01.08.09
Reading the appointments: DoD
Extremely interesting analysis of the picks within DoD by Spencer Ackerman:
Thursday’s announcement of the new senior subcabinet leadership at the Dept. of Defense was conspicuous for a name it didn’t include: Richard Danzig.
Danzig, a former secretary of the Navy, has been one of President-elect Barack Obama’s chief defense advisers for over a year. His absence hints at a development with great significance for Obama’s first term: the implicit recognition that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Pentagon chief under President Bush and tapped by Obama to continue in the job, will not be a placeholder for a Democratic appointee waiting in the wings, as many in the defense community and Democratic politics have presumed.
Instead of Danzig, Clinton-era Pentagon comptroller and former Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) staffer, William Lynn, currently a vice president of the Raytheon Co. defense corporation, will be nominated for the deputy secretary position. Michele Flournoy, a co-founder of the new Center for a New American Security think tank — which has distinguished itself as a home for theorists and advocates of counterinsurgency, stability operations and irregular warfare — was tapped to become undersecretary of defense for policy, a pick that indicates Gates wanted in a partner for his recent efforts at reconfiguring the Pentagon to focus on complex and untraditional methods of warfare.
Conversations with Pentagon officials and those close to the Obama transition suggest that Danzig — once thought a likely prospect for deputy secretary — possessed a different set of skills than those Gates wanted in a deputy, indicating Gates’ influence over the Pentagon transition. “He sees it as [a] management” job, a Pentagon official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said, noting that Danzig is a defense theorist in his own right. The outgoing deputy secretary, Gordon England, was also primarily tasked with managing the complex day-to-day tasks at the Pentagon while the secretaries he served, Gates and Donald Rumsfeld, set policy. Management and not vision is the traditional role of the deputy secretary, with the neoconservative defense theorist Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary from 2001 to 2005, as the only recent exception.
The official noted that Gates does not see himself as a …
