Robert Gates may have been the antidote to Donald Rumsfeld and written an honest memoir, but he was also integral to stoking the fire of U.S. hostility toward Iran.
Now’s Not the Time to Go Soft on Robert Gates
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Robert Gates
America’s Orphaned Diplomacy
Thanks to some well-timed diplomacy this September, the world narrowly escaped another U.S. intervention in the Middle East. But military action in Syria was not prevented by a professional diplomatic strategy on the part of the Obama administration—that part was...
Will Panetta Help the State Department?
Leon Panetta, the new Pentagon chief, got through his confirmation hearings the newfangled way: by revealing as little as possible about what he’d do in office. He tipped his hand a bit more last week by calling “completely unacceptable” the across-theboard military cuts planned in the event the next debt deal fails.
The World According to Robert Gates
Calls for deep cuts in the federal deficit have returned the military budget–now more than twice the 2001 budget even before counting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan–to the fiscal chopping block for the first time in ten years. In response, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spent his last months in office stiffening his rhetorical defense of the Pentagon budget. His discourse reveals both the distance we have come in recent years in eliminating Pentagon inefficiencies and excesses, and the numerous dangers threatening American security around the world.
Military Spending Takes its Place at the Table
The two chairs of the Deficit Reduction Commission have floated their trial balloon. Here’s my good news/ bad news quick take on their proposals for military spending:
Good news:
- Cutting military spending—the formerly untouchable component of the budget—is off-limits no more. Secretary Gates has been proposing “cuts” that are actually shaved, and redirected, increases. What the Deficit Commission chairs are proposing is, actually, cuts.
- Military spending gets equal treatment! It makes up half the discretionary budget (what Congress votes on every year). The team of Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson propose cutting $100 billion from defense, and $100 billion from everything else. Proportional, in other words.
- This includes $20 billion in weapons buys. This would be the largest cut in this budget since the end of the cold war. The list includes items that IPS’ Unified Security Budget task force, which I chair, and the Sustainable Defense Task Force, of which I am a member, have recommended, including ending, finally, the hybrid helicopter plane—the V-22 Osprey—that’s struggled to become airborne since the eighties, and that even Dick Cheney tried to kill; canceling the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle program; cutting in half buys of the Joint Strike Fighter plane, the most expensive weapons program EVER; and further cutting the grab bag of high-tech toys, the Future Combat Systems.
- They propose cutting 1/3 of our overseas bases, bringing home 150,000 of our troops in Europe and Asia, which IPS has also been advocating for years. The savings they project from this are far smaller than our projections.
Bad news:
- They make no mention of savings to be gained from cuts to the nuclear weapons complex, for example, or to unneeded aircraft fighter wings, or submarines, or destroyers.
- They get to their $100 billion number by gesturing toward large quantities of unspecified “efficiencies.”
- While reassigning Defense Secretary Gates’ projected savings to the deficit is better than his plans to plow them back into his own budget, this money is sorely needed for job-creating investment.
- No sooner had the balloon been launched than other members of the Commission began taking pot shots at it. Further deliberations, and the voting, are still to come.
Gorbachev of the Pentagon?
The United States is facing a Soviet-sized crisis. Where is the Gorbachev who can rein in our military?
‘They’ Are Not Taking ‘Our’ Jobs
My neighbor two doors down flies a Confederate flag alongside his more conventional stars and stripes. He drives a pickup truck, sports a number of provocative tattoos, and is about as white as Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich. I don’t know if he would vote for either Sarah or Newt, but he’s a pretty conservative guy. Still, he gets along reasonably well with the interracial couple who lives between us. And his son-in-law, an immigrant from El Salvador, just spent the last two weekends replacing our damaged shed with one that looks a whole lot better than anything Home Depot offers.
Dealing With Iran
It seems to be an open-and-shut case. Nuclear weapons are bad. It’s best for the world if no more countries acquire nuclear weapons. Iran is currently engaged in uranium enrichment that could eventually produce a nuclear weapon. It built a secret facility to advance this program and might now be building another one. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government makes all sorts of threatening statements about Israel, the United States, the West. We should therefore do everything possible to prevent Iran from going nuclear.
‘Aspirational’ vs. ‘Operational’ Military Budget Cutting
Quiz: Who said this? “Is it a dire threat that by 2020 the United States will have only 20 times more advanced stealth fighters than China.”
North Korea No Longer an Enemy?
In Korea in early June, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced what could potentially be the greatest shift in U.S policy toward the Korean peninsula in the last 50 years. Though the Western media paid little attention, the proposed change in tour lengths of U.S. troops stationed in Korea from 12 months to 36 months has profound implications.