The Issues
During a December 2008 news conference, Obama unveiled his national security team, saying immediately after taking office that he plans to give the military a new mission: to begin “responsibly” withdrawing from Iraq. Mullen will play a large role in determining how such a drawdown should be conducted. But he will also be critical to implementing the president's troop escalation in Afghanistan.
In December 2009, Obama announced he would send far more than that in deploying 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, though with a timeline for withdrawal of 18 months.
In September 2009, Mullen told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the U.S. would not be able to defeat the resurgent Taliban without an additional 2,000 to 4,000 troops for training and to fight insurgents.
Gays in the Military
Mullen made history in February 2009 when he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that allowing homosexuals to openly serve in the military was the correct policy.
“It is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do,” Mullen said. “We have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens. For me, personally, it comes down to integrity — theirs as individuals and ours as institutions.”
Despite his personal convictions, and Obama's support, the Pentagon has said that it will release a plan on ending the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy by the end of 2010.
Iran
Before Obama was elected, Mullen supoprted taking another shot at opening diplomatic channels with Tehran.
“I'm convinced a solution still lies in using other elements of national power to change Iranian behavior, including diplomatic, financial and international pressure. There is a need for better clarity, even dialogue at some level,” Mullen said during a July 2008 Pentagon briefing. He suggested Washington and Tehran open a “broad dialogue” that would “cover the full spectrum” of key issues.
Defense Spending & Readiness
Mullen advises the Obama administration on how much in annual federal dollars the Pentagon will need to carry out future missions.
The military was a winner in terms of the president's 2011 budget request. To accomodate an increased commitment to Afghanistan, spending was revised from an estimated $50 million to $159 billion in "overseas contingency funds" for the 2011.
Mullen spent much of 2008 warning against any move by the next administration to shrink annual defense spending, even with an eventual Iraq withdrawal. The Pentagon’s annual baseline budget — minus the emergency war supplementals that primarily have funded operations in Iraq and Afghanistan — stood at about 3.3 percent of the gross national product. But Mullen has called for the next president to increase that number to about 4 percent. That level of funding is needed, he says, to buy new weapon systems, replace or repair aging combat platforms, pay growing personnel bills and to add more troops.
Following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mullen and other senior military officials have raised concerns about the military’s readiness for future operations. In the 2008-2009 Chairman Guidance, which is updated annually, Mullen sounded alarms about training. He wrote that the Iraq war has kept the military from training for the entire set of missions it might have to perform in the future. “The pace of ongoing operations has prevented our forces from training for the full-spectrum of operations and impacts our ability to be ready to counter future threats,” states the guidance. "This lack of balance is unsustainable in the long-term,” wrote Mullen.
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