Obama’s Missed Military Opportunity

CIA Director Leon Panetta, left, offers agency-donated gifts to the Marine Corps “Toys for Tots” campaign.<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ciagov/5416293191/in/set-72157625851564767">CIA photo</a>

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Facing a military budget battle, Iraq and Afghanistan drawdowns, and a political clash over the country’s global security strategy, Barack Obama needed a new defense secretary who could either win over Capitol Hill or cow it into cooperating. He needed new blood. Instead, he promoted the old guard, announcing today that Leon Panetta, the 72-year-old CIA director, would be nominated to replace Robert Gates later this year.

There’s no question that Panetta’s long career of public service—from running the Office of Management and Budget to working as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff to his current contentious position—prepares him well to steer a large bureaucracy through political minefields. But with conservatives already painting him as a Left Coast Democratic stalwart, his good ideas are likely to meet stiff partisan resistance in Congress. And in picking a consummate political insider for the DOD post, Obama passed over two top-notch candidates, missing a chance to disarm conservatives with a defense-savvy Southern Democrat…or a bold, history-making woman.

The Southern Democrat in question was Ray Mabus, the current Navy secretary, who’s also served as Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia. More importantly, Mabus was the last blue-party governor of Mississippi, having ascended to that office on his strengths as the state’s auditor. A crusader against fraud, waste, and abuse, Mabus also earned a reputation as an “education governor” with a comprehensive plan to bootstrap that state’s floundering school system.

Popular with the White House and the Navy’s officer ranks (to which he belonged in the ’70s), Mabus’ influence is far more evident than most service secretaries: He oversaw the opening of the submarine service to women, a move that’s spurred wider debates on the military’s aging rules “no women in combat” rules. He spearheaded the sea forces’ new concern for environmental impacts and energy efficiency, pressuring the other services to follow suit. And, given his natural ties to the Gulf of Mexico, he led the White House’s efforts to draft a long-term restoration plan for the Gulf Coast in the wake of last year’s BP Transocean spill. Moreover, Mabus likely would have joined a long line of Southern Democrats who earned bipartisan support on defense policies, including John C. Stennis and Sam Nunn.

An even bolder choice for the White House would have been Michele Flournoy, Gates’ current undersecretary of defense for policy. An Oxford grad and longtime Democratic military adviser, Flournoy in 2007 cofounded the Center for a New American Security, a left-leaning defense think tank in a Beltway packed with right-wing defense “experts.” The highest-ranking woman in DOD history, Flournoy’s worked mostly behind the scenes, bending the ears of Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to give an overworked military establishment some future direction. She would have been a surprise pick to get the top job, and her political resume is lighter than her administrative one. But the historic nature of her nomination would have put conservative critics (except maybe Allen West) on their heels. And given the administration’s desire for transformative defense cuts, her nomination might have been a perfect start to a revolution in American military policy.

In truth, Panetta’s selection was probably a foregone conclusion for quite some time in the Pentagon’s top offices. In recent months, a bevy of officials, from Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen on down, have publicly pressed the importance of making the military more environmentally friendly and energy efficient. That culminated in the publication earlier this month of a “National Security Narrative” (PDF) by two of Mullen’s flag aides—a sweeping document that encourages the US to cut defense spending, invest in domestic infrastructure and education, and make environmentalism a priority. Those are great ideas, to be sure…but they also happen to dovetail with the interests of Panetta, a Monterey Bay, California, native and staunch green crusader who in 2000 co-chaired the president’s Joint Ocean Commission along with with a retired admiral.

The conventional wisdom is that “the White House could not have made a safer choice,” as echoed by Dov Zakheim, a Bush-era DOD undersecretary, on Foreign Policy today. “Panetta has demonstrated that he is a reliable part of the administration’s team.” Still, the new defense secretary will have a lot of political wrangling to deal with, inside and outside the Pentagon’s E-ring—from trimming the fat off big-ticket projects like the F-35 and F-22 fighter jets, to battlefield drawdowns, to selling Congress on a Van Jones-style green agenda for the military. And already, the right is painting Panetta as the wrong ideologue for the job. “There hasn’t been a Democratic politician in charge of the Pentagon since former Wisconsin Rep. Les Aspin held the post in the first year of the Clinton administration, but the old model is coming back into vogue,” blathered Fox News this morning, before asserting, without warrant, that the selection of Panetta (“a budget guy, not a military guy”) was “particularly alarming to Pentagon types.”

Less-shrill conservatives like Zakheim give Panetta a fairer shake: The CIA director has “worked well with DOD,” he says. But dealing with Republicans in Washington will be a lot messier. “He will do all he can to ensure that defense is not an issue in the forthcoming election,” Zakheim says, ominously adding: “That the Republicans are certain to make it an issue will be no fault of his.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate