Gates Faces a Ton of Work Before He Leaves Pentagon

WASHINGTON (Aug. 16) -- Robert Gates has a lot on his to-do list: Wind down two wars. Trim a bloated budget. Push through a nuclear treaty. End the ban on openly gay service members. And convince himself that this time he really will retire.

The man who has served two presidents of different parties as secretary of defense told Foreign Policy magazine he expects to leave his post as early as January but most certainly by the end of 2011. Others have reported that Gates intends to depart next spring.

"It would be a mistake to wait until January 2012," he told FP. "This is not the kind of job you want to fill in the spring of an election year."

The secretary said he was running out of energy after dealing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, getting rid of weapons programs that don't measure up or aren't needed and holding senior leaders accountable, as he did in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal and when he canned both the civilian and military leaders of the Air Force over lax oversight of the nation's nuclear arsenal.

Gates, 66, has eyed the exit door before, most notably as the man who first chose him for the job in 2006, President George W. Bush, wound down his second term. But when President-elect Barack Obama asked him to stay on, Gates changed his mind. "I worried a lot about the baton getting dropped in the changeover between administrations," he said.

John Ullyot, who was a Republican staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee when Gates was nominated and confirmed the first time in 2006, said the Pentagon chief may have an "aspirational goal" to step down next year, but he wouldn't be surprised if Gates stayed on longer.

"He's tried to retire before and keeps getting pulled back into the fray. I can definitely see a scenario where he's pressured to stay" until the end of Obama's first term, Ullyot said.

Indeed, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell insisted there was no news in the FP interview.

"This is not Secretary Gates announcing his retirement. This is the secretary musing about when it would make sense for him to finally bow out," Morrell said.

Noting that Gates has long said he would not serve for Obama's entire first term, Morrell chided reporters: "I would remind you all that every time Secretary Gates has seriously considered hanging it up for good, he ultimately has decided to keep serving, so my personal advice would be to wait for a real announcement, or better yet, wait to see what happens next year."

Ullyot doubts Gates will leave before the July 2011 deadline that the president has set to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. The FP interview was published the same day Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of coalition forces there, tried to lower expectations for a quick exit from that country.

"He has calmed nerves during the Iraq force draw-down, helped ease the transition from [George W.] Bush to Obama, managed a strengthening relationship with Pakistan, made some difficult defense reforms and kept his eye on other issues like the rise of China," said Michael O'Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution. "All that said, it is simply too soon to forecast his legacy because the trajectory of the one major war that may define his tenure more than any other issue -- Afghanistan -- cannot yet be predicted."

Rep. Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, lauded Gates as "an excellent secretary of defense -- one who is fully trustworthy, understands our challenges and is very supportive of the troops." But the Missouri Democrat's staff said it is premature to predict how his departure will affect the war effort since much can happen between now and next year, and the outcome may also depend on who is chosen as his replacement.

With at least some NATO troops likely to be in Afghanistan for another decade, Gates can hardly wait around until the last soldier comes home.

"I think the toughest thing in public life is knowing when to dance off the stage," he told FP. "And to leave when people say, 'I wish you weren't leaving so soon,' instead of 'How the hell do we get that guy out of there?'"

Whenever Gates leaves, "the next person's going to have to live with a period of significant uncertainty concerning the Iranian nuclear issue and other problems in the Middle East [and] the follow-through on Afghanistan and Iraq," said Wesley Clark, a retired four-star Army general and former NATO commander.

Part of that will involve the care and feeding of NATO allies and working to ensure that others don't follow the recent example of Dutch troops in ending their military mission in Afghanistan.

"He is very well appreciated overseas almost as much as he is here, and that's going to be a big question since so much of what we do is combined operations -- you really need to have a defense secretary who has diplomatic skills, and that's hard to find," said Ullyot. He recalled how Gates "immediately" repaired strained relations with allies who were rubbed the wrong way by his predecessor Donald Rumsfeld's "my way or the highway" approach to other countries.

The next defense secretary also will be called on to continue cutting Pentagon waste as the government seeks to trim the federal deficit. Speculation about when Gates will retire comes less than a week after he unveiled details of his plan to save $100 billion in the Pentagon budget over the next five years. The cost-cutting will eventually include such controversial steps as shrinking military health care and other benefits and downsizing the Marine Corps.

"I will miss him. He has exercised real control over the Pentagon bureaucracy and the military services, and he has learned how to influence Congress," said Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information. "He has begun to use that authority to start to strip away some of the bloat in the Pentagon, including bad weapons ideas like the F-22 and the C-17. There is a long, long way to go, however, and I fear that none of the candidates to replace him have the skill and the guts to continue, let alone expand, any of it."

Depending on when Gates heads for the gate, his unfinished business may also include:

-- The START nuclear arms treaty. Gates has invested a lot of time in the administration's push for Senate approval of the arms reduction pact, but, so far, Republicans have not been moved to support it. "Gates is uniquely positioned, with tremendous reservoirs of goodwill in both parties," Ullyot said. "It will be hard to replicate the almost nonpartisan appeal he has."

-- 'Don't ask, don't tell' repeal. The defense secretary plans to be around at the end of the year when a Pentagon working group reports its findings on how to repeal the military's policy on gays. But that's the not the end of it. Gates, or his successor, will then have to adjust Pentagon policies and certify that allowing gays to serve openly won't have a detrimental impact on the military before Obama can issue an executive order overturning the ban.