Can Robert Gates Tame the Pentagon?

His second front, Congress, is, if anything, harder. During an appearance on Capitol Hill, lawmakers pushed him to declare their pet programs safe. Senator James Inhofe pressed Gates to protect the FCS program, whose high-tech cannon is built in Oklahoma, Inhofe's home state. "We have a nation where steel mills are shutting down," said Representative Gene Taylor, whose Mississippi district builds ships and who chairs the House Seapower Subcommittee and co-chairs the Congressional Shipbuilding Caucus. "I would ask you to encourage your acquisition folks to take advantage of these low prices." Shutting down the F-22 line means "the loss of 95,000 jobs," warned Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss, as did many others in his state. "If we truly want to stimulate the economy, there's no better place to do it than in defense spending." Last month nearly half the Congress sent letters to Barack Obama urging him to keep the F-22 line humming.

To succeed, Gates will need backing from Obama, along with a plan to spend defense dollars more smartly, during the recession. Despite the protestations of lawmakers, defense spending is an inefficient way to create jobs because the skills that defense jobs demand require premium paychecks. (Civilians working on missile defense for Boeing in Arizona earn three times the state average, the company boasts--great for them, but not so good for taxpayers or the unemployed.) Gates has sent the White House $10 billion in military projects to include in the stimulus package--barracks, hospitals, clinics, child-care centers--that can more quickly generate jobs. Any additional funds saved by killing off major programs could be diverted into less glamorous programs the military needs more: cargo and tanker aircraft, Stryker combat vehicles and small littoral ships designed for coastal warfare. Today's weapons can be radically improved with new electronics, engines and other components without having to build whole new ships, planes or tanks. The F-16's builder says the latest version of that warplane rolling off Lockheed Martin's assembly line in Fort Worth, Texas, yields "the most advanced multirole fighter available today." In fact, the hottest F-16 now in the skies is flown not by the U.S. Air Force but by the oil-rich United Arab Emirates.

Gates, tempered by his decades of seeing what U.S. intelligence could--and could not--do, is leery of the buzzwords and silver bullets that ricochet around the Pentagon. "Be modest about what military force can accomplish and what technology can accomplish," he told an audience of midcareer military and intelligence officials last fall. War is "inevitably tragic, inefficient and uncertain," he said. So is taking on the Pentagon.

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