American Valor Quarterly Issue 6 - Spring/Summer 2009 | Page 30

as part of your advice you have to include the advice of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, which includes the Vice-Chairman and the service
chiefs of the various services. If their advice differs from yours,
you still have to present it. If the Army Chief had a different point
of view, I would be obligated to present his view as well as mine.
However, I don’t think in my entire tenure we ever had one of
those cases where I had to say, “Here is what I believe, but you
need to know a service chief believes differently.” We worked very
hard at working through the issues, as you might expect when the
nation is at war, which was the case when I took over. Seven days
after I take over as Chairman, we were in Afghanistan; so basically
we were at war the entire time I was Chairman. We worked very
hard to make sure the chiefs had worked through the problems
so we all agreed on the major issues that we wanted to present
to our civilian bosses. There are a
number of other responsibilities the
Chairman has, but the main one is
to serve as principal military advisor
to the President. The chain of
command runs from the President
to the Secretary of Defense to the
field commanders. The Chairman is
not in the command chain, but by
tradition all communication flows
through the Chairman to the field,
and then back to the Secretary of
Defense. It requires you to be very
well informed.

and the civilian leadership in the Pentagon. I have been working
now for several years trying to figure out what was the genesis of
that problem. There were some hard feelings, I think, that came
out of the first quadrennial defense review and it colored the way
he was perceived by the senior military leadership. That is really
unfortunate. What was even more unfortunate was when General
Shinseki was at this Senate hearing where he was actually forced to
give a number, or felt like he was forced to give this number, he was
criticized by senior officials in the Defense Department. That is
wrong. If a senior military person wants to give his advise, if he is
in front of a Senate hearing, if you disagree with what he says, call
him in privately and say, “Why did you say that?” I mean you cannot
just dismiss someone like General Shinseki, who has years and
years of experience. He is battletested. You have got to listen. You
do not do that in the public press.
I think that was a huge mistake and
I told Deputy Secretary of Defense
Wolfowitz, that was a mistake. He
agreed, but it was too late. It was
already public. So that just kind of
fueled the fire in this relationship
that was already not going very well.
Now it turns out, General Shinseki
served his four years out, and I think
did an admirable job and was at the
forefront of transforming the Army
to deal with the security challenges
of the 21st century and get away
from the Cold War paradigms.

Roberts: Following up on that, one
of the service chiefs that you served
Rober ts: As you mentioned
with was General Eric Shinseki,
earlier, within seven days of your
who was thought by some to have Recently retired General Richard Myers receives the Presiden- taking office as Chairman, we were
been poorly treated because he tial Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush in a ceremony at involved in Afghanistan, one of the
the White House, November 9, 2005. The award citation notes
gave advice on force levels that he
most unusual military actions in
his long and distinguished career while serving in the
thought would be required in Iraq
American history. You write about
United States Air Force.
that didn’t sync with that of the
how Secretary Rumsfeld liked to
overall command structure in the
show photos of our forces over
Pentagon. What is your take on that?
there riding horseback carrying high-tech gear to call in air strikes.
General Myers: Well, I cover this in the book. In a letter to
Secretary Rumsfeld after he had retired, he said that the number
that he gave in the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing was
a number that was probably larger than required in order to give
the Secretary and General Tommy Franks, who was the unified
commander responsible for planning the Iraq operations, flexibility
and leeway to do what they needed to do. So I think it has been
widely misinterpreted and misperceived about what he said and
what he meant by it. Of course, he was in on all the discussions with
the Secretary and with the President, as the President was asking
us if we had any concerns about going into Iraq, and nobody had
any concern or any reason to not go with the plan that General
Franks had developed.

AMERICAN VALOR QUARTERLY - Spring/Summer 2009 - 31

White House photo

General Myers: It was certainly a unique situation, with requests
for air drops of hay and western saddles for their horses. The
Tajiks’ saddles were made of wood and hard on the body, and
I don’t think a lot of our folks had much riding experience – I
am sure that their training did not include horsemanship. I think
that model of linking up indigenous forces with small groups
of Special Forces and Air Force enlisted members running the
communications gear and targeting equipment to call in precision
g ZYY