Gates' verdict: Pentagon's biggest enemy is itself

[Geee]

Washington Examiner:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates leaves office this month as widely respected as any public figure in America today, appreciated for his willingness to return to public service at a moment of high danger in Iraq and to faithfully serve presidents of both parties.
Initially skeptical of George W. Bush's surge in Iraq, Gates did much to ensure its success. Not always in agreement with decisions of Barack Obama, he carried them out and defended them ably. Whether you agree or disagree with his decisions, it's hard not to admire his intellectual honesty and candor.

All of which makes some observations in his valedictory speech at the American Enterprise Institute last week disturbing.

Gates spoke of "institutional obstacles in the Pentagon -- cultural, procedural, ideological -- to getting done what needed to get done" and the need for "fundamentally reshaping the priorities of the Pentagon."

He insisted that the defense budget "is not the cause of this country's fiscal woes," but conceded that "as a matter of simple arithmetic and political reality," defense cuts "must be at least part of the solution."

He did not lament, as he might have, that Obama declined to put money into shovel-ready defense procurement in his stimulus package. Rather, Gates defended projected reductions in the future as being much less in percentage terms than the one-third decline in defense spending between 1985 and 1998, when the Pentagon went on "a procurement holiday."

He noted that he cut or cancelled 30 procurement programs that would have cost $300 billion. But "the proverbial low-hanging fruit," he said, "have not only been plucked, they have been stomped on and crushed."

Moreover, he conceded that $700 billion in new procurement and R&D since 9/11 "has resulted in relatively modest gains in actual military capability." The Pentagon's "buying culture" has put us on "an unsustainable course, where more and more money is consumed by fewer and fewer platforms that take longer and longer to build."