Drones Rejoice! Petraeus to Head CIA, Panetta to Pentagon

The long-awaited shakeup of the Obama administration’s national security team has begun. Leon Panetta will leave the CIA to replace Robert Gates as secretary of defense. Gen. David Petraeus will leave command of the Afghanistan war to replace Panetta. It’s a good day to be an armed Predator drone or a shadow warrior.
Neither man is an obvious choice for his new job. Panetta is an accidental CIA director. With practically no intelligence experience, he became director in 2009 after President Obama’s first choice dropped out in the face of liberal opposition.
Unexpectedly, he forged a tight relationship with both agency veterans and the president, and turned the CIA into the tip of the spear for counterterrorism in Pakistan.
Petraeus has spent his life in the military and became the premier Army officer of his generation. His reputation for competence has led successive presidents to go to him to fix disasters — George W. Bush sent him to turn the Iraq war around; Obama sent him to Afghanistan after the McChrystal Rolling Stone debacle. But Panetta restored the confidence of the president in the CIA, so it’s not clear what’s prompting the need for such a drastic career detour for Petraeus — aside from the political need to keep him on Team Obama.
Panetta inherits what Heather Hurlburt of the progressive National Security Network calls “two and a half wars” — Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya — and a massive bureaucracy that both doesn’t know him and considers Gates a hard act to follow. Obama has said that the Pentagon needs to reexamine its global responsibilities so it can trim its half-trillion annual budget by $400 billion over the next twelve years, far more than Gates’ “efficiencies initiative” sought to cut.
“He’ll never live up to what building wants or has come to expect,” Hurlburt says of Panetta. “Gates tried to prepare them that this is coming, and cushion the building for what’s coming, but that’s not tenable. It’s an unenviable task.”


Panetta has a big credential in running the Office of Management and Budget for Bill Clinton. But he’s an unknown as a defense strategist. How will he decide on the future of troubled Pentagon priorities like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, or the recapitalization of ship-building before the Reagan-era Navy ships age out of usefulness?
But he’s generating cautious, first-blush optimism from defense watchers, even among the administration’s political opponents. “Safe choice,” says James Jay Carafano of the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has accused Gates and Obama of cutting defense too deeply. With both Petraeus and Panetta, “no one is going to question whether they are qualified.” Even Gates’ predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, no fan of Obama, tweeted that Panetta and Petraeus are “outstanding leaders.”
Nick Shwellenbach, director of investigations for the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, says a “huge pro” for Panetta is his OMB tenure. “He’s relatively well-equipped to fight the titantic defense budget battles to come. Plus, he’s got the confidence of the President,” Schwellenbach says. “His track record at CIA should inspire some confidence at DOD that he’ll go to the mat for them.” Lose the confidence of one constituency or the other, and he’ll face “increasingly unmanageable problems” in the Pentagon and Congress.
Then comes Petraeus. The CIA has often been run by uniformed military officers — Panetta’s predecessor, Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, most recently. But as much as Petraeus has worked with the CIA and the secretive, lethal Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and Afghanistan, that’s the limit of his time in the shadows.
But he’s got three major credentials for taking over the CIA. First, his reputation. “The agency will thinks it’s cool and be happy for the top cover,” Carafano, a retired Army officer, says. The rep is also an asset for repairing damaged or stalled intelligence relationships in the Arab world during the current political tumult.
Second, although he’s seen as the king of counterinsurgency, Petraeus spent the past nine months in Afghanistan emphasizing its harder, insurgent-killing edges, increasing special operations raids, drone flights and air strikes. That fits in with the rise of the CIA’s drone strikes and its shadow wars — Obama’s model for how to conduct the fight against al-Qaida without a huge troop commitment. The top counterinsurgent has effectively auditioned to become the top counterterrorist.
Petraeus’ third credential is operational. He’s got an excellent relationship with the Pakistanis, positioning him well to salvage an acrimonious relationship that’s crucial for the drone war. “Pakistan has put a lot of short sticks into a lot of hornets nets” Petraeus said last February, a typical response to journalistic or legislative skepticism of Pakistani counterterrorism efforts.
In short, get ready for lots more drone strikes. Panetta is certainly an advocate. With Petraeus’ ties to the military and to its elite commando units, the military-CIA collaboration on drone strikes and counterterrorism raids is likely to accelerate.
That’s especially true as the military leaves Iraq and seeks a reduced deployment schedule, leaving specialized and secret units to do the heavy lifting of counterterrorism. And that in turn could complement the coming defense cuts, as the Pentagon reassesses missions to jettison.
Ironically, Petraeus’ departure from Afghanistan gives the lie to any substantial reduction in troop components this year, since he’s leaving before even giving his recommendations on cuts to Obama. “It was always a joke,” Carafano says. “Obama deadlines are like Italian stoplights: suggestions.”
Still, Petraeus is a stranger to CIA, a clubby, closed society. He also has a reputation as an independent political power center, which can make Obama wary of him — and by extension, his agency. “He knows enough about what the agency does to not be utterly lost, but not enough that he won’t have to do an internal paradigm shift,” says Doug Ollivant, a retired Army officer and member in good standing of the Petraeus brain trust since before the Iraq surge. (“I still consider myself to be on his team,” he adds, by way of disclosure.)
“He loves to rise to the occasion of a challenge, and this will be one,” Ollivant continues. “He may get a less than enthusiastic reception from some in the agency, but he is a pretty good guy to work for if you are producing, and I suspect he will win them over in relatively short order, despite concerns about the ‘militarizing of intelligence.’”
These clearly won’t be the last moves in the Obama national security team. Petraeus is rumored to be succeeded by Marine Gen. John Allen from U.S. Central Command. Both the chairman and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are due to leave this year as well, as is Adm. Gary Roughead, the Navy’s chief officer.
Hurlburt argues that the Panetta and Petraus picks reveal the sort of national security figure Obama wants: “Both excel at going into the system, and bending the system without breaking it.”
Photos: Army, CIA
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/04/drones-rejoice-petraeus-to-head-cia-panetta-to-pentagon/