Gates' replacement: Panetta gets the ink; will Mabus get the job?
As Defense Secretary Robert Gates wound up his final trip to Iraq this weekend, defense insiders spun a web of speculation about who will replace him. Most of the attention has centered on CIA chief Leon Panetta, a former White House chief of staff. But there is another serious contender for the post: Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, a former governor of Mississippi who has an unusually close relationship with President Obama, National Journal reports.
Mabus doesn’t enjoy Panetta’s high profile in official Washington, but the Navy secretary has had a long and varied government career that could make him a good fit for the Pentagon’s changing mission. Gates has been a wartime Pentagon chief who spent his first years in office helping to bring Iraq back from the brink of civil war. More recently, he’s been a central player in the administration’s decision to sharply escalate the Afghan war. His successor will face a fundamentally different set of challenges: overseeing the American withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan while reconfiguring the Defense Department to adjust to a new era of mounting budgetary pressures.
Gates hasn’t announced when he plans to retire, but most military and Defense officials believe it’ll be sometime this summer, probably in July. That would enable him to take part in the Obama administration’s Afghan war review and help Obama decide how many of the surge troops to bring home. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is set to retire when his term ends in September, so a Gates departure this summer sets the stage for his successor to play a major role in choosing Mullen’s replacement as the nation’s top military officer.
Read "Panetta gets the ink; will Mabus get the job?" in the National Journal.
