The Prospects for Robert Gates at Defense

Fred Kaplan, in the linked story from Slate.com, thinks Bob Gates is a great choice for Secretary of Defense in the Obama administration. Kaplan reviews Gates's resume in some detail, and I don't think anyone doubts that he has the credentials for the job. Moreover, Kaplan makes the very good point that a new secretary would spend about a year, with the White House nipping at his heels about possible spending cuts, just figuring out where the problems might be. Gates has some ideas for changing the Pentagon, and Obama might just provide him the tools to make those changes.

The other thing I like about Bob Gates is his essential humility. I'm not kidding myself that anyone who has run the CIA and the Department of Defense is without a healthy dose of ego, but Gates does not seem to be carried away with himself. He knows he has a job to do, and he knows that someone else defines the overall goals and objectives of that job. Bob Gates may, because of that, put his personal stamp on the U.S. military to a greater degree than some of his predecessors who had that as an explicit goal.