One of the amendments to the bill that didn’t pass last night was a measure to strip out $485 million worth of funding for a second engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. President Obama, backing Defense Secretary Bob Gates, announced yesterday that he’ll veto a defense bill that contains the engine. “This program is a perfect example of wasteful spending that Congress must begin to address, and I am disappointed that our amendment failed,” Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), the amendment’s main sponsor, said in a statement after last night’s vote. “I hope we can work in conference with the Senate to eliminate this program once and for all.” They’ll have to. The Senate mark-up of the bill managed not to include the money for the engine.

It’s unclear what Senate Republican strategy is going to be for the defense bill. Only one Republican, Susan Collins (R-Maine), voted for the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal, and several others, including John McCain (R-Ariz.), were angry at the measure’s passage in committee last night. There would be no shortage of cognitive dissonance if the Republican caucus filibustered over a half-trillion for defense and over $150 billion for two wars just months before an election.

But the veto threat could give them a way out of the dilemma. If the conferees are unable to strip the funding for the engine out, Obama — who last night said repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would “help make our Armed Forces even stronger and more inclusive” — would have to choose between infuriating his defense secretary or abandoning one of his central promises to a key Democratic constituency.

After Blumenaeur’s amendment failed, Gates’ spokesman, Geoff Morrell, emailed reporters, “We don’t want nor need the extra engine, but this is just one step in a long journey and Secretary Gates is committed to staying engaged in this process the whole way, including if necessary ultimately recommending President Obama veto this legislation.” All eyes will be on the House-Senate conference.

For weeks now, Gates has done everything he can to get Congress not to put money into the bill for a second engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which he has repeatedly characterized as a “costly and unnecessary” engineering curiosity. He’s even made a legacy-building speech at the library honoring the patron saint of sensible defense spending, Dwight D. Eisenhower, holding out the engine as the crucible of a fight over Pentagon bloat. Again and again for the past several weeks, he’s told anyone who would listen that if the second engine is in the defense bill, he will recommend that President Obama veto the entire half-trillion-dollar bill.

None of that actually stopped the House Armed Services Committee from putting $485 million for the engine into the bill last week. My understanding is that the second engine is not currently in the Senate version of the bill that will go through committee mark-up tomorrow. But now that the White House has blessed a legislative maneuver to make the defense authorization bill the vehicle to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a signature issue for the Democratic base, is Gates standing firm on his recommendation to veto a bill containing the second F-35 engine?

“Absolutely, positively, unequivocally, yes,” says Geoff Morrell, Gates’s spokesman.

It’s possible Gates won’t have to recommend any veto and Obama won’t have to consider using one. Although it’s more likely than not that the Senate committee will put funding for the engine in the bill, sometimes miracles happen. Over in the House, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) announced today that they’re going to push their own amendment during the floor vote to block the money for the second F-35 engine.

Those measures are perhaps the best chances for the politics of repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” not to run smack into the politics of Gates’s efforts to curb defense waste. The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal votes in the House and especially the Senate committee tomorrow are already extremely close, according to Hill sources and LGBT repeal advocates. Who knows how a potential veto recommendation from Gates on a different issue would impact members’ calculations.

Perhaps only two things here are clear. First, the congressional fight over repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” isn’t the congressional fight that Gates wanted the defense authorization to be about, even if he did issue reluctant support for the move earlier today. And second, it’s possible that Obama will be put in the difficult position of having to choose between a core priority for his much-snubbed supporters in the LGBT community and a core priority for his defense secretary.

“Secretary Gates continues to believe that ideally the DOD review should be completed before there is any legislation to repeal the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell law. With Congress having indicated that is not possible, the Secretary can accept the language in the proposed amendment.”

In a press briefing that just concluded, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said that if it receives “formal notification” from EADS as well as Boeing that they intend to bid, then the Defense Department will keep the bid open until July 10. That’s 30 days short of what EADS wants. Morrell called it a “reasonable period of time,” and sweetened the pot, adding that the Pentagon would compress its schedule for a decision on awarding the KC-X contract, keeping to a deadline of “early this fall.”

Asked if international politics played a role in the decision — EADS is the parent of French aerospace giant Airbus and French President Nicholas Sarkozy said that if the process was fair, “EADS will bid” during a White House appearance yesterday that was largely about cooperation on Iran — Morrell firmly denied any such thing. “Politics are not a part of this process,” he said, “Never have been, never will be.”

Legislators have an expectation that EADS, should it win, will build the KC-X in Mobile, Ala. A group of eight bipartisan friends of Boeing in the Senate wrote to President Obama today urging the Pentagon to side with the American company.

That study hasn’t concluded. Nor has the Senate taken up Joe Lieberman’s (I-Conn.) bill to repeal the ban. But Gates has some unilateral tools at his disposal, and this week he intends to use them.

“He will announce changes to the way the current law is being enforced that make it more difficult to begin investigations and kick people out,” said a defense source who would not speak for the record ahead of Gates’s announcement. Spokesman Geoff Morrell hinted in his briefing yesterday that Gates would make some changes, but did not specify any.

Gates has speculated for at least a year that he was considering unilateral steps, ahead of a congressional repeal, to ease the burden “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” places on gay servicemembers. Civil-rights groups have urged him to take such steps, particularly on the process for beginning investigations of servicemembers’ sexual orientation that can drive people out of the military. It’s not clear yet when this week Gates will make the announcement [see update], nor is it clear yet just how enforcement will change. But those who worried that there would be no movement on “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in 2010 while the study commences, despite President Obama’s call for repeal this year in his State of the Union, can probably take heart.

Update, 7:30 p.m.: OK, I’ve got many more details for what Gates is about to announce. This is going to happen in an announcement Gates will make at the Pentagon tomorrow.

According to a knowledgeable source, Gates will effectively limit enforcement to those cases where a servicemember actively outs himself or herself and “leaves the chain of command no legal choice but to proceed” with an investigation while the law remains on the books. That means the clear majority of cases for discharging someone under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — so called third-party based investigations — will no longer be in effect. While the change won’t apply retroactively, it will apply to “ongoing active cases,” my source said. That means, effectively, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” investigations based on third-party outing will slow to a snail’s pace and the criteria for pursuing them will be “much more stringent.”

The net effect of what Gates will announce is to “slow and/or reduce the number of discharges” under the policy, leaving as many soldiers, sailors airmen and marines in the military during a time of two wars.

“Secretary Gates met with the President just before Christmas and gave him a commitment to stay on the job for AT LEAST another year. They agreed to revisit this issue again later this year, but for all intents and purposes their original agreement still stands: he serves at the pleasure of the President indefinitely and he is honored to do so, though he certainly looks forward to one day retiring to his family home in the Pacific Northwest.”

One presumes Gates, a former A&M president, would add: Hook ‘Em.*

*I asked two Texans with whom I am watching the BCS Championship if a Texas A&M president would indeed be pulling for Texas here. This is their call.

Update: I am getting slaughtered on Twitter, and by at least one former Defense official, for suggesting anyone from A&M would root for Texas in anything ever. All right, fine! I had two sources on this! Of unquestionable Texan credentials! One of whom looked like he was going to cry after the Arenas interception! Like Ahmed Chalabi, I declare myself a hero in error.

“Secretary Gates still believes General McChrystal’s focus right now should be on managing the war in Afghanistan rather than wading into the debate about it back here in Washington. There may be a time when he can add to the discussion beyond what his assessment already has, but the first order of business is for the President and his national security team to carefully consider the assessment and the way ahead. The department is working closely with Congressional defense committees to keep them informed of this process as it unfolds and our discussions with them will also determine what makes sense in terms of further briefings or even hearings once the President’s review of the assessment has been completed.”

In an email, aides to Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, say the senator agrees. From Levin spokeswoman Tara Andringa:

Senator Levin has said that calling General McChrystal, General Petraeus, and Admiral Stavridis in to testify at this stage would be premature.  He has said that he will call military and civilian witnesses to testify before the committee once commanders in Afghanistan have made their recommendations, which they have not yet made, and after the recommendations have been reviewed by the chain of command.

Gates is the one who ultimately makes Defense Department witnesses available to the congressional committees, as McChrystal’s spokesman, Lt. Col Tadd Sholtis, underscored earlier.

Without hyperbole, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is the crucial swing vote on Afghanistan, and that complicates the argument for escalation in unexpected ways. Over the past several months, Gates has advanced a thoroughly nuanced and judicious number of proposals for Afghanistan. He advocated up to 30,000 additional troops in January, while arguing that the more important move would be to advance Afghan-driven security and publicly fearing that sending any more U.S. troops would push Afghans past a “tipping point” whereby they consider the U.S. to be occupiers. He fired Gen. David McKiernan for reasons that remain somewhat obscure and replaced McKiernan with McChrystal, a move that drew on Gates’ continued close relationship with Gen. David Petraeus, the Central Command chief. He ordered McChrystal to perform a strategy review, then kept it withheld inside the administration as a “pre-decisional” document in order to preserve the administration’s freedom of action, and compounded the move by cleaving McChrystal’s resource requests from the review itself. When it comes to the troop question itself, Gates has said over the last month that McChrystal has mostly persuaded him that Afghan perceptions of occupation depend on U.S. troop actions, not merely troop mass. But he’s also made clear that McChrystal has to make a really solid argument for any such troop increases, as he won’t be a “rubber stamp.”

Gates absolutely cannot be mau-maued as some kind of hippie. He was the defense secretary behind the Iraq troop surge, the man who fired Adm. Fox Fallon, the Central Command chief who vexed Petraeus on Iraq (though not really for that reason), and a prestige member of the non-neocon Republican foreign-policy establishment. His moves at the Pentagon for two and a half years have uniformly been to orient a massive bureaucracy toward supporting the wars it’s actually fighting instead of the theory-driven acquisition schemes that the different services desire. “My attitude [is]: If you’re in a war, it’s all in. I don’t care what we have left over at the end,” Gates told Wired’s Noah Shachtman for a brand-new profile. So when Mr. All-In says there are reasons to be skeptical of going all-in, it’s hard to argue for going all-in.

But even if he can’t be mau-maued, if Gates actually came out against the increase, he would still take heat from the right. But that wouldn’t be a position worthy of a former CIA director. Instead, Gates has placed himself in the best possible position: not an obstacle to a troop increase, but a persuadable skeptic. That means those who are trying to box Obama have to spend time dealing with Gates, and not alienating him. Hence the section of the Kagans’ proposal that spends time arguing that the U.S. doesn’t have to worry about being seen as an occupying power. The last thing escalation advocates want is to be refuted by the Republican defense secretary behind the surge. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has urged Obama not to “Rumsfeld” Afghanistan by declining to send more troops. But when the Anti-Rumsfeld disagrees, that’s the end of that line. Gates has ways of preserving Obama’s freedom of action and keeping everyone in the Pentagon and in Kabul on board. He will fire you if he feels you’re getting out of your lane, as ex-Army Secretary Francis Harvey and the Air Force leadership can all testify.

And so, not surprisingly, when Gates received Skelton’s request for McChrystal’s testimony, the response, delivered through Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, was “The secretary believes his focus and attention should be there and not back here in — in a political process.” That’s Gates’ job. And Gates is succeeding.

So what did the Pentagon think of Huckabee’s implicit suggestion that the leadership was misleading the public? “That is not the inference I would draw from Mr. Huckabee’s comments,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, “but if that is what he was trying to imply I would say that Secretary Gates’ support is completely genuine … as is that of Joint Chiefs.”

Graham, who also serves on the Armed Services Committee, said, “My message to my Democratic colleagues is: We made mistakes in Iraq, let’s not Rumsfeld Afghanistan.”

“Let’s not do this thing on the cheap,” he said.

By “Rumsfeld[ing],” Graham explained that he meant in Iraq there were not enough American troops on the ground to control the population. “Don’t resist the fact that we are going to need more [troops].”

Already the seeds of that message have been sown. Fred and Kim Kagan, two advisers for Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s 60-day strategy review, wrote a piece for the Weekly Standard hinging off beleaguered Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell’s attempts last week to tamp down reporter speculation about the review and turning it into an alarmed observation about the potentially Rumsfeldian approach to the war taken by Obama.

The Kagans and Graham all have the bona fides of true Rumsfeld critics after the Iraq war debate of 2006. (Though Graham didn’t suggest a new Iraq strategy as much as he urged an infusion of new troops. But whatever.) Will the rest of the GOP want to make the critique that the trouble with Obama in Afghanistan is that he’s acting too much like the Bush administration? It’s not such a bad line of attack, particularly if McChrystal issues a request for new troops that Obama ultimately rejects.