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Sources: SecDef race focuses on Danzig

President-elect Barack Obama is leaning toward making Richard Danzig, a former Navy secretary and one of his top defense advisers, the next U.S. defense secretary, according to sources.

“The Bush appointees are preparing to turn it over to [Danzig],” said a former Army official, citing conversations with high-level defense officials.

A second source close to the campaign’s planning process said that while no final decision has been made, “that definitely seems to be the direction we’re headed in.” How the shift from incumbent Robert Gates to Danzig would be carried out, the official said, has yet to be ironed out within the Obama camp.

But what is increasingly clear, both sources said, is the Obama camp’s deliberations about the secretary post appear to be coalescing around Danzig.

The most likely scenario would be keeping Gates on for a short period with Danzig as his deputy. That would allow him to continue overseeing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars until the Obama defense and national security team is ready to take over, the sources said.

Then Gates would step aside, Danzig would be elevated and a new deputy defense secretary would be nominated by the president.

Exactly how long Gates would remain in the post after Obama is sworn in on Jan. 20 has yet to be determined, the sources said. Gates may stay until Danzig is confirmed, or he may be retained for a bit longer. But the length of Gates’s run with the new administration “will probably not be a very long one,” the second source said.

In the months before to the election, former Pentagon officials and analysts said Gates had a good chance of being asked to stay on into the next administration, noting his role in revamping U.S. strategy that steered the conflict in Iraq in a more positive direction.

But since the election, a growing number of defense insiders expressed doubts about doing so.

Their doubts included:

• Questions over how well Gates would mesh, in terms of ideology and world view, with other members of the Obama defense and national security team.

• Whether Gates agrees with the Obama team on a number of issues, including pulling out of Iraq, defense spending and about a long list of issues about weapon programs.

• That keeping the incumbent on as the Pentagon boss could handicap the new administration’s ability to fill other crucial Department of Defense jobs.

• The conclusion that retaining Gates, who is so closely linked to Iraq, would anger Obama’s Democratic base.

The movement toward Danzig comes a week after Obama’s Nov. 4 election day victory. He and Gates had been on a shortlist for defense secretary job that sources said also included: John Hamre, deputy defense secretary under President Bill Clinton; Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s emerging threats and capabilities subcommittee; and Sen. Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican who briefly ran for president and has broken with the party line on the Iraq war.

DISCUSS: The right choice for SecDef?