Ex-State Dept. Chief REVEALS Hidden War Making Process | Col. Lawrence Wilkerson

## The hidden machinery of American war-making The recorded exchange with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson pulls back the curtain on a question that matters for peace as much as for power: how does the United States actually decide to use military force? What the conversation reveals is less a tidy flowchart than an ecosystem — dense, competitive, and often driven by personalities and informal networks as much as by formal institutions. Rather than a single, rational body weighing evidence and risks, U.S. strategic decision-making emerges in the discussion as a bricolage of cabinet rivalries, think‑tank influence, institutional resource imbalances, and episodic crises that convert long-standing preferences into actionable policy. Wilkerson’s account is rooted in decades inside the machine — from Pacific Command war planning to the inner circle around Colin Powell at the Joint Chiefs and then at the State Department. That vantage point is crucial: it shows how certain documents and ideas that might seem rhetorical or public-facing actually migrate into operational reality when the right constellation of actors and events align. The stakes of that translation are immense: national security strategies that read like abstract commitments can become the literal instructions for use of force. ## How institutions compete — and why the Secretary of Defense matters One of the clearest threads in the exchange is the asymmetry of power among U.S. departments and agencies. Wilkerson frames the Secretary of Defense as the single most consequential cabinet official for warfighting outcomes, noting not only the sheer budgetary dominance of the Pentagon but the institutional muscle that comes with it. When the conversation contrasts the budgets Powell obtained for State versus those Rumsfeld commanded at Defense, it is not simply about dollars; it is about the leverage those dollars convert into influence over what missions are even possible. But the transcript also nuances this point: formal hierarchy and constitutional precedence do not map cleanly onto practical power. The Secretary of State may hold doctrinal seniority in order of precedence, and historically the State Department housed the Policy Planning Staff as the U.S. government’s self-styled strategic think tank. Yet, as Wilkerson shows, structural formality can be hollowed by operational dominance. Defense bureaucracies, contractors, and a concentrated set of senior officials can set the terms of debate — deciding which options are affordable, which forces can be deployed, and which logistical pathways will be used — effectively making the department the motor of militarized policy. The practical consequence is that a Secretary of Defense who asserts themselves can disproportionately shape national trajectories. Wilkerson’s anecdotes about Rumsfeld and Cheney evoke how discretionary decisions at the top of Defense — to cancel programs, to settle interservice disputes, or to insist on particular operational priorities — ripple through the policymaking ecosystem. ## Strategic thinking as an occasional luxury Wilkerson is blunt about the paucity of strategic thinking in American government. Strategy, in his account, is not a constant activity but a periodic effort that surfaces when an administration or a faction decides to prioritize long-range planning. Most of the time, he argues, the government is "working its inbox": responding to immediate crises and political pressures, not cultivating a durable geopolitical posture. This diagnosis ties directly to the episode Wilkerson recounts about the post-9/11 national security strategy crafted for public consumption. When the Policy Planning Staff and other serious strategic thinkers produced documents, they were often sidelined or sterilized for public release. Conversely, think tanks aligned with neoconservative priorities were able to produce a version that, while presented as a grand strategy, read more like an assertive declarative commitment to American hegemony. The conversation suggests that strategy becomes consequential not merely when it is well crafted, but when it is internalized by those who control the levers of execution — and when a gripping political moment makes hard choices palatable to domestic audiences. The danger of episodic strategy is twofold. First, it makes the state reactive: when the rare strategy appears, it may overreach as it attempts to compress long-term objectives into the short political window available. Second, it opens the door for strategic capture by ideologues who know how to translate bold declarative language into actionable programs when crisis narratives dominate public discourse. ## Crises, networks, and the revival of dormant agendas A recurrent theme in the recording is how certain elites patiently sustain their preferences across administrations, awaiting the moment when an extraordinary event can convert those preferences into policy. Wilkerson’s description of the neoconservative milieu — its placement in think tanks and within the Defense Department, its long pedigree reaching back through Cold War intellectual formations — highlights this patience. These actors need not hold permanent formal power to be effective. What matters is their proximity to decision-makers, their credibility within certain policy circles, and the presence of a catalytic event that legitimizes sweeping action. The conversation draws a direct line between 9/11 and the revived appetite for transformative uses of force. For people predisposed to favor assertive global postures, a shock like 9/11 becomes a political license to pursue projects otherwise politically unworkable. Wilkerson likens 9/11 to a Pearl Harbor for these networks: a singular moment that changed the permissibility calculus for strategic aggression. That is a useful heuristic for understanding how episodic crises can be harnessed by pre-existing networks to institutionalize new commitments, whether through wars of choice or sweeping restructuring of security priorities. From the perspective of neutrality and nonalignment, this dynamic is sobering. It shows how domestic political entrepreneurs can weaponize crises to lock in militarized trajectories, and why small states or nonaligned movements must watch not just policy statements but the networks behind those statements. ## Individuals versus structure: a dialectic, not a dichotomy When asked whether people or structures drive U.S. foreign policy, the conversation resists a simple answer. Wilkerson’s own teaching emphasized the character of decision-makers — the question "Who the hell is making the decisions?" sits at the core of his pedagogy on fateful choices. Personalities matter: a Secretary of Defense intent on reasserting departmental primacy, a vice president newly hardened by trauma, or a cadre of ideologues with papal-like confidence can redirect policy in decisive ways. Yet structure conditions possibility. Budgetary flows, the concentration of the defense industrial base, institutional histories, and legal authorities create constraints and affordances for what any person can accomplish. An individual in a weak department may have ambitions but lack the means; an individual in a powerful post may translate whims into wholesale programmatic shifts. The conversation suggests we should read U.S. policy-making as a dialectic: personalities push against and through structures, and structures amplify or blunt personalities. This synthesis carries a practical implication: efforts to temper militarism must target both the institutional architecture (budgets, procurement monopolies, legal checks) and the recruitment and selection of individuals who will occupy critical posts. Neglect one side, and the other will compensate. ## The normalization of hegemony and the erosion of restraint Perhaps the most provocative claim in the exchange is that some official documents — public national security strateg

State Dept. Chief REVEALS War Making Process | Lawrence Wilkerson Neocons have been setting US foreign policy agenda for many decades, but how does the decision making process in Washington to use military power actually work? What's the role of the different agencies, who's the most powerful institution inside the apparatus and what role do individuals play? Well, let's ask someone who must know. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired US army officer, former Chief of Staff of the Secretary of State, and a member of the activist group “Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.” After decades of experience with Washington I want to pick his brain about how US power structures function and the military-political process actually works. #M3 And the only thing in that document, really, that I'm talking about is this statement that is clearly saying we will achieve and maintain global hegemony at any cost. That's what it said. And I knew the people who wanted that, people like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and others. I knew that they were behind that. #M2 Hello, everybody. This is Pascal from Neutrality Studies, and today I'm talking for the second time to Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired U.S. Army officer, former chief of staff to the Secretary of State, and a member of the activist group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. After decades of experience in Washington, I want to pick his brain about how U.S. power structures function and how the military-political process actually works. So, Colonel Wilkerson, welcome. #M3 Good to be with you. #M2 Let me start with my first question. You are a man who has a lot of experience with the political process in Washington, which also interlinks directly with its foreign policy due to your role as the chief of staff to the Secretary of State. Could you explain to us what your different roles were over the years? And just before the talk, you mentioned you served in one of the most dysfunctional administrations there was. Can you explain that as well? #M3 -- 1 of 19 -- Sure. I was just a standard Army officer, a soldier for roughly 20 years, doing what everyone else did. I went to Vietnam, served in Korea, in Japan, and elsewhere. Then, as I departed as a lieutenant colonel from the 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks on Oahu in Hawaii, I went to the then Pacific Command, led by a Navy four-star admiral, encompassing 35 countries and 35 ambassadors with whom we had to work, and some fairly volatile characters in a sense. For example, we had responsibility for China, and we had responsibility for what we called Global O-Plan Operations Plan 5001, which complemented 5000. 5000 was war with the Soviets on the Western Front in Europe. 5001 was our plan to get their attention so they would have to divert forces from that front to their Pacific front. So we had a hell of a mission, really, and I had a hell of an admiral who would later be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I was the executive assistant to his two-star admiral, who was the real power at PACOM. He was the policy and strategy guy. So we did all the planning, all the war planning. We did all the strategizing, all the geopolitical conversations with the admiral. Then Admiral Crowe, the big guy, went to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ronald Reagan picked him. I was there when Reagan went out on the boat with Admiral Crowe, and essentially Admiral Crowe gave him a tour d'horizon of this massive command. Reagan went back to Washington and said, "I want that man to be my chairman," and he was. Powell, of course, followed him, and I followed Powell because he picked me up from that job to be his special assistant. I was his special assistant for four years while he was the most powerful military individual in the world, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. #M2 What year was that? #M3 This was 1989 to 1993 under H.W. Bush as president, and then the last year was under Bill Clinton in the first year of his first term. We cut the military by 25% across the board. When we cut the defense industrial base, it was quite an experience to watch that happen. A lot of things came out of that that weren't necessarily good. For example, we cut the defense contractor base from about 100 or so to about six, and now they run monopolies. They build lousy products and sell them at a maximum price, and they have the Defense Department over a barrel because they are the only ones who can do it. Sad to say, we produced that. And then I worked for Powell in a private capacity for about three years after I served four more years as director of the Marine Corps War College. He hired me, and we went back to work again as a team. We did such things as go to Lagos, Nigeria, to observe the elections of President Obasanjo at that time, who was elected. We did other things with the Carter Center in Atlanta. We did things with other people across the country. And Powell kept his hand in U.S. foreign policy. And I knew he -- 2 of 19 -- was looking at something. I thought he was probably looking at Secretary of Defense because he knew, and I knew, that's the most powerful position in the American government outside the president. Many would say it's more powerful than the president. #M2 The Secretary of Defense, not the Secretary of State. #M3 No, the Secretary of State is probably one of the principal cabinet officers. And by the founders and the Constitution, in order of precedence, the Secretary of State is first. Of course, he's in the presidential chain, actually. But a very weak individual, very weak individual in a very weak department. And Powell used to say it like this, and the Secretary of Defense at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, agreed with him. Powell got $25 billion the first year of his State Department Secretariat. Rumsfeld got $375 billion. And Rumsfeld said one time, I lose more money than you get, Colin. And he was right. He was right. The most powerful department. But he didn't. He picked Secretary of State. And I knew almost immediately, I think, that I'd been wrong in my calculations because one of his heroes was George Marshall, and George Marshall was both Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. But I think his time at State was more formidable for the country in terms of the legacy he left, including the only strategic think tank in the American government, really, the policy planning staff at State. And the imprimatur he gave them was the imprimatur that Richard Haass, who became Powell's director of policy planning, and Powell brought back to the State Department. So we began to think strategically again. Hadn't done that since World War II. And it was a difficult thing because the government doesn't think strategically. The American government does not have a strategic bone in its body. It claims to, but it doesn't. It works its inbox. From day to day, it works its inbox. It is purely tactical, purely focused on the issues of the day, mostly political issues rather than strategic. And so anybody who thinks strategically is put aside. And we learned that. We learned that big time because there was no strategy behind the global war on terror whatsoever. There was no strategy behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003. We just did it. There's not even a national security decision document published for the first time since World War II when we invented these documents that codified the decision to go to war in Iraq. We just did it. #M2 This is so ironic because I remember distinctly how Condoleezza Rice was extremely proud, proclaiming that for the first time the U.S. had a strategy, a grand strategy. That term only came up, I mean, to me, only back then. And she was so proud of that. -- 3 of 19 -- #M3 We and the policy planning staff authored and wrote several strategies for the government. And they were good strategies in my view. And Powell approved of them. Condi didn't want them, so she turned to her staff and said, produce a strategy. She didn't like those either, so she contracted it out. That tells you something. And there are plenty of think tanks in Washington that think strategically. And she got what she wanted, she thought, and others in the cabinet approved of it. But it's really not a very definitive document unless you're actually going to adhere to it. And all those publicly produced national security strategies, indeed the national military strategy in the past, published for public consumption. I'm not talking about secret versions, top-secret versions. But those published for public consumption, which is what the press talks about and so forth, have been more or less anodyne. They're just, you know, keep America safe. Keep America's allies safe. Fight our enemies across the domain of warfare. Those kinds of statements. This one wasn't that way. This was a neoconservative national security attack produced by the think tank combination that she chose to produce the strategy. And she bought it. And I'm sad to say that my boss bought it, and we even had discussions about it, and I asked him if he was happy with it, and he said, yeah, why are you asking me? I said, well, this strategy essentially says, boss, that if anybody stirs at the bottom of the mountain upon which America is perched, we will kill them. We will either use military power or sanctions or both and kill them. It doesn't matter what it is. It could be a rat stirring at the bottom of the mountain. It could be a behemoth stirring at the bottom of the mountain, like China. We're going to kill it. We're going to kill it before it gets a chance to grow up and kill us. That's what we're saying in this strategy. Oh, it's not that austere, Larry. Au contraire, look at it closely because I think it is. And he did have some reservations once he looked at it more closely, but he had the same attitude he'd had about those kinds of documents all along. And I have to confess, I did too. They're public. They go to the public, so they don't mean a damn thing. Well, it did mean a damn thing. And let me back up for a moment and tell you that one of the reasons I kind of didn't like it was not just because Condi had turned us down flat about what we were saying should be our strategy. It was because what I saw there was essentially the same thing that Paul Wolfowitz, then the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, had sent across to H.W. Bush during his four years in office when I was Special Assistant to Chairman Powell. Bush was the most experienced president since World War II outside Eisenhower. I mean, I would compare Bush's experience with Eisenhower. Look at what he'd been: Vice President for eight years under Ronald Reagan. Head of the RNC. Ambassador to China. Director of the CIA, so beloved they named the building after him. After saying for years they were never going to identify Langley with the CIA, they named it the Bush Center. So that tells you something about this guy's experience. He'd never been out of the intelligence world since he got his plane recovered in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. So -- 4 of 19 -- this is a very experienced guy. He wrote on this same document, which came over from Paul Wolfowitz at that time. He wrote on the document, "Send this back to the crazies in the bottom of the Pentagon." Bush Senior. Yes, Bush Senior. And that's exactly where it went, and it died there, we thought. But here I am looking at it coming back, orchestrated, no doubt, by the think tank neoconservatives hooked up with Wolfowitz, now Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Feith, now Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. So it came back, and it came back in roughly the same format, but no one was there to write the sentence back to the crazies. We actually decided that that was going to be not only for public consumption and therefore anodyne and not really important, but it was going to be our strategy. And the only thing in that d