Pod Save the World - Former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter

Episode Date: July 3, 2019

Tommy sits down with former Defense Secretary Ash Carter to chat about his book “Inside the Five-Sided Box”, and some of the most complex challenges facing our national security community today, including the war in Afghanistan and closing the prison in Guantanamo Bay.

Welcome back to POTSave the world. This is Tommy Vitor. I just want to wish you all a happy July 4th. A special shout out and thank you to any and all U.S. service members listening to the show. You guys are the reason that a lot of us are able to be with our families today. Have a beer, watch some fireworks, maybe grill out. So we're grateful for all that you do and for listening to the show. I really do appreciate it. Today's episode is an interview I taped with the former Secretary of Defense, a guy named Ash Carter. He has a new book out. It's called Inside the Five-Sided Box, Lessons from a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon. I talked to Ash about his book, but also tried to get him just to tell us like, what the hell is that job like? So we talked about the Doomsday Plain, which is this flying command central that can survive a nuclear attack that the Secretary of Defense and maybe the president can be on to order a return strike in the event of the worst-case scenario.

I asked him to defend the 730 billion-plus Pentagon budget because I think for a lot of us, that sounds like an insane amount of money. And I asked him to walk me through how it actually works. He's written previously that the Obama administration, where he was the Secretary of Defense, didn't do enough to respond to Russian interference in our election. So I tried to get him to elaborate on that. We talked about Saudi Arabia, his take on possible war with Iran. And then I tried to press him a bit on his belief that we should keep a residual for

in Afghanistan. I think he made a version of an argument that I have heard over and over and over again for 18 years about, you know, the need to continue training Afghan security forces and have a presence. I'd love to hear what you guys think if you think that's more compelling, but it was, you know, good to get an exchange of ideas there. And then finally, we talked about some of the bureaucratic infighting that drove him crazy between the Pentagon and Ashes team and the NSC staff. You will hear that it clearly pissed him off and it was fun to. hear some of those stories and then frankly press them a little bit on the underlying policy beefs that seem to have led to some of that infighting. I think maybe that the closing Guantanamo

was more important than some of the process fouls he talked about. But we got into it a bit. We mixed it up. I might have annoyed him. But that's okay. Without further ado, here's the conversation with former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. Ash Carter, welcome to Crooked Media, heckhorse. Good to be with you, Tommy. Thanks for having me. Thank you for coming. I was hoping we could start with day one of your time as Secretary of Defense. You know, you worked in the Pentagon for 37 years total, I believe. Yes. So you were familiar with where the bathroom was and all these things. But I imagine, I mean, the first day, it's got to be some heady stuff. What do you do when you walk in that morning? Well, I don't want to sound immodest, but I had been there for 37 years. I'd been in the Secretary's office many times. And you know, it's interesting. The furniture is exactly the same. Really? Yeah, the desk is Pershing's desk.

Okay. World War I. Behind it is a carved table. In fact, in the book, there's a side-by-side picture of me at that desk and Robert McNamara at that desk. And it's exactly the same stuff and exactly the same layout with exactly the same chairs. And so I had been in there many, many times. And more serious answer is that because of all that and because I've been the number two and the number three, before that. And I also knew the administration some from having been number two and number three.

It's not the same as being number one. But I knew the job and I kind of knew what I wanted to do. And I didn't have, as you never have in government all the time in the world to do what you want to do, but I had the time to start everything I wanted to start. You never have time to finish everything. But I had time to start everything. So I was pretty confident that I understood the job and could take it on. In that sense, I may have been unusually familiar with the place. If you take some of my predecessors, for example, they had a lot of different government experience of all kinds. Going back, I knew Bob McNamara, but in all wonderful experience, but I don't think there's anybody except maybe Bill Perry who had the same amount of experience

in the Pentagon. Yeah. I mean, was there an added sense of responsibility? Oh, sure. You're making literally life and deficit. Yeah, you feel the, weight. And I felt that more the last day than the first day, Tommy. I remember as soon as I was out and Jim Mattis was in, there's something that goes off your shoulders because you're not thinking all the time about those 2.8 million people. You're not thinking all the time, what if, what if, what if. And it is palpable. And you don't feel the weight necessarily day to day. You're working hard, you feel the gravity of it, but you don't feel the personal weight. When it lifts off, it's palpable. Yeah, I bet. The Pentagon is, I think, a truly unique building, place to work. I mean,

there are giants who have worked in that office, who have served, who have experience that is impossible to replicate. What did you learn over your tenure working at that department about how the place works, how to get things done? Because a lot of people try to do. Because a lot of people try and fail. Yeah, one of the things I can do in the book is take you to every corner of the Pentagon. It's kind of an executive guide to the place. So I have been in the acquisition, the technology, the personnel, the policy, the intelligence, space, cyber, every corner of the place in the course of our budget, spending money, contracting in the course of my career. And, I'm the kind of person who reads nonfiction.

I like to know what a place I've never been and never will be is light. And that's especially true when it's a place that affects so much of your life. And that is the largest enterprise on Earth. It has more employees than Amazon, UPS, McDonald's, Target, and GE combined. That's staggering. It has, does more R&D. Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined. We have the largest real property holdings in the world, the size of Pennsylvania.

And so you're doing management on a scale that no other place has. And I think a curious citizen, the CEO who runs a smaller enterprise, but still an important enterprise, I hope young people who are inspired to service, despite everything they see in Washington, Nevertheless, it's the noblest thing you can do with your life. And they get a little glimpse of it and maybe a little part of it excites them. So I have obviously great fondness for the place after all those years. I'm sure. I'm sure.

Well, let's talk about some of the cool perky things. So can you tell us, listeners, what the doomsday plane is? Yeah, it's called the E4B. It is the nuclear war command and control plane. And interestingly, when I first worked for Caspar Weinberg in the Reagan administration, it was brand new. So I remember it from those days, and I had something to do with designing the communication systems on it that can, for example, communicate with submerged submarines from the air. So from the outside, it looks beautiful. It's a big 747.

It says United States of America on a white fuselage, beautiful blue stripe and just gorgeous. Inside, it is 1980s. There are big battle stations that look like Captain Kirk kind of things because that was the technical. of the time. Now, all that's dead now, it's not being used for anything, and instead the battle staff sit there, battle staff, meaning the staff that would conduct nuclear war, if God forbid it, wherever it required, they're working at ordinary, you know, laptops there. The other thing that's odd about it is that it has no windows to shield it from the electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear weapon. So it's a very eerie kind of environment to travel in. On the other

hand, it is mid-air refuelable, which means you never need to land. You can just get in the air in Tash Kent and land in Washington 28 hours later and never have to get off and refuel. So it's got its conveniences, and it's obviously necessary that the Secretary of Defense travel in it. People ask me, well, wasn't it cool to have your own 747 fly, whatever you wanted it? It doesn't feel like that. Yeah. It feels like work. I'm sure. I'm sure. I was going to get this later, but you sort of touched on it. You're a physicist by training, I believe. Yes, yes. You know, you have, I think, a unique understanding and expertise of nuclear weapons. Can you explain what the nuclear triad is? And, you know, I read that it will take 350 to 450 billion an estimate over the next 10 years

to modernize it. Can you explain to people listening why we need three different delivery systems for weapons we pray will never use? It's a very good question. Why three different kinds, first of all, First of all, why any at all if you're, because if we don't recapitalize the triad, eventually what we have is going to age out and will be unreliable and is unusable. So let's start with the, do we need or not need? I mean, I long for the day when nuclear weapons are not present on Earth, just like a lot of other people, including some statesmen who came before me with whom I disagree on this matter. But I don't expect that in my life.

time or very soon at all. And I think it's important that we protect ourselves and that we be able to deter attack on the United States. So it's that simple. Why three different kinds? Here's how you get to the three different kinds. You need something that will for sure survive an attempted first strike by Russia. And therefore you need a submarine force. and you need it large enough so that if it's the only thing that survives, clobber Russia in a way that if they see that beforehand and understand that before, and they don't do it in the first place, which is the whole, they don't attack us in the first place, it's the whole idea of deterrence.

Then bombers. Well, we have bombers anyway, because we buy bombers for other reasons. So then the question isn't really whether you're buying a whole new thing, it's whether you buy bombs to put on the bombers. and that seems like an economical way to have an additional hedge. And also, bombers provide some flexibility in terms of the way they're alerted and deployed. Because they can turn around. They can turn around for sure. And also, if you want a signal that you're getting concerned,

you can put the bombers out on the runway, armed, and do various things with them. So that's a convenience. But basically, you have many ways. So the submarines you have to have, the bombers, you have. have anyway, that's two. And the third, the ICBMs are at the current moment too inexpensive to worry about. They were built 50 years ago. They just sit in the ground. You have to man them, staff them, but that's not terribly expensive. Now, you ask about recapitalizing all that. Well, you've got to recapitalize the submarines, and I'm afraid that's the most expensive part of it.

The bombers were going to have and do anyway for other. reasons, for example, the new B-21 bomber, which we started a few years ago. The most questionable are the ICBMs, not because it's so expensive to buy a new missile. But remember, they're out in these silos out in the Midwest. Those turn out to be very expensive. If we can simply put the new missiles in the old silos will be okay, and it's not going to be prohibitively expensive. If we have to rebuild silos, poor concrete structures under around, That may prove prohibitively expensive, in which case we won't, in fact, recapitalize. We'll just keep the ICBMs going as long as we possibly can't.

So that's the rabbit. There's nothing wholly about any of this, but it all makes sense. Do you think that we should adopt a no-first-use policy when it comes to nuclear weapons? No, I don't because it is an important part of our reassurance to our European allies and to our Asian allies. that if they are attacked, America comes to its aid, and it's important to them that when we say that, we mean everything we have, even if we wouldn't necessarily use nuclear weapons

against any old attack against our allies and aid. So it's extremely important to our friends that we not make such a pledge. The Chinese, the Russians, the North Koreans, the Iranians, they'll never believe that anyway. Nobody's going to believe that we aren't going to use them just because we say so, in peacetime. So here's something that means nothing to your potential enemies and disturbs your

friends. How does a policy that does that recommend itself? Good question. And I, we had this discussion actually in the White House number times of the president. Right, right. Asked that question. I gave him this answer and he seemed to accept it. But there is a crowd around that's been arguing for no first use and I respect them, but it is not a policy. that adds up when you consider what its effects would be. Do you feel hopeful about our ability or likelihood of negotiating additional reductions in the nuclear arsenal with the Russians? I know. It's certainly hard to see us getting anywhere with Vladimir Putin in that domain. I have known Vladimir Putin, as the book says, since 1993.

Right. When I would go with President Clinton to summits with Boris Yeltsin. and Vladimir Putin would be sitting in the back, taking notes. He is not a mysterious person. He says what he thinks. And if you want to know what he thinks, just read what he says. And a lot of it is respectfully argued and cogently argued, but I don't buy. I mean, as an American, I can't accept much of what he says.

In particular, he seems intent upon thwarting the United States in itself as an objective, which isn't an easy objective to negotiate. with. I do, however, think it's important that we not lose contact as the expression goes with the enemy. You got to keep talking. And I'm a little worried about the low level of, to which dialogue has sunk just in terms of magnitude. Russians are capable of believing really wild things if you don't stay in touch with them. We have an issue at the moment with the credibility of our own selves within our own country and some of that. as a result of the election.

And we have plenty of pushing back to do in Russia. So there's some rough work to be done with Russia, in my judgment, in NATO with respect to standing strong against hybrid warfare, against acting in response to cyber attacks on our country and so forth. So there's gonna be some rough house. But you have to accompany the rough house with some dialogue or you could get yourself into real trouble

and never really get anywhere towards making things better if that's possible. Yeah, that sounds right. So I imagine one of the challenges you have as the Secretary of Defense is keeping a handle on an enormous budget. The Congress is currently working on a, I believe it's $733 billion defense budget for this year. I mean, that's just, it's a staggering amount of money. And I'm wondering if you think that that level is sufficient or necessary and whether you could make the case for why it is to a likely liberal audience that hears that eye-popping figure. It's a very good question. first thing is that people have to hear that there's a real effort not to waste it. Yeah. You focus a lot on this. I did. And now one of the things in the book, and by the way, one of the things that all the presidents I've ever known were embarrassed by is they're asking for substantial defense budgets. At the same time, there are stories about toilet seats and

so forth that cost. You can't keep a straight face and ask that if you know you're wasting a minute. So when it came to the Joint Strike Fighter and things like that, I was a real hawk about getting costs, which happened in the case of the Joint Strike Fighter, under control, and running the acquisition system, when I ran the acquisition system with some discernment in an iron fist so we wouldn't waste that money. That said, there are several reasons why the American Defense budget is large and give you some perspective. The first is we pay our people a lot. We don't have a draft, and for reasons we can discuss, I don't want to have a draft. Therefore, we compete in labor markets for good people, and we have to pay them. In that connection, we, for example, have very generous medical benefits, which also are escalating faster than the cost of living and cost. So there are some reasons why, if you compare ours to other countries, it's just more expensive.

A strategic connection is this. We have five big current actual or potential military challenges. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and terrorism. Think about each of those. They only have us. All the Chinese think about is us. All the Russians think about as us. All the Iranians think about us, the North Koreans, and so forth.

So we have a, unfortunately, but necessarily diverse portfolio. And some things you can use for all those purposes, but not everything. So counterinsurgency and counterterrorism most relevant to the war against ISIS, but it was very important to me to wage and win, and we did both. Afghanistan and so forth, they're demanding, but not at all the same way. that a war with China would be if God forbid we were ever going to war with China. So we find ourselves running a number of different lines of defense budget at the same time. But you're right.

There's a debate now going on between $750 billion on one side of the debate and $733 billion. It's a little hard for even me to see a big difference if that's all the debate is about. but it's a fair question. It's a lot of money. Oh, one other thing I think it's important to say, I always refused and maintain this view ever to trade my dollars for the dollars of other government agencies. I was invited to do so many times because I think education is an important investment

in our future. I think R&D is an important investment in our future. I think infrastructure spending is. And I was never willing to say that they were not important sources of American strength in the future. And go ahead, give me more money at the expense of somewhere else. You know, and we need to be realistic here. Discretionary spending is only 30% of the federal budget. If we're really going to deal with some of these spending issues,

we need to get to the real roots of them, which are revenues and mandatory spending and not put all the pressure on discretionary spending. That is very accurate. I think it's probably interesting for people to understand that you hear about these big ticket items. You have 35, you have 22, but there's a lot of more mundane matters that are probably driving costs, like health care costs or food or housing or all the things you're talking about. I mean, it's a huge enterprise. And our people matter.

People and technology are what make us the finance fighting force of the world has ever known. And if you're the Secretary of Defense, the people are what make you wake up every morning. Obviously, the ones at war, particularly. And if you go to hospitals on weekends like my wife and I did and you go to Dover when they're fallen and you greet the families there, that creates a sensation of responsibility and close to them that is very profound. and I had to do all the personnel management for the largest workforce in the world. And there are all kinds of wonderful aspects. These are fantastic people all the way from young kids who are, you know, 18, 19 years old and show up at boot camp and we take their smartphones away from them

and put them in an envelope and send them home to their mothers. and that's a transformation. And I wish we could do that with every 17 and 18 year older. We do it with ours, and they become a lot better right up through our senior officers who are excellent. You know, the Joint Chiefs, we would sit around a table. We're all kind of my age at this moment, still all male, but that'll change over time.

But people who had been around, just as Jim Mattis, for example, who followed me, just take an example. him and I have known each other since he was a major, and I was an assistant secretary. So he's been doing this a long time, too. So these are pretty accomplished people. Right through our veterans who I always say that if I were Secretary of Defense during Vietnam, I don't know what I'd do because I couldn't stand to see our people treated that way. And people now treat veterans very well, and that's not just charity.

It's because they've recognized that when you hire a veteran, for example, example, you're getting someone who is a good leader, is disciplined, will get his or her tail out of bed in the morning and show up for work for sure, which you can't take for granted everywhere. And so the people is basically what keeps you going. Every time I got fed up with Washington, I got on an airplane and go visit the troops. Yes. I imagine that would be a much better role than sitting in a deputies committee meeting or some situation in a meeting all day. Yeah, once Susan Rice called a NSC meeting in the late afternoon and sent around this big, thick binder. And this was, I was only in the job about two, three days.

And I called her up and I said, Susan, I don't have time to read this stuff before a four o'clock meeting with the president. And she said, well, this is the most important part of your job. And I said, no, it's not. Policymaking is one part of my job. But, you know, the president also expects me to carry out his orders. excellently. And he also expects me to run half the federal government. So it's just a piece of my job. And I've got to do the rest of my job. And I can't read your stuff all day. And no, I must say, it's one of the things about Susan Rice is I could always argue with her. And she took it very well,

a lot and a lot of respect for Susan. And we could have that kind of conversation. There would be no hard feelings about it. But I was right. It was a third of my job. You were in government when the Russian interference happened. I've seen you talk about how not enough was done to deter them or to respond. What options were left on the table? Well, if you want to know why, if you want evidence, by the way, for why not enough was done by the Obama administration or yet by the Trump administration, you only have to look to Vladimir Putin. This is not a man who has been pushed back on at all. So that's the proof that not much was done.

Is he deterrable? Yes. In that sense, he's rational. And that's why you need to push back on him. We haven't talked about the Chinese yet, but that's true too. They respond to counterpressure. And people who are afraid to apply counterpressure are thinking wrongly about safety. It is safer to push back.

You don't want to be reckless about it, but you want to be steady and consistent about it. otherwise they will get the idea that they can do something that it turns out that they can press you to a point where it turns out they cannot and that's a formula for trouble so at any rate no we did not do enough um i'm not entirely sure i'm quite sure i was not privy to all the consultations because for very appropriate reasons the president never involved me in political discussions. And this was in the midst of a campaign and an important part of the discussion must have been if we raise this to a very visible level, will that become a campaign issue? And is it reasonable for an outgoing administration to burden a presidential campaign?

And a next administration of whoever wins, nobody knew at that time. with a crisis with the Russians at the very end. So those were considerations that I'm sure President Obama was dealing with. I wasn't privy to them, but I respect their magnitude. But I think it's quite clear we haven't done enough. Now you say, what can you do in return? Give you a few examples. First of all, it's a fallacy that you have to return cyber with cyber.

You don't. You never have to respond like for like. Somebody attacks us. I always used to say an attack is an attack, and I'm going to do whatever I want. in return. And when people flew airplanes into our buildings, we didn't fly airplanes into their buildings. So if somebody attacks me of cyber, I won't necessarily attack back in cyber. One thing that Vladimir Putin ought to be made to think about is that two can play the game

of fooling around in one another's internal affairs. Now, he resents greatly, and he lives in a glass house. our sponsoring of NGOs and so forth that question his essential dictatorship of Russia and some of the lies that he tells his own people and we could play rough in that area we could do much more with NATO and in Europe Russia is a vast country with as Winston Churchill might have said a soft underbelly and I wouldn't let them forget. And I can tell you that in the planning that I directed, because I put together the first war plan with Russia in 25 years.

That must have been fun. Well, that's unfortunate, but it's necessary. And you have to look at the vastness of Russia and say, well, I wouldn't like the job of defending that. Yeah. And so I've got plenty of, I don't want to talk too much about this, but there's plenty we can do to the Russians if we want to get rough. Well, I hear you on the political consideration discussion.

And I think, look, I think a lot of the problems we're in today are probably the results of national security experts making political judgments and then executing on them. I'm thinking about Jim Comey for a second. But setting that aside, if I'm Vladimir Putin, I look at the outcome of my interference campaign, the propaganda, hacking, John Podesta, whatever. And I think the benefit has benefited me maybe more than any covert action that they have ever undertaken against us.

I'm trying to understand a set of actions against him that might be onerous enough that it would determine me. You know, he doesn't really face a real election per se. He already blames us for the Panama Papers, which I think he found humiliating might be the wrong word. There's a lot. Well, that's exactly the kind of stuff. That is an example. I just gave you several examples, but any example is something that will surely rile him up.

Yeah. Is anything that exposes the way his political machine works and the odd or awkward, which there certainly are aspects of Vladimir Putin's rule? So two can play this game. Yes. And if he wants the respect that we have generally shown him, and he's not going to show respect for our political system while I take the gloves off for a little while

and see how he likes it. So I think we do have options and we've just not exercised them and we can all go back and rationalize why it may not have been done. I don't fully understand why it is not being done now. Obviously, I'm not in the government, but there's plenty of we can do.

I don't believe it in this. It's like this with China, North Korea, and so forth. If you think about these things, enough and I have been thinking about him for a long time, you know there's much that can be done. Well, you know, you mentioned China earlier. So, you know, Xi Jinping as tough a cookie as there is on the world stage, he's now marrying up absolute iron grip on his country's leadership with big data and surveillance technology that is allowing him to control people in ways like never before.

I mean, how much do you worry about him and the rise of China? versus some of the other great power challenges. It has to be your biggest worry because it's the biggest dog out there. And it has turned out to be a communist dictatorship, not what in the 1990s people had hoped it would become, which is something that was larger but relatively benign and increasingly like us. It is not becoming increasingly like us. And I knew Xi Jinping, obviously, I knew Hu Jujintel, I knew Zhang Zemin. So I've known the Chinese going all back to the 1990s.

And I have seen that as you go through those three leaders a steady progression where the point of view that it is China is not just an international power, but is the overweening power of Asia, has taken the place of the view that, hey, this international system works pretty well for us. Why don't we join it rather than challenging it? Challenge rather than join has grown in intensity. And you see that fully in Siegeen-Ping. And when it comes to technologies like AI and people ask me who's going to win the competition in AI, I say, well, they're certainly going to win the competition and who creates the perfect repression machine because we're not aspiring to that application of AI. I don't think they're going to win the AI raise either for that.

matter. It's all other story. But not only the technological, but the economic and ideological competition with China is going to be the story of the next generation. And a couple of things to keep in mind as you contemplate that. The first is that we had a Cold War before, and it was with a communist dictatorship. But we aspired to changing their way of government, which most Americans don't aspire to doing it in the Chinese case, but the real difference was we never traded with the Soviet. Right, right. Our economists have not given us a playbook for trade,

and you see us groping towards a playbook. That's the best description you can give of the tariffs business. They're an ingredient of a solution, but they're not really the whole solution. What do you do about students who are paid for by the U.S. federal government? What do you do about things like AI? What do you do about all of these challenges that have strategic implications but are really about economics as well? We need the economists to give us that. All they have is free trade or an impermeable membrane, which is what we had during the Cold War.

And neither of those fits this particular model. So we've got some innovation to do with respect to policymaking in China. It's not done yet. There's been a lot of work done by both the Obama and the Trump administration. to call out and try to suppress the threat of Chinese technology companies like Huawei, which are potentially building out 5G infrastructure and places have done work in Korea with allies. Do you think that's the right approach? Should we be trying to take out their companies or should we be building up our own or both?

I mean, how do you think about it? I think of it as a play in the playbook. Okay. But you said the way of dealing with it. And I feel the same way about tariffs and so forth. We keep alighting upon one thing and saying, is this the policy? Now, I'm not an international economist, but I've been around a long time, and I can tell we don't know what we're doing in this area.

And for a long time, all the economists, the only guidance they ever gave the president as far as I could tell was don't do anything that upsets the markets, which may have been fine for them and their clients, but isn't much good for the average American. And we got to get a better deal for our own people. I actually agree with that proposition. I think that our companies don't expect us to be confrontational, but they do expect their government to stick up for them

when an uneven playing field is presented to them. Same thing is true with friends and allies and other countries. Remember, before one gets too exercised about China, China is halfed, that China is only half of Asia. If we retain friends and good trading partners and some counterweight to China in the other half of Asia, we'll be fine. They're not what all there is to Asia.

They're only half of Asia. And so I would be very careful not to sacrifice our relations and our trade with those others. That's why it's only ancient history now, but TPP was such a good idea. Because it was the all, it was everybody clustering together around a set of principles. If you leave the battlefield to bilateral contests, a network of bilateral contests, you're seeding the battlefield to the Chinese. That's where they are, the strength of a dictatorship comes in.

They can bring military, economic, and political power jointly to bear in a way that our societies cannot do. And so if you play the game on their terms, they're going to win. That's a mistake. Yeah, agreed. You're a defense expert. You're a nuclear physicist expert. So the Trump administration apparently authorized several U.S. companies to begin sharing some unclassified nuclear energy technology or information with the Saudis. Is that a good idea?

It's not a good idea if it leads to Saudi Arabia beginning to aspire to a nuclear weapon. Yeah. I do not think that the Saudis look at an indigenous technical capability as their path to a bomb. I think they look to Pakistan and the way Saudis do everything else using money rather than their own ingenuity. It is not a hardworking populace. That's a problem that the kingdom has, which is. All they have done is had other people pump for them and build their houses and clean their houses and so forth. And so the indigenous artisanal and managerial capacity is not the same as it is in other places that you see taking off in the world industrial stage today like India,

which obviously has the capacity to make nuclear weapons because it demonstrated it. So at the same time, it's a mistake to start anybody flirting with that, I think, and to begin to stimulate all the inevitably exaggerated fears of everybody else in the region that Saudi Arabia is going to do that. So we have always been very careful about not getting the Saudis hooked in any way psychologically on something they can't do by themselves anyway. which is therefore pointlessly going to get their neighborhood exercised. That is why we have shied away from it historically.

It's a tough neighborhood. I imagine you've done a lot of travel to the region, done a lot of work with the leaders there. I mean, when you look at Muhammad bin Salman's behavior over the last couple of years, from the civil war in Yemen to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi to, I saw a recent report that they're buying some sort of ballistic missile technology from the Chinese, does it make you think it's time to recalibrate that relationship? I think it is because it is no longer true that we are as abjectly dependent upon them for energy.

We still are in global energy markets, but it's not the same thing. This idea that our arm sales to them, which I value, arm sales are a good thing. They help our industry and their reflection, their way that we strengthen our friends and allies, which is a force multiplier. That's a good thing. But the idea that it's a favor they're doing to us, which is an idea they seem to have sold recently successfully, as the former chief arms exporter of the United States,

I can tell you it is just a transaction. And if they think they're doing it as a favor, they ought to ask for a lower price. So that's no favor. And then last is they never come through militarily. their ground forces are not very capable. They're only capable ground force is that which protects the monarchy itself, which is quite small. So they're not like the Emirates, which have a very good special operations forces.

The Saudis do not. They have a big air force because they've spent a lot of money on it. They're working on their Navy, but it's not a hugely capable military. And they never do anything that we've asked them. to do. I asked them repeatedly and in many different ways and in many different modes to help us against ISIS and they didn't.

And I even said, okay, let's do it the old-fashioned Saudi way and just get your wallet out and help rebuild Mosul and all the towns up the Tigris River Valley that have been destroyed either by ISIS or the war.

They are your Sunni co-sectarians and you have the money to do it. that's a way to make a contribution still not. So I think we should reset. And I haven't even started on Yemen yet, where we didn't actually work with them at all. But their military is hard to work with

because they're ready fire aim. You saw that when they started their coalition against Islamist extremism. They went out and announced it. No one in the Muslim world had ever heard of it before and had ever had agreed to join it. So they're like that. But that is my best explanation.

I'm no expert on this, and I don't have access to all the facts. For the Khashaghi murder, you couldn't possibly have planned that thing. It was too botched to be planned. You can't have been planned that to have turned out that way, in other words. Do you think they were trying to render him? I think it was a ready fire aim thing. it reminded me of trying to do a military operation with them. And they hadn't thought through the endgame.

That's the only explanation I can, again, I have no particular law enforcement information. But it reminded me of trying to work with them. So I think I'm for having them as our friends and partners in a dangerous part of the world. Don't get me wrong. But we're not the petitioners in this relationship. And I think we can ask for. a reset, as you called it. And I think that's appropriate. I left the Obama White House in 2013. The president spent most of the first year or two

focused on Afghanistan, including a very significant surge of troops on two different occasions to the region. I suspect that if he could have that decision back, he would. It's hard for me to see what major benefit to U.S. national security came of sending tens of thousands more U.S. service members to Afghanistan, but you know better than I do, and I want to back-check that. The benefit is that substantial progress, very substantial progress, has been made towards building Afghan security forces that are capable of keeping a modicum of order within the borders of Afghanistan. That's what we did with the Afghan army and the Afghan police. And, of course, when I was under secretary, that was my job was to run the wars and the engine room since, not up in the bridge sense, built 258 bases in Afghanistan in the summer of 2010.

You remember these times. And in those days, we started to build the Afghan army. And you would get a recruit. They would not know the date, not only the date of their birth, but the year of their birth. They were all named Muhammad, many of them, with no other. last name. Imagine trying to enroll them. They could not count the number of bullets in the magazine of their rifle. That was the human capital we were dealing with at the start. And we've built them now into a not perfect and their writ doesn't run throughout the country. Don't get me wrong,

but the ability to maintain a modicum of order within the country. And I think that if we stick with that project, not by substituting for them, but for continuing to help them, that is the benefit. And that means two things, Tommy, for our security. One is no more attacks on the United States emanating from Afghanistan. But there's another thing that's very rarely discussed, which is the upside to having a friend in a lousy part of the world. Look at a map. You have Pakistan to one side, you have Iran to another side, you have Central Asia and on to Russia to the north. And here you have a government, the government of Ghana in Afghanistan, that wants to work with our military. I suppose and guess that if we weren't there, we would be trying to figure out

how to get back there. And if you want all of that upside in one anecdote, think of this. We could not have gotten bin Laden in Abadabad without Jalalabad in Afghanistan. We could never have gotten there. So having a place from which you can operate and a friend is an important thing for protecting our country and keeping the peace. This, by the way, is an important principle. It just unfortunately needs to be said because it's been contested. People say, why are we still in Korea? We've been there for 50 years. Why are we still in Europe? We've been there for 70 years. That is to me a success.

There hasn't been a war on the Korean Peninsula for 50 years. And we have had a foothold in Asia, an American foothold in Asia. That's been a great benefit for us. In Europe, there was not a war for 50 years. So the reason they were put there was successful. They weren't wasted there. They did exactly what they were supposed. to do.

And so I'm quite comfortable, as long as Americans aren't dying in Afghanistan, anything like the times that I'm sure you remember, but I very much remember because I was every weekend at the hospitals. If our simple being there and helping them out is not burdensome. I hear people say to me, people come to me and say, I'm tired of Afghanistan, and I want to say to them just exactly what are you tired of? reading about it, watching it on television? Maybe the price.

I know people who are tired of Afghanistan. Yeah. Well, look, I think there's maybe a middle ground here, right? Which is you could have, I think at the time, there were maybe 17,000 or 33,000 U.S. service members there. Certainly there could have been an additional training capacity that went in, that didn't include tens of thousands of Marines going into Helmand province in the south, for example, because it seems likely that,

if the Trump administration cut the deal with the Taliban that has some sort of power sharing arrangement, the Taliban will have maybe some control over those reasons, right? I mean, I think the territorial taking and losing and retaking of areas is, I think, what maybe leads people to question policy. The reason that we went in a large scale was to reset the balance there. The Afghan security forces were not strong enough. And we had Hamid Karzai running the country, which set the whole thing back for a year. That was hard fighting and very bitter fighting. I would have liked to avoid it also.

But I think in retrospect it was a necessary step to make. So this is one of these situations where history has handed us a bad situation. But again, as long as we're not dying in large numbers and spending large amount of money, we're just sticking with the enterprise we began. I don't see walking away from it at this point. We're not going to turn the place into Switzerland. And by the way, you mentioned the idea of reconciling with the Taliban. I do not believe that that is possible. I think the way that you, if negotiations could ever work with the Taliban and will be when they're afraid they're going to be.

beaten, not when they're confident the Americans are tired of it and they're going to leave. But haven't we made that argument for 18 years? Yes, and it's been true each and every year. So what do we do? The way you... I mean, does it turn to Vietnam? No, no, I just said, we don't need to go back and do the fighting. No, we just need to stay and help the Afghan security forces.

But to the very serious question of will negotiations with the Taliban succeed in an environment where they think we're leaving, not staying, I'm saying no, because they think that their situation will be improved over time. People don't negotiate unless they believe they can't improve their situation by continuing to fight. That's the only way that wars end and the only way civil wars end. So they have to come to the view that negotiations is the only way they can advance. If they think we're leaving and I'm going to abandon the Afghan security forces, then they'll play the game of negotiation. And I believe that that's what they're doing now. And that's the price we pay after all this time for saying that we're going to leave.

Why would you ever do that? Say that you're going to leave? Yeah. I mean, because you have it as great an obligation to U.S. taxpayers and service members and their families and the people that you're ultimately accountable. to as Afghans. Well, but the same thing applies there, which is it's not the right policy to leave. If, again, if we were paying a lot more in blood and treasure, then it would be a closer call. Yeah.

But now a definition of success is possible for a relatively small continued investment. We're just fatigued. with a war. Yeah. Well, that's not a good strategic rationale. I'm fatigued with lots of places around the world. We haven't talked about North Korea yet, but I have a lot of North Korea fatigue. But you can't afford to take that point of view.

They're there every year, year after year, the wonderful North Koreans. And it drives you crazy, but you've got to stick with it. Yeah. So this was a microcosm of maybe some of the debate that might have played out in the Situation Room during this, the Afghan-Ser. discussion. You talk about some of those inner situation room politics in the book and in a fun way that I think is illustrative of a broader story. Can you tell listeners what table dropping was at a meeting and why you loved it so much? Yeah. I tried in the book, which covers a whole lot of things,

but it does do a little bit of the traditional Washington situation room stuff, instead of saying who said what at what particular moment, which I would never do anyway. I don't violate President Obama's or other people's confidence is lightly at all. I just try to tell some interesting stories about what it's like. And one of them was when some NSC staffers, so-called table drop. Now, table drop means cabinet members come in and somebody walks around the table handing out a proposed policy that nobody in your department has ever seen before. You've never seen before.

and they have cooked up. And I think had the president been present at that moment, he would not have liked it either because I think President Obama had a fair sense of process about him, but I was really offended. You know, you don't do that to me. Before I come to a meeting on something serious, I study it, I expect a piece of paper,

I expect discipline process. So I bawled it up and threw it at the person. Who gave it to me? And I said, don't table drop, you know what. Right. And I later got in the newspaper, which was fine with me because it was a story I was proud to have told. And my understanding, or at least this is what the Washington Post reported, was it was about whether or not to transfer a detainee out of Gitmo by a certain deadline or make a decision by a certain deadline. Yeah, it was to create a policy that detainee decisions about whether to transfer a detainee out of Gitmo by a certain deadline.

detainee decisions about whether to transfer, which means taking someone out of Guantanamo Bay detention facility and giving them into the custody of another government that you trust to take care of them and not let them come down in the battlefield, which is a reasonable thing to do in some cases. Whether there was going to be a timetable for doing that. Well, under the law, I'm the one who signs off on that. That's what the law says. The Secretary of Defense signs off on that. Now, I took that really seriously. I'm not going to sign off on sending someone off somewhere who's going to come back and hurt my people. I know people want to close Montana Mabo. I wanted to pay a detention facility. I did too.

But only if it could be done safely. So they were essentially trying to put a timetable on my decision-making, on a grave matter, on which as a matter of law, it was my responsibility. and am I going to take that from some pipsqueak and then excuse my friend? No, present company in Cleveland? No. No, I wasn't. It's offensive. Okay.

Now, let me be a pipsqueak that pushes you on this. Agreed that the process foul is fair. You're never a pipsqueak. No, no, like, agreed process foul is great. You would not have done something. No, I would never do. No, but I guess Gitmo is a funny example to me because, like, there's a finite number of individuals in Gitmo.

They've been rotting there for a decade plus. the Intel files have been gathering dust, right? Like, isn't it also offensive that there's this, like, irreparably broken justice system that has these guys in limbo? Like, how do we push these people out? Because what you're talking about, I think, is the risk of recidivism and then returning to the battlefield. But isn't there always going to be some risk of that?

Don't we have to execute on that policy at some point? Well, we did transfer. and I authorized quite a number of transfers. And I studied those cases each individually, and I studied the person detained. And there were cases where in our concern over our own counterterrorism situation in the early days after 9-11,

we sort of grabbed a lot of people who turned out to be minor flunkies and so forth that were not really very threatening. True. The great majority of them, including people who have returned to the battlefield were released in previous years. In fact, well before the Obama administration came in, let alone me as Secretary of Defense. But I didn't want to see any more return to the battlefield.

But there were a number of them who could be transferred, and that was fine. And I would get the recommendations of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Director of Central Intelligence, Director of National Intelligence, Secretary of State, and I would take their recommendations and my own views together and make a determination. And you're right. There were cases, but there were also cases in which I read the file and determined that there was no government to whom I would entrust that individual, given the gravity of their acts and their continued intentions with respect to terrorist action in the United States. Now, so that's the situation, not a wonderful situation at all. And not an easy answer to it.

I'll tell you what my answer was in one moment. But you asked whether there was a good justice system for dealing with it. Well, there's not because the Geneva Conventions don't quite apply and the prisoner of war and swapping at the end of a war and so forth. The U.S. legal system for a variety of reasons doesn't, and the justice to prison. part never showed any enthusiasm for taking that over. Political cowardice. So, perhaps. And so we had a system which was costing a lot of money and not getting anywhere.

So you're right. The no concept of justice was working here. My view was that I would probably be able to safely transfer some additional detainees, but there would remain about 40 that I would not transfer. And if we wanted to close Gitmo, we needed to find a place to detain them. And if you didn't like it being in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, then we needed to find somewhere else. I began looking somewhere else with the president. I told the president this.

I said, for closing Gitmo, but only safely. And safely means finding places to put the president. the people who can't be transferred safely. And so we began looking around, and I looked in Leavenworth, Kansas, where we have a military facility. Senator Pat Roberts called me up and said, Ash, I just gave a press conference to the Kansas press and told them that over my dead body, would you ever build a prison for Gitmo? And this is somebody who was resolutely opposed to closing Gitmo, but he wouldn't let me.

Similarly, in South Carolina, Senator Lindsay Graham was usually quite good on these issues, and I worked with him. I broached the idea of Charleston, also a big military facility, and there wasn't a whole lot of NIMBY enthusiasm there either. So the practical matter is that I think the right policy was close it and transfer people to another kind of detention facility. And when you got to that second ingredient, you got no enthusiasm for it. And President Obama, I think, understood all this entirely. I had many, many conversations with him. And he allowed me to design and then try to find a location for an alternative detention facility. So I still think that's right.

It's a lot less talked about now than it was back then. But they're still there. Now, nature is, meanwhile, moving them into advanced age, and I think ultimately they will pass away if this situation continues. You hear a lot from, you know, former cabinet officials. There's, there's an eb and a flow, I think, in terms of whether White Houses or NSCs are too involved or not involved enough in national security affairs. I'm curious what you think the right balance is, because we got this a lot in the Obama White House, Bob Gates wrote about it, but, you know, this wasn't LBJ picking

bombing run targets in Vietnam. This was determining how many U.S. service members would be sent to Afghanistan in the troop search or something like that. I mean, how do you, over your 37 years view what the appropriate balance was? It's changed over time. And when Casper Weinberger, when I for Casper Weinberger, he wouldn't allow us to tell the White House anything. He thought that there was one and only one contact, and that was him to the president.

And many of his successors felt the same way. But that was the era of nuclear war. And that is really such a narrow decision-making channel. It is still the case that it's basically me and the president and the commander of Stratcom. And nobody else really matters in that critical chain. And there isn't a whole lot of complexity to discuss. But wars are different today, Tommy. So I never objected to the proposition that operations that we were contemplating could not be shared under appropriate security restrictions with the secretary, with people in the State Department or the intelligence community.

Because sometimes I needed to know what they thought because this wasn't a purely military question. And under appropriate security guidelines, I was happy to have them. what I did not experience that Bob, was a good friend of mine, did experience, was micro-management. And I give the best explanation I could in the book, which is that I discerned very early that President Obama had the suspicion that when the Secretary of Defense sent over a piece of paper to him, that he was passing on, or something.

sometimes seem to be passing on the recommendations of his subordinates and not looking at it through the president's eyes. And of course, the Secretary of Defense is supposed to be the president's eyes. And what's the difference between the president's eyes and a commander's eyes? Well, a commander's really busy fighting the war. He's deeply involved in the technical and tactical details. A president has the whole world and the whole country to worry about. And so the Secretary of Defense is supposed to be bridging those two. And that takes work. Yeah. And so I tried to establish with President Obama, and I think I succeeded, the reputation for having scrubbed things very thoroughly. So if I'm proposing to him a night raid or a

airstrike or a hostage rescue. And it's risky. And he is ultimately the one responsible, personally, morally, and also politically, that I, Ash Carter, have assumed, before I passed it on to him, that political and moral responsibility. And I've been up all night asking all the questions and making sure that we had good answers. that seemed a reasonable expectation to me. And when I did that, he didn't do what he'd have to do if he came to doubt me, which is turned to his staff and say, would you guys check this? That is what someone who doesn't fully trust what he's getting from the Secretary of Defense does.

I didn't want to be someone he didn't fully trust. Now, I'm not going to say that, you know, he trusted. mean all things and all times and so forth, but I worked very carefully over time to convince him that I wouldn't lightly send him a proposal unless I had really tried to put myself in his shoes first. He deserves that after all. He's out. A president's out doing all kinds of other stuff. And so in my lifetime, it's changed over time. I think you have to have oversight of complex ops today. That wasn't true during the Cold War and it was just kind of all or nothing. And yet, as Secretary of Defense, don't want people in the White House or people around town

either jumping the chain of command on me. But the best way to avoid that is to be a Secretary of Defense whom the president feels is scrubbing things. things as much as he would have. And you knew President Obama. President Obama was a demanding person. And I respected that. I think you should be demanding of your staff. I was demanding to my staff. I was nice to them. He was always courteous to me. But he was impatient with sloppiness. And he darn well ought to be. I went way over time. I was too into this. The book is inside the five-sided box, lessons from a lifetime of leadership in the Pentagon. There's a million another great stories in the book. Everyone should read it if you want to know just a piece of what

that job is like. Ash Carter, thank you so much for doing this. Thanks. Really good to be with you, as always. Thanks for tuning in to POTS day of the world. Happy July 4th. I love you all. Talk to you next week.