Gates: DOD Needs to Start Making Choices

Defense Secretary Robert Gates's article for the January/February edition of Foreign Affairs, "A Balanced Strategy: Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age," is worth reading for a multitude of reasons, but I wanted to highlight how it extends the argument that procurement practices need to change to reflect current threats, and that more spending doesn't mean better national security:>> "The United States cannot expect to eliminate national security risks through higher defense budgets, to do everything and buy everything. The Department of Defense must set priorities and consider inescapable tradeoffs and opportunity costs" (emphasis POGO's).>> Gates is particularly critical of conventional modernization at the Department of Defense:>> The Department of Defense's conventional modernization programs seek a 99 percent solution over a period of years. Stability and counterinsurgency missions require 75 percent solutions over a period of months. The challenge is whether these two different paradigms can be made to coexist in the U.S. military's mindset and bureaucracy.>> Gates also echoes something we've said here before, that it's not just a matter of changing DOD's mentality, but also the mindset of Congress and industry. While Gates says the recent Russia-Georgia conflict demonstrates that nation-states still matter, he also points out that "[w]hat all these potential adversaries--from terrorist cells to rogue nations to rising powers--have in common is that they have learned that it is unwise to confront the United States directly on conventional military terms.