The Gates Panetta Petraeus shuffle

What do we make of this announcement, coming today, that Robert Gates will leave the Pentagon to be replaced by Leon Panetta, current CIA head, who will in turn be replaced by David Petraeus, who will himself be replaced in Afghanistan by Marine General John Allen?

First of all, Gates has been, I think, a very good Pentagon chief, as I've written before. It probably hasn't been easy for a Texas Republican to work inside a Democratic administration, but he's done so with to me eye very little of the kind of signal-sending that Republicans in those situations sometimes do, subtly undermining the commander in chief. He carried out the don't ask don't tell repeal. Where he disagreed, on Libya, he just said so plainly and somehow without being melodramatic about it. But when the order came he carried it out. He and Obama did disagree on the size of cuts to the Pentagon budget, and Gates' posture of $178 billion over five years fell short of what many Democrats and a small number of Republicans are looking for (the Pentagon budget is more than half a trillion dollars a year, equivalent in real dollars to its cold war-era heights).

What does President Obama think he is gaining from these moves?

Defense Secretary Panetta: Yes, another alumnus of Congress. Ugh. But Panetta has a reputation of handling the CIA well, and that is not an easy job, as the place has the nasty rep of either undermining or capturing its outsider chiefs. I think this move signals that Obama plans to take the defense budget way down, and that Panetta's expected job will be to hold the place together and sell the spending cuts to the few remaining hawks in Congress.