The Velvet Hammer

Back in 1993, Al Gore strode into the vice presidency swinging a hammer, literally. Aiming at the federal bureaucracy in general and at the Pentagon in particular, he smashed overpriced regulation ashtrays on national TV and later handed out "Hammer Awards" in mocking tribute to the semi-mythical $400 hammers the Defense Department bought during the Reagan buildup. Now, after seven years in office and more than $7 billion saved on weapons purchases alone, Gore has made an impact on the defense establishment-and it has made an impact on him. For Pentagon bureaucrats and industry officials who once flinched at the hammer, Gore is now, if not their ideal President, then at least "the devil you know"-a proven quantity far less unsettling to the system than his visionary Republican opponent, big-talking Gov. George W. Bush. In 2000, Gore is the candidate of continuity, not change.

The exception is Gore's apparently radical stand on gays in the military. In the Democratic primaries, he denounced his own administration's "don't ask, don't tell" compromise and endorsed the right of homosexuals to serve without fear of ouster. But even at the time, he quickly backed away from making the issue a "litmus test" for appointments to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and in the months since, he has downplayed the entire issue. His major military policy address, delivered at the West Point Military Academy graduation in May, did not mention homosexuals at all.

In truth, no one should have been surprised either by Gore's position in the primaries or by his pragmatic muting of it since. After all, it was Gore who "argued for the President to lift the ban outright [in 1993], in the opening days of the administration," says David Smith, a gay rights activist with the Human Rights Campaign. But after that bruising battle, which the Clinton-Gore White House lost, the ban on homosexual service was enshrined in statute, and only a radically different Congress would overturn the law. So in practice, "I doubt very seriously, if [Gore] were to win the Presidency, that this would be the first, second [or even] third thing out of the box," said Smith. "We would not repeat 1993." In short: Slow and steady as she goes.

Such cautious changes go beyond cultural concerns to pocketbook issues as well. Former Reagan Defense official Lawrence Korb says, "What you will see under Gore is a continuation of the change that the administration made in the fall of '98, when they decided to plus up Defense spending" with moderate budget increases each year.

Indeed, one of the ironies of the campaign is that the defense industry, traditionally allied with the Republicans, seems more comfortable with the Democrat. It is Gore, not Bush, whose campaign Web site includes a section touting the candidate's commitment to "supporting a healthy industrial and technology base." On military procurement, says one industry official, the Clinton-Gore administration has "done a nice job: They're at $60 [billion a year] and their five-year plan takes it to $70.9 billion in '05." Having finally reversed years of painful cuts, industry seems to feel it has domesticated the Democrats. Bush, by contrast, is a wild man: His call to "skip a generation of weapons" by concentrating on advanced research, potentially at the expense of current programs, sent a shiver up private-sector spines-and was explicitly rejected by the Gore campaign.

Indeed, Gore's military reforms have often been to industry's advantage. The Clinton-Gore administration has pushed outsourcing and cut red tape, opening new opportunities for the private sector. The latest evolution of these changes, the drive for civil-military integration, aims to ease arcane military-specific requirements and allow companies outside the traditional defense industries to do more business with the Pentagon.

Such an opening is especially important if the military wants to exploit the private sector's rapid advances in information technology. It is Bush who has most dramatically embraced a high-tech vision of a "revolution in military affairs." But Gore has paid more attention to the unglamorous organizational underpinnings of such change. In his West Point speech, to an Army audience, Gore pointedly said, "You [and] your colleagues in the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard must stand together as never before-not just in joint operations on the battlefield, but in the shared development of operational concepts, weapons systems and fully integrated support networks." Such appeals for jointness echo Gore's longtime Senate comrade, Connecticut Democrat Joseph I. Lieberman, as well as retired Adm. Bill Owens' call to consolidate research, development and procurement in a single interservice agency.

Whether Gore would really fight the jealously separate services to impose more collaboration is an open question. Gore's record shows that he does not treat defense reform as an end in itself. According to Lexington Institute analyst Loren Thompson, "Gore's principal expressed interests in defense policy during his years as Vice President have really been extensions of his other concerns: arms control, technology, reinventing government."

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. is a reporter at National
Journal. James Kitfield contributed to this article.