Robert Gates will reportedly stay on at the Pentagon as defense secretary at the start of the Obama administration. Defense experts react.

PETER BROOKES
Keeping Secretary Gates on is a good idea. He’s been a solid performer, including guiding the incredible turn-around of the situation in Iraq. Plus, he seems to have the trust and confidence of both sides of the aisle in Congress — a definite bonus.

On the practical side, with (at least) two wars ongoing, it makes bureaucratic sense for Obama’s ultimate choice for defense secretary to sit sidesaddle with Gates as his deputy for a period so he can get up to speed on the challenges that face the Pentagon and the country. I would expect Gates to be replaced by an Obama appointee within six to nine months — a year on the outside.

On the political side, keeping Gates in office gives Obama some breathing room to develop his own policies, avoiding early mistakes that might come to define his presidency. Or at worst, if things don’t go well for the new administration at the Pentagon or in the wars, Obama could scapegoat Gates as a holdover not only of the Bush administration, but of Bush policy, too.

— Peter Brookes is a Heritage Foundation senior fellow.


LAWRENCE DI RITA
President-Elect Obama’s decision to retain Secretary of Defense Robert Gates may be a safe decision in the near term. From another vantage point, it is a missed opportunity for the new administration. In keeping Gates, the Obama team may be unwittingly endorsing a status-quo element within the Pentagon that resisted the post-Cold War defense transformation that began in the late 1990s and was accelerated by President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and the senior military leaders they empowered. You never get a second chance to make a first impression; Obama’s first impression on those who prefer the relative comfort of the status quo to the uncertainty and difficulty of the long overdue change at the Defense Department is: “Don’t worry about me.”

President Bush replaced Rumsfeld with Gates because — notwithstanding Rumsfeld’s work in shaping and executing the transformation agenda — he wanted a fresh set of eyes on the conflict in Iraq. Secretary Gates, together with some new military leadership in key positions, provided those sets of eyes and President Bush’s revised strategy in Iraq has been a success. But the success in Iraq is not without cost — less focus on everything else.

When Gates took office, the national-security apparatus was undergoing the most rapid and profound transformation since the Department of Defense was established in 1947. Rumsfeld was acting at President Bush’s direction to bring the institution into the 21st Century. A partial list of the Bush/Rumsfeld program: the most extensive global military base closure and realignment since World War II; the complete realignment of the global U.S. force posture in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East; the expansion and modernization of U.S. special forces; the redesign of the United States Army; the most significant reduction in strategic forces in the nuclear era; the implementation and deployment of a basic system of defense against ballistic missiles; the creation of an entirely new civil-service system for the Department of Defense; the establishment of new military commands for the Homeland, and Africa; the list goes on.

Given what he believed would be a two-year mandate, Gates had little choice but to relegate much of this to the back burner. His first priority was clear: Address the situation in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Afghanistan. Gates’s able deputy Gordon England did his best to sustain the momentum on other issues.

There is no substitute for energy in the executive, though, and the secretary of defense is the Pentagon’s chief executive. The momentum needed to alter the basic direction of a large organization like the Department of Defense is entropic; it breaks down over time in the absence of renewed energy. The secretary of defense, vested with the authority of the president himself, provides it. Without it, there cannot be true change against the naturally centrifugal forces of status quo among defense contractors, members of Congress, and their constituents for whom defense spending is often viewed as a public-works program. Rumsfeld muscled his way through these forces without fear or favor. Gates, given what he believed would be limited time and a limited mandate, mostly avoided them.

Secretary Gates and his key lieutenants carry small digital clocks that count down to January 20, 2009, when their appointments expire. They must now reset those clocks, but it is unlikely they can reset their own focus and energy levels. In retaining Gates, Obama is declaring that he does not intend to use any of his own popularity and influence to sustain the defense-transformation momentum that began a decade ago and which President Bush accelerated and greatly expanded.

— Larry Di Rita served in a variety of assignments at the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2006, including as a chief aide to Secretary Rumsfeld. In 2003, he was policy adviser to the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs in Iraq.


VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
The Gates reappointment is welcome news, given that he has provided stable, sober leadership during two wars, and overseen dramatic improvement with the Petraeus surge. Gates’s stellar academic record and years of government service probably make him on paper one of the most qualified government servants in American history. He has proven tough in firing people who were caught in scandal or free-lanced to the media, and has been outspoken when necessary.

Politically it makes sense that, for a year or two, Obama won’t have to worry that a wartime liberal secretary might embarrass an incoming Democratic administration (cf. the ill-starred Les Aspin and controversies over homosexuals in the military, bottom-up-review, no tanks for Somalia, etc., and, then cf., the Clintonian face-saving scramble to find a centrist professional like Perry and then a Republican moderate replacement like Sen. Cohen).



That said, one wonders if, while these centrist appointments please moderates and conservatives (given the possibility of something much harder left), in aggregate they will undermine the hope and change mantra.

You see we are now moving well beyond the tentacles of the Clinton octopus (Emanuel, Podesta, Holder (?), etc.) and even the promise to reach across the aisle and appointment a Chuck Hagel-like anti-Bush maverick — and instead are entering Bush territory itself. And that raises questions beyond “adjustments” seen during the campaign on everything from drilling and coal to campaign financing and NAFTA.

Rightly or wrongly, Gates is the custodian of existing Bush U.S. military/defense policy (despite earlier positions on Iran not that much different from Obama’s advocacy of engagement without preconditions) and that touches upon everything from staying in Iraq until 2011 in accordance with the Petraeus plan; keeping Guantánamo open a bit longer; being tough on Russian aggression in Georgia; homeland-security provisions; movement ahead on missile defense (cf. the Obama campaign video on that); present policy toward Iran; Predator strikes in Pakistan; and on and on — many of which policies candidate hope-and-change Obama has strongly denounced in the recent past.

Imagine Candidate Obama announcing in August, “And if I am elected President, I promise to enact hope and change with Rahm Emanuel as my chief of staff, John Podesta as my transition chairman, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Larry Summers as my chief White House economic adviser, and Bob Gates as my secretary of defense.”

Bottom line: very good appointment.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.


MICHAEL LEDEEN
I’m very pleased that Bob Gates will remain at the Pentagon. He inherited a badly dispirited building and has restored its efficiency and morale — no small accomplishment. At the same time, he has learned firsthand about the often incredible qualities of our military, which I suspect surprised him at least a bit. I think he’s bonded with them, which means that they will be pleased he’s staying, and that’s enormously important. He’s one of Washington’s best listeners, which makes him a rara avis. And he’s got a first-class mind. He was Bill Casey’s favorite Soviet analyst, which says a lot.

Like the rest of us, he’s got some shortcomings — I’m not happy with his apparent reluctance to be tougher on Iran — but so what? He’s a real talent, he’s performed well, and he’ll serve President Obama loyally and candidly. Full marks to them both.

— Michael Ledeen is Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

CLIFFORD D. MAY
Bob Gates is far better than any of the other candidates President-Elect Obama might have been expected to select for his secretary of defense. He has time on the job — which means he is experienced in a way no senator or governor could be. He’s a seasoned professional who knows Washington and its Byzantine bureaucracies. He’s a grown-up. He understands how hard American troops fought, and how high a price they paid, to turn the situation around in Iraq. He knows what’s at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

If Obama retains Gates, he almost certainly retains Generals Petraeus and Odierno as well — and that, too, is all to the good. They are our most creative and competent military commanders, warriors in the best sense.

For extending Gates’s tenure, Obama will face carping and criticism — not just from Lefties who will complain that this isn’t the “change” they were promised, but also from the “realist” Right — those who wanted to see the job go to an outspoken critic of the Iraq mission, such as Chuck Hagel, Lawrence Korb, or Wesley Clark.

By retaining Gates, Obama sends the message that he intends to focus on the economy, that he will be spending most of his time attempting to fix what is broken, rather than tinkering with what’s working reasonably well. Some might see that as a conservative impulse — or maybe just good management. Come to think of it, that does represent a kind of change.

— Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism .


MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS
The report that Barack Obama may keep Robert Gates on as secretary of defense, at least for a while, is good news. Constitutionally, we are required to change presidents according to schedule, even in the midst of a war. Under the circumstances, Gates provides continuity during wartime. The reports that Obama will name Jim Jones — the former Marine commandant and Supreme Allied Commander, Europe — also bodes well. Between them, Gates and Jones will, I believe, provide excellent advice to the new president. Whether he listens or not is a different matter.

I am a “two cheers” for Rumsfeld guy. But I concluded that by the end of 2006, his time had passed. He was more interested in extracting the military from Iraq than winning. The Gates-Petraeus team has been a success in Iraq and will, I believe, continue to work with Petraeus as commander of U.S. Central Command, with responsibility not only for Iraq, but Iran and Afghanistan as well. We should also remember that Gates has not hesitated to exercise civilian control of the military. Not only has Gates fired the secretaries of the Army and Air Force and the chief of staff of the Air Force, but he has signed a National Defense Strategy document over the objections of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And he didn’t hesitate to accept the decision of Adm. William Fallon to step down when he took issue with Bush’s policy toward Iran. All in all, a good choice.

— Mackubin Thomas Owens is a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He served 30 years in the Marine Corps and Marine Corps Reserve, including service in Vietnam as an infantry platoon commander in 1968-69. He is the editor of Orbis.

Editor's note: This feature has been adjusted since posting.