In the end, there was a consensus.
For months, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had been advocating for an audacious counterterrorism strike that two previous administrations had deemed too risky.
It was time, he argued, to take out Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force. Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American troops and was believed to be behind a deadly attack on a U.S. base in Iraq, as well as the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad in December.
Killing Soleimani is something the Pentagon had considered over the years but never recommended pulling the trigger on because conventional wisdom held that the blowback could lead to all-out war.
“We had him in our gunsights on a number of occasions,” said retired Marine Gen. John Allen, former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, who is now president of the Brookings Institution.
“The idea of ultimately killing him has to be taken as a strategic decision” because of the potential of “destabilizing the region,” Allen told CNN.
But the inaction only emboldened Soleimani, who moved freely around Iraq, making no effort to conceal his whereabouts or travel plans as he brazenly directed Iran-backed militias to attack U.S. forces.
This made it easy for Pompeo to make his case to President Trump and his fellow Cabinet members, and Soleimani became a fat, easy target when he arrived in Baghdad on Jan. 3.
“There was unanimity that we were making the right decision,” Pompeo said on CBS’s Face the Nation. “It was a collective decision. It was intelligence analysis that doing nothing created far more risks than the action that we took.”
On that Sunday after the strike, it was Pompeo alone who defended the drone strike, making the rounds on the political talk shows. It was a role that, in the past, would have been performed by the defense secretary and the chairman of the joint chiefs.
But under Trump, and especially since the departure of his first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, the Pentagon has mainly been demoted from a policy-making to a policy-implementing institution.
While Pompeo was the public face of the president’s decision, both Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley were keeping low profiles, meeting with Pentagon reporters informally, away from the cameras.
Esper, as he often does, struggled to explain Trump’s policy, in particular, the president’s pronouncement that he would target Iran’s cultural sites, which would be a war crime.
While Pompeo brushed aside the criticism, Esper would only say that he would follow the law of armed conflict.
Then, the Pentagon had to clean up the mess created when an American one-star general shared a draft letter with his Iraqi counterpart that seemed to announce the United States was preparing to pull out of Iraq.
While Pompeo was seemingly everywhere demonstrating his value as the president’s most accomplished defender, the Pentagon was looking like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
In the week after the most significant strike the Pentagon had conducted since the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Esper appeared in the briefing room only once.
By all accounts, Esper and Pompeo get along well and agree on most things. Both are former Army captains and were in the same West Point class of 1986.
Pompeo had the distinction of graduating first in his class, and now, almost 25 years later, Esper is still overshadowed by Pompeo, who is clearly first among equals in Trump’s Cabinet.
Many of Esper’s predecessors were significant players in forming defense policy, including William Perry under President Bill Clinton, Donald Rumsfeld under President George W. Bush, and Robert Gates under Presidents Bush and Barack Obama.
For Esper, who inherited the job after Mattis quit and Mattis’s deputy, Patrick Shanahan, left for personal reasons, the most he can aspire to is to win the award for “Best Performance by a Cabinet Member in a Supporting Role.”
And in that sense, he’s taking a page out of the Mattis playbook, namely, keep your head down and serve the president the best you can.
“As Mattis underscored often, the secretary of defense is and should be subservient to the secretary of state for most matters, since the former provides tools and capabilities and the latter, for the president and country, develops overall foreign policy,” says Michael O’Hanlon, a defense and foreign policy expert at Brookings.
“Some, like Rumsfeld, often took over the policy and went too far,” O’Hanlon said. “While Perry and Cheney and Gates were great defense secretaries, Mark Esper operates in a different domestic environment, to put it mildly. He is better off deferring to Pompeo when possible on most, but not all, things.”
After two years, Mattis found it too frustrating to work for a president who neither sought nor took his advice.
Esper has turned out to be a better fit in that he’s more comfortable saluting smartly and carrying out orders, even if that means playing second fiddle to his former West Point classmate.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
