Even Homer nods

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Delivering his “last policy speech as US defense secretary” on 10 June in Brussels, Robert Gates did not pull his punches. The levels of feebleness and incapacity demonstrated by many allies over Libya confirmed that NATO had become a “two-tiered alliance”.

Delivering his “last policy speech as US defense secretary” on 10 June in Brussels, Robert Gates did not pull his punches. The levels of feebleness and incapacity demonstrated by many allies over Libya confirmed that NATO had become a “two-tiered alliance”. There was still time to “avoid the very real possibility of collective military irrelevance”. But unless Europeans began to assume a fairer share of the common defence, they could expect that “future US political leaders… may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost”.  

I do not have many heroes – but Robert Gates is one. His record as a public servant speaks for itself – culminating in the unique distinction of being pressed by an incoming Democratic President to carry on running the Pentagon as he had under the outgoing Republican. But what I have really admired about Gates has been his knack of moving ahead of events, and getting there early with succinct truths about the changing world scene – usually to the discomfort of the vested interests of what Eisenhower dubbed the “military-industrial complex”. Thus several generations-worth of argumentation in favour of unnecessary defence expenditure fell away when, in the Jan/Feb 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs, Gates pronounced that “Russia's conventional military… remains a shadow of its Soviet predecessor”. And anyone interested in defence reform should light a candle to his thoughtful analysis of how defence establishments left to their own devices will repeatedly sacrifice the needs of the present to their ambitions for the future. (His formative experience in this regard was his struggle to interest Pentagon generals in getting bomb-proof vehicles to their troops in Iraq.)

More recently, Gates has led the way in applying the brakes to the runaway truck of US military expenditure, even succeeding in cancelling some of the more egregiously extravagant equipment megaprojects, despite the inevitable resistance from Congress.

And Gates’s economic realism was on display again last Friday, when he acknowledged that NATO’s problem was as much about how the European allies chose to spend their reduced defence funds as about the fact of budget cuts in an age of austerity.

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