In August 1992, the Senate Armed Services Committee requested testimony from a senior official from the Joint Chiefs of Staff at a hearing on Bosnia. There was zero appetite among the Joint Chiefs to get involved militarily in Bosnia, and Powell directed his principal military assistant, Lieutenant General Barry McCaffrey, to convey this to the committee. To prepare, McCaffrey drafted his presentation and slides sans approval from the Office of the Secretary of Defense or the White House. When committee senators asked what force level would be required to end the violence in Bosnia, McCaffrey replied, "It would be around 400,000 troops." According to McCaffrey, Powell later asked, "Where the f#&k did you get those numbers?" He replied, "I made them up, based on my understanding of the parties and the situation." Nevertheless, the anchoring effect of the highball estimate ultimately succeeded in shelving the ground presence option.
In fall 1998, the White House tasked the Pentagon with developing options for halting the Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. In return, the Pentagon estimated a requisite deployment of 175,000 to 200,000 NATO troops. As a senior administration official stated: "The numbers came in high. No one said yes, no one said no; it was taken off the table...It was a complete eye-roller." When the White House reconsidered ground options in Serbia after three months of air war, the initial proposal effectively prevented any serious debate, since "there was only one option by then that the Joint Chiefs would support."
At the same time, during Clinton administration debates over whether to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, senior civilian officials believed that military leaders were intentionally oversizing the options on the table. National Security Adviser Sandy Berger stated flatly: "[The military] didn't want to do it [attack al Qaeda]...There was just no enthusiasm and creativity." His deputy, James Steinberg, recalled that the civilian advisors "were not at all happy with the military's options for going after Bin Laden." Meanwhile, Vice Admiral Scott Fry, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1998 to 2000 and the man who often presented such options, argued, "We could never impress upon the civilians in the National Security Council how far Afghanistan was from a staging base or carrier group."
Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, debates over force levels spilled over into the public sphere. After Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki testified that a post-war occupying force would require "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers," Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz immediately dismissed the estimate as "wildly off the mark." Campaign planners found subsequent proposed options silently rejected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with no explanation or "force caps" (a ceiling for permitted ground troops) beyond "rework the plan." As a result, the size of the U.S. ground invasion of Iraq shrank substantially and -- combined with inadequate post-conflict stabilization planning -- ultimately played a role in the emergence of the insurgency.
In 2005, CIA and special operations teams in northern Pakistan developed intelligence that provided "80 percent confidence" about the future location of senior members of al Qaeda, including Ayman al-Zawahiri. Over time, the plan to kill or capture these militants grew to include somewhere between 150 to several hundred special operators and CIA operatives. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called off the raid at the last moment because of its unwieldy size and less than 100 percent guaranteed actionable intelligence.
(Six years later, President Obama would authorize the raid that killed Osama bin Laden with fewer U.S. special operators (79 and a dog), less certainty that the al Qaeda leader would be in Abbottabad ("50-50"), and significantly farther into Pakistani territory (100 miles). However, although Obama is lauded for authorizing the operation, it was probably less politically risky than Rumsfeld's decision, largely because Special Operations Command (SOCOM) had dramatically improved and routinized such raids. As Admiral William McRaven described the killing of bin Laden: "We did 11 other raids much like that in Afghanistan that night. From a military standpoint, this was a standard raid and really not very sexy.")
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