Secretary Gates' next move should be to turn away from weaponry and start to create a military leadership that cares about the lives of the soldiers and Marines it puts in harm's ways. That certainly is not the case today, and so Gates will have to fire a large proportion of now-serving general officers. In almost the ninth year of the Afghan war, the U.S. general officer corps has allowed U.S. politicians to maroon an American field army in Afghanistan which is vastly undermanned and dependent on supply routes that run through hostile territory. Its new local commanders -- General Petraus and McChrystal -- have imposed rules of engagement that are already yielding unnecessary American dead and ensure that the enemy escapes and draws succor from civilians who support the intensifying insurgency. Both politicians and generals tremble in fear at the thought of even questioning the legacy of a long-dead, half-wit British princess which forbids the use of landmines, without which most insurgencies -- and surely this Afghan insurgency -- are unwinnable. And, one should not forget, these U.S. killers of American soldiers and Marines are abetted by the prominent media shills who the politicians and generals send to the Afghan war zone to make their living by fawning over the likes of Petraus and McChrystal, and by propagandizing the American people with opinion pieces for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that weep crocodile tears for dead American soldiers and Marines, urge the continuation of the already lost Afghan war to "keep faith" with the fallen, and even argue that the death of U.S. military personnel is fair price to pay to be able to provide little Afghan girls with schoolbooks. And all of the foregoing miscreants are agreed that our Islamist enemies must be allowed the effective safe haven they have long enjoyed in Pakistan, and from which they enter Afghanistan at will to kill our soldiers and Marines.

Secretary Gates next job? Thoroughly clean the aristocratic stables that house the self-seeking U.S. military’s general officer corps. But, alas, Gates can do nothing about the American voters who keep electing Republican and Democratic politicians who, to please the media, our elites, and the Europeans, continue to send our soldiers and Marines overseas as targets not killers.

Reading the press accounts of the F-22 in particular, and the defense budget in general, one would get the impression that Secretary of Defense Gates had killed the F-22, ending the era of manned fighters, and several other conventional weapons programs and was slashing the defense budget. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Pentagon actually spent $70 billion developing and procuring the F-22, more than just about any individual weapon system it has ever built. Moreover, since taking over at the helm at the Pentagon in November 2006, Gates has requested and received funding from the Congress for 45 of these Cold War relics, four more than his predecessor Donald Rumsfeld thought were needed, and ramped up production of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Finally, the other big programs that Gates cancelled did not signify a major strategic shift. The airborne laser and multiple kill vehicle programs were unlikely to work in the future and the Navy actually wanted only two DDG-1000 destroyers, not the three Gates requested. Moreover, while the vehicles for the FCS program may change, the network remains intact.

As the Congress was making decisions about the FY2010 defense budget, Gates’ team at the Pentagon was already working on the QDR, which is supposed to guide the FY2011 budget and the FY2011-15 defense program. But, the Obama administration had not yet issued its National Security Strategy (NSS), which is supposed to guide the QDR. And more importantly, what framework guided the changes and priorities that Gates made in the FY2010 budget? Finally, OMB has already mandated the topline for defense spending for the next decade as part of the president’s deficit reduction plan. Can these topline numbers be altered by the QDR?

It would seem likely Gates will send up a FY2011 budget very similar to the FY2010 budget and, if Loren Thompson’s information is correct, leave office, having served nearly four years, longer than most of his predecessors, except for McNamara, Weinberger, and Rumsfeld.

Let's put this in a larger context:

DOD's biggest problem is the damage done to the ground forces by repeated deployments to Iraq. Some people are on their fourth or fifth rotation - 10 months in Iraq, 6 months at home, and then back to the theater. The strain on families and individuals is tremendous. The Army and Marines have problems in retention and readiness - that morale is still good is solely due to the quality of the folks on the ground. The reason the Services are hitting their recruitment numbers is that the recession has reduced the alternatives for a steady job. Repairing the disastrous consequences of the last seven years for the ground forces is a high priority.

DOD's immediate problem is the growing war in Afghanistan. This is not a fight that can be won by military force alone. The Taliban are not quitters, they are motivated, we squandered irrecoverable opportunities in 2001 and 2002, and we do not have a political strategy to defeat or demilitarize them.

DOD's long-term problem is the self-inflicted damage from the acquisitions process. We have been unable to replace bombers and tankers from the 1960s and fighters from the 1980s. Don't even mention satellites. Gates has commented on the slow pace of getting needed new equipment to the troops. Our acquisitions process does not serve them well. It's not a lack of money - DOD got more than half a trillion dollars last year - it's an inability to spend the money effectively.

Ground forces, Afghanistan, acquisitions. New airplanes will not fix them, and do not forget that they must be addressed after starting with an $800 billion surplus in 2001 and ending up eight years later with a trillion dollar-plus deficit and the worst recession since 1929. The F-22 is a great airplane and if the nation hadn't dug itself so deeply into so many holes, buying more would be a good thing to do, but someone broke the piggy bank and requests to spend more must wait to see how well it can be put back together.

When asked a question about a weapon system it is hard not to talk about the weapon in question. Yet that is what I will try to do.

Military societies are not really about weapons or even strategy. They are about identity. The US Military, if we were to position it in history, would jump out as an inconceivably vast soldier-enterprise: With no counterpart since the beginning of military civilization. Even the mobilization of nations for the great religious wars of the last century cannot come close. After all they were there but for a season: saisonarmee.

Unique in history … Welcome to the Defense Tribal Confederacy: A grand federation of fighting tribes and their Socii — the Defense Contractors — and their Adjunct Fellows — the Intelligence Community, State/AID, and DHS. With families and all others committed to this enterprise — like me — our Confederacy is nothing less than an emerging nation-within-a-nation: 25-30 million “Defense Americans” — and it has been evolving for 60 years (National Security Act-Korean War).

What is its identity then? Do you really mean “nation” — as in: A nation-within-a-nation?

Yes — and yes again.

The Tribal Confederacy evolved within a Cold War carapace for forty years: gradually transforming from the stainless civic paradigm that existentially defined America — the nation-in-arms, where every citizen served — to a “volunteer force,” and then in the shattered aftermath of 9-11, to the sacred identity it is today: The 300, The Defenders, The Americans-who-sacrifice, The true Sons of Liberty. Eight years and counting of Long War, the gulf between “Shopping America” and “300 America” is as vast as it is so-delicately unspoken.

So what does this have do (Anyway!) with the F-22?

Here is what the secret decoder ring tells me: Mr. Gates, the first true President of the Confederacy, must protect the lifestyle context and thus the identity of his people, his nation. He is doing so with utmost prudence, cutting away the most flagrantly excessive examples of extravagant hypertrophy, and above all its darkest icon: the F-22.

He is doing this to preserve and indeed enshrine his maneuvering room as an independent player in American politics: and hence to preserve the life of his nation. He has already acquired untouchable authority within the new administration of “Shopping America,” whose president has insufficient authority to take on the Confederacy’s President — because he did not serve. Mr. Gates is giving him every reason not to want to take him on. Gates in judicious contrast is building the authority of his office, because the time has come for the Confederacy to politically lock-in its autonomous place in American life.

What about strategy, you say? See the bottom line: There is no strategy worthy of the name, save the battles and campaigns within the precincts — the Forbidden City — that is the Imperial Court. “Strategy” as the surface conversation among knowing idiot savants (all of whom also know better!) is simply “color commentary” that accompanies the lavish processions and incanted rites that serve, like Roman triumphs, to represent the symbolic and hallowed underpinnings of Confederacy authority within the larger orbit of American politics.

Is this sinking in? “Cold War” cut the cultural template. But it ended in Confederacy anguish and lamentation, “Chicken Kiev” notwithstanding. So too did its putative, faux-glorious successor-paradigm: “Military Transformation.” Too bad. For an evanescent decade of narcissism, we of the Confederacy were truly Gods of War — in our minds.

That is over now. Over. Over. Over.

Ah but we might still be Gods of the Irregular: “Rescuing” the most wretched of the earth. Our new chant, lifted to the heavens — “Whole of Government” (read: the Confederacy and its Adjunct Fellows) — can still, still do “transformation” better and bigger even than now-discredited Gods of War. Where you ask? Why among those wretched people and their wedding parties for whom we Titan-grant “security.”

Yes we can.

But that is the best we can do now. It is simply, “the paradigm we have.” And so it must be: For now. Mr. Gates fastens on it now because it represents a defining template with a reified narrative — The Surge — and thus it is our best political bet moving forward. It has political cred: what the French once called cran (guts). It is today’s future.

So in this light F-22 and DDG-1000 and FCS look like the perfect captives of a triumphant Toltec campaign — hauling in a few thousand enemy warriors taken with pressure-flaked flint mace and now under the thrall of brilliantly feathered bird-warriors. Who will shortly — in transcendent sacred rite — walk them up the steps of the central temple: Where their hearts will be ripped out by equally elegant pressure-flaked flint blades. In them we will be renewed.

It is always about culture, not weapons. It is always in the end about sacred identity.

[And it is also all in my book: Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change. If you persevere you will find the secret decoder ring here!]

Dan Goure and I shared that platform at the Heritage Foundation. I would not go so far as Dan in terms of how he characterizes Bob Gates. But I do think that Gates is attempting to swing the pendulum excessively in the direction of "irregular warfare." Like many militaries, that of the United States traditionally has fought the last war in preparing for the next one. And it has frequently been surprised. Whether Korea in 1950, Iraq in 1990, or Afghanistan in 2001, the US has found itself fighting in unexpected places at unexpected times. And it has then sought to fashion its military to fight again in more or less the same way and in more or less the same place.

The Secretary of Defense has gone one step further. Instead of preparing to fight yesterday's war again, he is preparing to fight today's war again. Were his program to be fully implemented, and were, for example, the Korean Peninsula to explode at long last, would those systems more approproiate for "irregular warfare" be optimal for taking on the North? I doubt it.

And who is to say that we will not face another major "peer competitor" within the development life cycle of our weapons systems--that is, within the next fifteen to twenty years? After all, it took Hitler's Germany less than a decade from his ascent to power to his march down the Champs Elysees. Given the combination of Moore's law, and the availability of all sorts of weapons systems on the open, gray and black markets, not to mention the fact that not all states have the same unwieldy development and acquisition system that we do, who can predict with certainty that no state will rise up to challenge American power two decades hence?

Bob Gates was right to cancel the F-22. His decision to terminate the second F-35 engine is less obvious--it may be unwise to tamper with a program that is so critical to the militaries of our closest allies. He may even be correct in increasing the size of the lanbd forces once more--though how he will lift them anywhere, given his very reluctant acquiescence to an expanded C-17 program, the uncertainty of the tanker program, and the cost of that ground force expansion in the face of promised budget constraints, is puzzling at best. But his focus on "irregular warfare" at what all perceive to be the expense of conventional cvpaabilities, is excessive.

Will the Secretary "transform" the Pentagon to reflect his vision? In many respects, he is really carrying forward many of Don Rumsfeld's initiatives, including the emphasis on UAVs, maritime missile defense, and, for that matter, the termination of the F-22 line. But Rumsfeld found that managing two wars limited his ability to focus on the internal aspects of Pentagon management, including the contents of the DOD long-term program. Gates has certainly built upon the foundation that Rumsfeld laid, and he has made significant progress. But, like Rumsfeld, he too is unlikely to finish the job--if the job of transforming the DoD can ever be finished--and the permanence of his changes, even those with which I agree, will very much depend on the priorities and the commmitment of his successors.

Colleagues,

Most every detached observer applauds the termination of the F-22 program. After all, it makes no sense to spend tens of billions on hugely expensive weapons that have little utility for the contingencies that are foreseen. Broader issues surround the F-22 affair, though, as indicated in Sydney Freedberg’s last set of questions.

Daniel Goure has set us in the right direction.

1. Since we cannot make sound decisions on either weapons systems or force deployments without placing them in a clearly delineated strategic context, formulating the latter is imperative. There is reason to question whether an adequate strategic security assessment exists despite the continual heavy paper flow. Surely, there has not be the necessary prioritizing using measures of what is vital and what are the pertinent time frames (China ten years from now, iterative wars in Southwest Asia now and forevermore?) The unstated conviction that we should and can prepare ourselves for everything provides partial explanation. But you always need a ‘preferred’ enemy.

2. The current Quadrennial Defense Review apparently is not confronting those hard choices. Michelle Flournoy, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, has lead responsibility for it. She was quoted in The New York Times a couple of weeks back as saying, 'We're trying to recognize that warfare may come in a lot of different flavors in the future.' The Baskin Robbins approach to defense planning won’t do, however. Inescapably, the result is not being fully prepared for anything and becoming hostage to the vagaries of the budget cycle in an era of chronic heavy deficits.

3. A defense review should be derivative of an overall foreign policy strategy of which security is only one part, and military capabilities only a part of security. It is hard to say whether the Obama administration has such an embracing strategy. There are no signs of one. That poses the question of who should/could do it. Hillary Clinton lacks the experience. General Jones’ tasks have been defined otherwise and in any case does not have the best aptitude. Robert Gates is handicapped due to the fact that his perspective is from the Pentagon. Moreover, many would question the credentials of someone who has been a fulsome supporter of the Iraq intervention from the outset and a life-long hawk on all matters. Joe Biden’s knowledge and wits might make him a candidate to direct the project; but Obama prefers to keep Biden available for delicate diplomatic missions.

4. Consequently, we are in the odd position of having the country’s fundamental strategic assessments and planning made by second and third tier officials during a turbulent, fluid period in world affairs. Those officials are themselves preoccupied in coping with on-going crises.

5. The lack of a cogent, comprehensive strategic design means that Pentagon planning will be disjointed and elide the hard choices – on weapons systems among other matters.

Cheers,

Michael Brenner

Winds Blow Colder at Pentagon

What we’ve learned in the last few months about this administration’s approach to defense policy is that it is determined to warp back to the way we did defense planning during the Cold War.

George Orwell might as well have been Secretary of Defense Gates’ head speechwriter. While Gates rejects “next-war-itis” and demands defunding “Cold War” weapons, his policies seem driven to achieve the opposite impact on long-term defense planning.

During the Cold War, military planners picked the wars they wanted to plan against. Hello, that is exactly what Secretary Gates is doing. The Secretary has simply decided to play Russian-roulette with future national security by demoting some long-term challenges to “less likely” or “less important” to pay for the wars that we are in now.

The Pentagon, for example, took a u-turn on missile defense, reversing course on policies that spanned a decade and had been endorsed by both Republican and Democratic controlled Congresses. What these cuts lack is logic. It would be hard to label missile defense a “Cold War” program, since most of what we have now started in the late 1990’s (and let me think, yeah that is after the Cold War) and designed to addressing emerging missile powers like Iran and North Korea. Here we are faced with a case where the threat continues to march forward (North Korea has conducted 70 percent of its ballistic missile tests in the last six months); the need is as great as ever, yet the admininistration drops a 15 percent cut on the program—and that is before it conducts a major review of the program.

Cuts in missile defense have nothing to do with jettisoning Cold War systems, but instead are based on assumptions that the North Korean and Iranian programs are moving so slow that what we have now can keep us ahead of them and leaders in Washington through arms control measures will negotiate a safer future. Of course, Gates may be wrong on both scores. Indeed, it looks like the North Koreans and Iranians are taking the signals of the new administration’s apathy on missile defense to accelerate their weapons program and thus pose a great strategic challenge to the US in the future.

The realities of missile defense competition, however, have no place in Gates’ world. Rather than deal with emerging challenges, Gates has picked very Cold War-style democratic policies to deal with defense problems. In fact, what he is doing looks an awful lot like a witch’s brew combination of Bob McNamara and Harold Brown—raping the modernization budget to pay for current operations and letting the military go “hollow.”

Truth is we need a defense budget that can counter the “range of threats” enemies might want to throw at us in the future—not just the ones Gates cares about. And we also need to realize that our enemies will most likely invest in the kinds of capabilities that we don’t feel like countering. Thus, for example, the best way to ensure a new nuclear arms race is to do exactly what we are doing now—scrimping on missile defense, letting our nuclear deterrent rust away, and sacrificing conventional superiority by not stocking up on modern weapons like the F-22.

I worked with SecDef Robert Gates for a number of years and admit to being an admirer of his intellect and style. He is, and I mean this as a compliment, a fantastic bureaucrat. Gates analyses the situation, gathers support for action, and then executes in a low key fashion that makes things better. For a guy, who is likely final position in the Federal government, he has picked a great battle -- reshaping our national defense to make sense by objective, not by procurement.

Having spend a quarter century in the national security community, I have been stunned at how little substance sometimes drives the process - an not just the usual politics. In the last fifteen years, in particular, the desire to produce a system or a program has far outdriven the process. Don't get me wrong. There was a reason that Eisenhower complained about the developing military industrial complex in 1960. But, the system is now totally out of whack and Gates knows it.

A minor victory was achieved recently as Gates, with DNI Dennis Blair, went into revamp a major satellite system that had simply gone awary in terms of cost and purpose. The F-22 is another step. I suspect he will try more until the "plaque in the system" so builds up that it rejects any further efforts. There are a lot of reasons for that plaque -- from a decreasing number of large scale contractors who attempt to purchase help from the Hill via lobbyists or campaign contributions to the 'system within", wedded to their programs and sometimes looking for future employment with the contractors they are overseeing.

Gates knows that the current procurement system -- with its fifteen year time frames for production -- also do not reflect the realities of today's and tomorrow's warfare. We need flexible systems able to carry on nation-state warfare as well as assymmetric warfare. These systems need to be based in an understand of the realistic future threats America faces and the harsh budget realities of the next five to ten years.

The bottom line is that the "k.o." of the F-22 represents a step in the right direction. Making these changes permanent -- enabling faster production at lesser costs with more direct application to the threat -- that is battle that others besides and beyond Gates will have to engage in for a long time to come. But, it is a necessary fight for the sake of our national security.

As I said in a recent presentation at the Heritage Foundation, the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, poses the greatest challenge to U.S. security. In the absence of a National Security Strategy, he virtually alone is setting the course of U.S. security policy, prioritizing threats, and determining how they shall be addressed. Without a national discussion, or even a debate within the government, he has decided to shift the emphasis in U.S. defense planning away from state-on-state conflicts and towards our current fights in Iraq and Afghanistan and towards the so-called Long War against violent extremism. He has also mortgaged the future of the U.S. military to a particular view of future threats.

As the Administration’s strategist-in-chief, he is acting as if he were the intelligence chief or secretary of state. Secretary Gates has based his decisions not simply on the demands placed on the military today, but his expectation of what they will face ten and even twenty years ahead. He is making judgments on the character and seriousness of potential threats based not on their military capabilities or even intentions but on demographics, economics and sociology. Thus, the Secretary dismisses the danger of Russian adventurism because of its economic and demographic weaknesses.

Yet, every U.S. military campaign of the past two decades has occurred in places and ways unforeseen by defense planners. Whether it was Panama, Somalia, Iraq (twice), the Balkans (twice), Afghanistan or Georgia, everywhere the U.S. military has been sent was a place that was not predicted even a few years before. Granted, the places in which the military had planned to fight have remained quiet, but that was and is due in large to the deterrent value of a force posture geared for precisely those contingencies.

Moreover, it is one thing to seek to fight and win the wars we are in. It is quite another to assert that these will be the wars of the future. Much of his argument rests on the fanciful belief that the U.S. has such overwhelming superiority in the means of conventional warfare that no adversary will take us on in this space. Of course this holds true only so long as that superiority is unassailable and the Secretary seems to be doing all he can to reduce it.

But even if true, many experts have assert that future opponents are investing in a range of so-called asymmetric capabilities designed to defeat areas of major U.S. advantage. The Secretary has focused on one of these, the IED threat. To counter this problem he has spent billions on MRAPs and MRAP ATVs and rightly so. But our enemies are pursuing other asymmetric technologies. These include ballistic and cruise missiles, advanced air defenses, fourth and even fifth generation fighters, sea mines, electronic warfare, anti-satellite weapons and cyber.

What has the Secretary done to address these other threats? He opposed procurement of additional F-22s, the only aircraft capable of day-night/all weather penetration of advanced air defenses. He essentially halted development of a new long-range bomber despite the growing threat posed by ballistic missiles to U.S. and allied airbases close to enemy borders. He cancelled the Airborne Laser and Kinetic Energy Interceptor and cut back on procurement of the Ground-Based Interceptors, the only systems able to deal with long-range ballistic missiles. His rationale was that the current threat consisted of short to medium ballistic missiles, However, every state that started with short-range systems, including North Korea and Iran, have steadily progressed to the development of longer-range missiles.

Moreover, is not entirely candid about what the investments the Department is making. Although, he claims to be investing more in defenses against shorter-range ballistic missiles, this is not the case. For example, the number of Standard Missile 3 Block IA/IBs, the missile defense variant, to be purchased over the next three years has been cut by nearly 40 per cent. Although he asserts support for the F-35 fighter, the Secretary’s future budgets will actually purchase fewer of these than had been planned. If the Secretary has his way, in a few years the only open military aircraft production lines in the U.S. will be for the C-130 and the F-35 (the KC-X will be a commercial derivative). Of course we should not worry, the secretary says, because we are investing heavily in unmanned aerial systems (UAS). Of course, not a single UAS in the inventory could last a minute in contested airspace. But that is what we have the F-22 for, right?

The damage Secretary Gates is doing to the future of the U.S. Air Force holds equally true for the Army and the Navy. He cancelled the manned ground vehicle portion of the Future Combat System, requiring g the Army to design a capability more exclusively centered on our current conflicts. He has cancelled or delayed every major Navy surface ship program from the DDG-1000, to the new aircraft carrier, the future missile defense cruiser and the LPD and MLPs.

Secretary Gates is taken the military back to the future. In contravention of everything we know about how post-industrial organizations should be structured, he is creating a military that is manpower heavy and technology poor. As a result, the military will be saddled with rising personnel costs for decades to come, even as budgets shrink and it becomes more difficult to acquire the systems and capabilities needed for future conflicts.

While the corporations of the world are flattening their organizations and outsourcing all but basic functions, he is taking the Department in the opposite direction, seeking to add tens of thousands of new civilian employees. By doing so he threatens the progress made by programs such as Performance-Based Logistics in reducing costs and improving support to the warfighter. In his nostalgia for the bygone days when government employees ran everything, he seems to have forgotten that this also was the era of the $600 dollar toilet seat.

Taken in totality, the decisions Secretary Gates has made – and those he is expected to make in the near future – will bequeath to his successors a military that will be older and more costly to operate, have fewer technological advantages over potential adversaries and be less able to deal with high-end threats. Almost without exception, it has been the most advanced U.S. weapons programs have been targeted for termination, reduction or delay. The only solace we can take is in the Secretary’s judgment that we can take risk in the medium-term. However long that lasts.

Secretary Gates has made a very important beginning in curtailing the purchase of unneeded systems. The termination of the F22 program is, however, very small potatoes. With Presidential support , he held to a number established in the Bush Administration. More significant, was the termination of the disorganized, poorly supported Future Combat System program, which was actually a system of more than a dozen interlocking systems and vehicles. That bill, however, will have to be partially paid by purchasing of new ground systems, while the small victory in the F-22 is likely to be permanent.

The real crunch for Mr. Gates and his successors will come in a few years. By then, the combined weight of Iraq and Afghanistan will likely diminish, and the overwhelming weight of the budget deficit will be crushing economic growth and public policy. The Pentagon, even more so than it usually does after wars, will face incredible constraints as Obama attempts to find money for his domestic priorities and to alleviate the national debt. Gates and his successor will look back on 2009 as one of the last year where they had big bucks and where they could cut fat. Soon, they will have to cut muscle at a time when international challenges are not likely to be lessening.

What can be done? Gates and his successors will have to look hard at the programs that support both conventional and irregular warfare. They will have to find the least necessary of the important programs approved in the last few years. Among the muscles that they will have to put on the surgical agenda are: increases to Marine and Army manning, the Marine Corps' amphibious beach assault vehicle, the F-35 program for the carrier navy, intratheater air lift, and any number of future Army vehicles (most unmodernized since the early 1980s). Absent Afghanistan and Iraq pressures, the multi-billion dollar MRAP fleet can be mothballed, sold, or sunk to create reefs and jetties.

Ironically, Obama et al may have to revisit some of the cuts already made. Cuts to missile defenses in particular may be problematical when (not if) the Iranians explode their first device. The Bush tenure was characterized for Irregular Warfare. The Obama years may well be characterized by anti-/counterproliferation policy and hardware. That won't alleviate Pres. Obama's need to raid the Pentagon's coffers.

Secretary Gates did well last week in advancing his priorities. While termination of the F-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter alternate engine are largely symbolic moves, the Senate actions show that Gates really is making progress in winning the political system over to his priorities. Those priorities involve putting more emphasis on so-called asymmetric threats -- terrorists and insurgents at the low end, attacks on joint-force enablers like networks and satellites at the high end.

Gates says he is seeking a defense establishment in which 50% of forces are postured for conventional warfare, 10% are postured for irregular warfare, and 40% can engage in either form of conflict. So there will be more money for warfighters with irregular-warfare skills, more money for intelligence, and more money for equipment useful in fighting insurgents, like C-130 Hercules cargo planes and CH-47 Chinook helicopters. The bill-payer for these items will be next-generation conventional weapons such as the F-22 fighter. Gates has made it clear that military planners who don't get with the plan will be fired (or retired).

However, the shift in spending is more complex than may observers grasp. For example, the Army's Future Combat Systems program isn't really going away: the network remains intact, the accelerated transfer of its technology (called "spinouts") is continuing, and Gates has set aside money for new combat vehicles that can host the network while better incorporating the lessons of the last eight years (meaning: defeat IED's). And Gates has strongly committed the administration to purchasing all 2,443 stealthy Joint Strike Fighters. So this isn't the end of the world for defense contractors.

In fact, it may be only a modest detour over the long run. Gates has signaled to reporters traveling with him that he will depart the Pentagon after the 2011 budget cycle, which means before mid-term elections. So he won't be around long enough to fundamentally alter how the Pentagon does business. With the government currently spending $5 billion per day that it does not have and the President more interested in launching a second New Deal than bolstering defense, there is little likelihood military outlays will remain stable as Gates plans. Even if outlays remained high, the rapidly rising cost of military personnel would dampen spending on new technology at a time when much of the arsenal is older than ever before.

The Senate system, political and otherwise, is not designed to stop producing much of anything -- let alone weapons -- especially in a lousy economy. The 58-40 vote to put the F-22 out of it misery offers a ray of hope that intelligent defense decisions can be made in Congress, even if it takes a massive effort by a determined secretary of defense, the president, and arm twisting by Rahm Emanuel. Perhaps the single individual to credit most for this important success is John McCain. Without him, and even with Gates, the vote would have been purely partisan, supplemented by pork crazed Democrats, such as Murray, Boxer, Feinstein, Byrd, and many others.

Important as it is, the vote should not be misinterpreted as a manifestation of Gates' "reform" agenda. Put simply, reform is not his agenda; reorientation is. Clearly he wants to focus on fighting the wars at hand, and he is having some real success at that, but only inside the Pentagon. And, reform it is not.

Reform means a change in business as usual. That ain't happening. Case in point: look at the F-35 program, which Gates is anxious to promote and which some touted as picking up the slack that killing the F-22 left. The F-35 is a classic example of buying a pig in a poke; in fact, we will buy 500 of them before the first definitive (IOT&E) test report lands on Gates desk, and it is a undiluted example of the same kind of design thinking and execution that got the Air Force into trouble with the F-22. Namely, costs so high, performance so compromised, and availability so un- that we get as a result an air force that is smaller, older, and less ready to fight at vastly increased cost.

The recently enacted Weapon System Acquisition Reform Act is another clear example of the non-, even anti-, reform agenda that dominates in Secretary Gates' Pentagon. Riddled with loopholes and the thinking that the Pentagon should be left alone to fix itself, the original draft bill was given even more loopholes and self-report card writing after Deputy Secretary William Lynn's interventions.

Both reform and Gates reorientation both have a long way to go to succeed. Despite a post-mortem death wriggle in the form of a CQ article that pretended there was new, but belated, news that the F-35 program is falling apart and therefore the F-22 merits reconsideration, the F-22 is a-goner. (News that the F-35 is having huge cost growth and serious performance problems is very plainly nothing new.) But, Gates' agenda to focus clearly on fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is still very much under siege in Congress. It's not just the porkers determination to fund more VH-71 helicopters, C-17s, F-18s, and several billions more in pork. Much more importantly, and with little opposition from Gates, the House and Senate Armed services Committees and the House Appropriations Committee are pressing ahead with their beating up on the most important account in the Pentagon budget as far as the two wars are concerned. Specifically, they all recommend billions in reductions in DOD's Operation and Maintenance account to pay for the pork they add in the Procurement and R&D accounts. O&M pays for training, weapons maintenance, fuel, and much more of the items basic to any war effort. Congress couldn't care less; the O&M account (and to a lesser extent the military pay account) is their bill payer for pork. To their credit, Senators Levin and McCain pointed this out when they undid Saxby Chambliss' revolting raid on these accounts to pay for his extra F-22's. Very sadly, however, Levin and McCain left in tact other raids on O&M (over a $billion) to help pay for the rest of the pork in their bill. The House Armed Services Committee and the House Appropriations Committee did much the same. The Senate Appropriations Committee will; it just hasn't reported its bill yet.

Gates has a long way to go in Congress to enforce his effort to take the wars seriously.

As for real reform, the 58-40 vote in the Senate shows that with huge effort some progress can be made. Among the 58 who voted against more F-22s are some potential leaders in Congress against the bad ideas in the defense budget that make us weaker at increasing cost. Based on what I am hearing from some of them, there is a real chance we will see more such actions. The longest journey starts with the first step.