A Transformer in Disguise

Donald Rumsfeld's primary mission when he returned to the Pentagon as secretary of defense in 2001 was to transform the U.S. military to meet the missions of the new century. Today it seems more likely that it is his successor, Robert Gates, who will leave the lasting legacy.

It's not just the high-profile firings--Air Force secretary Michael Wynne and Chief of Staff Michael Moseley recently joined former Army secretary Francis Harvey, CENTCOM chief Admiral William Fallon, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace on the list of senior defense officials Gates has pushed out. Nor is it simply the critical promotions of General David Petraeus to replace Fallon and General Raymond Odierno to take Petraeus's place in Iraq.

What these decisions reflect is Gates's larger purpose: to make the U.S. military focus on the war they've got rather than the war they'd like to have. Though he's only been in the job for 18 months and will presumably be gone with the rest of the Bush administration next January, Gates has managed to push aside what he calls the "next-war-itis" that metastasized during Rumsfeld's reign and became almost as intractable a problem as al Qaeda or the Taliban.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. When he replaced Rumsfeld after the Republican "thumping" in the 2006 elections, Gates was widely viewed as the man who was going to end the futile fighting in Iraq, slay the neocon dragons, and return a sensible "realism" to the land. He was an intimate of "Poppy" Bush, a member of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, and a representative of the permanent Washington establishment. "They had to bring in someone from the old gang," wrote Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. "With Bob, the door is opened again to 41 and Baker and Brent." The republic would be saved by saner men.

Gates was also supposed to soothe the ruffled feathers of the generals in revolt against Rumsfeld and the "adventurism" of Bush's foreign policy. He was, in the words of William Webster, the former head of the CIA and FBI, a "consensus builder." His agenda was to restore "a whole series of relationships--with [Capitol] Hill, with other agencies and with the senior military leadership."

Where Rumsfeld has been abrasive, Gates would be smooth. "Gates is a man who believes in institutions," one of his early advisers told Fred Kaplan of Slate. "And he saw the need to repair the institution of the Defense Department."

Gates certainly promoted this image: "I saw too many instances, when I was very junior in the C.I.A. and elsewhere," he recalled in an interview, "where somebody would come in and try to impose change from the top and not listen to people. And even if they were able to implement that change in the short term, it ended the day they left office. It's really important, if you want lasting change, to involve the professionals in the institution."

But now Gates seems to be on a mission to impose change, and in a hurry. In a series of recent speeches he's taken on "the professionals" at almost every turn. Gates, as civilians who run the military ought to do, seems to be evaluating and judging the conflicting professional advice. He's listening to one set of professional voices--not just Petraeus and Odierno, but the collective voice of the younger generation of officers who have learned the hard way how to fight and win in Iraq and Afghanistan--pushing back against the other.

The "Gates Transformation" is, in many ways, a simple recognition of reality. It's been very difficult for the Pentagon, and indeed the whole of the U.S. government, to come to grips with the realities of a long war. The Rumsfeld version of transformation--a transparent battlefield, long-range precision strikes, and "rapid, decisive operations"--had a narcotic effect. And not without justification: The initial invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were unprecedented triumphs. But, though they were remarkable, they were not decisive. The enemy was different than we thought, not Saddam's "elite" Republican Guard tank divisions and Taliban militias but Al Qaeda in Iraq, Jaish al Mahdi and Iranian-backed "Special Groups," and the Taliban in "Pashtunistan." Counterinsurgency is more than counterterrorism, and irregular war is long and protracted rather than rapid and decisive.