What Will Gates’ Legacy Be at Defense?
By Jed Babbin
The worst-kept secret in the Pentagon today – discussed furtively among the most senior military and civilian staff and around the correspondents’ corridor – is Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s intention to resign from the post he has held since 2006. Why Gates hasn’t yet resigned is a matter between him and the president. But one event may be instructive, and it points to his determination to craft his legacy.
In June 2009, while I was the editor of a political journal’s website, we published an article that was highly critical the changes Gates had imposed on the armed services, especially in cutting advanced weapon systems – such as the Air Force F-22 and the Navy DDX – which many defense experts believe are essential to maintaining America’s battlefield advantage.
That article spurred Geoff Morell, Gates’s press secretary, to call me and lambaste both our publication and the two retired generals who had authored it. (Morrell’s oft-demonstrated wrath has made him one of the most unpopular Pentagon press secretaries in memory.) Arguing that Gates is a latter-day Cincinnatus, Morell insisted that Gates didn’t need or really want the Defense Secretary’s job and would rather go back to Texas. He added that Gates was only staying out of a sense of duty.
Perhaps. But Gates is a long-time Washington insider, and plays the game as well as anyone since James Baker was White House chief of staff. Gates – a Baker protégé — listens far more closely to congressional liberals than to the military professionals who serve under him. Gates must know that the military officer corps holds him in low esteem and that they – more than journalists and congressmen whose praise he cultivates – will inform the history of his tenure at the Pentagon.
In 2007, Gates had to decide if Gen. Peter Pace would be nominated for a second term as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mi) threatened a contentious hearing on the Iraq war if Gates and President Bush backed the smart, telegenic Vietnam hero who was held in the highest regard throughout the uniformed services. Gates decided against Pace, leading the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that “the man running the Pentagon is Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan. For that matter, is George W. Bush still President?”
Gates had been edging away from President Bush and his agenda long before Obama was elected. In his most memorable speech, given in May 2008, Gates condemned what he called “next war-itis,” the “propensity of much of the defense establishment to be in favor of what might be needed in a future conflict.” He added that it was hard to conceive of a conventional war.
In abandoning the culture of “next war-itis” Gates reversed not only technological advancement but also the forward-thinking mentality that led to the rise of generals such as David Petraeus and James Mattis, the new CENTCOM commander.
Disdaining development of military technology, Gates decided and imposed the significant cuts in the acquisition of major new weapon systems before the Quadrennial Defense Review was completed. The QDR is designed to provide the analytical basis for defense budgets and weapon acquisitions. Gates’s far-reaching decisions without that analytical basis cost him credibility within the military establishment.
Gates again over-reached by promising a sea-based missile defense for Poland and our European allies to replace the ground-based defense system promised by President Bush.
Navy experts have told me that the Obama-Gates plan is a promise the Navy can’t keep because there are too-few missile defense ships in the fleet to meet it. To constantly deploy three – as the Obama-Gates plan provides – would require nine ships to enable rotations for crew rest and normal refitting. Without robbing ships from the fleet defense role, there cannot be nine available to protect Europe.
Abandoning Pace, cutting the future defense systems and then over-promising on missile defense, Gates has lost the trust of too much of that defense establishment. Gates’s support for the rapid repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” further undercut that trust.
Both he and Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Michael Mullen supported the repeal – Mullen with undue enthusiasm – in a Senate hearing in February. Gates said that he wanted a study to determine the effect on the military before congress acted, but when congressional Democrats proposed an immediate repeal without waiting for the study, Gates gave lukewarm support to a repeal measure.
DADT will continue to complicate Gates’s tenure. Key Republicans were horrified by it and a strengthened Republican hand in the Senate may block Mullen’s reappointment.
Gates’s biggest battle – one which will keep him in the Defense Secretary’s chair at least until next February – will be the coming defense budget fight.
Liberal calls for major cuts in defense spending are becoming more frequent and more heated. This is not just another “guns vs. butter” argument between liberals and conservatives. As British economist Niall Ferguson highlighted in a recent speech, it is a battle inevitably resulting from the massive scale of new spending and the accumulation of government debt.
Ferguson said that by combating “…our crisis of private debt with an extraordinary expansion of public debt, we inevitably are going to reduce the resources available for national security in the years ahead…I fear that the financial crisis doesn’t just impact on the economy. It actually impacts on American power in the hardest sense.”
When the next defense budget is submitted in February, it will be up to Gates to argue it through a congress that is increasingly skeptical of the Afghanistan conflict and eager to cut military spending on the war and everything else. To the high praise of congressional liberals, Gates will not fight for any part of the budget the president believes to be expendable.
Gates’s legacy will not be decided in congressional hearings, but on future battlefields, both conventional and unconventional. History will decide if we are stronger or weaker, and its verdict will be unforgiving of political maneuvers which result in the latter.
