A transformational era naturally features swift exits for generals

Nice piece by Greg Jaffe in WAPO about how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have lead to a return of old US political tradition of firing generals during wartime. This may seem like new stuff, but it ain't.  Go back to the Civil War and Lincoln's stretch of going through generals at high speed, or WWII when failing generals were fired at a rapid pace early in the war.

The veneration of generals in the post-Cold War era has been the anomaly--not the rule of US history.  And with the huge shift from pure Leviathan skills to those associated with SysAdmin work, there's naturally a steep learning curve--and not everybody gets to pull a Tommy Franks.

The irony:  we keep asking for more accountability and for generals to stand up to politicians when it matters, but when we get some turnover as a result, we start worrying about that too. I only wish we had more turnover, especially in politics.

Chart of the day: dropping defense budges in Europe

Apologize for grubbiness of scan.  WSJ online version didn't include the charts, and all I had was my marked up version.

Point is simple enough:  none of our traditional allies feature anything but seriously declining defense budgets, and with our own budget coming up huge strains, it's clear we need new friends if we're going to continue playing the role of military superpower.  Indispensable?  Yes.  Sufficient?  No.

The SysAdmin's workload remains heavy

Christian Science Monitor story by way of WPR's Media Roundup.

Gist:

It may be only his second day of military training, but Abdullahi Ibrahim Aden is already convinced that he can help bring peace to his war-ravaged nation, Somalia.

Clutching an AK-47 in a field two countries away from his homeland, Aden, a former street kid, refugee, and nurse, is one of the first recruits in an ambitious program run by the European Union (EU) to help train 2,000 soldiers for the fledgling Army of Somalia's fragile Transitional Federal Government, or TFG.

"Somali children, grandfathers, and grandmothers are dying in the streets," says Aden. "That is why I came to be a volunteer, to change what is happening in my country."

Involving 150 instructors from 14 EU countries at a cost of $6 million to European taxpayers, the program is the latest in a series of internationally funded training efforts around East Africa designed to bolster the beleaguered government and nudge Somalia closer to peace after almost two decades of conflict.

Money for logistical support is coming from the United States, which has reportedly already pumped millions of dollars into similar smaller training programs run by local militaries in Uganda and Djibouti over the past 18 months.

Why so crucial? Lack of local resources.

Like all things SysAdmin, it is a matter of pay-me-now-or-pay-yourself-later.

Of course, my critics have long asserted that my vision is so naive in its assumption that Core countries will be willing to do SysAdmin work.  And yet the efforts continue and grow, and Core militaries progressively shift resources from the Leviathan bin (way too expensive for the EU anyway) and into the SysAdmin portfolio. What is needed, of course, is to steer rising New Core powers in similar directions, instead of encouraging their own fantasies regarding the utility of great-power war.

It was never a question of political will, but rather one of finally recognizing the international security landscape for what it is: an era of intense frontier integration that can either be addressed or put off by the dream of future great-power war.  But the integration will proceed apace whether we engage it or not. Globalization is simply that powerful--the essence of our 5GW victory that few on our side are ready to embrace.

Yes, there is plenty of naivete on this subject, but it rests primarily with those who cling to their romantic notions of past warfare.

Mattis becomes Central Command boss

That makes two of my three "monks of war" (Esquire 2006--reposted again on the site) in the two most important military positions right now: Petraeus running Af-Pak and Mattis running CentCom as his boss.

Can I pick 'em or what?

Just goes to show that not every flag officer I profile gets immediately relieved of duty!  Most have done just fine.

I really had a blast writing that piece, as I combined the interviews with addresses to the student bodies at both Leavenworth and Quantico (Marine Corps U, which I do again next month).  They weren't hard picks to make, even in late 2005, when I started the story.  You just knew both would end up on top somehow--just a surfeit of the right experience and vision.

No need to worry about who "overshadows" whom, because they're old friends, true believers in the COIN and world of SysAdmin (Mattis being of the "Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!" mindset), and they've worked successfully for each other and with each other in the past.

A very solid choice by the Administration.

My favorite personal Mattis stories:

1) first time we met on the Rumsfeld piece, he tells me he's been an Esquire subscriber all his adult life and that he read my "Pentagon's New Map" in his tent the night before he leads his troops into Iraq in 2003; and 

2) after I called him "casually profane" in the subsequent "monks" piece, he sent me an email asking me something to the effect of "where the hell do you get off saying anything like that about me?" because, "God damn it man, my mother's going to read that!"  I remember that when I read his email, I just about gagged on my coffee because I started laughing so hard.

Mattis really is just about the funniest general I've worked with (Marine Tom Wilkerson is a close second--now head of the US Naval Institute), and the best read too.  Guy can quote any historical figure you care to name--at the drop of a hat.  The whole "monks" theme was built around the fact that many of the Marine officers who've served under him consider him the ultimate warrior monk, in part because he makes them read like maniacs. The guy has no definition of downtime--just blade sharpening.

I couldn't be happier for him.  He truly deserves this as the epitome of a great career.

The SysAdmin needs loitering capacity, the Leviathan needs pure strike

WPR piece by David Axe.

The seminal opening bit:

The past year has been a pivotal period for one of the world's most important strategic industries. In 2009 and early 2010, the military aerospace industry marked key turning points: For the first time, the U.S. Air Force -- the world's most important aerospace customer -- bought more unmanned aircraft than manned aircraft. In the same time-span, the Air Force refused to extend production of its exclusive, world-beating F-22 fighter beyond the 187 units it has already ordered, instead opting to develop the smaller, potentially cheaper-per-unit and exportable F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. 

No 9/11 and this does not happen--except maybe waaay down the road.  Ditto on the Long War.

When I wrote in Esquire seven years ago that going into Iraq would force the US into assuming serious strategic ownership of that region (and the Gap in a larger sense), I had this kind of change in mind--a massive and irreversible reformatting of the structure of the force and hence how we use it.

Great piece, worth the subscription.

Negotiation 101 for SysAdminers

USA Today story on how Army is teaching negotiation skills to West Point cadets.

H.R. McMaster quoted approvingly.  

Details:

Until recently, the Army had put little effort into figuring out what makes a successful negotiation.  West Point began offering course in negotiating as a leadership skill in 2006 and last year started the West Point Negotiating Project to spread the training throughout the Army.

Good stuff.  Hell, I would love to take a course like that myself.

Usual alarming quote from Col Gian Gentile saying we're turning the force into a big bunch of wusses.

The Politics Blog: 10 Essential Truths of the Petraeus-McChrystal Switch

Well, well, well — where have we seen this before? The indiscreet U.S. commander whose tongue digs his own grave. The stunning resignation submitted within hours of the magazine's online posting of the story. And General David Petraeus — yet again — as the go-to choice as America's turnaround specialist. Amidst all the nonstop chatter from pundits, politicians, and former ambassadors, allow me to distance myself from the familiar situation I was in with Admiral William Fallon and sift through the tea leaves to look ahead at Petraeus's new gig. Because there are magazine stories, and then there is war. And because — who knows? — Afghanistan may be a lot better off, and Obama may have picked his replacement in more ways than one.

Read the full post at Esquire.com's The Politics Blog.

Central Asia for the long haul

Eurasia.net story via WPR's Media Round-Up.

I remember getting in trouble while working in OSD for saying in a public speech that the US would have military bases in Central Asia for decades.

Well. . .

The Pentagon is preparing to embark on a mini-building boom in Central Asia. A recently posted sources-sought survey indicates the US military wants to be involved in strategic construction projects in all five Central Asian states, including Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

In perhaps the highest-profile project, the Pentagon intends to construct an anti-terrorism training center in southern Kyrgyzstan. The facility was originally intended to be built in Batken. But now it appears that it will be situated in Osh.

According to the notice posted on the Federal Business Opportunities (FBO) website in mid-May, the US Army Corps of Engineers wants to hear from respondents interested in participating in “large-scale ground-up design-build construction projects in the following Central South Asian States (CASA): Kazakhstan; Kyrgyzstan; Tajikistan; Turkmenistan; and Uzbekistan.”

Just so we remember who the neighbors are, because they have a HOA known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

"Runaway general"? Hardly. Runaway mouths? Definitely

I just read the Rolling Stone piece and found the tone of disrespect somewhat stunning.  The media immediately references my piece on Fox Fallon from 2008, but I'm more impressed with the differences than similarities-- as in, Fallon disagreed with the president on substance while McChrystal's gripes strike me as stylistic (e.g., Obama struck him as uncomfortable before brass) and superficial.

Fallon never said anything disrespectful of his superiors in front of me, nor did his staff.  The admiral just fundamentally disagreed on the possibility of going to war with Iran and wasn't shy about sharing that opinion in the press, which he did repeatedly prior to my piece (which he later said misrepresented his views while quoting him accurately--to the tune of over 1,500 words).

Here, McChrystal does just the opposite:  never really disagreeing with his superiors while openly disrespecting them.  I say "openly" because he and his staff did it repeatedly in front of a reporter they knew was there to report on what he saw and heard--just like I did.  

Is that enough to get him fired?  That's Obama's call.  The fact that McChrystal is quoted both directly and in a secondary manner (through his staff) making truly derogatory remarks about so many principals (VP, NS adviser, our AMB in-country, Holbrooke) is problematic going forward, but firing the right guy for the right job when he agrees with your policy is likewise a hard choice for the president.

In the end, it all comes down to the relationship itself.  A magazine story can damage such a relationship but it cannot define it. Fallon was on thin ice with the White House when my story appeared, making it the final nail in the coffin. If Obama's relationship with McChrystal is solid, the Rolling Stone story won't be enough to trigger his sacking. But if it was already fragile/strained, then it may become the excuse.  But my guess is that McChrystal and Obama-Biden are on an entirely different trajectory over Af-Pak than Fallon and Bush-Cheney were over Iran.

Winning in Iraq: What else do you call it?

The periodic chart in the NYT that tracks trends over the years in Iraq and Afghanistan and now Pakistan too.

Unsurprisingly, the numbers are inconclusive in the latter two, reflecting the previous neglect and now the heightened effort.

The only numbers here that jump out are from Iraq.

Somehow we go down from 153k US troops to just 95k, while the Iraqis go up from 445k to 665k and EVERYBODY'S deaths go down dramatically--ours and theirs (to include their civilians).  

Hard not to call that victory, and that's important to remember. Bush-Cheney screwed up the postwar, and then spent years resisting the move to serious COIN, finally giving in after the 2006 election rebuff. When the generals really took over and did what their own hearts and minds told them was right, we got success.  Didn't come in a flash and it cost plenty, but we got success.

That's where the rush job now on Af-Pak strikes me as destined to fail--and prove nothing, especially when we doom ourselves by aligning with Pakistan.

Where I was wrong on Iraq:  I did not believe that the COIN would be enough absent a regionalization effort that included some cool-down on Iran.  I still think we'd have a much more stable Iraq with such an effort, but I clearly underestimated our ability to stabilize Iraq and put the civil war dynamics on the backburner. Iran's domestic troubles have helped in this regard, but we are still a long ways away from engaging Iran more sensibly on the nukes.  There I see a postwar generation of leaders not unlike the Brezhnev crew in the USSR (in relation to the Great Patriotic War) that are brutal enough in their repression but clearly calculating in their brinkmanship with the West and essentially obsessed with getting their revolution historically recognized by the West in the form of admitting their "power" achievements--to include nukes that protect them from regime change.  In sum, I don't view Iran as irrational.  We've been down this pathetic path before and we know how to handle it.  So the regionalization logic, while deferred, still awaits Iran's clear achievement of nuclear weaponization, which is coming.

On Afghanistan, I will stick to the same regionalization logic, because Pakistan's interests here are so strong in seeing Kabul dominated by a Pashtun/Taliban dynamic in the south.  As with Iraq, I see a larger player (India) that must be satisfied on some level if we want true regional security to emerge (and guess what, it's basically another unofficial nuclear power, as is its rival Pakistan). 

In the end, both of these regional efforts at security regimes will resemble what we did in Europe following WWII, and yes, even there it took about 30 years to work itself out, but our patience and our engagement and our military resolve all paid out magnificently.

Gates: a 5GW warrior working a wedge

PLA Daily photo.

WAPO piece by way of WPR's Media Roundup.

The gist:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates accused China's military on Thursday of impeding relations with the Pentagon, taking exception to its unwillingness to invite him to Beijing during his trip to Asia this week.

Gates told reporters that there is a clear split between China's political leaders, who he said want a stronger military connection with Washington, and the People's Liberation Army, which he said does not.

"I think they are reluctant to engage with us on a broad level," he said. "The PLA is significantly less interested in this relationship than the political leadership of China."

Beijing's political and economic relations with Washington have gradually improved in recent years, as the emerging global superpower and the established one have tried to come to terms with each other. But military cooperation has lagged, a source of frustration for Pentagon officials.

They say that communication with the People's Liberation Army needs to improve to deal with regional crises, such as South Korea's accusation that a North Korean submarine torpedoed one of its warships in March, to broader strategic issues, such as the long-term buildup of China's military forces. Washington also has been seeking China's support -- without much success -- in trying to deter Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

We make our choices on things like Taiwan arms sales and military aid to Pakistan, and these choices allow hardliners in the Chinese and Indian militaries to make their case against stronger cooperation with us. At some point, we decide other things like North Korea and Iran really are more important, or we keep with these yin-yanging relationships that never quite come to fruition. You have to remember:  we're the established superpower, and they are the risers, so sensitivities must be observed, just like the Brits did with rising America a century ago. It's just the cost of doing business.

But I like Gates' explanation here, because it's a truthful one: the PLA can't afford too much comity with the US military, because it undercuts their own Leviathan funding and pushes the nation down the path of assuming more responsibility for its expanding global economic network ties, which will bog down the PLA in all sorts of SysAdmin work.

But in Fifth Generation Warfare terms, this is how we do it.

Man-bites-dog story: New cyber command chief says US completely invulnerable!

Okay, so I lied.  The WAPO piece really stated that Gen. Keith Alexander, new head of US Cyber Command, warned that the US was vulnerable to such attacks and that evidence exists that rivals and enemies plan to do just that in the event of wars/terrorism.

Then again, what do you expect the new head of a new command to say on the subject?

Don't get me wrong:  the command makes sense.  DOD nets receive 6 million hacking attempts a day.  Then again, Bank of America receives something in the same range.

I just find the coverage a bit rote.

SOCOM turned loose by Obama administration

WAPO story by DeYoung and Jaffe.

Key point:

Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials.

Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.

Commanders are developing plans for increasing the use of such forces in Somalia, where a Special Operations raid last year killed the alleged head of al-Qaeda in East Africa. Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific group.

The surge in Special Operations deployments, along with intensified CIA drone attacks in western Pakistan, is the other side of the national security doctrine of global engagement and domestic values President Obama released last week.

One advantage of using "secret" forces for such missions is that they rarely discuss their operations in public. For a Democratic president such as Obama, who is criticized from either side of the political spectrum for too much or too little aggression, the unacknowledged CIA drone attacks in Pakistan, along with unilateral U.S. raids in Somalia and joint operations in Yemen, provide politically useful tools.

Obama, one senior military official said, has allowed "things that the previous administration did not."

'More access'

Special Operations commanders have also become a far more regular presence at the White House than they were under George W. Bush's administration, when most briefings on potential future operations were run through the Pentagon chain of command and were conducted by the defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"We have a lot more access," a second military official said. "They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly."

So the soft-on-terror bit doesn't hold with Obama.

I approve of this message:  I see no reason why my trigger-pullers should not stay trigger-happy.  They are good at what they do, and I prefer to take the fight to its sources.

Doesn't obviate the nation-building realities of the international security landscape, where we definitely need to swap out Old Core allies for New, but it demonstrates our commitment to waging the Long War on its own terms.

So a solid course from this White House that earns my respect.

Gates getting even tougher--and more realistic--on the budget

NYT piece by Thom Shanker.

Gates turns the budgetary screws a bit tighter:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has ordered the military and the Pentagon’s civilian bureaucracy to find tens of billions of dollars in annual savings to pay for war-fighting operations, senior officials said Thursday.

His goal is $7 billion in spending cuts and efficiencies for 2012, growing to $37 billion annually by 2016.

Every modern defense secretary has declared war on Pentagon waste and redundancy. And there have been notable, but relatively narrow successes, in closing and consolidating military bases or in canceling a handful of weapons systems.

But if Mr. Gates’s sweeping plan is fully enacted, none of the armed services or Pentagon civilian agencies and directorates would be immune from the pain of annual cost-cutting, which would become institutionalized across the Defense Department.

The spending guidelines were delivered orally to senior military officers and civilian officials before Mr. Gates’s departure this week for an Asian security conference in Singapore, and the official signed guidance will be issued over coming days.

The goal is to force all of the Defense Department agencies and organizations, and all of the armed services, to save enough money in their management, personnel policies and logistics to guarantee 3 percent real growth each year, beyond inflation, in the accounts that pay for combat operations.

Current budget plans project growth of only 1 percent in the Pentagon budget, after inflation, over the next five years.

“Given the nation’s fiscal situation, there is an urgency to doing this, rather than shifting more of the nation’s resources toward national defense,” William J. Lynn III, the deputy defense secretary, said in an interview.

Mr. Gates’s spending orders offer a considerable incentive to the armed services. Each dollar in spending cuts found by a military department would be reinvested in the combat force of that branch, and not siphoned away for other purposes.

The last bit is the smartest.  The services always fear that answering the call on budget discipline is a zero-sum game.

A grim reminder that contingency operations are not good for the defense establishment's bottom line--at least once the splurge mentality is curbed.

The ultimate in disconnectedness

Excellent reportage by Elisabeth Bumiller in the NYT.

Some Afghan women are so conditioned to fear outside males that it limits the ability of the US military to provide to their medical needs.

The killer (literally) quote:

Corporal Gardner, a helicopter mechanic who was working with the female Marines from Pendleton but had not trained with them, found herself as the lone woman dealing with five ailing Afghan women. There was no female interpreter or medical officer — there are chronic shortages of both — and the Afghans refused to leave their compound or let the male interpreter and medical officer come to them. Corporal Gardner devised a cumbersome solution. “Some of these women would rather die than be touched by a male,” she said. “So we’ll diagnose by proxy.”

The quote misleads a bit:  the women have been conditioned into accepting this restriction.  The people who would rather see them die before being touched by a male doctor are their husbands and fathers and brothers and sons.

Such is the level of gender control:  their health is sacrificed to the honor of their males.

It does get any more backward than this:  my pride before your pain.

Pakistan: pre-approved for retaliatory strikes.

Mohammad al-Corey Haim makes an appearance in court.  Add just a touch of success to his efforts and the plans currently being put together inside the Pentagon (would you expect anything less?) would have instantly morphed into operations that involve more than sending our incredibly flying machines to pick them off in onesies-twosies.

The gist:

The U.S. military is reviewing options for a unilateral strike in Pakistan in the event that a successful attack on American soil is traced to the country's tribal areas, according to senior military officials.

Ties between the alleged Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, and elements of the Pakistani Taliban have sharpened the Obama administration's need for retaliatory options, the officials said. They stressed that a U.S. reprisal would be contemplated only under extreme circumstances, such as a catastrophic attack that leaves President Obama convinced that the ongoing campaign of CIA drone strikes is insufficient.

"Planning has been reinvigorated in the wake of Times Square," one of the officials said.

At the same time, the administration is trying to deepen ties to Pakistan's intelligence officials in a bid to head off any attack by militant groups. The United States and Pakistan have recently established a joint military intelligence center on the outskirts of the northwestern city of Peshawar, and are in negotiations to set up another one near Quetta, the Pakistani city where the Afghan Taliban is based, according to the U.S. military officials. They and other officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity surrounding U.S. military and intelligence activities in Pakistan.

The "fusion centers" are meant to bolster Pakistani military operations by providing direct access to U.S. intelligence, including real-time video surveillance from drones controlled by the U.S. Special Operations Command, the officials said. But in an acknowledgment of the continuing mistrust between the two governments, the officials added that both sides also see the centers as a way to keep a closer eye on one another, as well as to monitor military operations and intelligence activities in insurgent areas.

Obama said during his campaign for the presidency that he would be willing to order strikes in Pakistan, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a television interview after the Times Square attempt that "if, heaven forbid, an attack like this that we can trace back to Pakistan were to have been successful, there would be very severe consequences."

I do love the way that woman speaks the truth without apology.

Honestly though, this possible dynamic makes me question the entire lets-choose-Pakistan-over-India logic of this administration.

We are letting others drive our strategy, others who have our worst outcomes in mind.

The IED killer we've been waiting on?

USA Today article with very good news:  “The military has developed technology that uses a high-tech beam to detonate hidden IEDs . . ..”

The only downside: it seems to operate on a wide space, revealing the bombs in the process and—under the right conditions—puts locals in danger IF they’re not forewarned about such countering operations (you know, a blaring voice in the local language announcing that in the next five minutes, everybody should stay clear of roads).

US Marine Corps general James Mattis says, “This is an offensive capability that will change the face of this war.”

I wouldn’t call it “offensive” but resiliently defensive—in effect, we tell the enemy, “All your long and hard and stealthy work gets negated by the flip of our switch, meaning you kill nobody in the process.”

But the “offensive” part comes in the beam’ ability to trigger IEDs while insurgents/terrorists are potentially carrying them or even when they’re under construction.

Mattis advocates putting the technology on aircraft (presumably drones too) and having them sweep areas proactively.

Naturally, the Pentagon announces the capability while providing no details, as countering tactics will invariably ensue.  To what effect?  We shall see.

But this is indeed good news and a development that bears close watching.

The Office of Naval Research is credited with the development.

New rules force Lockheed to shed PA&E

WSJ story.

Sad for me to see because I played a small role as outside cheerleader on the purchase (I ended up giving speeches to a couple of the early Lockheed-Pacific Architects & Engineers corporate gatherings.

But CEO Bob Stevens announces he will be putting PA&E up for sale because new federal rules from last year (Weapon System Acquisition Reform Act of 2009) places stricter limits on mil-industrial companies who provide both managerial support and then seek to build on systems that are ultimately slotted in under the same--i.e., it's a conflict of interest to both manage programs on behalf of the government and then seek to bid on subordinate contracts.

PA&E was acquired in 2006 as part of Lockheed's move into soft-power/second-half/SysAdmin activities.  PA&E continues to do well; it's just that the new rules force divestiture.

To me, this is part of the yin-yang struggle within DoD:  it knows it's stuck with a lot of SysAdmin workload for the foreseeable future, but it fears the military-industrial complex getting too used to horning in on these activities--contract-wise--because the Pentagon wants these functions to migrate elsewhere ultimately, and the more the mil-indusrial complex settles in, the harder that becomes.

So it's just hard to have it both ways, as both the Pentagon and Lockheed find out.

Chart of the day: America's "longest war"

USA Today cover story.

When you do the division, you get this for frequencies:

• 13,000 or so deaths a month, or 400 a day for the Civil War (where both sides are counted in the total);
• 9200 deaths a month, or 300 a day for WWII;
• 565 deaths a month, or 19 a day for Vietnam;
• 308 deaths a month, or 10 a day for the Revolutionary War;
• 51 deaths a month, or 1-2 a day for Iraq; and
• 9-10 deaths a month, or one every three days for Afghanistan. 

America has only about 31m people during the Civil War, so the percentage of the population is stunning at 1 in every 50 Americans dead.

The same ratio for WWII (132m population) is 1 in every 325 Americans.

For Vietnam (200m), it's 1 in every 3,450 Americans.

For Afghanistan/Iraq combined (300m), it's 1 in every 56,000 Americans.

A sense of the burden relative to the population and over time.

If we count Afghanistan as a war, I believe it's fair to argue that it's still shorter than our counterinsurgency effort in the Philippines from 1899 to 1913, or roughly 175 months.  We lost 4,200 troops there (24 a month or almost one a day, on average).

Gates' "final battle" at the Pentagon

Nice editorial by WAPO.

The set-up:

Robert M. Gates spent his first two years focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in each case backing a "surge" to turn around U.S. fortunes. Now, with his time in office probably dwindling, he's taken on a final mission: reforming Pentagon spending so that the United States will be able to maintain its military forces in an era of fiscal austerity. Though the outcome of a war isn't at stake, it's crucial that Mr. Gates succeed.

Gates strives to keep his divisions and such in this uncertain world, so he targets the "tail" behind the "tooth."

This is, to use some military jargon, a target-rich environment. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon budget has nearly doubled, not counting the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan. Much has gone to non-military ends. Health-care costs, for example, have risen from $19 billion to $51 billion and make up nearly a tenth of the entire budget. A military family of four pays an average of $1,200 annually for health care, compared with $3,200 for other federal employees. Wages have risen 43 percent, compared with 32 percent in the private sector.

While the military's overall size has shrunk since the Cold War, generals, admirals and their headquarters have remained intact. The private sector has flattened and streamlined management since 2000, but the number of levels of staff between the secretary of defense and a line officer has grown from 17 under Donald Rumsfeld to as many as 30 under Mr. Gates. The latter likes to point out that a request for a dog-handling team in Afghanistan must be approved by five four-star headquarters.

A seasoned veteran of Washington, Mr. Gates doesn't aim for radical change. He'd like to cut $15 billion or so from these costs in the 2012 defense budget. The problem, of course, is Congress.

A real sign of presidential courage would be to veto a congressional defense bill loaded up with the usual pork, like, as noted in the editorial, a second engine for the F-35 fighter that the Pentagon says it does not want.

Reminds me of the line from the "Contact" (from the military industrialist S.R. Haddon played by John Hurt in my all-time favorite role of his):

First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?