SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW — Israel’s war against Hamas rages on, Israel is considering opening a new front against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and this week the Houthi militia group struck a Greek carrier that later capsized in the Red Sea. The Middle East is facing a particularly tumultuous moment, with much of the turmoil involving groups backed by Iran.
Cipher Brief expert General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie (Ret.) was deeply familiar with these groups, these tensions, and the Iran-related threat generally during his tenure as Commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) between 2019 and 2022. CENTCOM’s purview includes the Middle East and Iran, and in his new book, The Melting Point: High Command and War in the 21st Century, McKenzie writes about his direct involvement in the region, with allies and adversaries alike.
Cipher Brief CEO & Publisher Suzanne Kelly spoke recently with Gen. McKenzie for an episode of the State Secrets podcast – a conversation that delved deeply into his experiences with Iran – including his role in the strike that killed Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani – as well as the relationship between American civilian and military leadership.
"There's nobody cheerleading, it's very, very silent," Gen. McKenzie said of the atmosphere in the room where he and other senior officers were monitoring the Soleimani mission. "It's a bunch of true professionals carrying out a very complex, dangerous, difficult mission. And we were all aware that we were taking human life in this. The boom happens, you see it, you see the flash of light on the screen. There's no cheering, there's no clapping."
THE INTERVIEW
The excerpt of this interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Kelly: Why write the book? What inspired you to do this?
McKenzie: That's probably best captured in the title – The Melting Point. It's lifted from a book by Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August, which talks about how Europe entered the First World War. She has a line – "Melting point of warfare: the temperament of the individual commander." I first read the book many decades ago, and that line has always stayed with me.
I was a commander at a key time and place in our nation's history over the last three years. I was not an observer, I was a participant, and it allowed me to see how things work at the policy level, at the military level, and how that nexus joins that very complex nexus that is the heart of civilian-military relations.
I wanted to talk about the way America's military works. I think we have a great constitutional system here, and the military has a proud and proper place in that system, and I wanted to just take a little time to discuss that.
Kelly: You focus on three central themes, and one of them is what you just mentioned – the importance of that civilian control over the military. Not always something you would expect someone who reached the level you did within the military to come out fighting for.
McKenzie: It's important that when major decisions are made that affect the direction our country's going to go with its military operations, that those decisions are made by civilians. The people elected them, our constitution placed them in charge, and they bear ultimate responsibility for those decisions. They need to take advice from military leaders and advice from other agencies, but the uniqueness of being a combatant commander, which is the job that I had, was you're in a position to give that advice and then you have a responsibility for executing.
Many people give advice, many people execute. Only combatant commanders stand astride the bridge of policy advice and execution.
There's also no tradition of U.S. officers resigning, quitting, or standing in the way of decisions that have been made. The Uniform Code of Military Justice is pretty clear: if the order is legal, you have to execute those orders. And I had no shortage of lawyers at Central Command to tell me whether or not an order was legal. But if you don't like the order, it doesn't matter. You still need to execute the task. Because we never want to get into a situation where senior military leaders challenge appropriately constituted civilian authority. That's bad for the republic in the long term.
Kelly: One of the things that you talk about in the book is when you first joined CENTCOM, there was an Iranian commander there who already had your attention. Take us back to that time and walk us through your joining CENTCOM, what that meant to you on a personal level and why you were fixated, almost, on Qasem Soleimani.
McKenzie: I joined CENTCOM in the spring of 2019. And one of the things I did in the first 90 days was I emphasized the importance of Iran as the principal adversary in the theater. They were behind most of the malign activities that were occurring across the region. I took some time to look at the way the headquarters was oriented and to refocus on the importance of Iran as our principal adversary.
CENTCOM is a large, complex headquarters. We do a lot of other things – we had combat operations ongoing in Afghanistan and operations in Iraq and Syria at the same time — although the Iraq operations tended to be tied a little bit more to the Iran problem. So we reoriented the headquarters to take a look at Iran.
In the meantime, in the spring and summer of 2019, Iran began to plan and execute a series of attacks against their neighbors in the region – a number of attacks on ships up around the Arabian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, a significant attack on the Saudi Aramco Oil facility in northeast Saudi Arabia, and continuing attacks by Iranian proxies on US forces in Iraq and in Syria.
To a great degree, the mastermind behind these operations was General Qasem Soleimani of the Iranian Republican Guard. Soleimani had American blood on his hands for many years. He killed a lot of Americans.
And he was a unique figure in the Iranian constellation of military leaders, because he stood outside the chain of command. He had a direct familial relationship with (Iran’s) Supreme Leader. He could talk to him directly, he could sidestep the Iranian army, navy, and other more conventional elements of the Iranian military, should he choose to do that. And he was remarkably charismatic.
The number one priority for Iran always has been protection of the regime. They view themselves as a revolutionary state, and they know full well that revolutionary states often don't outlive the revolutionary generation. So they're determined to preserve the theocratic regime with all its repressive activities that occur inside Iran, and all its malign activities that are exported from Iran. The number one objective is to protect that regime. The number two and number three objectives, to read their literature and their pronouncements, are destruction of the state of Israel and the ejection of the United States from the region. And Soleimani particularly pursued objectives two and three, and he was very assiduous in the way he worked that.
Kelly: On a personal level, it must have been somewhat satisfying to finally be able to take out someone who had killed so many Americans.
McKenzie: In December 2019, attacks were spiking against our forces in Iraq and in Syria. Soleimani was orchestrating those attacks. We believed he was going to come into Baghdad early in January 2020 to do some final coordination for significant attacks against our embassies, certainly in Baghdad. Our embassy was under severe pressure in late December 2019, early January 2020, as a result of that.
It became evident to me that the risk of allowing him to continue to coordinate those attacks was greater than the risk of removing him from the battlefield. That was the calculus that I had, and I had an opportunity to give an opinion on this.
We were focused on the fact that if we didn't act now, the probability was Americans were going to die.
I was not in the room with the president when that decision was made. We gave him a variety of options. They came back and directed us to take the strike on Soleimani, an action that I supported.
It's a complex process to run these attacks. You sit in a dark room, you're getting constantly bombarded by different kinds of information. You're talking to your people that are actually doing the work. And one of my principal jobs was to let the people who were executing the operation have the freedom to execute the operation without being an overbearing somebody over their shoulder, applying a screwdriver from 8,000 miles away. I'd like to think I did that. They might think I didn't do it enough, because nobody ever feels that the higher headquarters is actually helping them in situations like this. But I tried to sit there and ensure the president had the information he needed, the secretary had the information he needed, and I worked closely with the Chairman, General Mark Milley, during this period, all on video screens, secure phones.
Meanwhile, big video monitors showed where all the airplanes were. (Soleimani) was flying in an airplane to Baghdad, and other imagery from our drones were looking at the airport itself. So you begin to get into the actual execution, things begin to move very fast. You have a lot of time when you plan; time is your friend. When you execute, time is your enemy, because in execution, you have all the resources in the world except time.
As the plane landed, my Task Force Commander said, "Sir, if we're going to call it off, we need to do it now. Things are going to happen very fast." And I said, "Well, take your shot when you got it, nothing's changed."
And then it goes to silence. There's nobody cheerleading, it's very, very silent. It's a bunch of true professionals carrying out a very complex, dangerous, difficult mission. And we were all aware that we were taking human life in this. The boom happens, you see it, you see the flash of light on the screen. There's no cheering, there's no clapping.
My next thought immediately was what I needed to do to be prepared for the aftermath. At that moment, there was no sense of satisfaction, no sense of anything except, "I need to now get ready for the inevitable Iranian response," because we had to make calls to our friends in the region to tell them what had happened. We had kept this compartmented, and nobody likes a surprise like this. So you get very busy for a couple of hours making those calls. Meanwhile, we're waiting to ensure that the mission was accomplished, and we were able to determine that pretty quickly. And so I could tell the president, "Yes, we have accomplished the task you gave us."
When I got home late that night, I probably sat down and the enormity of it hit me, the significance of it. But in the moment, you are completely and wholly consumed with execution because you’ve got people in risk. I had forces in Iraq that I knew were vulnerable. I had a commander there who was sitting in full body armor talking to me on the other end. I was very much aware of the risk he bore as the result of the action that we had taken. So all that goes through your mind, but the main thing is you just don't want to screw something up. You don't want to do anything that's going to cause damage or loss of life to our side as we execute this presidentially directed mission.
Kelly: The aftermath is important here – to learn whether you think that the killing of Soleimani was an actual deterrent to Iranian aggression in the area.
McKenzie: We know deterrence is a concept in the mind of the opponent, where the opponent thinks about the action they want to take, and they have to debate, "A, can we do it? B, is it worth it, or will they punish us if we do that?" When you deter someone, you need to display capability to actually hurt them or prevent them from accomplishing their goal. And you need to display will.
Well, the Iranians know our capability. They have a very clear understanding of what we can do. But what they always doubted is our will. And Soleimani had been central to that.
In 1983, when the Marines were attacked in the Beirut bombing, we ultimately withdrew as a result of that. Many people don't remember that, but the Iranians certainly do. So they have a sense that the U.S., if pressed, will back down. The Soleimani strike caused them to reconsider. They did respond, but in a calculated manner.
They were still trying to kill Americans. They weren't trying to lowball it, but they weren't looking to fire hundreds of missiles at us either, or at bases across the region. We were able, by excellent action by commanders on the ground in Iraq, to ensure that no fatalities occurred. We did have cases of mild traumatic brain trauma, which is significant, and I don't want to minimize that, but we had no fatalities. And about the same time, the Iranians messaged us through the Swiss that it was over, they didn't want to continue.
So I would argue, from that period, for quite a while, that contested deterrence was established. The Iranians were not willing to go state-on-state against us. They were willing to continue pinprick attacks, but they were not willing to take us on, on a large scale. So I would argue that it did effectively reset deterrence.
But deterrence in this region always has a short half-life. You have to continually flex deterrence, demonstrate activities that prove deterrence. We did it here just a couple of months ago. Iranians had been attacking our forces in Iraq and Syria. There was a series of strikes. The Iranians have backed down as a result of that.
Within their system, the Iranians are rational actors and they respect and understand the use of force, and when we choose to deploy force effectively, the Iranians will respond.
Kelly: Anyone at your level who retires and writes a book like this, it's going to have a dramatic impact on other young people who are thinking about entering the military, and many who are already in the military. I'm wondering if you have a particular message to those people. What leadership lessons do you want to leave for them?
McKenzie: I entered the military in 1979, the very end of Vietnam, if you will. As I leave the military and look back over my career, a couple of things stand out to me.
We do have the best military in the world, mainly because of the excellence of the young NCOs, the young sergeants, corporals, staff sergeants that actually do the work, that actually lead brand new troopers and marines as they come in.
That band of people – you don't find it in most other militaries. It's important that we maintain it now, because that's the glue that pulls it all together.
That's why the Russians are underperforming so terribly in Ukraine. They don't have this, they don't have that mid-level management, junior officers, captains, lieutenants, staff sergeants, gunnery sergeants, sergeants first class, chief petty officers, sea or airman chiefs that make all this stuff actually happen. That's what we need to fight to retain.
How you do that is, they’ve got to look up and feel that the senior leaders are actually behaving ethically, behaving morally and doing what they're supposed to do.
As a combatant commander, commander at any level, everybody's looking at you all the time. You have to be aware of that. And you can't gain their trust by words. You gain their trust by actions. You have to over-communicate. The American soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, guardsmen, they're not responsive to directive orders. They're responsive to, Here's why we're going to do this. Here's why it makes sense. Here's my plan. Americans like to know why they're doing things. Successful commanders and successful organizations in the military – as in business – you over-communicate down the chain of command.
Kelly: Were there one or two people that really inspired you and shaped your view of leadership?
McKenzie: As I look across history, I am particularly affected by Field Marshal William Slim, who was a British commander. Bill Slim, as he was known, fought in the China-Burma-India theater (in World War II). He was defeated by the Japanese the first half of the war, fell back to India, fought a brilliant battle, and then gained strategic victory. He was a remarkable leader and he wrote a great book called Defeat Into Victory, which is a book I reread frequently because there was no artifice about it. I try to model some of the stuff I do after him. He said, "The key to being a senior leader is you've got to be able to communicate energy with affection."
That's a difficult thing, because the job's got to be done. But if you can, you want to do it in a manner where people like what they're doing, they feel valued, they know that their work and the sacrifices they're being called upon to make are respected and acknowledged.
Kelly: Based on your experience, how are you looking forward to where the flashpoints are going to be, and where you think the pacing threats are?
McKenzie: I think China remains the pacing threat for the United States. We need to configure our military to be able to contest China, and I think we're doing that. I'm fully on board with that view, but I think we need to take a sophisticated view and view it as a global problem, not just a Western Pacific problem. That is a long-term problem, but it needs to be the pacing threat.
At the same time you can't ignore Russia. A small and declining economy, bad demographics, a lot of problems, but one thing they've got is a nuclear arsenal with the ability to kill all of us in about 40 minutes should they choose to do so. Now we can kill them, too, so that's cold comfort for all of us. But Russia is not so much a pacing threat.
China and Russia together, they're the two existential threats, let me be clear about that. We need to pace against China and we need to also look at Russia to a lesser degree. If we're going to weight one, you weight China, but you can't ignore Russia because the capabilities you need are different.
Iran and North Korea – though they are not existential threats to the United States. And we also need to look at the long-term problem of violent extremism. It's not going away, and it's going to grow in places like Afghanistan where we've left. It's going to grow in Sub-Saharan Africa. That's a chronic problem and that will require highly specialized forces.
Kelly: One of the threats we really haven't focused a lot on is the cyber threat. And clearly that's going to shape the way we do everything, from living our lives to going to war.
McKenzie: In cyber, it's hard to know where our red lines are. It's hard to know where the boundaries are. It's hard to know how we would react if attacked in cyber. And would that be a cyber response? Would it be a kinetic response? How do you cross the boundary there?
I remain convinced we're the most powerful nation in the world in cyber, but we're also the most vulnerable nation in the world in cyber, because of the technological foundation for everything that we do here in the United States. Everything runs on some form of cyber, and so we are uniquely vulnerable and we have a patchwork of systems to protect it.
So we're vulnerable, but we also have the most powerful offensive capability in the world.
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