June 12, 2008
MIRACLES do happen: A Bush Cabinet officer has proven not only competent, but wise, honest, independent and courageous.
That man is Defense Secretary Robert Gates - who just may be the best SecDef this country has ever had.
If only he could stay on into the next administration, he might rival our greatest Secretary of War, Elihu Root, the crucial military reformer of the early 20th century.
Gates is just and deliberate, but he's wonderfully tough when it's time to make hard decisions. In his brief tenure - since Dec. 18, 2006 - he's stood up to each of the services when they deserved it.
Even more crucially (and dangerously), he's been willing to face down the plutocrats of the defense industry - the thugs in $3,000 suits who've robbed our military for decades, stealing your tax dollars.
Gates' most-recent demonstration of patriotic guts involved firing the Air Force secretary and chief of staff.
They had it coming. The secretary was oblivious and inert. The chief of staff, Gen. Michael "Buzz" Moseley, thought that the only Air Force missions that mattered were supporting Lockheed Martin and fighting attempts to expand the use of cost-effective UAVs (a k a "drones").
A member of the Air Force's notorious "fighter-pilot mafia," Moseley pushed bankrupting buys of aircraft-without-an-enemy, such as the F-22 - then refused to send that platinum-plated piece of junk to Iraq, where its defects and limitations would've been exposed before the buy was complete.
Meanwhile, Moseley and the dozing service secretary continued to neglect our nation's nuclear deterrent - even after repeated embarrassments showed that mission and safety standards had eroded almost to Soviet levels.
Moseley always had an excuse for every security breach. But Gates wasn't interested in excuses. Instead, he applied a military axiom: "The maximum effective range of an excuse is zero meters."
Gates not only faced down the Air Force's entrenched fighter-pilot mafia, his new choice for Air Force chief of staff reflects that service's real missions: Gen. Norton Schwartz made his bones flying transport aircraft and in special operations - two disciplines that matter.
While Moseley's fair-haired boys drilled very expensive holes in the sky over Nevada in $330 million aircraft that never flew a combat mission, the in-the-fight Air Force of transport crews, special operators, ground controllers and ground-attack pilots were at war.
