The U.S. military is often the only agency on the ground. Infantrymen must act as diplomats in the morning, agricultural experts in the afternoon and cops after dark. Gates' article noted improvements in inter-agency cooperation, but -- with succinct resignation -- concluded that "military commanders will not be able to rid themselves of the tasks ... ."
Gates' defense plan, presented this week, seeks to embed these capabilities but also thwart the most likely current and emerging conventional threats, what he called "the security challenges posed by the military forces of other countries -- from those actively hostile to those at strategic crossroads."
"Most likely" sounds bland, but for Congress, defense industries and many military leaders, they are fighting words. Money isn't the only reason -- legitimate debate over what constitutes adequate preparation for a "war of national survival" is not only justifiable, but a duty. The reason the United States confronts terrorist threats is that America has the combat power to win conventional force-on-force fights, and that must be retained.
Gates doesn't dispute that -- he argues for balance. Budgets are limited. Procuring the expensive "perfect" may be ideal, but acquiring sufficient numbers of "the better than good enough" is more rational.
As a specific example, Gates bets that a sufficient number of F-35s assures U.S. air dominance in the coming decades, so the Pentagon can buy fewer F-22s. Now a battle over numbers flares. Gates says 187 F-22s. I estimate the right number is around 250. Hey, it's not quite thin air. It's based on attrition and operational estimates, and posits a U.S.-China clash over Taiwan.
No one wants that conflict, but if it occurs sometime in the next 20 years we'll rue the day we didn't buy more F-22s. Gates, however, wins the bigger point -- America has less expensive systems that more than overmatch potential adversaries.
Choices must be made, and Secretary of Defense Gates has made his. He has done so with an acute assessment of the long-term strategic benefits of assuring success in Iraq and Afghanistan complemented by a cool, intellectually defensible estimate of future requirements. His proposals now become a Washington budget warfighting document.