Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Robert Gates

  • Former Defense Chief Calls for Tougher Action Against Russia

    It has been nearly a month since Russian president Vladimir Putin, in response to the overthrow of Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovich, ordered thousands of Russian soldiers into the Crimean. Seemingly caught off guard by Putin’s moves, which came despite American intelligence assessments that he would not enter into Ukraine by force, the Obama Administration has been forced to react to the situation largely on the fly.

    Republican lawmakers in Washington DC have attempted to use the crisis in Ukraine to bolster their narrative of Barack Obama as a president who is unable to anticipate events or demonstrate strong leadership during times of crisis and unwilling to send a visible message to America’s adversaries that bad behavior will be met with stern consequences. The government, assisted by Democratic Party allies, has fought back against such accusations. And, despite poor approval ratings and concern in Democratic circles that Republicans could pick up more seats in the congressional elections this fall, President Obama has brushed aside criticisms as partisan and contrary to the facts.

    But when a former cabinet official starts to question the president’s policy, the criticism seems less partisan and more substantive. (more…)

  • Inevitable Cuts Undermine American-British Partnership

    Robert Gates served both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama as America’s defense secretary. He is a man well versed in defense, considered perhaps even the best Pentagon chief since 1945. Clearly then, here is a man worth listening to when he says that defense spending cuts, taken by the British government, undermine the United Kingdom’s ability to be, in his words, a “full partner” of the United States’.

    He did not say, however, that the relationship between the two countries was at an end, nor that it had even been fundamentally altered, as the BBC’s Jonathan Beale claims. Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, has pointed out while witnessing some locomotives, his country retains the fourth largest defense expenditure in the world. Nor does it have a constitutional limitation imposed on its use of armed force, such as Japan, or a history of shirking NATO commitments, like France — two other American allies. (more…)

  • Robert Gates’ Farewell Message

    Robert Gates, the man who has effectively led and managed the world’s largest military force for the past four and half years, had a simple message as he stepped back into civilian life — the United States may have the most powerful and gifted military on the planet but that power could lose its luster if future presidents plunge the country into “wars of choice.” In other words, if you find yourself a part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or in the inner corridors of the White House, make sure you learn the lessons of the past before sending American soldiers to fight another war halfway around the world.

    For a defense official who served Republican administrations for most of his forty-plus years in government, the message may seem strange. The Republican Party, after all, traditionally prides itself on being “tough” on matters related to national security. Yet Gates’ affiliation with Republicans is also why his words should be taken seriously. After a long and hard decade of never ending combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, the men and women serving the American military are stretched to the breaking point. Gates may not say it out in the open for fear of being chastised but he clearly recognizes that the United States are not as resilient as they used to be.

    Throughout his career as defense secretary, Gates was seen as both a problem solver and a “fixer.” A well established character within the American intelligence community with a solid reputation, he was tapped by President George W. Bush to lead the Pentagon in the midst of one of the most tumultuous times in the nation’s history. By the time Gates was nominated to the post in the autumn of 2006, the war that the Bush Administration had gambled most of its credibility on was spiraling out of control. Thousands of Iraqi civilians, Sunni and Shia alike, became the main victims in a barrage of violence from rival militia groups, predatory policemen and militants affiliated with the Al Qaeda brand. While the Bush White House denied it outright numerous times, Iraq was looking more and more like a civil war. Donald Rumsfeld, who led the Pentagon at the time, seemed detached from what was going on.

    The situation, both in Iraq and in the Pentagon, needed to change. And it needed to change as soon as possible. Thus after a tough nomination process in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gates went into his office and started the difficult work of turning the war around and rebuilding the strength and soft power appeal of the United States. Generals and commanders who were previously safe from reprimands were fired for poor performance while junior officers who were courageous enough to think “outside the box” were awarded promotions in the hopes of spurring a new wave of innovation within the Army and Marine Corps.

    Perhaps more significant than anything else, Gates made sure that he was close to the president but not so close as to jeopardize his credibility as impartial and fair to dissenters. President Bush certainly benefited from Gates’ more temperate demeanor as did Barack Obama.

    Gates, of course, was not perfect. For one, he was a main reason for President Obama to sidestep Marine Corps General James E. Cartwright as next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Many of the goals that Gates sought to accomplish while at the Defense Department either proved to be too difficult to solve or were left untouched. Although the Pentagon is now starting to find savings in order to cut its $700 billion budget, defense spending is still vastly more than it needs to be at a time when Washington is attempting to cut government spending anywhere it can. Robert Gates also leaves behind three wars — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya — with the one that he is most identified with — Iraq — still plagued by insurgent violence, suicide bombings and assassinations.

    Just as Robert Gates came into the Pentagon with a lot on his plate, so too will his replacement, Leon Panetta. The stereotypical Washington insider, Panetta enters the office facing a host of challenges, many of which will take decades to solve. As Gates found out time and again, trying to break through the status quo, whether by cutting the size of the defense budget or decommissioning a missile defense shield, has the affect of stirring resistance from at least someone on Capitol Hill.

    One thing is certain, said Gates. If the United States do not find a way to stop embroiling themselves in war for war’s sake, none of these problems will be as serious as the trouble that could pop up in the future.

  • Gates Warns Against Isolationism After Afghanistan

    Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is due to retire two weeks from now. The only leftover from the Bush Administration in President Barack Obama’s cabinet reflected on the war in Afghanistan and the future of American armed forces in interviews with Fox News Sunday and CNN’s State of the Union.

    A number of American combat forces are scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan this summer. Asked how many troops could start coming home, Gates cautioned in an interview with ABC last week that the president’s “judgement call has to be made in a context of a wide variety of issues.”

    On Fox this Sunday, Gates reiterated that his job was to present the president with various options and lay out the potential complications that come with them. He refused to mention a specific number however so Chris Wallace asked instead what he thought of the administration’s strategy. “We have had a lot of success over the last fifteen months in Afghanistan,” he said, praising the “surge” initiated by President Obama. “The conditions on the ground are far better than they were a year ago.” The president, he added, would not jeopardize the gains made by the military under his watch. (more…)

  • Kill the F-35

    The Pentagon is expected to announce additional delays and cost increases for Lockheed Martin’s monopolistic F-35 stealth fighter. Launched in the 1990s as an “affordable,” widely used replacement for the F-16, F/A-18 and other aircraft, in recent years the F-35 has become exactly the opposite. Sales estimates of up to 4,000 jets — more than half of them for American forces — seem increasingly fantastical as governments look to cut defense costs. Increasing development delays only make it easier for customers to cancel or defer their planned orders. With the order book looking thinner and thinner, pricey development gets spread out over fewer jets. Instead of costing the same as or less than today’s $50 million F/A-18E/F, the average F-35 will be around twice as expensive, per airplane, until very late in a projected thirty year production run.

    For that reason, it’s time to pull the plug. That’s right: kill the F-35. It’s the surest way to save the Pentagon’s fighter fleets from slowly wasting away.

    Last summer, the Pentagon tried to deny, then ultimately admitted, that F-35 development had run into serious management and technical obstacles. They problems cascaded throughout the program. This spring, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced a major reorganization of the program, firing the general in charge, delaying full rate production by a year to 2015 and adding $3 billion to development. Now Bloomberg is reporting that the Pentagon will push back full production to 2016 and add an extra $5 billion for R&D. The news comes just weeks after the United Kingdom, previously the biggest projected F-35 customer after the US, reduced its anticipated buy to just fifty or so copies, down from 138.

    Critics have a word for this cycle of increasing cost and decreasing orders. It’s called the “death spiral.” It’s how the US Air Force has ended up buying just 187 F-22 fighters, several years late and at a cost of more than $300 million per jet, instead of the 381 the air service said it needed. If we allow the F-35 to continue spiraling, it will gobble up essentially all available funding for tactical airplanes for the next thirty years, without delivering the number of jets we need to keep up our fleets. Plus, the F-35 program as designed directs most of the Pentagon’s fighter budget to just one big manufacturer, basically starving the others. That’s bad for the American defense industry.

    Kill it

    It’s time to kill the F-35 as a production program and redirect most of its roughly $300 billion future cost into other, more cost effective aircraft designs spread over a greater number of manufacturers. Taxpayers have already spent around $50 billion on the F-35, but that’s not a compelling reason to maintain the program in its current form. Rather, the F-35 should become strictly a prototyping and technology-development program, rather than a large-scale production program — much in the same way the Pentagon cut the Navy’s $5 billion per copy DDG-1000 “stealth” destroyer to just three hulls, meant mostly for experimentation. We’ve paid for a hundred F-35s. Let’s put them to good use refining concepts and technology. But we shouldn’t buy more of them

    The timing is right. America still has four other, active manned fighter production lines, plus drone programs, that can deliver the same or more capability and more aircraft, all at lower overall cost, and faster. The impact on foreign allies will be minimal. The implications for weapons manufacturers can be mitigated by reinvesting the savings. My proposal to kill off the F-35 is not about cutting American defense spending or reducing the size or capability of American fighter fleets. Rather, ending the F-35 now would result in a stronger military and healthier industry.

    The big question is, does Gates have the fortitude to dismantle the biggest weapons program in history? Despite Gates’ record as a boondoggle killer — he curtailed the DDG-1000 plus the Army’s $200 billion Future Combat Systems — it’s an open question whether he has the clout and foresight to do the same with the F-35. To be sure, the F-35 will be one of Gates’ final acquisitions challenges: he’s expected to step down in 2011. The F-35 decision could be his most lasting legacy, if he can muster the courage to kill it. Or, if he concedes to more delays and cost increases, the F-35 could prove to be Gates’ biggest regret.

    The American air fleet need new fighters. The Navy and Marines have several hundred first-generation F/A-18s expected to age out in just a few years; most of the Air Force’s F-15Cs and F-16s will be worn out in a decade or so. To maintain the existing, overall fleet of some 3,000 tactical fighters, the Pentagon must buy at least a hundred fighters a year, starting now. And it must do so within existing budgets, as economic conditions make a topline increase highly unlikely.

    There’s just one way to accomplish this. End the F-35 as a production program. The Pentagon should spend a few billion dollars over coming years experimenting with the F-35 airframes and systems, using the hundred jets we’ve already paid for. But plans to buy 2,400 F-35s for the Air Force, Navy and Marines must stop. That would free up at least $12 billion a year immediately, and more down the road. Gates should reinvest that money in new and existing aircraft. Specifically, he should:

    • Continue F-22 production at a rate of twenty per year, at a cost of around $4 billion annually. Add, say, two hundred planes to current fleet. I admit I supported Gates’ earlier plan to truncate the F-22 in favor of the F-35, but circumstances have changed. A roughly four hundred strong F-22 fleet could provide air defense and defense suppression capability for the Air Force, enabling bigger fleets of less advanced jets to bomb and patrol with relative impunity. Extended F-22 production would help keep Lockheed happy in lieu of F-35 production.
    • Replace F-15Cs with stealthier F-15 Silent Eagles, available from Boeing today. The Pentagon should negotiate to buy twenty per year for less than $2 billion, for a total of two hundred. Alongside two hundred existing F-15Es, the newer F-15SEs would be capable of air superiority and ground attack within airspace sanitized by the F-22.
    • Buy 400 F-16E/Fs from Lockheed for United States-based air patrols and, in wartime, “bomb truck” duties alongside older F-16s. The new F-16s can be had for just $50 million a copy. Forty per year for $2 billion would recapitalize the US Air National Guard before old-model F-16s age out. Between the F-22, F-15SE and F-16E/F, the Air Force would get eight hundred new fighters in ten years, for the same price as continuing the F-35. The risk is smaller; the return is faster on the same overall investment; we lose no capabilities. Plus, the Air Force fighter fleet would remain at its current size of around 2,000 jets.
    • For the Navy, sustain Boeing’s F/A-18E/F production at $2 billion per year for forty jets, while adding new technology and weapons. The sea service should also boost investment in Northrop Grumman’s X-47 armed drone, or the armed Sea Avenger from General Atomics as a less risky alternative. For that, figure $1 billion annually. That funding would help keep Northrop and General Atomics viable as warplane makers. In sum, the Navy gets enough planes on a sustained basis to avoid depopulating its carrier decks — and adds a new, long range capability in the form of an armed drone.
    • Direct the Marines to buy new F-18s: twenty per year should suffice, at a cost of around $1 billion. That would mean eventually surrendering fixed-wing operations from assault ships, currently performed by the AV-8B jump jet and originally slated for the vertical landing F-35B model. Ending jump jet ops does mean giving up a capability, but it’s a capability of marginal value. To replace jump jets on the assault ships, the Marines could add a few attack helicopters to the existing AH-1Z program, at marginal cost. Navy and Marine fighters flying from large carriers would cover beach landings.
    • On the fringes, allow F-35 testing to continue, strictly for tech and concept development. Findings could fold into next generation fighter programs starting in a decade or so. Around the same time, the Pentagon should start buying new bombers — something that might not be possible with the F-35 crowding the budget.
    • Encourage American allies to replace their planned F-35 fleets with Eurofighter Typhoons, Dassault Rafales, Saab Gripens, F-15s, F-16s, F-18s or light fighters from a range of manufacturers. As with the Marines, the only customers that will lose capabilities are those planning on using F-35Bs from assault ships. That includes the Italians, for sure, plus maybe Spain and South Korea. Again, this represents a capability of marginal value: certainly nothing to justify continued investment in an increasingly wasteful program.

    This story first appeared on War is Boring, November 1, 2010.

  • Everybody Loves Robert Gates

    Whether the characterization is fair or not, many Americans have labeled the George W. Bush Administration as the most incompetent American presidency in the past thirty years. But if that is true, Robert Gates should be considered the sole survivor — indeed the sole exception — to the generalization.

    Even before Washington was ready to absorb Bob Gates into the Pentagon’s senior ranks, the Beltway was intimately familiar with his intense work ethic and focused personality. Gates is a Washington veteran in every sense of the word. He has served a total of six presidential administrations over a time span of forty years.

    His first Washington gig took the form of a low level CIA analyst, where he was responsible for assessing classified information on anything and everything Soviet.

    But his low status didn’t last very long. After a short eight year stint at the agency, he served on the staff of President Gerald Ford’s National Security Council, only to return to the CIA a few years later as a top analyst in the agency’s Strategic Evaluation Center. Little did Mr Gates know that his hard work would eventually earn him the attention and respect of an American president. Two years later, he was nominated by George H.W. Bush to be his top official in the Central Intelligence Agency. (To date, Gates’ is the only employee in the agency’s history to have climbed the entire CIA career ladder.)

    All of these accomplishments should be noted. Indeed, a normal person would probably find it tempting to quit after a grueling period as CIA chief. But Bob Gates is no normal person. He’s a worker, a highly respected intelligence leader, and a savvy bureaucratic infighter. He also happens to be someone who can reach across the partisan aisle on a tough issue and extend a hand when the country needs a burst of unity.

    In hindsight, perhaps this is why George W. Bush would ask Gates to lead and revive a defense establishment that was losing morale amid two frustrating wars.

    Rewind to the latter months of 2006. President Bush’s party just got trounced in the midterm elections; the war in Iraq was spiraling out of control; America’s credibility in the entire Muslim world was at an all time low; and the Taliban was starting to make a comeback in Afghanistan. Hundreds of American troops were dying in combat every month. To say that the Defense Department was looking for someone who could calm things down and bring everyone together would be an understatement.

    The United States was at a turbulent point in its history. It didn’t stop Robert Gates from accepting the job of defense secretary.

    Four years later, we can now sit back and reminisce about how great of a job Gates has done. Thanks in part to his temperate leadership style and his complete trust in his commanders, America’s most contentious foreign policy challenges are now starting to simmer down to a somewhat tolerable level.

    An Iraq that was once labeled as an unwinnable quagmire was gradually becoming less violent as a result of a new strategy. Sunni insurgents that were wreaking havoc on Iraqi society were now becoming marginalized by a broad sector of the Iraqi population. Iraqi civilians once hostile to American forces were now responding to a little military concept called counterinsurgency. A certain degree of trust was rebuilt between American troops and Iraqis, resulting in information that would crack down on insurgent operations. Meanwhile, Gates was shielding General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker from congressional scrutiny, which allowed the duo to take risks that were required to turn the situation around.

    Now, one administration later, Secretary Gates has expressed his desire to leave public service and move on with his life. In an exclusive interview with Fred Kaplan, the Washingtonian commented that he is quite happy with what he has accomplished and would be content on retiring next year if President Barack Obama didn’t ask him to stay on.

    You may recall that Gates said a similar thing at the end of the Bush Presidency. But incoming President Obama found the secretary to be so transformative and so connected that he asked him to continue his job for another year. Six months later, Gates is not only still part of the Obama team but one of the most popular members of the administration.

    Does the secretary really want to retire? If so, will President Obama let him? At a time when the United States are still active in Iraq, escalating in Afghanistan and fighting a covert war in Pakistan, Obama may not feel comfortable in letting him go.

    Either way, the Obama Administration better start searching for replacements. Lord knows it’s going to be extremely difficult to fill Gates’ shoes.