Uncategorized

The Robert Gates Clock Is Ticking (Or Maybe Not)

By Michael Scherer | @michaelscherer | August 16, 2010 | +

Set your countdown clocks to 2011, when Robert Gates, Defense Secretary to George W. Bush and Barack Obama, plans to step down. “It would be a mistake to wait until January 2012,” he tells Foreign Policy, in an exclusive interview. “This is not the kind of job you want to fill in the spring of an election year.”

[UPDATE: Fred Kaplan, the author of the Foreign Policy article, emails to point out that Gates may be bluffing. Indeed Gates has done it before. Writes Kaplan:

Gates did not tell me that he is leaving in 2011. He said that he'd like to leave, and thinks he should leave, in 2011. However, I begin the piece by noting that, in my last interview with Gates, at the end of 2007, I asked him if he'd consider staying on in the next administration. He replied, at the time, that the circumstances under which he'd do that were "inconceivable." So when I interviewed him for FP last month, I asked him what changed. He confessed that he'd been engaging in a "covert action." He was telling everybody that he really wanted to go, in hopes that this would discourage the next president from asking him to stay - but all along he knew that if the next president did ask him to stay, he would.

Read the entire Kaplan piece here.]

Considering that the 2012 election season is set to begin at the end of 2010, this may suggest an early 2011 exit for Gates. Gates departure may be felt less on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where there are many cooks in the kitchen, than in his personal crusade to bring some level of rationality to the defense budget. It’s an uphill slog that now depends significantly on Gates own credibility and star power. Fareed Zakaria asks today, “Can anyone seriously question Gates’s ideas on the merits?” Probably not. But with Gates gone, it will be that much easier for the approriators and the lobbyists to gain, once again, the upper hand.

Dwight Eisenhower was right, after all. The military industrial complex presents a “grave danger.” Aside from Gates, I can think of few who might be in a position to take it on directly.

Related Topics: military industrial complex, Robert Gates, Uncategorized

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  • http://djtrudeau.wordpress.com djtrudeau

    This is one of those issues that should be on the top of everyone’s talking list. For all the screaming about stimulus and health care bills, they don’t represent the types of systemic costs that are creating the biggest budget issue going into the future. Defense, social security, and other “you can’t touch these” areas are not being addressed because they do shake up the status quo and changing them will cause immediate sacrifice by the American people.

    I think that’s a key to why it isn’t at the top of the agenda, even for many who claim spending is the number one issue of the day. We’ve now gotten to the point where we don’t want to sacrifice. We want to go to war without having to change anything at home. We don’t want to change the age you go into social security because we don’t want to stick it out any longer. And people who are making record amounts of money don’t want to pay any more taxes.

    I’d love to say I’m not guilty of these, but I probably am. So let’s keep arguing about mosques in cities we don’t live in or how stupid Palin’s latest quote is. It keeps our attention focused on what other folks are doing wrong and less on ourselves. It does make me grateful for those (like soldiers) who do make the sacrifice. It also makes me angry at the complacent egos who use them for their own ideological causes.

  • michaelfury

    “He is not trying to cut the actual defense budget; he merely wants to increase efficiency while reducing bureaucracy, waste, and duplication.”

    - Fareed Zakaria

    http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/forever-war/

  • mycophile

    very well said
    .
    we are all addicted to the spoils of deficit spending
    .
    even its most vocal critics
    .
    let’s hear from some of them
    .
    i don’t have to name you, do I?
    .
    and, no, i don’t mean let’s hear you just bash deficit spending again.
    ,.
    I mean let’s hear you about making huge sacrifices in the economic growth and world policing models so dear to you and in your own lives in order to reverse our spiral course down the economic toilet bowl.
    .
    Let’s hear you talk about saying no to the Complex.
    .
    but most importantly, How? How shall we fashion our withdrawal scheme so that we survive it?

  • carotexas1

    Michael you might tell Chuck Todd about the Kaplan update, he has already offered the job to Hilary.

  • apr2563

    Eisenhower was right. I know you are relatively young Michael. How long did it take you to figure this out?

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