Blast from my past: "Sleeper: The Awakening of Robert Gates" (2010)

Sleeper:  The Awakening of Robert Gates

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Esquire, "People Who Matter" issue, February 2010

Given Barack Obama's obvious inexperience in national-security affairs, our two wars, our war fatigue, our evolving sense of what war is, our broke federal government, and the fact that we spend about 55 percent of our discretionary federal budget on national defense, the position of secretary of defense looms more prominently now than at any time in American history.

But who is Robert Gates, and what is he doing running the Pentagon?

Three years ago, when looking for Donald Rumsfeld's replacement as secretary of defense, you could not have found a more unlikely champion for the U. S. military's profound evolution from its cold-war, big-war perspective to its new focus on small wars and counterinsurgency than Gates. And then a year ago, with the American people having emphatically changed CEOs, favoring a new president who seemed in most respects to be the opposite of his predecessor, you could not have found a more unlikely man than Gates to be staying put.

Picking over this most careful of Washington careers, one finds no examples whatsoever of a man given to bold visions, controversial stances, or tough calls of any sort. The quintessential company man (Gates is only the third rank-and-file CIA analyst to rise to directorship) prior to becoming secretary of defense, Gates's primary career accomplishment was simply winning confirmation as CIA director in 1991. (He was nominated in 1987 and withdrew under fire for his entanglement in the Iran-contra scandal.) It's presented as the climax of his 1996 quasi-autobiography (From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War), and yet Gates does not even bother to examine his subsequent two-year reign as director, when, presumably, he learned all manner of important intelligence regarding the collapse of the Soviet Union. Who writes an autobiography and leaves out the best part? Bob Gates does, for the simple reason that when the cold war ended, the defining drama of his life and career was over. His only stated memories of that time are of the "false 'peace dividend,' " "our 'holiday from history,' " and "the 'false tranquility.' " Beyond that, it's almost as if Gates himself ceases to exist once that struggle is over.

He ends his book by noting that "I spent more years working [in the White House] than any President but Franklin D. Roosevelt." And yet his insider's story is most revealing in how he explains that which he knew nothing about: 1) the Iran-contra scandal, and 2) "the Agency's greatest counterintelligence failure, and perhaps its greatest operational failure, during the last half of the Cold War" — Aldrich Ames's decade-long run as a Soviet mole in the "heart of the CIA's clandestine service."

Befitting his long career in the shadows, there is no identifiable Gates doctrine, strategy, plan, bumper sticker — nothing. There is really only admirable longevity and profound loyalty to his mentors and bureaucratic masters. (Secretary Gates consistently reminds audiences of how many presidents and Cabinet secretaries he's served under.) Everything in Gates's history-crammed career near the very top of America's national-security establishment testifies to a personal philosophy of accepting no risks, never leading on anything, staying close to one's mentors, waiting on concrete events, husbanding all possible resources, placing no strategic bets, and moving only when the bureaucracy as a whole decides it must. If, after the tumultuous reign of Donald Rumsfeld, you were looking for a perfect caretaker (armed with his countdown clock that just screamed, "I'm temping here!"), then you could find no more trusted instrument for maintaining the status quo than Robert Gates, the cold war's premier non-rocker-of-boats.

So what on earth happened?

Gates's selection was the revenge of Brent Scowcroft against the dreaded neocon cabal of Cheney and Rumsfeld. His master called and Gates, in a distinct nod to the beloved Bush père, answered. That much seems clear and makes sense, given Gates's lifelong proclivities.

As for the rest, most everything that Gates is now doing appears to be in repudiation of everything that came before in his career. And he is doing so by placing three profound — and truly strategic — bets, which I call the Harold Brown Bet, the Hillary Bet, and the Long War Bet. All go against his character, because each discounts current intelligence (which is still overwhelmingly directed against familiar cold war threats), involves a significant reordering of the military's force structure (favoring surveillance assets over firepower), openly pursues a strategy of turning old enemies into future allies (despite their clear military buildups and "uncertain paths"), and embraces the tactics of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan against our own Frankenstein creation — the mujahideen-cum-Taliban.

He has said that he "did not molt from a hawk into a dove on January 20, 2009." Yet he has slashed multi-billion-dollar programs and rails against the defense-industrial complex's "next-war-itis," i.e., the preference for tomorrow's high-cost gadgets over cheap and fast solutions for the wars we've got now.

Short of discovering that Gates was the longtime KGB handler to both Aldrich Ames and Oliver North, no more surprising transformation could be imagined.

The vast chasm between Gates the self-imagined leader and Gates the lifelong follower has been erased — Silent Bob the note-taker replaced by Vocal Bob the rice-bowl breaker, and his display of personal leadership has luminaries from across the political spectrum scrambling to declare Gates the best secretary of defense — ever. A lifer cipher, Gates has suddenly morphed into that most precious of Democratic presidential assets: the SecDef whose pragmatism is unassailable by extremes both Right and Left.

Father, the sleeper has awakened!

The Harold Brown Bet

Gates often quotes Jimmy Carter's secretary of defense, Harold Brown, on America's strategic arms race with the Soviet Union in the 1970s: "When we build, they build; when we cut, they build." What's interesting here is that Gates doesn't use this quote to justify a continued conventional buildup to counter a rising China — which is definitely in build mode, no matter our choices — but rather to describe the Pentagon's continuing need to adapt itself to the ever-morphing threat of radical Islam. To those in the Pentagon eager to reengage with resurgent Russia or to slot China into that threat box, Gates answers calmly: "One cold war was enough."

Gates has admitted that Washington "would be hard pressed at this time to launch another major ground operation," thanks to Iraq and Afghanistan. And in October, when hosting China's second-ranking military officer, Gates signaled his clear desire to "break the on-again, off-again cycle" in America's military relationship with China. Despite what he once described as "their excruciatingly slow progress toward democratic institutions and the rule of law," Gates now wants to insulate the Sino-American relationship from the vagaries of day-to-day events.

Why take this gamble?

Last spring, defending his proposed cuts of major military platforms designed primarily for great-powers war, Gates said, "It is important to remember that every defense dollar spent to overinsure against a remote or diminishing risk — or, in effect, to 'run up the score' in a capability where the United States is already dominant — is a dollar not available to take care of our people, reset the force, win the wars we are in, and improve capabilities in areas where we are underinvested and potentially vulnerable."

It's just that Gates now feels America is finally getting a true twenty-first-century defense budget, in which wars against transnational terrorism are no longer subsumed within larger plans for major wars but instead run the show.

This of course opens Gates and especially President Obama to a savage attack from the Right, and particularly from the neoconservatives, who you may have assumed by now had been vanquished in the bloody sands of Iraq. Instead, they have launched a vigorous critique of the president's recalibration of relationships with both Russia and China, where a new term, "strategic reassurance," emerged last fall as the State Department's preferred description of the administration's new strategic approach. The term, introduced in a speech by Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, quickly generated a lot of diplomatic buzz around the world but especially in Beijing, where, in general, experts found the phrase less offensive than the Bush-era term for China's future role in global affairs as a "responsible stakeholder," primarily because it suggested a two-way contract that admitted each side needed to reassure the other about its strategic intentions: In a nutshell, America needs to reassure China that it won't seek to prevent its rise, and China needs to reassure the world that its rise will not come at the expense of other nations' security or prosperity.

In truth, Washington thinks that it has already done plenty of strategic reassuring, and this new idea consists mostly of us asking China to reassure the world of its intentions. And while it is true that the Obama administration has scratched many of China's persistent itches recently (e.g., showing deference to Chinese leadership at recent G-20 summits, resuming high-level military talks with the PLA, and delaying any meeting with the Dalai Lama until after Obama's November trip to Beijing), the most crucial ones, according to the Chinese themselves — explicitly backing off on Tibet, ending arms sales to Taiwan, and ceasing military surveillance within China's exclusive economic maritime zone — remain unaddressed.

Speaking objectively, none of these issues are worth torching the global economy over, especially in its current fragile state. With China expected to account for roughly 50 percent of global growth through 2011 while picking up the lion's share of America's floated public debt, there are clearly bigger fish to fry, like depegging the yuan from the dollar. Moreover, America cannot essentially change any of these issues, no matter how much we engage in feel-good provocations. So all that will come of pressing such issues (including human rights) in the short run is to limit the scope of possible collaboration with China on larger global issues of common concern.

Of course, Bush and Cheney did nothing of that sort, spending their last years appealing to Beijing to bail them out on a host of rogue-state situations (e.g., North Korea, Myanmar, Iran, Sudan, Zimbabwe), thus demonstrating the extreme nature of America's strategic tie-down in Iraq and Afghanistan. But now that these wars belong to Obama and the Democrats, who most clearly do not seek to maintain American primacy through their continued vigorous prosecution and indeed are looking for ways to unwind them responsibly, the neocons are more than happy to demand the White House stand up to all manner of Chinese "aggression" and "perfidy" so as to signal America's long-term resistance to the threat of authoritarian capitalism. Please!

And so Gates has laid the Harold Brown Bet on the table, making him almost completely unrecognizable from his former self. While the United States of America has stopped mindlessly stockpiling a military force destined to fight another great power, China has not and will not anytime soon.

The Hillary Bet

Given what war is now, in the age of transnational terrorism, Gates is firmly committed to beefing up the Defense Department's "soft power" capabilities, meaning those pertaining to stability operations and nation building. Based on my professional interactions with the secretary's point people on this issue, I can report that the military's long-term goal is to migrate most of these capabilities in the direction of either a superempowered State Department or, failing that, a new federal agency positioned somewhere between Defense and State.

But here's the trick: The more the Pentagon embraces small wars and irregular warfare, the more the rest of the government logically fears having its functions "swallowed up by the military," as Gates puts it. Already, major defense contractors are swallowing up traditional State Department and Agency for International Development contractors, Lockheed Martin buying Pacific Architects and Engineers (the State Department's version of Kellogg Brown & Root), and contractor giant L-3 recently purchasing the blue-chip aid contractor International Resources Group.

Gates has formed a strong personal and professional bond with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But can he really expect her to transform State and AID sufficiently to someday soon own this cluster of government capabilities? Enough for military commanders to rely on these agencies versus further expanding those capabilities within their ranks? Given the restoration of basic American diplomacy she is attempting at the same time, it is highly doubtful.

Gates declares asymmetric warfare (i.e., the type of surprising and irregular warfare that terrorists engage in) the "mainstay of the contemporary and future battlefield," and clearly does his business that way, but assuming that the rest of the U. S. government will eventually step to their shared responsibilities — absent some future catastrophic failure — is a major-league bet, and not a safe one.

And that's a wager that may already be approaching settlement in Afghanistan, thanks to the Obama/Gates surge.

The Long War Bet

You can imagine how desperately the hard Right looks for any signs of daylight between Barack Obama and Robert Gates.

And if none can be found, then the secretary himself must be targeted.

Of course, there are small glimmers of difference, as in the slight rhetorical shading on just when that drawdown in Afghanistan will begin, exactly, and there's Gates's use of the word win vis-à-vis that war or, more dramatically, in the way Gates stands firmly behind the need to modernize our nuclear deterrent while the president calls for a nuclear-free world.

But these differences are nothing to finesse for a chameleon such as Robert Gates. For let it be said that Gates's tenure as SecDef marks a victory for the career bureaucrats — the lasting power behind the throne of temporary political arrangements otherwise known as presidential administrations. Gates did not start this revolution in military affairs; the revolt of the generals — over Bush and Cheney's unwillingness to embrace counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq — was merely codified by Rumsfeld's fall. And as it was why he was hired in the first place, Gates simply embraced the COINdinistas already ascendant within the Army and Marine Corps (see "The Monks of War," March 2006, at esquire.com), becoming their fierce champion.

Meanwhile, in 2008 at West Point, he said, "What has been called the Long War is likely to be many years of persistent, engaged combat all around the world in differing degrees of size and intensity. This generational campaign cannot be wished away or put on a timetable. There are no exit strategies. To paraphrase the Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, we may not be interested in the long war, but the long war is interested in us."

And despite Obama's shift, it is hard to believe that Gates does not still embrace the larger strategic logic of a persistent global struggle. As he said in a speech last April, "The responsibility of this department first and foremost is to fight and win wars — not just constantly prepare for them."

Clinging to the new, hot-button concept of "hybrid war," Gates defends this historic institutional shift by noting that his new budget breaks down roughly as "10 percent for irregular warfare, about 50 percent for traditional, strategic, and conventional conflict, and about 40 percent dual-purpose capabilities." It's a reasonable opening bet, but a bet nonetheless, because Gates is openly advertising the fact that the United States of America has reached its limits. And he must demonstrate the U. S. military's commitment to counterinsurgency to keep old allies engaged and at the same time dissuade much-needed new allies from their mindless pursuit of big-war capabilities, all while not quite divesting America of its more traditional responsibilities as keeper of the great-powers peace. In each instance, the Pentagon is betting that the Chinese, the rest of the U. S. government, and the rest of the world's great powers will eventually fall in line.

Coming from a retired risk-averse cold warrior who never had reason to believe he'd have this chance, that is one amazing hand. And so to these three strategic bets we should add a fourth, which can best be described as the Career Bet. Forget everything that came before, because Robert Gates is all-in now.