Kat, I see, stole my thunder in her post below, necessitating a bit of a rewrite. Sigh. I oughta lock the place until I'm open for business... I don't need to throw the props to Cannoneer #4 yet again, but I thought of him when the Secretary was going through that portion of his speech.

I find the Washington Post's headline interesting... Gates Urges Increased Funding for Diplomacy, with the tagline of Secretary Calls for Use of 'Soft Power'.

I watched the address live. My take, like my notes, are a little different.

This speech is potentially a historic address, if Secretary Gates can put in motion a plan that the next administration will be able to carry forward. He's couching it in terms that a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton could take this concept and move with it, embrace it, and make it their own.

The SecDef is actually calling for a huge reorientation of the Federal Government to blend that Canadian concept of "soft power" with the "hard power" of military power. Not as two separate concepts, but as a unifying theme and construct.

He's calling to take the concept embodied in Provincial Reconstruction Teams and Human Terrain Teams and greatly expand their scope and ability - to include a deployability matching that of combat forces and essentially the institutionalization of the skill set in the US Gov, and not necessarily in the State Department, but perhaps in a different organization - making American foreign policy "joint" in the ways that the US military is becoming (cuz' it's an on-going process) Joint.

He used several historical examples, such as the move from the War Department and Navy Department to the Department of Defense in 1947 in response to the comment that "The war would have ended sooner if the Army and Navy had expended as much effort fighting the enemy as they did fighting each other." and all the tweaks (essentially all imposed legislatively, from without, he noted) through to Goldwater-Nichols which really started bashing Flag-rank heads together by making promotion to flag rank dependent on successful joint assignments of sufficient length to be more than mere block-checks.

He talked about the almost instantaneous dissolution of functional capabilities at the end of WWII, again after Vietnam, and the real destruction of intel (especially humint) and infowar assets (you can hear Cannoneer #4 whooping and hollering in the background) along with a surprisingly large reduction in State Department Foreign Service Officers after the Fall of the Wall.

He didn't call for a merging of State and Defense, nor a simple plus-up in their abilities. As I heard it - he called for a whole new organizational structures, that would institutionalize the skillset within the US government, across the structural/cultural pipes of the existing Cabinet structure.

That's what I heard, anyway. I heard a call for the true institutionalization of "Talk softly, but carry a big stick, and be able to do so proactively - especially the talking part, with the ability to *do* things.

I think he called for rather more than "Gates Urges Increased Funding for Diplomacy, with the tagline of Secretary Calls for Use of 'Soft Power'."

Hey, don't take my word for it - go watch Secretary Gate's Landon Lecture yourself, by clicking here.

And yes, Secretary Gates did basically put in a plug for bloggers - asking how come the US is the place in which Public Relations was invented, yet al Qaeda is better communicating it's message via the Internet. I'll save my slightly smug look for later.

I'm also guessing Ry will be darting out from a dark corner, orange rime of stale cheetos around his mouth yelling... "Barnett! SysAdmin Barnett! Leviathan! Barnett!" and then dart back into his corner... and the PG-17c (with housekeeping mod) will have to come out and clean up stale cheeto chaff from the floor. Okay, this last paragraph is going to scare the normals, isn't it?

Update: The transcript of Secretary Gate's speech is available here.