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Analysts: Gates unlikely as Obama SecDef

A number of complex forces would make it extremely difficult for President-elect Barack Obama to keep Robert Gates — despite his successes — on as defense secretary, according to sources.

Since Obama’s decisive Nov. 4 triumph, he and his top aides have turned their focus toward getting his transition team in place and selecting individuals to populate his government. The shape of the president-elect’s Pentagon team, sources say, will depend in large part on whether Obama decides to ask Gates to be his defense secretary.

In the runup to the election, former Pentagon officials and analysts said Gates had a good chance of being asked to stay on into the next administration, noting his role in revamping U.S. strategy that steered the conflict in Iraq in a more positive direction.

But in the past few days, a growing number of defense sources say there are potentially sizeable hurdles, including:

• Doubts about how well Gates would mesh, in terms of ideology and world view, with other members of the Obama defense and national security teams.

• It is unclear whether Gates agrees with the Obama team on a number of issues, including pulling out of Iraq, defense spending and programmatic issues.

• It could hinder the incoming administration’s ability to convince potential nominees for other Pentagon jobs to work for a Bush-appointed secretary.

• Politically, keeping an unpopular president’s defense secretary could undermine Obama’s campaign trail promises to his Democratic base about withdrawing from Iraq.

“I would be very surprised if the Obama administration keeps Gates on for one day more after Jan. 20,” said one defense official. “In fact, I would give it very long odds at this point.”

Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel who now writes on military reform for the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, agreed that Jan. 20 could be Gates’s final day for a host of reasons.

Macgregor said it appears Obama “allowed people to believe what they wanted to believe — that’s an old trick of successful politicians.

“When this notion came up months ago, Obama decided, ‘Why refute it? Why agree to it?’” Macgregor said. “It is a tactic that was used by a number of past presidents like FDR, Eisenhower and Reagan.”

Geoff Morrell, a Pentagon spokesman, said Gates has yet to rule out staying on if Obama asks.

“Secretary Gates has made no secret of his desire to retire again and return to his home in the Pacific northwest,” Morrell said. “Robert Gates is a throwback to the wisemen of yesteryear … who believe in the patriotic duty of serving their country.”

According to national security sources, a clear shortlist has emerged for the secretary job: Gates; Richard Danzig, former Navy secretary; John Hamre, deputy defense secretary under President Bill Clinton; Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s emerging threats and capabilities subcommittee; and Sen. Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican who briefly ran for president and has broken with the party line on the Iraq war.

The defense official, and other sources, dismissed speculation among defense insiders since the election that the Obama team might keep Gates and install the president-elect’s pick to succeed him as deputy defense secretary.

“First, Gates would see that as a White House spy working right under him,” the official said. Under such a framework, “when the White House wants something from the Department of Defense, who are they going to call? That would be the deputy, not the SecDef. … It’s not hard to understand how that would be unattractive to Gates.”

Asking Gates to stay on could lead qualified candidates for crucial DoD posts to pass on a government tour of duty, sources said.

“If you keep him on for six months or even a year, and you install one of your top defense advisors as deputy with the plan to make that person the next secretary, people aren’t going to know who the real boss is,” said David Berteau, director of the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is a former principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for production and logistics. “And if they take the job without that being clear, those aren’t the people [the Obama administration] will want or need for those jobs.”

Keeping the incumbent might create political problems for Obama.

“The president-elect won the Democratic nomination largely by running against the war in Iraq,” said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Arlington, Va.-based Lexington Institute. “So the idea that he would keep any members of the Bush team simply would not make any sense to his base of supporters. It would be very hard to explain to them.”

Then there’s the budget — the fiscal 2010 defense budget plan that Gates helped construct and which is due to Congress in February, just a few weeks after the president-elect is sworn in. If Gates stayed on, the Obama administration would have to weigh any major changes to the budget against the damage such alterations might do to Gates’s credibility inside the Pentagon bureaucracy.

And finally, the flailing economy has replaced defense issues at the front of most Americans’ minds.

“The notion of keeping Gates on as secretary, when you think it through, really starts to fall apart,” Berteau said. One major reason it would be difficult for the president-elect to keep Gates is “the economy is the major issue right now, it dwarfs everything else.”

That means the Obama administration, once in office, will be focused on turning around the economic and financial situation.

“Things like defense,” he said, “are going to kind of be on autopilot for a while.”

But one former Pentagon official dismissed the idea that keeping Gates would create too much friction within the Pentagon and the Obama national security apparatus.

“If they thought it would create too much tension, I doubt very seriously that they would even be considering it,” said Dov Zakheim, DoD comptroller under the current President Bush. He is now an executive with Booz Allen Hamilton.

“All the names being talked about for Pentagon jobs are people Gates has known for years,” Zakheim said. “Sure, there would probably be some friction, but my guess is they would all keep it to a minimum.”