Matt Yglesias

Rosa Brooks to DOD

Rosa Brooks’ final column for the LA Times is dedicated to making the case for more public support for journalism (which I think I would support, but I don’t really see as necessary either) but also includes some news of its own: “After four years, I’ll soon be starting a stint at the Pentagon as an advisor to the undersecretary of Defense for policy.”

She was one of my favorite columnists, but it’s probably more important to give people running the military-industrial complex than to have them writing newspaper columns, so I’ll count this as change for the better.

Defense Subcabinet Taking Shape

New Department of Defense posts announced:

• For Deputy Secretary of Defense, William J. Lynn III, who was DOD comproller from 1997-2001 and whose canned bio opens with the intriguing pitch that he “brings decades of experience and expertise in reforming government spending and making the tough choices necessary to ensure that American tax dollars are spent wisely.” Right now he’s working in government relations for Raytheon and he has background in Ted Kennedy’s office.
• For Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Michèle Flournoy, co-founder of the Center for a New American Security, is a person whose ever-increasing prominence will cause more and more of us to familiarize ourselves with the keyboard combination necessary to create the accent grave. The future first woman Secretary of Defense, Flournoy held a variety of DOD positions in the 1990s, then was at CSIS for a while before founding CNAS which has been impressively successful.
• I know nothing about Robert F. Hale, our new Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), other than that he was Comptroller for the Air Force during the Clinton years and thus will perhaps sympathize with the Air Force’s war on blogs.
• Jeh Charles Johnson will be General Counsel, having previously served as General Counsel of the Department of the Air Force.

None of this is really shocking, but the failure of Richard Danzig to land either the Deputy Secretary or the Undersecretary (Policy) job continues a trend in which those national security hands who got on board the Obama train early are not being rewarded for their trouble. I’m fairly certain Flournoy is now the highest-ranking woman ever in the civilian Pentagon hierarchy.

Gates and the Pragmatists

As Josh Marshall indicates, you need to understand talk of keeping Robert Gates on as Defense Secretary in the broader context of an effort to coopt the pragmatic realist wing of the GOP (for which “Scowcroft” is a good shorthand) and bring it into Obama’s coalition. I wrote my post-election column about this last week.

But here’s the nickle version. What you don’t want to do is “move to the center” on national security issues with Gates on board as a bipartisan token of said centrism. What you want to do is redefine the center away from the neocon / liberal hawk center that dominated public debate in 2002-2005 in favor of a new progressive / realist center that’s prepared to undertake bold regional diplomacy aimed not only at extricating ourselves from Iraq, but also achieving diplomatic breakthroughs with Iran and Syria and making progress on Israel/Palestine issues. There’s some reason — Gates’ 2004 CFR Task Force Report on Iran, the Jim Baker’s call for a “diplomatic surge” in the Baker/Hamilton report, Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama, pointed non-endorsements of McCain by Brent Scowcroft and Chuck Hagel, Nick Burns’ Time article on the need to talk with dictators — to believing that forging such a synthesis in a bipartisan way is possible.

But at the same time that I think there’s promise in this approach, on some level it’s just hard for me to assess. Obviously, before appointing anyone to anything you’d want to talk to them and see what they think. But of course Gates isn’t going to take my calls. Perhaps he has terribly wrongheaded views on all sorts of key subjects. But perhaps not. This is the kind of thing the Obama transition team needs to assess and unfortunately there’s not much light that those of us on the outside can really shed on the whole thing.