Vic Socotra

07 April 2009

The Other Shoe

(Robert Michael Gates, Secretary of Defense)

There was a solid thump on the floor yesterday. The Budget of the Defense Department of the United States of America was announced by the short gray man who is its Secretary.

I like Bob Gates, even if the echo of his sensible black wing-tip shoe dropping on the floor will rock my world. His right shoe dropped with the election. Now, here is Change for real in the form of the left foot.

Bob Gates is the consummate government servant. He has no discernable ideology, since he is no politician. He is one of us, the career people who have to execute whatever lunacy happens to emerge from the political the people put in place above us.

Bob is inclined to Republican policy, though you would not have known it before he retired the first time. He served Democrat and Republican alike, knew his constitutional place, and did what he was told to the best of his ability.

He could have been a lot of things in the world of Geroge W. Bush. He was offered the opportunity to be the first Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, but wisely declined. Think if he had been there when Katrina struck New Orleans- it makes you wonder if he would have permitted Brownie to do that “heck of a job.”

I doubt it. Things had to get worse than that for him to come back to the meat-grinder of Washington.

When he was called out of his nice cushy job as President of Texas A&M University to serve in the disastrous end-game of the Bush Administration, he answered the call, and called in some serious chips to get a national security team that worked.

Mike McConnell as Director of National Intelligence. Harnessing the ambition of Mike Hayden by giving him CIA, and Jim Clapper by channeling his considerable energy as the Assistant Secretary for Intelligence, the major players understood one another, and could concentrate on fighting the Sunni insurgency and not each other.

Eliminating the bad blood between DoD and the Intelligence Community was just one of the refreshing puffs of fresh air after the rambunctious Rumsfeld years. Gates knows his stuff, and with his steady and phlegmatic hand on the tiller, the tide was turned in Iraq, even as Afghanistan, the second war, began to stall.

One thing at a time. His reliability was one of the things that the new Obama team appreciated in the time of chaos that attends the changing of crews in the ship of state. As the last political appointment surviving from the Bush Administration, Secretary Gates rolled out the Future Years Defense Plan yesterday.

You program and budget junkies know that the “Fie-Dip” isn’t about now, or even next year, to the extent that it can be tinkered with. It is about the 2011 and the four years after that. So the submission of the Secretary’s component of the President’s budget isn’t about today or even the new fiscal year that commences on October first.

It is not the final word, of course, since the Congress looms between the Program and the Execution, and the Secretary has made some hard choices to reduce the amount of the public treasure that flows through the Department.

I told you Bob Gates is a great man. He is going to take the hit for this budget and the serious implications of Change. He has portrayed these decisions as his alone, unprompted by his Commander-in-chief. The Administration can always get rid of him, once the hard choices are announced, and wheel and deal blamelessly with the consequences.

If you seek a loyal and great American, Bob Gates is about as good as the breed gets.

Some of his decisions yesterday have the potential to change the lives of those of us who toil anonymously in this company town. The companies that build the fighter jets, and the tankers and helicopters and the ships.

Some of these animate but soulless things have extraordinary lives, longer than the people who operate them. The venerable B-52 bomber, for example, flies today, and first flew the year after I was born.

Secretary Gates eliminated funding for an aircraft to replace it, so there is the real possibility that it will outlive me.

In the next few days we will take a stroll through the wonderland of the Future Years program, and the hard choices that come with it.

Nothing here is for sure until it is certain, and nothing is certain even if the stake has been driven into the heart of a vampire program. It can always be removed by an earnest Congress, and zombie-like, lurch undead unto the future..

But I am going to try to tell the story against the backdrop of a weapons system that I know well.

It is a big one. It is the world’s first nuclear aircraft carrier, formally known as “CVN-65,” the USS Enterprise.

The Big E.

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