Gates pleads for urgent efforts to cut defense waste and prepare for future security threats

Gates steps up campaign to slash defense waste

ABILENE, Kan. — Defense Secretary Robert Gates is stepping up his campaign to reshape the nation’s defense establishment by shifting Pentagon spending priorities and imploring military and civilian officials to change the way they do business.

Returning to his home state, Gates was delivering a speech Saturday on defense spending as the featured guest at a celebration of the 65th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender ending World War II in Europe. He was to speak at the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in the former president’s hometown.

His spokesman, Geoff Morrell, said in advance of the speech that it was intended as a “hard-hitting message” on the need to learn to live with smaller growth in defense budgets in the years ahead, particularly in light of the nation’s economic distress.

The presidential library was a fitting setting for Gates to caution against unrestrained military spending. In his farewell address to the nation in January 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned of “grave implications” from the combination of an enormous military establishment and a huge arms industry. He worried about excessive influence on society from the military-industrial complex.

Like Pentagon chiefs before him, Gates has made a concerted effort to align defense spending more closely to the evolving, irregular security threats that have faced the U.S. since the demise of the Cold War nearly a generation ago. And like his predecessors, Gates has so far achieved mixed results while encountering fierce resistance in Congress and inside the Pentagon bureaucracy.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, did trigger real change at the Pentagon — but mostly in the form of enormous increases in the defense budget and less in terms of preparing to fight the kind of insurgencies that the U.S. has struggled to overcome in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hugely expensive programs like the Air Force’s F-22 stealth fighter, which was conceived during the Cold War, lived on.

“When all was said and done, the way the Pentagon selected, evaluated, developed and paid for major new weapons systems and equipment did not fundamentally change — even after Sept. 11,” Gates said last summer.

Gates has tried repeatedly to blunt the ever-rising cost to the government of providing health care for military veterans by proposing relatively modest increases in their insurance premiums, but Congress has blocked him. Those costs, combined with troop pay increases that Congress has added on top of the Pentagon’s requests, mean less money available to buy weapons and invest in new technologies.

Gates has managed to limit F-22 production short of what the Air Force had wanted, but he has had less success convincing Congress that the Air Force can get by without producing more C-17 cargo planes.

Last year, Congress defied the administration by including in the 2010 defense budget $465 million to develop an alternative engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Air Force’s multi-mission fighter of the future. The White House and Gates still support production of the F-35, which can fulfill multiple combat roles, but the administration asserts that the second engine program is unnecessary.

In a speech May 3 to the Navy League, which advocates for Navy programs and budgets, Gates said the nation must rethink whether it can afford such an enormous naval fleet at a time when the Army and Marine Corps need more money to take care of troops and their families.

“Do we really need 11 carrier strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?” Gates asked.

In remarks Friday to officers at the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., Gates said wryly that he gathered from Navy reaction to his speech that “they didn’t much like what I had to say.” Neither did Sen. Jim Webb, a Virginia Democrat and former Navy secretary whose state is home to some of the Navy’s biggest bases and shipbuilding interests.

“When someone says that there is a massive overmatch between our Navy and other navies around the world, I think that is a misstatement of why we have navies or how different countries field military forces,” Webb told a Senate hearing on Thursday.

Gates acknowledges that his efforts have attracted a wide range of critics in Washington and beyond. One is Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute think tank, who wrote on Wednesday in a review of Gates’ Navy League speech that he was “setting the stage for a decline in America’s global military power.”

In an impassioned address in Chicago last July, Gates said the nation’s defense spending priorities were increasingly divorced from current and future security threats. He said the time had come to draw the line on doing defense business as usual and to invest in weapons and equipment more fitting the nation’s needs.