The Beltway national security intelligentsia will apparently never be satisfied. Like soldiers, they seem only to be happy when they have something to complain about. Among the latest kerfuffles is President Trump’s decision to delegate decisions on Afghanistan troop levels to the secretary of defense.
WHITE HOUSE MICROMANAGEMENT IS BAD
During the Obama Administration, there was wide condemnation of the way the staff of the National Security Council (whose ranks swelled under Obama) was micromanaging the Pentagon. In November 2013, Rosa Brooks, now a law professor at Georgetown and once an Obama defense appointee, wrote the eye-opening confessional, “Obama Vs. the Generals,” for POLITICO Magazine. She reported that one defense official complained the White House “wants to run the show, day to day and minute to minute.”
Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates later wrote in his memoir that “The controlling nature of the Obama White House and the NSS staff took micromanagement and operational meddling to a new level.”
Things were so bad, according to another POLITICO report, that in August 2014, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, had to arrange to ride in the president’s limo in order to have a few moments of unfiltered time to express the seriousness of the threat posed by the Islamic State.
We all seemed to agree that micromanaging military policy, especially by people who do not have the foggiest idea how the military works, is a bad thing. But now that President Trump delegated troop level decision to Secretary of Defense James Mattis, suddenly the pendulum has swung too far the other way.
DELEGATING AUTHORITY, OR AVOIDING BLAME?
Andrew Exum, an Afghanistan veteran who served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense under Obama and was part of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s review of U.S. strategy in the region, accuses Trump of trying to avoid responsibility for the outcome. “You can delegate ends, ways, and means,” he tweeted, “but you can’t delegate risk. Trump will own success or failure in 2018 and 2020.”
Does Exum really believe that with this move, Trump thinks he’s effectively washed his hands of responsibility for the success or failure of the war in Afghanistan?
A common theme in discussions of U.S. policy during the Vietnam War was that the Johnson White House was too intimately involved in the details, failing to allow military leaders to make decisions as they saw fit. Ditto Obama and the war on terror. Trump is a business executive with no prior government experience. This means he’s comfortable with handing off decisions on things that aren’t his strength.
Any successful leader, in business, government, or the military, delegates authority. I understand there are those who believe this decision is one that the president ought not to have delegated. But as with all things Trump, the criticism is over the top.
Giving the SECDEF authority to set troop levels is not the same thing as giving him carte blanche. In fact, given the hyperbolic criticism of Trump over every decision, however trivial, one would think that his opponents would welcome the decision to delegate this to someone who they always hoped would be a moderating influence on his more impulsive and extreme tendencies.
We are rapidly approaching the 16th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan, without an end in sight. Instead of fretting over who is setting troop levels in the immediate term, the real cause for concern is the lack of a clear vision for how to get to a desired endstate—any endstate—in the medium or long term. Otherwise, we’ll be arguing over troop levels in 2021 and beyond.
