Pentagon Needs Major Reform, Former Defense Secretary Says

'I would argue, our most effective weapon system is the free market system,' Christopher Miller says

Former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller. (The Epoch Times)

“The only way you can force new thinking is to cut the budget. You have to reduce resources to the bureaucracy. That forces prioritization and new thinking,” Christopher Miller says.

In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek and Miller, former acting secretary of defense under the Trump administration, discuss Miller’s vision of a major reform of the military, along with the Jan. 6 Capitol breach, the Afghanistan withdrawal, and the unrestricted warfare strategy of the Chinese Communist Party. Miller is the author of “Soldier Secretary: Warnings from the Battlefield & the Pentagon About America’s Most Dangerous Enemies.”

Jan Jekielek: You started as a private in the infantry. That is the toughest slog, as far as I know. You went into special forces and became a special operator. Ultimately, in 2018, you ended up running counterterrorism at the National Security Council. You were confirmed in the Senate 99 to zero, if I recall correctly. Clearly, they were confident in your abilities to do this. Tell me about how you got this appointment in the first place.

Mr. Miller: I don’t know. You would have to ask President Trump. I was just a civil servant. A buddy of mine was at the National Security Council doing counterterrorism. He was leaving and asked if I wanted to come over and interview for his job. It was at the White House. I said, “Sure, I’ll come over for an interview. If nothing else, I’ll have a good story to tell.”

I was a government employee loaned from the Pentagon to work at the National Security Council. The president wanted to defeat ISIS, and the president did something amazing. Instead of controlling all decision-making at the White House, like the Obama administration had done, he said, “Decentralize and give authority to the people on the ground, so that they can operate more rapidly.”

It resulted in what is probably one of the greatest irregular warfare campaigns. We have conventional war, where it’s tanks and everything. But this is irregular warfare, with small groups of intelligence officers and special operators that propped up the indigenous forces, the Kurds, who wanted to fight back against tyranny, which was [Bashar al-Assad].

Mr. Jekielek: It did seem very effective, especially in comparison to the prior policy. Part of it— and this is your style—was to go to the people in the field and find out what their realities were.

Mr. Miller: I had been out of counterterrorism for a bit. I had been working at the Pentagon on some other things, and I wasn’t really clear on exactly where we were in the war against terror. I did my research. They call it a net assessment, where you figure out what the enemy’s doing and what we’re doing. The key thing was to go down there and listen.

There were some people who had been a part of the fight against al-Qaeda for 20 years. I listened to them because I wanted to know where al-Qaeda was in its evolution as a terrorist organization. I found out that al-Qaeda had seven senior leaders left, and the organization was basically on life support.

I asked, “What happens if we kill the final seven leaders?” Across the board, all the intelligence analysts said, “Al-Qaeda will be defeated.”

Mr. Jekielek: What was the outcome?

Mr. Miller: The outcome was that we didn’t get all seven. [Ayman al-Zawahri] was bin Laden’s second in command, who took over after bin Laden was killed. We couldn’t find out where he was. We thought he was in Pakistan. We didn’t have good intelligence on him.

He was killed by the Biden administration, thank goodness. The reason he was killed by the Biden administration was the collapse of Afghanistan. He set up shop in downtown Kabul, and we found him and killed him.

We were successful, but we didn’t get the job done before President Trump left office, which is one of those bittersweet things. I’m glad for America that it worked out, but I’m pretty bitter about the way the war in Afghanistan ended.

Mr. Jekielek: When you became secretary of defense, you figured out that you could bring down the force there from 8,000 to 800, a 90 percent drop. On the surface, that sounds like setting up for failure. What is it that you saw?

Mr. Miller: I first went into Afghanistan on the 5th of December, 2001. We took the country down, defeated the Taliban, and drove off al-Qaeda with 200 special operators and intelligence paramilitary officers. Color me stupid, but I said, “We took the country down with 200. I’m pretty confident that we can keep the Afghan National Security Forces in the fight with 200 advisors to provide air support, logistics support, intelligence support.” With the things that we had done with the Northern Alliance and the anti-Taliban forces in 2001, I felt we could use the same model to protect the Afghan National Security Forces and force an agreement between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

The military said, “We cannot go below 8,000,” but I knew the number was 800.

The idea was to keep a counterterrorism force out in the desert, away from the population, where we could keep intelligence on al-Qaeda and ISIS, so that our terrorist enemies couldn’t catch their breath. We’d keep them on the move and have our intelligence assets available to keep track of them.

We could also provide support to the Afghan National Security Forces with some contractor support and some small special operators to provide them with the critical capabilities to keep them fighting.

Mr. Jekielek: In the end, basically, President Biden carried through with the plan to withdraw. How did things collapse so terribly?

Mr. Miller: President Trump wanted to end the war and get our major military forces out of Afghanistan, and other places as well. I fully supported that. That’s one of the reasons why I was happy to take the job, because I agreed on this as acting secretary of defense.

We spend about $20 billion a year for our military special operators, who are paid, trained, and equipped to be very low-key behind enemy lines. In this case, they wouldn’t have been behind enemy lines. They were in a politically sensitive environment to protect American equities and advance our interests.

We also have a cadre of extraordinary Americans who do paramilitary work in the intelligence community. The idea was that we would maintain that force. Those are light-footprint, clandestine, low-visibility forces that could still maintain our counterterrorism presence there. I feel very confident that’s what we would have recommended to President Trump, and I think he would have accepted a small footprint of special operators and intelligence forces in Afghanistan. But you asked about the Biden administration.

Friday the 13th was the day I knew we lost the war. I had been following this closely, and there was a number given that the Biden administration was going to keep 800 military people in Afghanistan, which we typically do for security assistance.

Then I watched the news that morning and saw that the Afghan National Security Forces had collapsed. The Taliban were literally at the intersections outside Kabul—the same intersections that I had always obsessed over when I was doing combat operations there—and they were massing their combat power so they could go into the city. I could just see the Toyota Hilux trucks lined up on the road as far as you can see. I expected our warplanes to swoop in and just destroy this long column, like in Iraq and at the end of Desert Storm. When that didn’t happen, I knew the war was over.

Mr. Jekielek: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I believe in the book you say, “No one in the military really wanted to leave Afghanistan, because everybody knew when that happened, it was going to turn really bad.” No one wanted to be responsible for that.

Mr. Miller: My issue is that it was a very conventional military way of thinking, which is tanks, aircraft carriers, exquisite fighter jets, and lots of people. That thinking was not appropriate for this situation. It wasn’t appropriate after we took down the Taliban and al-Qaeda. At the end of the day, the strategic mistake we made was that it should have been a special operations war. We should have just kept a handful of people there, but instead we brought in lots of conventional forces.

It was the Pentagon doing what the Pentagon does, which is [approaching] every issue [like it] is a nail, with a hammer. There’s no original thought required. The irregular warfare way of small footprint, using information operations, supporting those who want to protect their freedom and fight, that would have been the way to go. That’s the genius of special operations. But that’s [not] the way the Pentagon thinks. That’s really the point of my book. We’re doing the same thing again. We make the enemy out so that our Pentagon can fight the way they want. We telegraph our punch every time.

Mr. Jekielek: You were an expert in irregular warfare, which is a very different approach from the conventional warfare at the Pentagon. The Chinese Communist Party practices unrestricted warfare, [in which] every possible method, and anything available to the state is used as a tool of warfare.

What I’ve discovered, having had many China experts and military people on the show, is that in the United States, this concept is still not largely understood, even to this day. Even though two Chinese military colonels wrote about it a long time ago and explained it in detail.

Mr. Miller: I feel very confident that if you go into every Army Green Beret team room—a team is 12 people—you will find that book, “Unrestricted Warfare.” They’ve given us the book on what they’re doing, and you know as well as I do that they are executing exactly along that strategic plan, which is total unrestricted warfare. I’ll give a shout-out to President Trump. He recognized that the key element that could impact the Chinese Communist Party was economic warfare, not military warfare.

We’re so out of balance in this country with our budget, where we put about a trillion dollars into defense. It’s actually 60 percent, but I’ll try to be nice and say it’s 50 percent of our discretionary spending, meaning the money that is available beyond Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. This is the money for roads, national parks, and libraries, etc.

You’ve heard about DIME. It’s the organizing construct for how we make strategy and how we utilize American power: diplomacy, information, military, economic—DIME. You want them all in balance. In many ways, that’s the art and science of strategy.

Right now, 50 percent is the M of the DIME: military. Information doesn’t even make it onto the chart. Diplomacy comes in, maybe 5 percent. Economics; it’s really, really hard to even pull up the budget figures. I’m getting these figures from the Congressional Budget Office.

We’re so out of balance, and that was the genius of that recognition—the thing that we need to compete with them on is economics, and I would argue, information as well. The military piece is what they want. They want us to spend all our money on the military. But you know as well as I do, a totalitarian and authoritarian regime like the Chinese Communist Party fears one thing: the instability of their population.

How do they maintain control? They have to have an enemy that’s out to get them. Right now, that’s exactly what we are portraying ourselves as, when we put all this money into the military arm element of power.

Mr. Jekielek: Your prescription sounds kind of counterintuitive. At the end of your book, you also say that we really need to cut military spending, and that is going to save a lot more lives and make the U.S. war fighting capability much more effective. Please explain that.

Mr. Miller: The only way you can force new thinking is to cut the budget. You have to reduce resources to the bureaucracy. That forces prioritization and new thinking.

I’ve met these incredibly talented people who are in our Pentagon and in our national security establishment, who are young, creative people. They see the fallacy of what we’re doing right now, which is refighting the Cold War. When you have a trillion dollars a year, there is no original thinking required. We’re playing directly into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

Cutting the budget forces us to have new operational and strategic concepts for dealing with the Chinese, an information, cyber, and indirect approach. There’s a huge population in China that are not fans of the Chinese Communist Party. We have the ability to influence that, and advance our goals, and also keep them from being too bellicose.

Our playbook has nothing new in it. It’s just rinse and repeat, basically since World War II. It’s very easy for the Chinese Communist Party to operate against us, because they have our playbook. We have their playbook, too. We have “Unrestricted Warfare,” but we are not attacking it that way.

And there are other ways to impact Chinese Communist Party decision-making. We need to take the offensive. We can do that through information, diplomacy, and military tools.

We’ve seen how the Chinese are taking over economically in Latin America, in Africa, in all these other areas of the world. We have ceded that ground. I would argue, our most effective weapon system is the free market system. Why we are not very strategically deploying capital in those areas to counter the Chinese is absolutely beyond me.

Mr. Jekielek: I have to ask about this because everyone is probably wondering. You were responsible for the DOD response on Jan. 6, 2021. What did it look like from your vantage point?

Mr. Miller: When the news starts hitting that the Capitol had been overrun, that’s not a good day in the Republic’s history. My point that I’ve made again and again is that the armed forces should never conduct domestic law enforcement operations, except when civil society has broken down during a natural disaster or when a city comes undone due to rioting.

We have to remember something. Capitol Hill is owned by the legislative branch. The military is the executive branch. If the executive branch sends the military to Capitol Hill without being invited, that’s called a military coup. I was never going to be a party to a military coup. We provided every single bit of military support requested by those authorized to request that. We were asked multiple times. I’m so glad, in retrospect, that our armed forces didn’t have to go up there and fight protestors and demonstrators that day. That would have been a horrible day for America.

That’s the job of the police, and that day they failed. Their leadership let them down. They didn’t have the capability and support they needed that day.

Mr. Jekielek: You write that President Trump had said, “You’re going to need 10,000 people.”

Mr. Miller: He did say that.

Mr. Jekielek: In response, [Washington’s] Mayor Bowser said 634. I can’t remember the exact number, whatever it was. You had your very clear red lines of what you could do and what you couldn’t do at that time.

Mr. Miller: Yes. The president had authorized me to do whatever was necessary to provide support to law enforcement. I gave them exactly what they requested. Let’s be clear: There was a fear that the military was going to be used, counter-constitutionally, and I wasn’t going to allow that. There was that perception.

There were former secretaries of defense that took counsel of their fears, and cautioned me and others not to misuse the military. I found it horrifying that it could be so political, that they would think that members of our armed forces would do something counter to their oath, and that I would, too.

Mr. Jekielek: In the end, you described the mobilization of the National Guard that did happen as the quickest in history, if I recall.

Mr. Miller: The 25,000 National Guard members were up there immediately following [the Capitol breach]. We’ve mobilized the National Guard. Got the request at 2:35. I got briefed at 3:00, 3:04. Mobilized the National Guard.

I was already thinking, “We have an inauguration coming up, so now we have to lock the city down. It’s my problem now. Civilian law enforcement failed. I’m going to have to do this.” It’s what I did.

Mr. Jekielek: Chris, what’s next for you?

Mr. Miller: I hope I can just be part of the conversation. Obviously, the policy prescriptions in the book are controversial and provocative. It would be fun if one or two of them gets a little life. I have this belief that we need to reform our Department of Defense. One of the ways we’re going to do that is through the private sector.

I’m trying to put my money where my mouth is, and I’m working for some really small, technologically interesting, autonomous warfare-type companies. Instead of just going to a major defense contractor, I felt it was really a requirement. I’m going to give it a whirl and learn about business because I haven’t ever done that. The free enterprise system is the foundation of this country.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.