Acting SECDEF Shanahan A Technocrat &Policy Enigma
Atlantic, 1 January 2019, America, Meet Your (Acting) Secretary of Defense
With no military experience and just a year and a half in government, the former Boeing executive Patrick Shanahan has yet to develop a foreign-policy vision of his own.
Extract: Patrick Shanahan, the man who is now the president’s principal adviser on the nation’s defense, tasked with leading the largest employer in the world and managing the fallout from Trump’s military retrenchment, has less experience in government (a year and a half) or the military (none) than any defense secretary since an oil magnate served as the acting head of the Pentagon for several weeks during Watergate 45 years ago. Patrick Shanahan is a relative enigma.
What’s most striking is that even those close to Shanahan weren’t sure how to answer when I asked what his firm foreign-policy views are, beyond pointing to his efforts to ensure that the U.S. military has a competitive edge and is ready for combat. “He’s pretty apolitical,” a close Shanahan associate told me, an assessment echoed by others I interviewed who know Shanahan. (While at Boeing, Shanahan donated to both Democratic and Republican political candidates.)
“As secretary of defense, even as acting, he’s going to have to show his cards,” says Rick Larsen, a Democratic representative from Washington State whose district includes a major Boeing production facility where Shanahan worked. “If it takes three months to get a new secretary in, even if it’s him, we don’t have three months to put a pause on the national-security strategy of the United States. We don’t have three months to wait to see how we’re gonna proceed on military-to-military relations with China.”
At the Pentagon—where he has focused on internal matters such as crafting annual budget requests and launching a process for migrating the department’s IT systems to the cloud, racking up only provisional achievements at best—Shanahan has described his role as the “chief operating officer.” He has, in other words, managed the internal execution of the vision articulated by Mattis, a legendary four-star general and “master strategist,” as Shanahan admiringly put it during his Senate confirmation hearing.
The 56-year-old Shanahan is an MIT-trained engineer and 31-year veteran of Boeing, most recently as a senior vice president for supply chain and operations, who acquired the nickname Mr. Fix-It for turning around beleaguered programs such as the development of the 787 Dreamliner passenger jet. Shanahan, who was reportedly not Mattis’s first choice for the deputy job, is a technocratic program manager through and through.
Shanahan refers to a Pentagon office as the “obeya room” in homage to the Japanese corporate problem-solving technique, and cites Kodak as a cautionary tale for the consequences of failing to innovate. Whereas Mattis cast the National Defense Strategy as a means of bequeathing the free world as we know it to the next generation, Shanahan noted how “a risk-balanced, opportunity-driven approach will spark innovation and help protect our hard-earned culture of excellence from the unintended distortion of budgetary instability.”
While visiting U.S. soldiers in Iraq over Christmas, Trump praised Shanahan as a “good buyer” of military equipment, not some master strategist.
Shanahan can come across as less enthused about Trump’s ideas themselves than making the ideas work—of ingeniously solving the president’s problems, like a good engineer. “It’s pretty exciting,” he has said of the Space Force. “Over a very short period of time, it’s been thrust upon us to create and grow a new organization.”
“He’s not gonna dictate. He’s gonna follow what the president’s intent is,” a friend of Shanahan said. Shanahan, who is succeeding a man Trump reportedly resented for slow-walking his directives, is “an efficient doer of things,” he told me.
As the aviation journalist Jon Ostrower, who spent years covering Shanahan at Boeing, recently wrote, Mr. Fix-It enjoyed “exemplary” relationships with his superiors at the company because he made sure “the leadership delivered what it promised.” Some observers, including the late Senator John McCain, have voiced concern that, beyond the president hitting it off with a fellow businessman at the Defense Department, a suspiciously cozy relationship is developing between the Trump administration and Boeing, one of the nation’s leading defense contractors. Ethics rules require Shanahan to recuse himself from Boeing-related matters at the Pentagon.
With Mattis’s departure, the last full-throated advocate of the principles that have guided U.S. foreign policy for decades has now left Trump’s inner circle, following in the footsteps of figures such as H. R. McMaster and Nikki Haley. Taking their place are disruptors (such as the president’s sovereigntist national-security adviser John Bolton) and doers (be it pragmatic implementers of Trumpism like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or loyal foot soldiers like the UN ambassador nominee Heather Nauert).
Shanahan’s approach seems closest to that of Pompeo, who served in Congress but previously made a career in business as well. As something of an unknown quantity, Shanahan now appears to be auditioning before Trump, during a period when many of the president’s top aides—from his new chief of staff to his attorney general—are similarly in limbo as “acting” advisers.
Many Shanahan associates don’t pick a side when asked whether Shanahan’s view of the world is ultimately closer to Mattis’s or Trump’s. They acknowledge, however, that Shanahan doesn’t have Mattis’s foreign-policy pedigree or relationships around the world, and that “the Pentagon is so much more challenging than anything [Shanahan’s] ever done in his life” in terms of its massive budget and bureaucracy.
Hence, why Trump’s decision to speed up Mattis’s exit and install Shanahan by the first of January 2019 has alarmed Adam Smith, a Washington State Democrat and the incoming chair of the House Armed Services Committee. Shanahan “does not have the comprehensive understanding of global national security threats that Secretary Mattis does,” Smith said in a statement. “Throwing him into the role of acting secretary with no notice in this way unnecessarily places the United States in a riskier position.”
Shanahan has certainly “earned the Mr. Fix-It” nickname, says Larsen, who from his perch on the House Armed Services Committee has also interacted with Shanahan since his arrival at the Defense Department. But now “the questions I’m going to have won’t be along the lines of, ‘How is the cloud-computing contracting problem going?’” he told me. “It will be focused on, ‘What’s your opinion of the Syria withdrawal? What’s your opinion of nato? Will you be able to say no to the president or at least push back on the president and offer him advice that might be different than what he wants to do?’” For more, please see the hyperlink below:
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