Richard
02-17-2009, 11:58
Can Robert Gates Transform the Pentagon?
By MARK THOMPSON
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1879176,00.html
If you are a firm believer in the war in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert Gates' grim assessment last month of what lies in store for the U.S. might have made you shudder. "If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money, to be honest," he said.
But if you are a defense contractor who has enjoyed a decade of bottomless Pentagon funding, it was Gates' comments about a struggle much closer to home that are keeping you up at night. "The spigot of defense spending that opened on 9/11 is closing," he said. "With two major campaigns ongoing, the economic crisis and resulting budget pressures will force hard choices on this department."
Gates, the U.S.'s 22nd Defense Secretary, has declared a low-key war against the military services and the way they develop and buy the weapons they use to defend the nation. Up until now, he has done that mostly by jawboning: The U.S. can't "eliminate national-security risks through higher defense budgets, to do everything and buy everything," Gates says in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. That futile quest has led to weapons that "have grown ever more baroque, have become ever more costly, are taking longer to build and are being fielded in ever dwindling quantities."
But his war of words is about to become very real. As he prepares a budget for next year, Gates must decide the fate of a number of fantastically expensive weapons programs the military services say they need. He can't fund them all--and might be wise to take a knife to them all. In this, Gates has little choice: the military's annual budget has finished growing, and the billions it once imagined it might spend on future weapons have evaporated. So cuts--and big ones--are coming, and Gates will be the man who makes them.
Though Gates was hired by George W. Bush to clean up the mismanaged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates' greatest legacy may come in what he calls a "strategic reshaping" that better outfits the U.S. military to wage coming wars. Future weapons buys must "be driven more by the actual capabilities of potential adversaries," Gates told Congress a few weeks ago, "and less by what is technologically feasible given unlimited time and resources." Pentagon procurement, he said, is plagued by a "risk-averse culture, a litigious process, parochial interests, excessive and changing requirements, budget churn and instability and sometimes adversarial relationships within the Department of Defense."
Gates, 65, speaks with a flat Kansas twang that masks the edge he honed during a 26-year career at the CIA, where he was director during Bush 41's presidency. Following Bill Clinton's election in 1992, Gates left the capital for a lakeside home near Seattle, wrote a book and sat on corporate boards before moving to Texas, where he served at Texas A&M University for seven years, the last four as its president. "An obstinate bureaucracy can be a formidable antagonist," Gates said of the Pentagon in From the Shadows (1996), his memoir, "especially when giving up money is involved." Attempting to change the Pentagon has defeated nearly every one of Gates' predecessors. If he prevails, he will have done more to transform the Pentagon than anything his immediate predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, a self-proclaimed king of transformation, was able to accomplish. "I have no intention," Gates said late last year, "of being a caretaker Secretary."
In the coming days, Gates will have to decide what to do about countless weapons programs. Here are the three that matter most.
The Air Force
Gates' first showdown looms with a $350 million--a--pop fighter jet. (cont'd)
The Navy
Gates hasn't torpedoed anything that belongs to the Navy--yet. But its $100 billion plan to buy a new fleet of 100,000-ton aircraft carriers (and the ships and subs to defend them) is a tempting target. (cont'd)
The Army
Gates' final target is on land. The Army is getting $160 billion to outfit a third of its force with a complex network of electronically linked vehicles, beginning in 2015. This supposedly synchronized web of vehicles is called the Future Combat Systems (FCS) and would include tanks, troop carriers and unmanned aircraft ostensibly knit together in a computerized cavalry. (cont'd)
Gates, tempered by his decades of seeing what U.S. intelligence could--and could not--do, is leery of the buzzwords and silver bullets that ricochet around the Pentagon. "Be modest about what military force can accomplish and what technology can accomplish," he told an audience of midcareer military and intelligence officials last fall. War is "inevitably tragic, inefficient and uncertain," he said. So is taking on the Pentagon.
By MARK THOMPSON
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1879176,00.html
If you are a firm believer in the war in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert Gates' grim assessment last month of what lies in store for the U.S. might have made you shudder. "If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money, to be honest," he said.
But if you are a defense contractor who has enjoyed a decade of bottomless Pentagon funding, it was Gates' comments about a struggle much closer to home that are keeping you up at night. "The spigot of defense spending that opened on 9/11 is closing," he said. "With two major campaigns ongoing, the economic crisis and resulting budget pressures will force hard choices on this department."
Gates, the U.S.'s 22nd Defense Secretary, has declared a low-key war against the military services and the way they develop and buy the weapons they use to defend the nation. Up until now, he has done that mostly by jawboning: The U.S. can't "eliminate national-security risks through higher defense budgets, to do everything and buy everything," Gates says in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. That futile quest has led to weapons that "have grown ever more baroque, have become ever more costly, are taking longer to build and are being fielded in ever dwindling quantities."
But his war of words is about to become very real. As he prepares a budget for next year, Gates must decide the fate of a number of fantastically expensive weapons programs the military services say they need. He can't fund them all--and might be wise to take a knife to them all. In this, Gates has little choice: the military's annual budget has finished growing, and the billions it once imagined it might spend on future weapons have evaporated. So cuts--and big ones--are coming, and Gates will be the man who makes them.
Though Gates was hired by George W. Bush to clean up the mismanaged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates' greatest legacy may come in what he calls a "strategic reshaping" that better outfits the U.S. military to wage coming wars. Future weapons buys must "be driven more by the actual capabilities of potential adversaries," Gates told Congress a few weeks ago, "and less by what is technologically feasible given unlimited time and resources." Pentagon procurement, he said, is plagued by a "risk-averse culture, a litigious process, parochial interests, excessive and changing requirements, budget churn and instability and sometimes adversarial relationships within the Department of Defense."
Gates, 65, speaks with a flat Kansas twang that masks the edge he honed during a 26-year career at the CIA, where he was director during Bush 41's presidency. Following Bill Clinton's election in 1992, Gates left the capital for a lakeside home near Seattle, wrote a book and sat on corporate boards before moving to Texas, where he served at Texas A&M University for seven years, the last four as its president. "An obstinate bureaucracy can be a formidable antagonist," Gates said of the Pentagon in From the Shadows (1996), his memoir, "especially when giving up money is involved." Attempting to change the Pentagon has defeated nearly every one of Gates' predecessors. If he prevails, he will have done more to transform the Pentagon than anything his immediate predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, a self-proclaimed king of transformation, was able to accomplish. "I have no intention," Gates said late last year, "of being a caretaker Secretary."
In the coming days, Gates will have to decide what to do about countless weapons programs. Here are the three that matter most.
The Air Force
Gates' first showdown looms with a $350 million--a--pop fighter jet. (cont'd)
The Navy
Gates hasn't torpedoed anything that belongs to the Navy--yet. But its $100 billion plan to buy a new fleet of 100,000-ton aircraft carriers (and the ships and subs to defend them) is a tempting target. (cont'd)
The Army
Gates' final target is on land. The Army is getting $160 billion to outfit a third of its force with a complex network of electronically linked vehicles, beginning in 2015. This supposedly synchronized web of vehicles is called the Future Combat Systems (FCS) and would include tanks, troop carriers and unmanned aircraft ostensibly knit together in a computerized cavalry. (cont'd)
Gates, tempered by his decades of seeing what U.S. intelligence could--and could not--do, is leery of the buzzwords and silver bullets that ricochet around the Pentagon. "Be modest about what military force can accomplish and what technology can accomplish," he told an audience of midcareer military and intelligence officials last fall. War is "inevitably tragic, inefficient and uncertain," he said. So is taking on the Pentagon.