Slate: A summary of the summary...

Fred Kaplan is at it again, writing in fond praise of Robert Gates.

Since I'm a fan of Kaplan's, I'm going to follow him on this limb, hold my nose and support Gates (never trust a Republican, Momma always said) According to the article, Gates has written a piece about his goals in Foreign Affairs Magazine:

Kaplan:

It is unusual for an incoming Cabinet officer to spell out a precise agenda or to define the standards by which his performance should be judged before the president has even been sworn in. But that's exactly what now-and-future Defense Secretary Robert Gates has just done with an article in the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs.

Gates probably didn't set out to do that when he wrote the article, which was based on a speech he delivered at the National Defense University in September, before the election had taken place.

Okay, so since the Kaplan article is in itself a summarization of the Foreign Affairs Article, what follows now is a summarization of the Fred Kaplan article.

Here are Gates' bullet points:

• Cancel or sharply cut the F-22 and F-35 stealth fighter planes.
• Cut some of the Navy's budget.
• Get the Air Force into other missions besides air-to-air combat.
• Start an Army and Marine advisory corps to train soldiers to assist foreign armies.
• Get Congress to suspend the peacetime promotion system.

I can live with most of this, if only cautiously. The primary Military principle I learned from reading the late great Colonel David Hackworth is that the Army is the men, and the Army never pays nearly enough attention to the men in the form of developing better uniforms, a better assault rifle, a better ALICE pack. (That last bit was courtesy of a little book he wrote called Hazardous Duty).

The technology junkie is always looking for the next new thing, so I'm usually wary about cutting fancy new toys, but I've been hearing similar arguments about the F-22 for a long while. Some fighters hang around too long (the F-15 and F-16 maybe), so are too old but no good replacement is on the horizon (Navy F-14), some have lost their immediate mission (anything Stealth), but Military needs are never stuck in time. They're always shifting, always evolving. One minute we may not need a Joint Strike Aircraft, the next minute a new threat arises and there we are.

Personally, I've been wary of cutting the Navy budget, since they're usually the first responders as it where to Military conflict. It is their ships our Troops travel on, and their Cruise Missiles and Carrier Aircraft opening up each and every war.

And I am a little wary of training soldiers to assist foreign armies, only in that I don't want what training we give a foreign Army to come back and haunt us (see: Middle East, years 1948 to Present).