Matt Yglesias

Ilan Goldenberg Going to the Pentagon

Spencer Ackerman first reported that my friend Ilan Goldenberg, currently Policy Director at The National Security Network, will be leaving NSN shortly for an important post at the Pentagon. Specifically, he’ll be working as special adviser to Colin Kahl, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, with a portfolio focused on Israel and Iran issues.

I don’t want to discredit Ilan with unduly fulsome praise, but suffice it to say that the above is a photo of him on a panel at Netroots Nation alongside such DFHs as myself, Spencer, and Alex Rossmiller who you may recall from Americablog. He’ll be, of course, one voice among several on a few concrete issues that involve many, many, many thorny details. But I’m a “big picture” kind of guy, who thinks it matters a lot where people situate themselves on the broad questions, so I just went back and read this and smiled.

Defense Spending Going Up, Up and Away

The Bush administration’s Fiscal Year 2009 budget for the Department of Defense came in at $513 billion. That does not include the ongoing costs of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s by far the largest number in the world. And it represents a huge increase in the baseline budget from where it was in FY2001. And, to repeat, that’s not because the budget has gone up because of the wars. Well, the Office of Management and Budget was preparing to tell the Pentagon to spend $527 billion—a $14 billion increase—in FY2010. But the Pentagon wanted to spend $584 billion. So they had this effort underway to protray Obama’s $14 billion hike as a $57 billion cut. And now Spencer Ackerman tells me that the administration is starting to cave and promising a $537 total budget.

I expect conservatives concerned about overspending and especially deficit-averse Blue Dogs to be leading the charge against these kind of wasteful outlays.*

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Danzig to CNAS

Richard Danzig, a former Secretary of the Navy who was a key Obama defense policy adviser thoughout the campaign, will be taking a position at the Center for a New American Security rather than joining the administration. Initial transition speculation had him serving as Robert Gates’ deputy at the Pentagon in anticipation of taking over the top job down the road, but evidently that didn’t work out and none of the other jobs he was offered were too his liking. Speaking personally, I think the think tank lifestyle is pretty neat and don’t begrudge those in the executive branch their long hours, but not sure Danzig feels the same way.

Robots and DARPA

Ezra Klein offers up some neat video of a self-reassembling robotic chair:

On the continuum between today’s friendly iPod and tomorrow’s murderous T-1000 that you blow apart with a well placed grenade only to watch it calmly reassemble itself before your horrified eyes, this self-constructing robot chair is pushing uncomfortably close to the T-1000.

I’ve been reading Peter Singer’s Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century and I’m becoming somewhat less concerned about the looming robot slave revolt and somewhat more concerned about serious misapplication of social resources. Singer makes clear something I hadn’t previously understood, namely that military applications of robots isn’t like military applications of the internal combustion engine—a useful technology being used by the military simply because it’s so useful. Rather, in the United States the military actually represents the leading source of funding for basic robotics research (via DARPA) and the leading client for cutting-edge robots.

I think this is pretty problematic in pure economic terms. DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—is by all accounts an effective government agency and lots of technologies originally developed with DARPA funds have useful civilian applications. But at the end of the day, having research funded by DARPA rather than through some other mechanism tends, at the margin, to channel work to military applications rather than to civilian ones. Now on some level, that can fine. All the productivity-enhancing or quality-of-life-improving technology in the world wouldn’t be worth much if we were groaning under the Stalinist yoke. But realistically, a shortfall in high-tech military gear is far from the most pressing issue facing the United States of America. There are a number of respects in which the USA is lagging behind some group of nations or another, but military technology really really isn’t one of them. And over time our disproportionate focus on military-related research and military-related technology is going to undermine the very economic base on which our military strength—as well as our living standards more broadly—depends.

Pentagon Subordinates

A lot of people have been wondering what Bob Gates’ retention means for the giant cast of subordinate appointees who populated the Department of Defense. Are all those jobs going to Republicans? The answer is no:

Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, Gates’s right-hand man in running the Pentagon day to day, is widely expected to leave his post, said the officials, one of whom noted that England’s speechwriter is reportedly taking another job.

Leading candidates to replace England include Obama campaign adviser Richard J. Danzig, who could eventually replace Gates; Pentagon transition review team co-leader Michèle A. Flournoy; and possibly former Pentagon comptroller William J. Lynn, said Obama transition officials and sources close to the transition. [...]

The four undersecretaries of defense are also expected to leave, Pentagon and transition officials said. These include Undersecretary for Policy Eric S. Edelman, who has announced that he will depart by Jan. 20, with Flournoy also a candidate to replace him. John J. Young Jr., undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, is “without question” leaving, a source close to the transition said, noting that Gates has publicly criticized the Pentagon’s unwieldy acquisition process as shortchanging U.S. troops in the field.

Steve Benen observes “It’s unclear if the shift in deputies was part an arrangement worked out between Gates and Obama’s team, or if these officials were planning to depart anyway.” To provide some background and context, you need to understand that a lot of these guys were never Gates’ people anyway. Gates and Donald Rumsfeld had some pretty different ideas about a lot of stuff, but when Gates joined the Bush administration he wasn’t given the opportunity to clean house, fire everyone, and bring his own people on board. Since he’s been in office for a couple of years there’s been some turnover since that time, but still a guy like Edelman has always been a Cheney/Rumsfeld guy who happens to be serving as one of Gates’ top deputies, not a Gates guy who Gates is desperate to hang on to. In fact, I think we can be fairly certain that Gates’ views are closer to those of a moderate Democrat like Flournoy than to Edelman. So whether or not to get rid of people probably wasn’t a bone of contention between Gates and the transition. What needs to be negotiated isn’t whether or not some of these folks need to go, it’s who to replace them with.

Now it seems to me that at some point the Democratic Party is going to want to put a Democrat in charge of the Pentagon, so it’s especially important to see if someone like a Danzig or a Flournoy is given the deputy spot. You could easily imagine either of them serving as secretary in the future, but probably either one would be considered somewhat underseasoned at this point absent something like a spell as deputy secretary to acquire the requisite experience.

The Case for Gates

My colleague Brian Katulis made the case for keeping Robert Gates on as SecDef a while back along with his coauthor Nancy Soderberg. An excerpt:

In several speeches that haven’t received the attention they deserve, Gates has argued that, as he put it on Sept. 29 at the National Defense University, “direct military force will continue to have a role” in the “prolonged, world-wide irregular campaign” against al-Qaeda and other violent extremists. But here’s the important part: Gates understands “that over the long term, we cannot kill or capture our way to victory.”

Instead, he calls for beefed up U.S. diplomatic and development capabilities. Unlike Cheney and Rumsfeld, who were obsessed with potential great-power competitors such as China, Gates bluntly admits that the “most likely catastrophic threats to our homeland — for example, an American city poisoned or reduced to rubble by a terrorist attack — are more likely to emanate from failing states than from aggressor states.” His solution to failing states? Help patch them up. Shortly after he took office, Gates argued that the lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan is that “economic development, . . . good governance, providing basic services to the people, training and equipping indigenous military and police forces, strategic communications, and more — these, along with security, are essential ingredients for long-term success.”

Personally, I have somewhat equivocal feelings about this course of action, but I’m hoping Gates will prove Brian right.

Speaking Its Name After All

Yesterday, jumping off a Steve Coll post I called the Pentagon’s de facto industrial policy “the industrial policy that dare not speak its name.” But alert reader G.S. knows the DOD org chart better than I and observes that there’s actually a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Industrial Policy. In short, military-related industrial policy does, in fact, dare to speak its name. Meanwhile, all this cabinet-related transition speculation is getting dull. Better to make things interesting and start speculating on who Obama will tap for obscure posts like Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Industrial Policy. Who’ll be Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.

Kerry for State?

Spencer Ackerman reports:

Obama campaign advisers declined to comment on the record for this story. Nor would many Democratic foreign-policy experts who might join an Obama administration. But off the record, Obama aides made clear that Kerry’s name is on a very short list of contenders to become the country’s top diplomat. Another person talked up by the great mentioner is Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), a Vietnam War veteran whose foreign-policy views align surprisingly well with Obama’s.

The rest of the article focuses on Kerry, rather than Hagel. As the ninth most-important person in America, I’ll just observe that while Hagel seems like a plausible Secretary of State an the idea of an extended term for Robert Gates at defense also seems plausible, you surely couldn’t do both.