seem to take for granted.