The Melting Point: High Command and War in the 21st Century

PREFACE

As the commander of U.S. Central Command, I oversaw some of the most important—and controversial—operations in modern U.S. military history. I had direct operational responsibility for the strikes on Qassem Soleimani and two successive leaders of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the many months of deterrence operations against Iran and its proxies, and our methodical drawdown in Iraq. I directed the execution of our noncombatant evacuation operation in Afghanistan and our final withdrawal from that tortured country.

This is largely a first-person account of my time as a four-star general and my service as one of the eleven U.S. combatant commanders. It’s not all-inclusive. I spent three years as the commander, U.S. Central Command, and this isn’t a day-by-day recounting of that time. I’ve attempted to capture some of the highs—and lows—of my time in command.

I have found that writing—and every word in this book is mine—is a useful release. My experiences have given me a unique perspective on how national decisions were made and how they were implemented. My views were those of a participant and a key actor, not an observer. I’m proud of what Central Command accomplished during my three years of command. I’ve tried to be clear and straightforward about what we did well, and where I fell short. The men and women of Central Command—in Tampa and in the theater of operations—are among the finest our nation has to offer. It was the greatest honor of my life to join them in defending our nation.

There are three themes that intertwine throughout this book. The first one is the importance of the primacy of civilian control of the military. It has become a widely perceived truth that this control has been eroded over the past few years. I don’t believe that to be the case, and I believe I speak with some authority on the matter. Before Central Command, I spent almost two years as the director for strategy, plans, and policy on the Joint Staff, where I was the senior uniformed planner and strategist for the United States. I then served almost two years as the director of the Joint Staff, one of the most consequential three-star jobs in the U.S. military, a position where I interacted daily with senior civilian leadership both within the Department of Defense and across all of the branches of our government. The civil-military relationship isn’t perfect or frictionless, but then, it doesn’t have to be—and probably shouldn’t be. It is, however, more durable than many believe, and it is supported and embraced by the military to a degree that some critics do not choose to recognize.

The second theme is the uniqueness of being a combatant commander. Combatant commanders participate in the development of policy, albeit as junior partners. They are also responsible for the execution of that policy once civilian leaders have formulated their decision. This is a unique position, and it is very different than the role of a service chief or even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. None of these officers are in the chain of command, and they have no ultimate moral responsibility or authority for execution. Only the combatant commander stands astride the boundary of decision-making and execution. The title of this book was chosen with that thought in mind. It is from Barbara Tuchman’s observation in The Guns of August about that melting-point of warfare—the temperament of the individual commander.

Finally, the third theme argues that leaders do matter, and the decisions they make have a profound effect on what happens on the battlefield. Not everyone is a leader, and not everyone gets to make decisions. In an age when expertise is devalued and hierarchical organizations are routinely bashed, leadership in and out of uniform and the ability and willingness to make decisions still matter a great deal. While this book talks primarily about military leadership, the lessons go beyond and have universal application. I made good decisions, and I made some wrong ones. I’ve led well, and I’ve led poorly. I’ve tried to talk about all of this here.

This book is dedicated to two men who had a profound effect on my development as a man and as an officer. Col. Walt Clark was a hard-nosed, no-nonsense infantry colonel who was the commandant of cadets at The Citadel when I entered. In the many years since that time, we stayed close, and he and his wonderful family have been a big part of the McKenzie story to this day. His death in 2010 while I was in Afghanistan created a big hole in my life. Bill Gordon taught me several classes when I was a cadet, and he lit the fire of intellectual curiosity within me, something that has remained. I don’t know that a professor can offer a more significant gift to a student. Down through the years he has also offered wise counsel and friendship. We have stayed close until this day.

I couldn’t have done anything without my wife of more than forty years, Marilyn. Finally, I’d like to thank my agent, Andrew Wylie, for introducing me to the business of writing a book. I have enjoyed working with Naval Institute Press.

In this book, I’ve used some language from an article that I wrote in 2023 about the threat of Iran’s drone program. That article, Striking Back: Iran and the Rise of Asymmetric Drone Warfare in the Middle East, was sponsored by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. government. The public release clearance of the publication by the Department of Defense does not imply Department of Defense endorsement or factual accuracy of the material. Any errors of commission or omission are mine and mine alone. All of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to the Marine Corps—Law Enforcement Foundation, the Semper Fi and America’s Fund, and The Citadel Foundation.

Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr.

General, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.)

Tampa, Florida

June 2023

1

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS

The soft parade has now begun

Listen to the engines hum.

—Jim Morrison, The Soft Parade

For me, the 2019 graduation weekend at The Citadel marked the beginning of a crisis with Iran that would define my time at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). It would prove to be the core problem I confronted as a commander. It was a beautiful Friday afternoon in early May in Charleston, South Carolina. My wife, Marilyn, and I were at The Citadel, where I was to deliver the graduation address the next day. I had been in command of Central Command for a little over a month. This was a particularly meaningful occasion for me, since it marked forty years since my own May 1979 graduation. The Citadel is the state of South Carolina’s military college. Dating to 1842, it has managed to blend a liberal arts academic tradition with a military structure—the South Carolina corps of cadets. The Citadel and its slightly smaller cousin, the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, remain the only two purely military colleges in existence in the United States. In 1979, out of a graduating class of almost 489, 40 cadets were commissioned into the Marine Corps. Gen. Glen Bluto Walters and I had been the last two members of the class of ’79 on active duty until 2018, when Bluto retired as the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps to become the president of The Citadel. I was now the last man standing from our class. He had clearly flourished during his short period of time at the helm of the college, and the signs of his leadership were evident everywhere on campus.

One of the most important events of graduation weekend is the parade on Friday, where after the corps of cadets marches on to Summerall Parade Field, senior cadets leave their companies, march across the parade ground, and then take the review for the last time as cadets. The junior class takes over the regiment, and so the torch is passed. It’s a moving ceremony. For the seniors, it marks the last time they will ever march in formation at The Citadel. Like all ceremonies that mark a passage of growth, it emphasized departure for the seniors and new responsibilities for the juniors. It had an element of bittersweetness. I was struck by the passage of time—the beautiful, lush greenness of Charleston in May was no different from what Bluto and I had experienced back in 1979: the cadets looked the same, the pretty girls, the proud parents and friends; it all had a timeless quality. As I sat there, I could even picture the ghosts of girls I had once known and loved when I was a cadet, now long gone. Directly across from where we sat, across the wide verge of the parade field, was Summerall Chapel, one of many things on campus named for an earlier president and one of the formative leaders in the history of The Citadel. I well knew the biblical quotation carved above the broad wooden doors, Remember now thy creator in the days of thy youth. In various tableaux and bronze plates affixed to the outside wall of the chapel, several steps up from the street and covered by an arched overhang, were the names of The Citadel’s patriot dead, to use a phrase from one of those plaques. There were many of them, going back to before the Civil War.

The Citadel had been very good to me. I was at best an indifferent student as an undergraduate, but I did leave the college with three important academic achievements. First, I learned I could write, and write well, even under extreme time pressure. That was a quality that saved me during many late nights before papers were due in my classes as an English major. It would prove even more useful in my profession. Second, I developed an unquenchable thirst for reading, beginning with works in my major, but then taking an omnivorous approach to virtually any subject. Finally, and most importantly, I developed the beginning of a process about how to think critically. This was such a large part of my education at the college that I could remember the moment when the shades began to come off: it was spring 1976, and I was taking a final examination in a course called History of Naval Warfare, which was taught by Marine Corps Reserve Maj. Bill Gordon. He was an engaging, energetic teacher, a graduate of the college in the fabled class of 1966, with a Duke doctorate under the tutelage of Theodore Ropp and significant combat experience in Vietnam. The question his exam posed was about the U-boat campaign carried out by the Germans in the Atlantic during World War II. What set the question apart was that it invited the student to consider institutional impacts on the development and employment of submarines by the Germans and antisubmarine warfare by the Allies. It was a broadening question, and it lit a spark in me that has influenced my thinking ever since. I don’t want to overstate this—I’m confident that nobody in the class of 1979 (including me), or anybody who taught or led us during that time, would have seen in Cadet McKenzie in May 1979 whatever it was that led along a long and winding trail to being a general in the Marine Corps and the graduation speaker for the class of 2019—but it began a process that has continued for me until this day.

I sat next to Bluto in that warm, lovely Charleston weather, talking quietly about friends and classmates. It was a profoundly fulfilling moment for us both. As the corps of cadets began to march on, the crowd of several thousand fashionably attired family members and friends cheered and clapped. Marilyn and I were seated with Bluto and his charming wife, Gail, at the center of the reviewing area, the place where everyone’s eyes were naturally drawn. We were both wearing what the Marine Corps calls Dress Blue-White Alpha, with large medals and Sam Browne belt. It is both a uniquely visually compelling and uniquely uncomfortable uniform to wear. It features a black blouse with a high mandarin collar and white pants without pockets, with a large, heavy patent leather belt at the waist, with a loop over the right shoulder. For both Bluto and I, it would have been far more comfortable back in May 1979 than it was in May 2019. We were now both slightly less svelte versions of the two cadets who had been commissioned that May morning forty years earlier! We chatted with our wives while we waited for the ceremony to start.

At this point—and I’ll never forget it—my aide de camp, Lt. Col. Brett Salty Allison, came up behind my seat, leaned down, and said in the laconic, calm voice that aviators use when giving bad news, Sir, the chairman needs to talk to you right now. I thought quickly. The band was playing, and the lead elements of each of the battalions of the corps of cadets were coming out of their respective barracks arches. We were surrounded by thousands of people, and Bluto and I were the natural focal point for them all. As the CENTCOM commander, I always travelled with a communications team that could quickly place me in voice communication with any of my subordinate commanders, the chairman, the secretary of defense, or the president. My standard for the team was to be in comms within five minutes. We had set up communications back at the president’s house, a lovely low country–style home a few blocks away from the reviewing stand, on The Citadel’s campus.

There was nothing to do but go, and quickly. Bluto had heard Salty’s message, and he knew that it had to be extremely serious for Gen. Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and a fellow Marine four-star general, to reach out to me. Joe knew where I was and what I was doing; he would not call lightly. Thousands of eyes were drawn to us sitting there at center stage, interested in what was going on. Whispering an apology to Bluto, I got up and followed Salty out of the reviewing area, walking fast. Most of the people there that day knew who I was and that I commanded Central Command. An abrupt departure at the beginning of the most important parade of the year for The Citadel would start tongues wagging—and lots of speculation.

At Bluto’s house, my communicators quickly established the call to the chairman. There were a variety of communications links available, but this time we would talk on the one with the very highest level of classification. Chairman, this is Frank, is how I began the conversation. I knew what he was calling about. For the past few days, we had been getting intelligence indications that Iran was planning a series of attacks against our forces, and those of our friends and partners, in the Central Command region. The information was quite precise, and the intelligence community seemed to think that it was credible. I agreed with their assessments. The Iranians, pressed hard by the economic and diplomatic impact of the U.S. maximum pressure campaign, had apparently come to the conclusion that they needed to take some form of military action to reset the terms of the relationship. There was new information, made available in just the previous few hours. The Joint Staff had seen and reviewed it, and that’s what drove the chairman’s need to talk to me. The potential Iranian attack could come in the form of a state-on-state operation—perhaps from some of their more than three thousand ballistic missiles—or it could come in a more deniable manner—an improvised explosive device against our forces in Iraq, or an attack on shipping in the congested, narrow waterway of the Strait of Hormuz. All of these were possibilities.

As Joe Dunford and I weighed the reports, we both agreed that a proxy attack was the most likely. It could give the Iranians reasonable deniability, make it hard for us to attribute, yet still cause pain. We also knew that the Iranians had been emboldened by a series of recent decisions to greatly reduce U.S. force presence in the theater. Most significantly, we no longer had the continuous presence of an aircraft carrier and its accompanying ships. Aircraft carriers are unique icons, powerful symbols of U.S. commitment and power, and the Iranians carefully noted when they were and were not in the theater. Perhaps most significantly, a carrier was a moveable piece of U.S. sovereignty; in a theater beset with access, basing, and overflight restrictions, nobody could impose limitations on her operations. We had not had a carrier in the theater for many months. We had also reduced our number of fighter and attack aircraft squadrons significantly, and our Patriot missile batteries, used to defend against ballistic missiles and aircraft, were at an all-time low.

He then asked me if I needed anything. This was the crux of the matter, and the heart of our conversation. I knew the question was coming, and during the flight up to Charleston from Tampa earlier in the day, armed with some of the intelligence we were now discussing, I had jotted down some ideas for when this moment came. I knew that the carrier USS Harry S Truman and her consorts were operating in the Mediterranean, and I also knew that there was an amphibious ready group (ARG) with more than two thousand Marines in the Med as well. Without hesitation, I said, "I want the HST [shorthand for Truman], and I want the ARG. I also want more fighter squadrons." As usual, Joe had thought this through himself, and he told me that he would work the problem. We both knew that there were good reasons why many people would disagree with any decision that brought a carrier back into CENTCOM.

My request for the carrier was based on my belief that we needed to reestablish deterrence with Iran. Since taking command in late March 2019, I had done a lot of thinking on this. Clearly, if the Iranians were in advanced attack planning, deterrence had been lost. I believed that in the CENTCOM area, deterrence with Iran was achieved when Iranian leadership recognized that the potential goal they were pursuing was not worth the potential cost we could impose. Deterrence by punishment is only one of two possible approaches; the other approach is deterrence by denial—creating cognitive doubt in the mind of the opponent that they would not be able to carry out the action contemplated. Both of these approaches are heuristic, and since they occur in the mind of the adversary, effectiveness can be very hard to observe or quantify a priori. On the other hand, it’s very easy to see when deterrence has been lost—it’s always clear in retrospect. We did not maintain, and I did not request, forces for deterrence by denial. The carrier and more land-based Air Force fighter squadrons were all things that could impose cost on Iran and contribute to deterrence by punishment.

Joe ended the call—we agreed to talk again the next day, Saturday, and then again on Sunday, May 19. I went back out to rejoin Bluto at the parade. Joking with Salty, I told him that if I don’t go back out there, folks are going to be looking for Russian bombers in the sky. I got back in time for the pass-in-review, where the corps of cadets passes in company sequence in front of the long gray line of seniors. I took the opportunity, as all old graduates do, to take a step forward and salute when Cadet Company N November of the Fourth Battalion passed by. At The Citadel, your company is the center of your military and social existence. Saluting the guidon was not only a token of respect for my classmates, but also a recognition of all that had come before and followed us in Company N.

Moments like that had a way of recharging your batteries. I also had a lot to think about. I knew that in my call with the chairman, I had just made my first decision in a new cycle of escalation with Iran. In many ways, my entire professional life had been shaped toward this moment. I was worried, because I had great respect for the Iranian ability to attack unprovoked and violently virtually anywhere across the theater, but I was also confident—in both the force I commanded and the support I knew I would receive from the Joint Staff and ultimately the secretary. I was also confident in my own training, preparation, and judgment.

Marilyn and I had a great afternoon and evening in Charleston. It was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with many old friends and classmates. There was a large representation from the class of ’79 on hand—I think we all shared in the heights our class had risen to. The next day I addressed the class of 2019 and their families and friends. Unlike my graduation, which had been under the verdant magnolias in front of Bond Hall, the college’s administration building, the 2019 commencement was in McAllister Field House. While not quite as traditional a setting, it did have the significant advantage of not being affected by the weather—always a consideration in Charleston in May.

As I made my remarks, the events of Friday afternoon weighed heavily on me. I had been on the phone repeatedly throughout the night with my staff and my subordinate commanders, and I could not escape the feeling that we were on the brink of a disastrous confrontation with Iran. I told the graduates nothing new or revealing in my remarks, which were probably as much for my classmates in attendance as they were for the class of 2019. One thing I pointed out to them, which was even more poignant because of what I knew was brewing on the other side of the world, was that this would be the last time they would all be together. After I was finished, and degrees were presented, they would scatter—men and women—some to service on active duty, others to the professions or other callings. But they would never be assembled again and never wear cadet gray again. Like Cadet McKenzie in 1979, the soon-to-be graduates of 2019 politely applauded the old general at the podium and turned to face the future with hope and excitement.

For me, graduation weekend 2019 at The Citadel marked the beginning of the Iran crisis that would define my time at Central Command as much as anything. It would prove to be the primary problem that we would confront over the next three years, and it would weigh me as a commander in every way a commander could be measured. A central thesis of this book is the assertion that commanders are uniquely important. While they are only a subordinate part of the vast national security process, they exercise a profound influence with their advice for decision-makers, and then, of course, they face the sternest test of all: that of execution. Commanders alone both give policy advice to senior civilian leaders—participating in their deliberations—and then take the decisions of those leaders and transmute them into corporeal action. In the U.S. system, it is the combatant commander who exists at this melting point. Because of this, the temperament of the commander is at the center of what a command achieves or fails to achieve. Early Saturday afternoon, Marilyn and I flew back to Tampa and into the vortex.

2

CENTRAL COMMAND

Thou cam’st on earth to make the earth my hell.

A grievous burden was thy birth to me.

—The Duchess of York to her son, Richard III Richard III, Scene 4, Act 4

My path to command of Central Command began indirectly. In April 2015 I was serving as the commander of U.S. Marine Forces in Central Command (MARCENT). I had assumed command in May 2014. The assignment marked a return to Tampa for Marilyn and me; I previously had served as the J-5, the director for strategy, plans, and policy, from 2010 to 2012, working for Gen. Jim Mattis. We had enjoyed Tampa the first time, and I had found the problems of the theater to be both challenging and rewarding. When Commandant of the Marine Corps Jim Amos had offered me the opportunity to be promoted to three-star grade and return as the Marine commander for CENTCOM, I jumped at the opportunity. We lived in a lovely home on Hillsborough Bay, among thirty or so other general and flag officers who worked at either CENTCOM or Special Operations Command (SOCOM). The Marine Corps played a relatively minor role in CENTCOM, principally because of the functional design of the theater, where Army, Navy, and Air Force component commanders—my three-star peers—commanded all forces within their air, land, and sea domains. As a result, Marines in the theater were almost never under my operational control. Instead, they worked for Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT), Army Central, or Air Force Central. Despite this, Marines had much to contribute to the theater and were heavily employed in Afghanistan, and, increasingly in Iraq in the counter–Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fight. I travelled quite a bit as the MARCENT commander, usually spending a week to ten days every month in the theater. I would fly commercial into Kuwait and then move around the theater in a Marine Corps Cessna Citation, known as a C-35. Marilyn and I also enjoyed life in Tampa. We had the opportunity to make many friends out in town, where we found people in the area to be warm and welcoming. In short, life was good.

I expected to remain at MARCENT for about two years and detach in the early summer of 2016. My predecessor, Lt. Gen. Bob Neller, had gone on to command Marine Forces Command in Norfolk, and I expected a similar assignment or perhaps even a joint assignment to round out my career. Marine lieutenant generals typically did two assignments before retiring. To retire as a lieutenant general in the Marine Corps was the pinnacle of professional success. The small size of the Marine Corps meant it only had two four-star generals—the commandant and the assistant commandant. Unlike the other services, there was no web of four-star positions inside the Corps. Three stars was about as good as it got, and I was proud to retire at that grade. Marilyn and I had talked idly about eventually returning to Tampa, or going back to Charleston or even my hometown of Birmingham.

On a sunny afternoon in April 2015, I was sitting at my desk in the MARCENT headquarters, which was a modest single-story building adjacent to the CENTCOM parking lot. The CENTCOM headquarters consisted of two huge four-story steel and glass buildings that looked exactly the same— one of them housed the intelligence functions of the command, and the other the commander and the rest of the staff. They were imposing, and the small Marine headquarters, what my predecessor Bob Neller called the doublewides, was particularly unpretentious in the shadow of the massive CENTCOM edifice. The secure phone rang, and it was the office of the commandant. Please stand by for General Dunford, the aide told me. I quickly looked over my daybook—was I expecting this call? I also quickly looked at both my secret and unclassified computers while waiting for the connection to be finalized. Nothing there.

Joe Dunford and I had a long and deep personal history. We first met when we were captains, after company command, and we were in a summer seminar together before we went out as Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps instructors. He went to teach at Holy Cross, and I went to the Virginia Military Institute. We hit it off and stayed in touch over the years. In 1993, after I graduated from the School of Advanced Warfighting at Quantico, Joe was instrumental in bringing me to Headquarters Marine Corps to relieve him as the senior member of the commandant’s staff group, the speechwriting and support team for the commandant. He became the senior aide to the commandant. We worked closely together for two years with Gen. Carl Mundy. Following that, we both went to Camp LeJeune, where he became executive officer of the 6th Marine Regiment and I became executive officer of First Battalion, Sixth Marines, one of the battalions within the regiment. In the years that followed, we had stayed in touch, in the way that friendships developed in the Marine Corps, not limited by the frequent geographic separations. Joe’s wife, Ellyn, and Marilyn also became friends, so we spent a lot of time together. I viewed Joe Dunford as one of the finest Marines I had ever known, and I felt that his selection to be the 36th commandant was a huge boon to the Corps. We talked frequently, but as commandant, he didn’t call out of the blue during business hours unless there was business to be discussed.

I couldn’t see anything in my notes or in recent traffic that would indicate why he’d want to talk this afternoon—but I’d know soon enough. Sure enough, after the pleasantries, he got right to business: Frank, thanks for taking my call. You might want to clear your desk off before I tell you what I’m going to do, so you won’t hurt yourself. I wracked my brains about anything I’d done, but I felt innocent—as innocent as a Marine lieutenant general could be—so I told him I wouldn’t react to whatever he had to say by killing myself. Frank, I’m going to nominate you as the Marine Corps’ choice to be the Joint Staff J-5. I have reason to believe that you’ll be selected by General [Martin] Dempsey, so this isn’t a shot in the dark. Are you interested? I leaned back in my chair. The Joint Staff J-5, or the big J-5 as all the combatant command J-5s called the position, was the dream job for any planner or strategist. The Joint Staff J-5 was the senior uniformed military planner for the United States, and it called for working at the intersection of military planning and policy at the highest level. Would I take the job? In a second. Commandant, I’d be honored.

I also had to probe: How certain is this? Even as I asked the question, I was reviewing in my mind who was who on the Joint Staff, centering on the big three: the director, the J-3, and of course the J-5. This was important because the director assignments on the Joint Staff had to achieve a balance of service equities. The Marine Corps always fought hard to gain one of the big three, but it was hard to compete with the bigger services. The Army, Navy, and Air Force had bigger pools of flag officers to nominate for these jobs, and, frankly more paths to gain the qualifications necessary to compete for them. Getting one of these key positions would be a major achievement. Joe responded to my question: Frank, I feel pretty certain about this. It’s the chairman’s call, as you know, but I think he’s going to go with you. Joe further told me that the change would occur in the fall. I perhaps should have asked something deeper and more profound, but I could only think of one question: Can we get on-base housing up in DC? Chuckling as he hung up, Joe told me that he’d look into it.

After the call, I sat for a few minutes, collecting my thoughts. Some things now began to come together. In the fall of 2014, Gen. Martin Dempsey, then the chairman, had visited Tampa for a Buccaneers–Green Bay Packers football game to flip the coin. I was there as well to deliver the game ball. As we stood on the sidelines before the ceremony, making small talk, he said, We have plans for you, Frank. It seemed a little enigmatic. At the time, I didn’t think anything about it—just polite words from the chairman. Now it began to fit together a little better. I was excited about the possibility of being the Joint Staff J-5, but I was also very happy at MARCENT. It was command, and command in a theater of war. Later that afternoon, when I told Marilyn, she had the same reaction—excited about returning to northern Virginia, and sad to leave Tampa again, where she had really flourished. Her price for going was simple and direct: season tickets for the Washington Nationals baseball team. I felt we could work that out, and so we agreed.

Over the next few weeks, the nomination process ground on. I knew how the decision would be made: in a personnel meeting with Secretary of Defense Dr. Ash Carter. There would be a list of nominees, one from each service. Short biographies would be appended. The chairman would make his recommendation, and the secretary would either agree or propose an alternative. For the three-star billets on the Joint Staff, the chairman’s recommendations were almost always accepted without debate. Sure enough, that’s what happened, and by the early summer it looked like a done deal. It was then that things began to get complicated. General Dempsey was the hiring official, but he would be retiring in fall 2015. If I got the job, I would work for him for only a short time. Who would relieve him?

Of course, it turned out to be Joe Dunford. As a result of that, I spent almost two years on the Joint Staff as his J-5, and then Joe asked me to be the director. The director of the Joint Staff (DJS) is perhaps the most challenging and sought-after three-star job in the U.S. military that doesn’t involve operational command. That officer manages the Joint Staff for the chairman but also serves as a conduit to the combatant commands, the services, Congress, and the civilian leadership of the department. Historically, the DJS position was a clear precursor for four-star command. Thirty-seven of the forty-eight officers who have been the DJS were subsequently four-star leaders.

Map 1. CENTCOM

In the summer of 2018 Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis nominated me to be the commander of Central Command. I was excited about the possibility of the assignment. Most of my colonel and general officer career had been spent in the CENTCOM region. I felt that I knew the issues and had benefitted from the opportunity of learning from then-General Mattis when he was in command. In early December, I testified before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, and then I was confirmed later in the month. I took command on March 28, 2019, relieving an old friend, Gen. Joe Votel. It felt like I was coming home.

Central Command (see map 1) has always been a less-favored child among the regional combatant commands of the United States, and the words of the Duchess of York to her son Richard III in the epigraph of this chapter are a good summary of the prevailing view of the military establishment of the United States about this upstart command. It was an old axiom of the British army that they always fought their battles at the junction of four map sheets. The Middle East, ranging from Egypt in the west to Pakistan in the east and Kazakhstan in the north to Yemen in the south, fell along the boundary between the two most important combatant commands in the U.S. military—the European Command (EUCOM) and Pacific Command (PACOM, later Indo-Pacific Command). In the mid-1970s, neither of these headquarters had time for or interest in the Middle East. European Command was focused on the Soviet threat, while Pacific Command, picking itself up off the floor after the loss of Vietnam, shared the focus on the Russians and the still-nascent Chinese threat and, of course, Korea. Additionally, the services had little interest in the region. The Navy in particular had scant affection for the narrow, shallow waters of the Arabian littoral. The degree to which the Arabian Gulf figured in any U.S. strategic calculus was the precise degree to which it dealt with the Soviet Union and a perception that they held plans to attack to the south, overrunning the oilfields of Iran and potentially other states.

By the mid-1970s U.S. policy in the region was based on maintaining relationships with two key anticommunist states: Iran and Saudi Arabia. It was a fraught time; in 1968 Prime Minister Harold Wilson withdrew British forces from the region. The United States, fully engaged in Vietnam, had little excess capacity or interest in filling the hole east of Eden. Over time, the relationship with Iran became dominant, based on geography (Iran controlled the northern accesses to the Gulf region) and the friendliness of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had been reinstalled on the Peacock Throne by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and British partners in 1953 after a twelve-year interregnum. He was an autocrat and a despot, but he was also virulently anticommunist.

After President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, his administration looked at the region through two very different and often competing lenses. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor, argued for a greater U.S. military presence in the Gulf, based largely on the theory that oil exports from the region were critical for maintaining both the U.S. and other Western allies’ industrial bases. In a conflict with the Soviet Union, there would be a fundamental requirement to maintain access to the oilfields of the Arabian Gulf. The opposing view was held by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who felt more harm than good would come from permanently stationing U.S. forces in the region—a region with strong and deep anticolonial memories. He did not dispute the need to maintain access to the oil but argued for a more nuanced offshore presence.¹

Early in his presidency, President Carter laid the seeds of the future Central Command. On August 24, 1977, the president established a global quick-reaction force, known as Readiness Command, based in Tampa, Florida. While deployable anywhere, a major part of its mission was clearly the Middle East.² There was strong opposition to the concept, mainly from the Marine Corps and the Navy. The Marine Corps jealously guarded its self-imposed dictum of first to fight and saw any new rapid deployable capability, even a joint one, as an institutional threat. The Navy wasn’t eager to give away command of its ships, particularly if it would be in the narrow waters of the Middle East.

Despite this presidential command, planning languished. In a pattern that continues to this very day, the services fought the idea of allocating forces away from the Pacific, Europe, or even the United States for operations in the Middle East. What gave some impetus to the planning process was the possibility that Russia would push through Iran, either coopting the new regime or just brushing it aside, and gain the oilfields as well