Gates takes reform agenda to military officers

By Katherine McIntire Peters

Defense Secretary Robert Gates this week is lobbying what is arguably his most important constituency to accept his reform agenda as embodied in the Obama administration's 2010 defense budget proposal -- the men and women who will lead troops on tomorrow's battlefields.

"These recommendations are less about budget numbers than they are about how the United States military thinks about and prepares for the future," Gates told officers at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, on Wednesday. The officers are students at the Air War College, Command and Staff College, and School of Advanced Air and Space Studies.

Gates' budget proposals would significantly reprioritize investments in major weapons programs; increase spending on programs that benefit troops, notably in medical research, health care and family support; and reform contracting.

Fundamentally, the proposals reflect how Gates believes military leaders should prepare for future warfare and care for troops and their families. They would institutionalize support for the men and women on the battlefield, and compel the services to work together to buy the most effective weapons, he said.

"These are just the kind of basic questions you will be dealing with as you go on to staff and command positions," he told the audience. For that reason, Gates said he was visiting each of the service war colleges to explain his decision-making and address questions officers might have.

Gates said his budget decisions reflected his frustrations as Defense secretary during the past two years: "Whether the issue is fixing outpatient care, getting better armored vehicles or sending more [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] capability into the theater, I kept running into the fact that the Department of Defense, as an institution which routinely complained that the rest of government wasn't at war, was itself, not on a war footing, even as young Americans were fighting and dying every day."

The needs of combat troops were not much championed at the Pentagon, especially in comparison with the services' conventional modernization programs, which too often took precedence in the department's budget, according to Gates. The needs of combat troops were relegated mostly to supplemental funding requests to Congress, he said.

"One of the things I've learned since entering government 43 years ago is that the best way to ensure that an organization really cares for and fights for something, as a lioness does for her cubs, is to put that thing in its base budget," Gates said.

As such, he has moved funding for many items into the Pentagon's base budget that formerly were paid for through supplemental funding requests -- things such as medical research and brain injury and psychological health treatment programs. Likewise, investments in helicopters, transport aircraft for moving troops and equipment on the battlefield, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance -- resources that are needed in Iraq and Afghanistan -- will be shifted from supplemental funding to the Pentagon's base budget under Gates' proposal.

Shaping Gates' thinking about what weapons programs to cut or accelerate was his conviction that the old definitions of conventional and irregular war are no longer useful. "We face a more complex future than that," where nation-states will be as apt to employ irregular tactics as terrorists, and where nonstate actors may have weapons of mass destruction. "This kind of warfare will require capabilities with the maximum possible flexibility to deal with the widest possible range of conflict," he said.

That is the reason behind Gates' decision to halt the Air Force's F-22 fighter program at 187 aircraft in 2010. "The F-22 is, in effect, a niche, silver-bullet solution required for a limited number of scenarios," he said. Instead, Gates wants to accelerate the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a cheaper, multiservice fighter, eventually purchasing more than 2,400 of the aircraft. While the F-22 is a more sophisticated aircraft, the F-35 will provide strength in numbers and be suitable for a broader array of missions.

Gates' remarks were "very well-received," said Maxwell spokesman Phil Berube. A transcript of the event showed a number of officers expressed appreciation for Gates' decisions and his explanation of them. It was the Defense secretary's first visit to the service's premier officer training school since June 2008, when he flew there to explain his unprecedented decision to fire Michael Donley and Michael Mosley, who were Air Force secretary and chief of staff at the time, because he had lost confidence in their leadership, Berube said.

Gates conducted similar briefings at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia and the Army War College in Pennsylvania. He planned to visit the Naval War College in Rhode Island on Friday.