Lessons for the next war

THE NEXT PRESIDENT will inherit a daunting set of national security problems. Captivated at the start by an illusory belief that the United States could, and should, impose its will on the world's bad actors by shock and awe, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld drove the world's sole surviving superpower into a diplomatic, strategic, and fiscal ditch.

On the last lap of the Bush administration, there has been one tonic voice of reason, which the next administration would do well to heed. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a former CIA director and president of Texas A&M, has labored to undo the damage done by his predecessor.

Gates has been realistic about what military force can and cannot achieve. He has astonished jaded observers of bureacratic turf battles by calling for increased funding for the State Department, traditionally the funding rival of Defense. He did so because he grasps the interrelatedness of diplomacy and force.

He has called for regional cooperation to foster reconciliation and stability in Iraq. And he has argued in public, as in private, for diplomatic means of dissuading Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

Above all, Gates has used his authority as defense secretary to change course at the Pentagon: to prepare for the missions the uniformed military is likely to confront in the future, rather than the conventional state-against-state conflicts that have for too long shaped the Pentagon's procurement policies. This remedial aim was at the core of a sage and pointed speech he delivered Monday to military officers at the National Defense University in Washington.

"What is dubbed the war on terror is, in grim reality, a prolonged, worldwide irregular campaign - a struggle between the forces of violent extremism and moderation," Gates said. "Direct military force will continue to have a role. But we also understand that over the long term, we cannot kill or capture our way to victory."

Gates was telling future leaders of the US armed forces something the next president will need to explain to the public. Where possible, Gates said, military operations "should be subordinate to measures to promote better governance, economic programs to spur development, and efforts to address the grievances among the discontented from which the terrorists recruit."

These are the nation-building tasks that Rumsfeld scorned. They cannot be accomplished by spending billions on ever-more complex high-tech weapons systems. Gates was simply being practical when he lamented that those systems (which Rumsfeld promoted) have left the nation's military with too few of the low-tech war-fighting machines needed for the conflicts Americans are likely to be fighting in the future.

Gates has made no secret of his wish to return to private life next January. But the next president would be wise to appoint cabinet officers who have what Gates says he learned in his career: "a sense of humility and an appreciation of limits."