Initially designed by two army engineer officers in July 1941 in response to rising office-space requirements for military staffs, the Pentagon was envisioned to provide four million square feet of air-conditioned office space in a four-story building with almost no elevators. The final result was a five-sided, five-story behemoth with 17.5 miles of corridors that held thirty-three thousand workers at the height of World War II. It opened to its first occupants in April 1942 and was completed by January 1943—less than eighteen months from concept.
Although I claimed it as such, this wasn’t my first “work experience” in the Pentagon. My father had served multiple tours there in the 1950s and 1960s and would periodically take my brothers and me along. I’d marvel at the huge hallways and the tradespeople who would pedal the hallways on large white tricycles. Usually our visits were short, but if my father had weekend work to do, he’d sit us at a desk with pencil and paper so that we could amuse ourselves.
One Saturday we became fascinated with a metal “tree” on the desk that held about fifteen rubber stamps. To keep us quiet, my father found an ink pad and paper—and we were in business. After a while we left, my father driving our sand-colored 1955 Chevrolet station wagon back to our Arlington, Virginia, home. My mother was waiting at the door.
“Mac, you need to go back to the Pentagon right away,” she told him. “Security called.”
He deposited us, climbed back in the car, and took off, no doubt a bit worried. He told us later that he’d forgotten the scrap papers we’d tried all the rubber stamps on, and a security guard doing routine checks had found papers marked “Top Secret” and other classifications strewn on the desk, unsecured. Years later the memory made me smile when reading articles about over-classification of government documents.
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About forty years later, my next Pentagon experience began with some of the same wonder I’d felt as a boy. From outside, the enormous structure conveyed an imposing message of might, purpose, and a bit of intimidation. The Pentagon had an amazingly functional design and was in the midst of a long renovation when, at 9:37 A.M. on September 11, 2001, Flight 77 slammed into the western face of the building, killing fifty-three passengers, six crew members, 125 Pentagon employees, and five hijackers. Aggressive repairs were under way when I arrived in August 2002, and a large American flag hung at the work site. Inside, the increased post–9/11 security reinforced the serious aura.
Unlike many officers, including Annie’s father and mine, my first Pentagon tour was as a general officer, which came with advantages and disadvantages. It spared me some of the pain of working endless actions in rabbit-warren-like office space, but the hours and frustrations with bureaucracy seemed equally distributed. Reassuringly, the quality of the people was good, and many of the actions we worked on were clearly important.
Without question, my biggest surprise was Iraq. At XVIII Airborne Corps, we’d focused our attention on Afghanistan and to a lesser degree on Pakistan. But when I arrived to the Joint Staff in August 2002, the primary focus was on planning for potential operations against Saddam Hussein’s regime. Couched as contingency planning against the possibility of hostilities, we conducted a war game soon after I arrived that served to identify and frame solutions for many of the challenges analysts predicted would arise in the event of war in Iraq.
At that point I judged the likelihood of war there to be remote. Although Saddam Hussein was an almost perfect caricature of an evil dictator, I didn’t take Iraq’s military prowess seriously after the first Gulf War. Further, it seemed to me in 2002 that the international response to 9/11 would further constrain Saddam’s ability to act. Although the example of North Korea countered the theory that such regimes inevitably collapse, I suspected that would be Saddam’s eventual fate.
As fall passed into winter, the probability of war rose steadily. The bill authorizing President Bush to use force against Iraq passed the House of Representatives on the afternoon of October 10 and cleared the Senate—by a vote of seventy-seven to twenty-three—just after midnight on October 11. Saddam’s seemingly illogical reactions to international pressure seemed to confirm assessments of WMD programs that ultimately proved incorrect. Our inexorable buildup of facilities and then combat power, which initially could be interpreted as necessary levers to pressure Saddam into compliance, increasingly looked like concrete steps toward war. Sometime shortly before Christmas of 2002, I remember assessing that our deployments and other preparations had passed the point of being designed to pressure Saddam. It seemed that a decision had been made to go to war.