Robert Gates spent the past four years running the Pentagon by riding herd over the military brass, on everything from the Iraq surge to the defense budget. But a day after Gates passionately urged a Senate panel to quickly repeal the ban on open gay military service, the heads of the Army, Marines, and Air Force publicly broke with the defense secretary. Still, Gates may not be losing his mojo just yet.
The chiefs of all four services said that they'd "follow the law" if Congress ultimately decides to repeal the law this year, as Gates and Admiral Michael Mullen want. But only Admiral Gary Roughead, the top Navy officer, actively endorsed overturning "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Friday morning.
Marine General James Amos registered the most fervent opposition, saying "we should not implement repeal at this time" and reading out a message from a Marine in a combat unit worrying about potential sexual "competition" undermining the tightness of his team. Like Amos, Air Force General Norton Schwartz warned against placing "additional discretionary demands" upon a military fighting two wars, and recommended deferring repeal until 2012.
Army General George Casey was cagier, declining to oppose repeal, but also stressing the "risks" of adding "another level of stress" to the Army. Although a months-long military survey found that 70 percent of troops thought getting rid of the ban on open gay service wouldn't be problematic, Casey argued that "a major cultural and policy change" during wartime would "be more difficult for the Army than the report suggests."
Senate advocates of junking the ban tried their best at spinning ambiguities in the chiefs' testimony into ultimate support for repeal over the long term. But opponents took a victory lap. "We don't need to be under the misimpression that there's some great groundswell of support with this," Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions said.
Gates recognized during a Tuesday Pentagon briefing that the service chiefs were "less sanguine" than they were about getting rid of the ban. But there was a time when Gates would lock down dissent on key priorities. When he put together a budget that axed a host of long-cherished military programs in 2009, he made the chiefs and others sign non-disclosure agreements about their internal debates.
That had a powerful impact. Schwartz, for instance, had been a fan of the F-22 fighter jet that Gates stopped buying. When it came time for Congress to approve Gates' budget, Schwartz took a deep breath and penned an op-ed saying it was time to "move beyond" the plane. That's hardly surprising, since Gates has no problem showing generals the door -- includingSchwartz's predecessor.
So is Gates losing his touch? It's tempting to conclude that Gates' self-announced departure from the Pentagon next year has made him enough of a lame duck for the chiefs to thwart him. And there may be something to that.
But Gates also signaled for months that he wanted the military to have a voice in the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" debate. In a February committee hearing, Gates said he'd convene a Pentagon study to guide how any repeal of the policy ought to work, and spent months encouraging troops to tell the study what they thought. He opposed Congress taking action to get rid of the ban until the study issued its report, and only lent his full-throated support to a congressional repeal after the report came out on Tuesday.
Nor did he signal that the chiefs needed to keep their dissents to themselves. To the contrary, on Tuesday, Gates said the chiefs' perspectives deserve "serious attention and consideration" and pledged giving them "an opportunity to provide their expert military advice to the Congress." During yesterday's hearing, he testified that he wouldn't sign any certification allowing repeal to move forward "until the service chiefs are comfortable that the risks to unit cohesion and to combat effectiveness of a change had been addressed to their satisfaction and to my satisfaction."
Amos, the most pro-"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" of all the chiefs, testified that Gates' posture "makes me very comfortable" that any risks to the force would be "mitigated" by that kind of consensus. All the chiefs expressed satisfaction that Gates would listen to their viewpoints, with Amos adding that "none of us will be shrinking violets" on implementing any repeal. That might not augur well for the Senate overturning the ban during this month's lame-duck congressional session. But it does suggest that Gates hasn't lost control of his service chiefs.
Photo: U.S. Air Force
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