Gates seeks tighter focus on current conflicts
Of all the changes at the Pentagon since the departure of Donald Rumsfeld, arguably the most significant in the management of the department has been the thawing in relations between the uniformed military and their civilian overseers. Rumsfeld's successor, Robert Gates, has gone out of his way both rhetorically and operationally to reach out to all ranks in most major decisions he has made as US secretary of defense.
Yet in his first 19 months in the job, Gates has done something that Rumsfeld contemplated only rarely in the six years he held the Pentagon's reins. Gates has fired, forced to resign or failed to renominate at least half a dozen of the highest-ranking generals and service secretaries.
These personnel changes were sparked by different incidents. However, taken together, they paint a clear picture of Gates's vision for the US military and his desire to have the Pentagon focus more on the two wars at hand – Iraq and Afghanistan – rather than gazing into the distant future.
A cure for 'next-war-itis'
Although Rumsfeld built a reputation as a disdainful and occasionally vindictive taskmaster, he never dismissed a single general or admiral, even as the war in Iraq spiralled out of control. By contrast, Gates has targeted some of the most senior positions in the Pentagon, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the head of US Central Command, the military headquarters responsible for the Middle East and Central Asia.
To most Pentagon observers, Gates's moves are an effort to return accountability to the Pentagon's leadership. A further goal, however, has been to shift a Pentagon bureaucracy that Gates believes is still not on a war footing seven years after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.
Almost all of his high-profile sackings have been of military and civilian leaders who, in one way or another, failed to focus on the two ongoing wars and instead continued to spend time and money on planning and weaponry intended to address future threats. This is a condition for which Gates has even invented a term: 'next-war-itis'.
The signal was sent out in the very first days of Gates's tenure. Revelations that the Army's premier health-care facility, the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, had subjected dozens of war veterans to substandard outpatient treatment – including mould-infested barracks – broke just weeks after he was sworn in. Gates soon requested the resignation of Francis Harvey, the secretary of the army. Shortly thereafter the army's surgeon general, Lieutenant-General Kevin Kiley, was also forced to submit his resignation.
Gates said his main concerns were not so much about the poor handling of the scandal – in which both Harvey and Kiley sought to blame others – as what it revealed about the army itself. Much like the army leadership's delay in getting heavily armoured troop carriers to Iraq to protect soldiers from roadside bombs, Gates felt the failures at the hospital showed the army had not moved quickly enough to deal with a changing war – one from which far more soldiers were coming home wounded than expected.
This lack of urgency also played a part in Gates's decision not to renominate Marine General Peter Pace as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which made Pace the first chairman since the Vietnam War to serve only a single two-year term. Publicly, Gates cited as the reason for his decision the prospect of a gruelling nomination fight in the Senate that would distract the Pentagon at a particularly tough time during the Iraq war. But senior defence officials said at the time that if Gates had real confidence in Pace's stewardship of the wars, he would have fought to keep him. More telling was the man Gates chose to replace Pace: Admiral Michael Mullen, chief of naval operations. Gates was clear about his reasons; Mullen was highly focused on the current fight. Gates also noted that when asked about challenges faced by the military, Mullen was the lone service chief to voice a concern outside his own service, being worried about the toll the Iraq War was taking on the army.
The most recent departures came in June 2008, when US Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and General Michael Moseley, the air force chief of staff, were forced to resign, ostensibly over a series of spectacular failures in the air force's stewardship of the US nuclear arsenal. In one case, in August 2007, a B-52 flew across the country with four nuclear warheads strapped under its wing by mistake; in a 2006 incident, revealed in March 2008, fuses for nuclear missiles were accidentally shipped to Taiwan.
However, these dismissals were also clearly meant to send a message that the air force was too concerned about future conflicts, like a potential war with China or a resurgent Russia, rather than current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.They also came amidst bitter disagreement over the air force's newest stealth fighter plane, the F-22. Gates approved the purchase of 183 of the aircraft, less than half the 381 the air force had wanted, and derisively noted that it had never flown on a mission in Afghanistan or Iraq. Meanwhile, he was engaged in a battle over the service's inability to get more unmanned drones flying over Iraq and Afghanistan.
It did not help Wynne and Moseley's case that, even after Gates decided on the lower number of F-22s, air force leaders continued to push publicly for more. In February, Gates ordered Wynne to rebuke a four-star air-force general for insisting in a media interview that the service would eventually find a way to acquire 381 of the fighters, a move a Pentagon official close to Gates called 'borderline insubordination'. Defence officials said Gates was particularly incensed by Wynne's continued advocacy for the aircraft; as a civilian, Wynne was a member of the political administration and required to promote the president's policies.
The acceptable limits of dissent were also central to another important departure, the resignation in March 2008 of US Navy Admiral William 'Fox' Fallon as head of US Central Command. Gates, who appointed Fallon as CENTCOM commander, has insisted that the decision to leave was Fallon's alone. But by the time it came, it was one with which Gates certainly did not disagree.
Over the course of his abbreviated year-long command, Fallon had habitually disagreed publicly with administration policy. Just days after President George W. Bush warned that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to 'World War Three' and Vice President Dick Cheney promised 'serious consequences' if Tehran did not drop its uranium enrichment, Fallon gave an interview to the Financial Times in which he said, 'Generally, the bellicose comments are not particularly helpful'. In an Esquire magazine article that eventually doomed him, Fallon defended his trip to Egypt and meeting with President Hosni Mubarak, despite White House criticism, and went on to query the administration's strategy towards Pakistan.
Fallon will be replaced at CENTCOM by General David Petraeus, who assumed command of US forces in Iraq after writing the US Army's new counter-insurgency doctrine. Petraeus is certainly a man steeped in the conflicts of today.
While Gates has cut a swath through the top military brass, he has consistently reached out to the uniformed military. On almost every domestic and foreign trip he takes, for example, Gates sets up meetings with enlisted soldiers and orders all officers out of the room so that he can hear their complaints and concerns candidly.
And while he might not tolerate too much public dissent from military leaders, inside the Pentagon he has encouraged general and flag officers to speak their mind during occasionally intense debates over the military's future direction. As one three-star Pentagon general told the Los Angeles Times: 'Previous folks were confident they had the answer. And my sense is senior leadership, uniformed and civilian, is now saying, "I am not sure I have the answer, so let's have the discussion. "'
The Gates legacy
Gates's predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, came into office vowing to push the 'transformation' of the US military. In Rumsfeld's view, the military – particularly the army – was too wedded to its Cold War heavy weaponry, instead of looking to technological advances, like GPS-guided bombs and sophisticated surveillance drones, to clear the fog of war and allow the Pentagon to pare back on conventional ground forces.
The word 'transformation' is rarely uttered any more inside the Pentagon. Gates's future vision has been more prosaic and focused on manpower-intensive counter-insurgencies that rely less on technology and more on adaptable human leaders on the ground.
When he replaced Pace with Mullen as Joint Chiefs chairman in June 2007, Gates demonstrated his desire to get an officer focused on current wars into the military's top job. The same logic lies behind Gates's more recent selection for the new US Air Force chief of staff. If confirmed, General Norton Schwartz would be the first man without a background in fighters or bombers to occupy the role since the service's birth after the Second World War. Schwartz, who heads the US Transportation Command, rose through the ranks as a cargo pilot and flew AC-130 gunships during his tenure in the special forces.
In the army, Gates has not only promoted Petraeus, but has also recently nominated two vocal advocates of counter-insurgency warfare to influential posts. Lieutenant-General Peter Chiarelli will become the army vice chief, seen as the service's chief operating officer; while Lieutenant-General Martin Dempsey, who was Fallon's CENTCOM deputy and has been acting as commander before Petraeus arrives, becomes head of the army's training and doctrine command.
In selecting such officers, Gates is attempting to leave a lasting legacy as the military grapples with its spending and structure in a post-Iraq world. This is a legacy with which some in the military still disagree, arguing that small wars, while difficult and time-consuming, are easy to prepare for and do not threaten the long-term survival of the US. Big wars, they argue, are expensive, require endless training and investment, and are the kind of conflicts that involve struggles for national survival.
The debate between current war and future war is one that will confront the defence secretary in the next administration.
