Anthony C. “Tony” Zinni is the chairman of the board of directors of BAE Systems, Inc., the company’s wholly owned U.S. subsidiary that employs approximately 55,000 employees in the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, Israel, Germany, Mexico, Switzerland, and South Africa. Zinni joined the Marine Corps in 1961 and was commissioned an infantry second lieutenant in 1965. His 39-year military career included command of a Joint Task Force and a unified command. His final tour of duty was as the commander in chief of U.S. Central Command. After retirement from the U.S. Marine Corps in 2000, Zinni served in numerous diplomatic positions, including U.S. peace envoy in the Middle East and the special envoy to the Henri Dunant Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (Indonesian, Philippines, and Sudan peace effort). Zinni is also a Distinguished Military Fellow for the Center for Defense Information, a part of the World Security Institute, and he has been an instructor in the Department of International Studies at the Virginia Military Institute. He is a graduate of Villanova University with a bachelor’s degree in economics. He holds master’s degrees in international relations from Salvae Regina College and in management and supervision from Central Michigan University, as well as honorary doctorates from Villanova University, The College of William & Mary, and the Maine Maritime Academy. His books include the bestsellers Battle Ready and The Battle for Peace, and his Leading the Charge was published in August 2009. Zinni sat down recently with John D. Gresham and Susan L. Kerr for an exclusive and wide-ranging interview.

The Year In Defense – Can you tell us something of your background? Where you were born and went to school, your life growing up, and your early career in the Marine Corps?

Gen. Anthony “Tony” Zinni – Well, I grew up right outside Philadelphia. My parents were both immigrants to the United States. They came when they were young with my grandparents, both from Italy, both from the same part of Italy. Met here and married. I grew up in a small mill town right on the outskirts of Philadelphia, a place called Conshohocken, Pa., on the Schuylkill River.

My father was a chauffeur and came to this country in 1910. My mother came in 1906. He was drafted into the Army and served in World War I, my brother in the Korean War, cousins in World War II, at the Battle of the Bulge and in the Pacific. All drafted into the military.

I went to Catholic school and Villanova University as a commuter student. I had to work my way through school; my father helped with the tuition. I joined the Marine Corps my first day on campus in the Platoon Leader Class program. So, when I graduated, I was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1965.

When were you commissioned into the Marine Corps?

I was commissioned in June 1965. I joined the Corps in ’61, and was commissioned a second lieutenant in ’65.

You timed it pretty well to get into the Vietnam War didn’t you?

Actually, right after I graduated and was in the Marine Corps Basic School – second lieutenants go through there for their initial training – is when the Marines landed in I Corps [northern South Vietnam] region. The beginning of U.S. combat troops in Vietnam. I initially went to Camp Lejeune, N.C., with the 2nd Marine Division. I was an infantry officer, platoon commander. I was actually a platoon commander and rifle company commander as a second lieutenant, and then commanded an infantry training company as well. So, I had two company-size commands as a lieutenant, which was unusual.

I went from there to the U.S. Army’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, N.C., as a precursor to going to Vietnam as an advisor to the Vietnamese Marines. Spent almost a year in country there. Just about coming up on my year in Vietnam, I contracted a bunch of diseases, as almost every advisor did, and I was evacuated. I then spent some time at our Basic School as an instructor – tactics, counterinsurgency, that sort of thing.

Then I went back to Vietnam as a company commander and was wounded, spent time as a company commander on Okinawa after recovery on Guam, and then was a company commander again in the 2nd Marine Division. The initial advisory tour was fascinating because of the exposure to the culture, and the Vietnamese Marines were the elite forces of the South Vietnamese military. I saw a lot of action, action as an advisor and company commander. I had command of six companies and three platoons as a company-grade officer, which I think was just a lucky roll of the dice as it turned out.

That’s got to ground you in the infantry pretty solidly doesn’t it?

I think it does develop leadership values as you try to learn by trial and error, but I really think you get the valuable experiences from all the different kinds of places that you are exposed to in command, whether it’s in Vietnam, or it’s in Okinawa, or it’s in Camp Lejeune, N.C.

It’s also interesting to note that you had a fairly strong early experience with the special warfare community.

I did. First of all, going to JFK Center at Fort Bragg for the course then that they ran for advisors and trainers, I was fascinated by the Army Special Forces and their training and unique missions. I was highly impressed with the senior-staff NCOs and warrant officers there. I got to know many of them and their superb officers through the years.

Later, as a lieutenant colonel, I headed a section at our Marine Corps headquarters that was responsible for special operations and terrorism counteraction issues and capabilities. It was an interesting time in that we made decisions on the Marine Corps’ contribution to SOF and developed the MEU(SOC) concept at the time.

How does that affect your approach today to your philosophies of service, command, management, diplomacy, and all the other things that you have done over the past couple of decades?

I obviously had a real fascination with small-unit tactics and individual field skills, and being with the Vietnamese Marines I think taught me a great deal. They were basically light infantry. They lived off the land. We did not have MREs or C-rations or anything like that. So, their field skills and their bush knowledge were really great. I saw how they operated, like the enemy, as opposed to American units that had helicopters and heavy logistics lines. The Vietnamese didn’t like helicopters coming into their areas unless it was for critical requirements. It would disclose their positions, especially when you’re in the jungle. They operated with very little equipment. And I thought for that kind of war, it was the right approach. Americans with such a heavy personal load, but also the logistics support dependency and everything else, I thought limited us.

The other exposure I got, as part of the course at Bragg, was language through training, high-intensity language training, with Vietnamese families that were down there that were contracted to teach us, not only the language but also about the customs and the culture. Of course, the best teacher was being exposed to that and living in the villages; they had a quartering act in Vietnam, so you moved in with the people when we were in the villages. I got to see the war from that side, from the people’s perspective.

It didn’t dawn on me how different a perspective on that war that I was seeing until I got back after my first tour and at the Basic School, where I joined back up with a number of my contemporaries who had come back from the Marine divisions in the north, the 1st and 3rd Marine divisions. When we would talk about the war, I realized that I saw a totally different war. First of all, I saw the war from the DMZ [demilitarized zone] all the way down to the Mekong Delta, because the Vietnamese Marines moved around. I also saw the war through the eyes of the people.

You weren’t just in the northern I Corps region?

I was actually in all four corps areas – the Capital Military District and the Rung Sat Special Zone, all the sectors of South Vietnam. I saw everything from conventional fighting against the North Vietnamese Army to pure guerilla operations, along with the riverine operations. I operated in the mountains, coastal areas, swamp/river networks, jungle, and urban areas. It was kind of this totality of what the war was about, and it was very different in each of these areas. But I also saw it from the perspective of the people, as I said, which I think gave me a totally different view than those who were only with U.S. units and had really little exposure to the population. They didn’t understand the people, didn’t talk to them, and didn’t live with them.

Our approach with the Vietnamese Marines goes back to [Lt. Col. Victor] Croziat, who established the Marine Advisory Unit, and who had been with the French during the Indo-China War as an observer. He believed the most effective way to advise is to throw yourself totally in and trust the Vietnamese. So, we only had two officers to every battalion. We didn’t have advisory teams like most other advisory efforts. Our radio operators were Vietnamese Marines and usually the battalions were split, so I rarely saw another American.

So, you were very much like the small two- and three-man teams the Special Forces would use?

The senior advisor stayed with the battalion commander and the junior advisor, what I was, went out with anything from a squad-size patrol to a company-sized operation. If the battalion split, the XO would take half and I’d go with him. You were completely exposed to small-unit operations and out on your own in that environment.

You must have been humping a lot in Vietnam as a young lieutenant.

Oh, we did. I think the time I spent with small units on light infantry operations, patrols, etc., working at small-unit skills and living with the people, sort of shaped my view, especially in that kind of counterinsurgency mission.

Your mid-level career – major, lieutenant colonel, and such – anything defining or special in there for you?

My mid-career, non-operational tours tended to be training, teaching, and instruction assignments. I ran an infantry training center at Camp Lejeune. I also taught at our Basic School, and was always in tactics or operations instruction. I also taught at our Marine Corps Command and Staff College. I tended to have a second track in training and education assignments, along with working in doctrine development, when I was not in the operational forces. In the operational forces, I was a battalion commander, executive officer of a battalion, and operations officer, all infantry.

But always with a hands-on, field officer orientation?

Yes.

Can you talk a bit about your command-level experience?

After command of the platoons, companies, and battalion, I commanded a Marine infantry regiment on Okinawa, Marine Expeditionary Unit also on Okinawa, Marine Expeditionary Force on the West Coast, Joint/Combined Task Force in Somalia, and Unified Command [U.S. Central Command].

[Former Commandant of the Marine Corps] Chuck Krulak was sure proud of your work there, by the way. Can you talk a bit about your work with him?

Chuck revamped the Combat Development Center at Quantico, [Va.] because he felt strongly that it didn’t have the relevance to the operational forces that he wanted it to have. Obviously, Quantico’s mission dealt with concepts, doctrine, organization, requirements and training, and education. He wanted to really energize it. His measure of success was not the paper you’re producing but whether the operational forces thought we were credible and met their needs. He wanted Quantico to be something the entire Marine Corps saw as the heart, soul, and mind of the Corps and delivering what they needed to be successful on the battlefield. As his deputy, I was involved in much of the dynamic restructuring he did at Quantico.

You operated under the very early implementations of Goldwater-Nichols/Nunn-Cohen. You then lived with those reforms for the rest of your career. Given that you were there at the beginning – before that, during, and after – with a little bit of perspective as we’re now 20-some years along since the legislation became law, what do you like about the Goldwater-Nichols/Nunn-Cohen construct today? What do you dislike, and what would you change if you could?

First of all, I thought it was probably the greatest piece of legislation, military legislation, that has been enacted for several reasons. Obviously, the services prior to that operated in what I would call a “deconfliction” mode. In other words, their sole interaction was to stay out of each other’s way and to find a way of doing that. When Goldwater-Nichols was brewing, I was at our Marine Corps headquarters and I somehow got involved in the whole “joint” business. I knew our service chief at the time wanted to kill it, along with all the other service chiefs. It was the only thing we cooperated on. I had a long discussion with the commandant about this – “Why do you want to kill it?” And he said, “Well, this is the danger. Anytime you have legislation that forces integration, it creates another bureaucratic level, so we’re going to have this class of mandarins,” he said, “Purple-suiters imposed on top of the services.”

Their fear was that there would be this joint structure that would be separate from the services. If you think about the way the intelligence community came together after 9/11, and Homeland Security earlier in this decade, that’s exactly what they did. There is a tendency to create more bureaucracy that sits on top and it tries to force integration and it never works. But I thought the brilliance of Goldwater-Nichols was that the integrating structure, the joint command structure, would come from the services. In other words, you as a serving officer would have your tours in the joint commands but would return to your service. There was also a congressionally mandated demand for quality in joint officers, and you needed those joint tours to get promotion.

So, Congress was creating it out of whole cloth, and in each joint command [CENTCOM, EUCOM, PACOM, etc.] would be a service component, so you would have service representation, a sense of ownership, and true participation in decisions. There weren’t these “purple-suiters” that other nations’ militaries have tried before.

I went into the joint world the day I got promoted to brigadier general and spent virtually my entire tenure as a general officer in joint work; I watched it go from that “deconfliction” construct to coordination to true integration by the time I left the service in 2000. It needed more improvement and it’s getting there now, but in the beginning everything was identified as Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and special operations. Ten years later, from what I saw, people were blind to uniforms. When we were creating organizations for a mission and task organizing, people were talking about capabilities, melding capabilities. I thought that the integration and the synergy and the efficiency you get – and I saw this as a joint commander – was a tremendous advancement.

The big problems were in joint doctrine. It was like pulling teeth to get the services to agree on creating doctrine for joint capabilities like a land component command, a logistics component command, or a joint air component. But it evolved. The air was the toughest one at the beginning, but it actually was the first to get integrated. We now need to effectively integrate the different agencies of government as we did the services.

Such as the 2002 Department of Defense Title 10 addition that allowed SOF officers to create and command Joint Task Forces?

I think SOF should be a fifth component. I think having JSOTFs [Joint Special Operations Task Forces] are operationally effective ways to employ SOF. But the combatant commander, the regional combatant commander, needs to be in charge. Nobody should come into my area of operations [AOR] and conduct operations without me being in charge and without me knowing about it. That has happened.

Isn’t it fair to say that a number of the problems we had in Mogadishu back in 1993 were because you had a JSOC component in there not properly coordinating with the other U.S. and United Nations forces? What were your personal observations of that situation when you arrived?

When Ambassador Robert Oakley and I landed three days after the Battle of Mogadishu, Oct. 3rd and 4th, 1993, our mission – we had previously stopped in Eritrea and Ethiopia and contacted Gen. [Mohamed Farrah] Aidid – was to make arrangements to go out to his hideout to meet him. We were going to be picked up by his gunmen and going to demand the release of Warrant Officer Michael Durant [a 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment pilot who had been shot down and captured during the firefight], and to get a ceasefire and then put things back together.

When we landed, it was a mess in there. You couldn’t tell who was in charge of anything. Oakley said to me, “Before we go out tomorrow morning, make sure all military operations are shut down. I don’t want to be in Aidid’s headquarters and all of a sudden, there’s an attack on us.”

So, I had to deal with five separate military commands without any unity of command, a basic guiding principle of war. Nobody was in charge. There should have been one U.S. commander there.

How did the talks over the return of Mike Durant and Aidid’s captured subordinates go?

He ought to send a big “thank you” to Ambassador Bob Oakley. Aidid’s guys wanted an exchange of prisoners, to which Oakley said, “That’s not going to happen. We’re not going to do that and there’s no negotiating for prisoners. Before we go any further, you have to release him unconditionally. That’s the first gesture.”

It was heated, the debate and discussion. It was just Oakley, me, and Randy Beer, the three of us there in this compound with them. It was tense but they respected Oakley like no one else. In the end, they agreed. I had an interesting discussion with Aidid about the tactics and strategy he used as he confronted the SOF units and others at that time. He was a clever tactician.

We really did play into his hands, then?

I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t there, but he was describing from his end the tactics they applied.

Is it true Aidid was bipolar?

Oh! Definitely! Schizophrenic. There were really three Aidids, with three distinct personalities that I could determine from my first tour there with Operation Restore Hope.

This interview, published in four parts for the Web,  was first published in its entirety in The Year in Defense: Naval Edition for 2010.

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