Can Robert Gates Tame the Pentagon?

Gates, 65, speaks with a flat Kansas twang that masks the edge he honed during a 26-year career at the CIA, where he was director during Bush 41's presidency. Following Bill Clinton's election in 1992, Gates left the capital for a lakeside home near Seattle, wrote a book and sat on corporate boards before moving to Texas, where he served at Texas A&M University for seven years, the last four as its president. "An obstinate bureaucracy can be a formidable antagonist," Gates said of the Pentagon in From the Shadows (1996), his memoir, "especially when giving up money is involved." Attempting to change the Pentagon has defeated nearly every one of Gates' predecessors. If he prevails, he will have done more to transform the Pentagon than anything his immediate predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, a self-proclaimed king of transformation, was able to accomplish. "I have no intention," Gates said late last year, "of being a caretaker Secretary."

In the coming days, Gates will have to decide what to do about countless weapons programs. Here are the three that matter most.

The Air Force

Gates' first showdown looms with a $350 million--a--pop fighter jet. He has to decide by March 1 whether to add more F-22 Raptor fighters to the 183 purchased by the Bush Administration. For years, the Air Force has wanted to double the fleet, while Gates has made clear that he thinks 183 is sufficient. A month ago, some Air Force officials were saying privately that maybe 60 more F-22s would suffice. The Pentagon's acquisition boss, John Young, recently detailed why more F-22s might be a poor investment. The F-22s that exist are ready to fly only 62% of the time and haven't met most of their performance goals. "The airplane is proving very expensive to operate, not seeing the mission-capable rates we expected, and it's complex to maintain," Young said. Besides, he added, the Air Force plans on spending $8 billion to upgrade most of the F-22s it already has.

Gates has tangled with the Air Force before. Shortly after arriving at the Pentagon in late 2006, he pushed to boost production of unmanned aircraft for use in intelligence work, only to run into the Air Force's long-standing love of manned fighters. But Gates' hunch was vindicated in Afghanistan and Iraq, where cheaper, unmanned Predator and Reaper drones have been flying around the clock but expensive F-22s have yet to appear. Air Force Major General Charles Dunlap Jr. has written that drones are "game-changing" because of their unprecedented ability to loiter for hours, waiting for the enemy to reveal himself--and then kill him with their weapons. And yet Dunlap's service remains wedded to white scarves, cockpits and all their inherent limitations.

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