The Next Secretary of Defense Is Kind of a N00b

No one doubts that CIA Director Leon Panetta is qualified to become secretary of defense. Not the senators who said they couldn?t wait to vote for his confirmation, and probably not Osama bin Laden, whose death is the direct result of Panetta?s leadership. But at a few points during his Wednesday confirmation hearing, Panetta appeared out of his comfort zone on key issues he?ll have to tackle at the Pentagon ? everything from shipbuilding to cybersecurity to the size of the Army. He even backed a plan that could edge us closer to a nuclear nightmare.

In his written responses to the Senate Armed Services Committee (.PDF), Panetta endorsed one of the crazier schemes in the U.S. military arsenal. That?s?a program called Conventional Prompt Global Strike, in which non-nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles smash adversary targets halfway around the world. ?A unique conventional capability to strike time-sensitive targets, so that distant, hard-to-reach places will no longer provide sanctuary to adversaries,? Panetta called it, and a ?valuable option? the president ought to have.

It?s also a?great way to start World War III. The Chinese, Russians or anyone else has no way of telling if an ICBM in flight carries a nuclear payload or not. A rational response is to assume armageddon is nigh, and launch their own nukes ? whether that missile is headed for them or for anyone else (like North Korea, say).

The Obama team, which hates nukes, has embraced Global Strike as an alternative to nuclear war. But the scheme is more likely to be an ironic accelerant of it. Now Panetta?s on board.

Speaking of the apocalypse: Panetta got all doomsday when talking about cybersecurity. ?There?s a strong likelihood that the next Pearl Harbor we confront could be a cyber attack,? he intoned.

But most cybersecurity pros think that kind of big, knockout blow from another state is just about the least likely scenario,?even in the age of the Stuxnet worm. Worse, watching the skies for a Cyber Pearl Harbor is a good way to miss the steady growth of cyber crime, as Danger Room boss Noah Shachtman notes in his upcoming paper for the Brookings Institution. Sony, Lockheed, Citibank ? the number of big companies getting pwned piles up by the day, while the annual losses to individuals keeps climbing and climbing. Watch it while you hold up your ?End is Nigh? sign, Leon. Someone just might be stealing your wallet and robbing your store.

Some of Panetta?s other meanderings were more benign, even if a bit wacky. He compared the security situation the U.S. faces to a ?Blizzard War,? seeming to mean a barrage of unconventional threats. (Unlike the Cold War, get it?) But that carried the unfortunate?unfortunate connotation that the U.S., the dominant military power on earth, is snowed under.

Then came his non-answers on several crucial looming decisions facing the military. Sen. Susan Collins wanted to know how he?d bolster shipbuilding so the Navy reaches the floor of 313 ships that Adm. Gary Roughead says the U.S. needs. ?The Navy has to project our force all through the world,? Panetta mumbled before vowing to study the question.?Nor did Panetta have an answer for how big the Army ought to be; how to restrain the ginormous $300 billion cost of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (?Obviously I want to make sure that we have the very best in terms of our fighter planes?); or how to rein in wartime contractors who defraud the Pentagon.

On the other hand, Panetta was firmly in command of matters in his comfort zone ? specifically, fusing Special Ops and intelligence and hunting terrorists. More on that in a subsequent post.

To be clear, running the Defense Department ? the world?s largest bureaucracy ? is a massive undertaking. No one?s prepared for every issue that arises. Panetta faced many of the same grumbles of inexperience when he came to the CIA in 2009, and he leaves it with bin Laden?s corpse at the bottom of the sea. It?s always better to admit unfamiliarity than front, and he?s shown that he can overcome that unfamiliarity. It?s just that the Pentagon bureaucracy has a tendency to try to snow under new secretaries when they show they?re not deep in the weeds on an issue. Maybe that?s a Blizzard War Panetta should watch out for.

Photo: Flickr/CIA

Source: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/the-next-secretary-of-defense-is-kind-of-a-n00b/

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