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Dec. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he will be an active player on incoming president Barack Obama’s national-security team and his reappointment to head the Pentagon has no time limit.
“I have no intention of being a caretaker secretary,” Gates said today at a Pentagon press conference. “The president- elect and I agreed that this would be open-ended. And so there is no time frame.”
Gates said a review of U.S. policy and strategy in Afghanistan will be a priority of the new administration. Another, he said, is closing the American prison for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, something he said will require legislation to prevent freed detainees from claiming the right of asylum in the U.S.
The secretary played down any differences with Obama over the pace and timing of U.S. troop reductions from Iraq. He noted that, while Obama yesterday reasserted his desire to withdraw American combat forces within 16 months, he also said the pullback must be done responsibly and that he would consult with the military before making any decisions.
Obama has sent “very positive signals to our men and women in uniform” about how he will approach his duties as commander- in-chief, Gates said.
Respect for Military
He said those signals include Obama’s statements about his respect for the military as an institution; his early effort to reach out to the nation’s most senior uniformed officer, Admiral Michael Mullen; and Michelle Obama’s stated desire to be an advocate for military families.
Gates spoke to reporters a day after Obama announced his reappointment to the incoming administration, a development that Gates said has never before occurred in the six decades since the position of defense secretary was created.
Gates, 65, was originally named to the post two years ago by President George W. Bush, a Republican. Obama is a Democrat.
Clearing up a couple of mysteries, Gates said he regards himself as a Republican, although he said he decided during his service as a CIA official that it wouldn’t be appropriate to register as a member of a political party.
And he said he met secretly with Obama at a fire station at Ronald Reagan National Airport just outside Washington on Nov. 10 to discuss the possibility of staying on. While it was known that Obama held a private meeting at the airport firehouse that day, whom he met with hasn’t been revealed until now.
Political Appointees
Gates said “virtually every political appointee” at the Pentagon will eventually be replaced in the new administration, although some may be asked to stay on until a successor has been confirmed by the Senate.
The top civilian appointee under Gates, Deputy Secretary Gordon England, announced today that he will leave when Obama takes office Jan. 20.
Gates said there was no “negotiation” with Obama over issues such as Iraq, where there have been apparent differences between them over Obama’s call for a withdrawal timetable and Gates’s insistence that troop reductions be based entirely on improving security conditions.
Gates said he is convinced that no one, including Obama, “wants to put at risk the gains that have been achieved with so much sacrifice on the part of our soldiers and the Iraqis.”
Security Agreement
At the same time, he noted that the U.S. has signed a security agreement with Iraq that calls for American forces to be withdrawn from Iraqi cities by next June and from the entire country by the end of 2011. And he said U.S. commanders are studying the possibilities for accelerating the pace of the drawdown.
As a result of these developments, Gates said, “I’m less concerned about that timetable. That bridge has been crossed.”
There are about 146,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, with an Army brigade combat team of about 3,500 soldiers scheduled to leave without replacement before the end of the year.
Gates was asked about his response earlier in the year to a question about staying on in the next administration. “The circumstances under which I would do that are inconceivable to me,” he said then.
That answer was “my own form of strategic deterrence” aimed at preempting the possibility that the new president would ask him to remain, he said today.
Fighting Two Wars
“With the country fighting two wars and our men and women in uniform at risk, if a president asked me to help, there’s no way I can say no,” he said. “So I spent a long time hoping the question would never be popped. I then hoped he’d change his mind. And yesterday it became a reality.”
Turning to budget matters, Gates said he hoped to send to Congress within two weeks the second half of an emergency war spending bill for fiscal 2009, which began Oct. 1. Congress has passed a $66 billion first installment; the Office of Management and Budget is reviewing the Pentagon’s request for an additional $83 billion.
“We were given a $66 billion bridge,” Gates said. “Everyone has known there is another piece to that. That’s still being worked by OMB.”
“One of the things we are trying to look at, we’ve got a lot of expressions of concern from the Hill about the reliance on supplementals,” Gates said.
As a result, the Pentagon is reviewing how much money to shift from wartime budgets to the annual base “of expenditures we can anticipate recurring year after year,” Gates said. “It gives you a bigger top-line number. It’s a bill that’s going to have to be paid one way or the other. That’s a discussion that has just begun.”
Weapons Systems
Gates highlighted among his challenges those posed by the size and scope of the defense budget and overall weapons acquisition systems.
“There clearly is going to be very close scrutiny of the budget, and we need to take a very hard look at the way we go about acquisition,” he said.
The new administration faces decisions on about $125 billion in major weapons programs, John Young, the Pentagon’s chief of acquisitions, told reporters on Oct. 30.
They include the purchase of additional Lockheed Martin F-22 fighter jets and Boeing Co.’s C-17 transports; the replacement of Air Force refueling tankers and combat search and rescue helicopters and the acquisition of a new satellite communication system.
While, Gates has previously spoken out on the need to limit the F-22 program to 183 aircraft, today he didn’t repeat this view.
To contact the reporters on this story: Ken Fireman in Washington at kfireman1@bloomberg.net; Tony Capaccio in Washington at acapaccio@bloomberg.net
