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If that were to happen, it may well mean that the president and vice-president intend to take military action against Iran before the end of this year and don't want a commander standing in their way.

"I try to be reasonably predictable to my own people and very unpredictable to potential adversaries," he tells me.

No wonder Fallon sticks out like a sore thumb with the neocons, who have the unfortunate tendency to come off as unpredictable to their allies and predictable to their enemies. Which is the opposite of strategy.

If anything has been sorely missing to date in America's choices in the Middle East and Central Asia, it has been a strategic mind-set that consistently keeps its eyes on the real prize: connecting these isolated regions in a far more broadband fashion to the global economy. Instead of effectively countering the efforts of others (e.g., the radical Salafis, Saudi Arabia's Wahhabists, Russia's security services, China's energy sector) who would fashion such connectivity to their selfish ends, Washington has wasted precious time focusing excessively on transforming the political systems of Iraq and Afghanistan, as though governments somehow birth functioning societies and economies instead of the other way around.

Waiting on perfect security or perfect politics to forge economic relationships is a fool's errand. By the time those fantastic conditions are met in this dangerous, unstable part of the world, somebody less idealistic will be running the place -- the Russians, Chinese, Pakistanis, Indians, Turks, Iranians, Saudis.

He said the seeds of U.S. combat successes in the 1991 Gulf war were sown a decade earlier with an infusion of new ideas on using modern technologies to fundamentally change the nature of warfighting.

"What is less well known _especially in America — is that much of the original thinking on these matters was done by the Soviet military as far back as the 1970s when officers wrote about what was then called a `military technical revolution,'" he said.

In his prepared remarks, Gates cited the Soviet military's work in the 1970s on how to use sensors, reconnaissance and command-and-control systems to gain a battlefield edge. In the next decade, he said, top Soviet generals envisioned a scenario in which conventional weapons could be as effective as nuclear weapons — "owing to the gains made in precision, information technology and communications."

That became the standard for U.S. military innovation, which first bore fruit in the successful campaign to oust the Iraqi army from Kuwait after it invaded in August 1990 and triggered a U.S.-led invasion.