Michael Crowley: The Reinvention of Robert Gates
[Michael Crowley is Senior Editor for TNR]
One afternoon in October, a blue and white jumbo jet flew high above the Pacific Ocean, approaching the international dateline. On board was the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, who was on an around-the-world trip that would end with a summit of NATO defense ministers, where the topic of the day would be Afghanistan. Gates was flying on what is often called “the Doomsday Plane,” a specially outfitted 747 that looks like a bulkier Air Force One and was built to wage retaliatory nuclear war from the skies. Its hull contains metal wiring to shield its avionics from the electromagnetic pulse emitted by nuclear explosions, and a super-reflective coat of paint renders it what the military calls “thermal radiation protected.” Officially known as the National Airborne Operations Center, the $223 million jet is the brainchild of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who feared that the Soviet Union could decapitate U.S. leadership with a surprise attack, and it bristles with communications equipment that can instruct American bomber pilots, ICBM crews, and submarine commanders to fulfill the compact of mutual assured destruction.
Today, the Doomsday Plane feels like a cold war anachronism. And, until recently, so did Robert Gates. For most of a CIA career that began under Lyndon Johnson, Gates had what he calls “a consuming goal”: defending the United States from the Soviet Union, which he still refers to as the “Evil Empire,” echoing the words of his onetime boss, Ronald Reagan. Some of Barack Obama’s top aides knew that era only as children. But it shaped a Washington national security establishment that is still struggling to adjust to a chaotic world of terrorism and counterinsurgency. No one straddles these contrasting periods more visibly than Gates, who today finds himself fixated not on Soviet missile silos but on Al Qaeda hideouts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even so, the past echoes: Gates was present as the cold war’s end gave birth to modern Afghanistan. He helped oversee CIA funding for the Afghan mujahedin, who drove out the Soviets, and the aid cutoff that began a cascade of chaos and violence that culminated in the September 11 attacks. “I think you need to have a highly developed sense of irony,” Gates told me in an interview aboard the Doomsday Plane. “Because twenty or twenty-five years ago, I was shoving arms across the border to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,” a former mujahedin leader turned anti-American warlord.
What’s also ironic is the extent of Gates’s influence over Obama’s Afghanistan strategy deliberations. Perhaps no Cabinet member matches Gates’s impact in the Situation Room as the White House reviews its war plan. It may be Washington’s oddest partnership: a secretive white Republican intelligence insider in his sixties, and a charismatic young African American Democratic president who was barely 30 when the Soviet Union fell. Asked about the contrast, Gates flashes a wry smile: “I think about it all the time,” he says.
In recent weeks, the contrast has verged on something like tension. The day Gates departed Washington on his plane, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had suggested that a decision about General Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops might wait until after a November 7 runoff election in Afghanistan. To his displeasure, Gates had learned about this new spin in the papers. He also was not impressed by the substance of it: “We’re not just going to sit on our hands, waiting for the outcome of this election and for the emergence of a government in Kabul,” Gates told reporters en route from Honolulu to Tokyo, where he was due to meet with his Japanese counterpart. His reedy Kansan voice barely cut through the engines’ dull roar. For a veteran of so many foreign policy crises, Gates seems oddly shy--he tends to avoid eye contact while speaking, looking to the side or into the middle distance. While Afghanistan’s fraud-ridden elections had “complicated the situation,” Gates continued, “the reality is, it’s not going to be simple, it’s not going to be complicated one day and simple the next.” Government legitimacy in Afghanistan would take time, he said, and “the president will have to make his decisions in the context of that evolutionary process.” Translation: We can’t wait for perfect conditions, Rahm. Let’s get on with it.
The episode was a reminder that, while the admiration between Gates and the Obama White House may be mutual, it may not be unconditional. Gates has so far won lavish praise for his management of the Pentagon. “Based on where we are today, I’d say he’s the best defense secretary I’ve seen in a long time,” says Andrew Krepinevich, a military analyst who serves on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. But the easy part is probably behind him. The past several months have demonstrated that Obama may be wary of a major long-term U.S. commitment in Afghanistan. Gates, by contrast, seems convinced that Taliban gains would be a strategic disaster. And other important policy differences lie on the horizon. Gates’s service to Obama has made him one of Washington’s most revered figures and completed a years-long rehabilitation of his once-controversial public image. The question now is how long it can last.
***
“I don’t think he’s gonna say a troop number.” It was Wednesday, and Gates was in Tokyo, at the modern Ministry of Defense headquarters. As he met with his Japanese counterpart to discuss U.S. military bases in Japan, Gates’s traveling press schemed out questions for a post-meeting press conference. “I think he’s made up his mind,” another scribe replied to the first. A decision was made to aim low and ask Gates whether he had reached a decision, leaving the specifics to another day. Gates appeared at a podium, solemn-faced next to the Japanese minister. “Have you come to a decision in your own mind about the best way forward?” a reporter asked. But the question had been posed in two parts, and Gates answered only the first, unrelated question. It would be one of several futile attempts by the Pentagon reporters on the trip to get Gates to say that he had reached a decision.
That was little surprise. Gates has been extremely measured in his comments about Afghanistan. After McChrystal argued for his troop recommendations at a London speaking appearance last month, Gates called it “imperative” that differences over policy be aired “candidly but privately.” That tone of discreet professionalism has become one of his defining qualities. White-haired and 66 years old, he is the elder statesman of the Obama administration--judicious, temperate, and objective, the model of a realist wise man. He has styled himself as the antithesis of the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis of the Bush administration, talking skeptically about military action against Iran and giving Obama political cover to scratch an Eastern European missiledefense system devised by the Bush team. “He’s an intelligence analyst,” says former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton, who has known Gates for many years and worked with him on the fall 2006 Iraq Study Group. “That is how he is trained. He brings that perspective--factual-based, digging for information, deliberative, calm. He weighs options. He’s not ideological.”...
Read entire article at The New Republic
One afternoon in October, a blue and white jumbo jet flew high above the Pacific Ocean, approaching the international dateline. On board was the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, who was on an around-the-world trip that would end with a summit of NATO defense ministers, where the topic of the day would be Afghanistan. Gates was flying on what is often called “the Doomsday Plane,” a specially outfitted 747 that looks like a bulkier Air Force One and was built to wage retaliatory nuclear war from the skies. Its hull contains metal wiring to shield its avionics from the electromagnetic pulse emitted by nuclear explosions, and a super-reflective coat of paint renders it what the military calls “thermal radiation protected.” Officially known as the National Airborne Operations Center, the $223 million jet is the brainchild of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who feared that the Soviet Union could decapitate U.S. leadership with a surprise attack, and it bristles with communications equipment that can instruct American bomber pilots, ICBM crews, and submarine commanders to fulfill the compact of mutual assured destruction.
Today, the Doomsday Plane feels like a cold war anachronism. And, until recently, so did Robert Gates. For most of a CIA career that began under Lyndon Johnson, Gates had what he calls “a consuming goal”: defending the United States from the Soviet Union, which he still refers to as the “Evil Empire,” echoing the words of his onetime boss, Ronald Reagan. Some of Barack Obama’s top aides knew that era only as children. But it shaped a Washington national security establishment that is still struggling to adjust to a chaotic world of terrorism and counterinsurgency. No one straddles these contrasting periods more visibly than Gates, who today finds himself fixated not on Soviet missile silos but on Al Qaeda hideouts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even so, the past echoes: Gates was present as the cold war’s end gave birth to modern Afghanistan. He helped oversee CIA funding for the Afghan mujahedin, who drove out the Soviets, and the aid cutoff that began a cascade of chaos and violence that culminated in the September 11 attacks. “I think you need to have a highly developed sense of irony,” Gates told me in an interview aboard the Doomsday Plane. “Because twenty or twenty-five years ago, I was shoving arms across the border to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,” a former mujahedin leader turned anti-American warlord.
What’s also ironic is the extent of Gates’s influence over Obama’s Afghanistan strategy deliberations. Perhaps no Cabinet member matches Gates’s impact in the Situation Room as the White House reviews its war plan. It may be Washington’s oddest partnership: a secretive white Republican intelligence insider in his sixties, and a charismatic young African American Democratic president who was barely 30 when the Soviet Union fell. Asked about the contrast, Gates flashes a wry smile: “I think about it all the time,” he says.
In recent weeks, the contrast has verged on something like tension. The day Gates departed Washington on his plane, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had suggested that a decision about General Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops might wait until after a November 7 runoff election in Afghanistan. To his displeasure, Gates had learned about this new spin in the papers. He also was not impressed by the substance of it: “We’re not just going to sit on our hands, waiting for the outcome of this election and for the emergence of a government in Kabul,” Gates told reporters en route from Honolulu to Tokyo, where he was due to meet with his Japanese counterpart. His reedy Kansan voice barely cut through the engines’ dull roar. For a veteran of so many foreign policy crises, Gates seems oddly shy--he tends to avoid eye contact while speaking, looking to the side or into the middle distance. While Afghanistan’s fraud-ridden elections had “complicated the situation,” Gates continued, “the reality is, it’s not going to be simple, it’s not going to be complicated one day and simple the next.” Government legitimacy in Afghanistan would take time, he said, and “the president will have to make his decisions in the context of that evolutionary process.” Translation: We can’t wait for perfect conditions, Rahm. Let’s get on with it.
The episode was a reminder that, while the admiration between Gates and the Obama White House may be mutual, it may not be unconditional. Gates has so far won lavish praise for his management of the Pentagon. “Based on where we are today, I’d say he’s the best defense secretary I’ve seen in a long time,” says Andrew Krepinevich, a military analyst who serves on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. But the easy part is probably behind him. The past several months have demonstrated that Obama may be wary of a major long-term U.S. commitment in Afghanistan. Gates, by contrast, seems convinced that Taliban gains would be a strategic disaster. And other important policy differences lie on the horizon. Gates’s service to Obama has made him one of Washington’s most revered figures and completed a years-long rehabilitation of his once-controversial public image. The question now is how long it can last.
***
“I don’t think he’s gonna say a troop number.” It was Wednesday, and Gates was in Tokyo, at the modern Ministry of Defense headquarters. As he met with his Japanese counterpart to discuss U.S. military bases in Japan, Gates’s traveling press schemed out questions for a post-meeting press conference. “I think he’s made up his mind,” another scribe replied to the first. A decision was made to aim low and ask Gates whether he had reached a decision, leaving the specifics to another day. Gates appeared at a podium, solemn-faced next to the Japanese minister. “Have you come to a decision in your own mind about the best way forward?” a reporter asked. But the question had been posed in two parts, and Gates answered only the first, unrelated question. It would be one of several futile attempts by the Pentagon reporters on the trip to get Gates to say that he had reached a decision.
That was little surprise. Gates has been extremely measured in his comments about Afghanistan. After McChrystal argued for his troop recommendations at a London speaking appearance last month, Gates called it “imperative” that differences over policy be aired “candidly but privately.” That tone of discreet professionalism has become one of his defining qualities. White-haired and 66 years old, he is the elder statesman of the Obama administration--judicious, temperate, and objective, the model of a realist wise man. He has styled himself as the antithesis of the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis of the Bush administration, talking skeptically about military action against Iran and giving Obama political cover to scratch an Eastern European missiledefense system devised by the Bush team. “He’s an intelligence analyst,” says former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton, who has known Gates for many years and worked with him on the fall 2006 Iraq Study Group. “That is how he is trained. He brings that perspective--factual-based, digging for information, deliberative, calm. He weighs options. He’s not ideological.”...