Gates and Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced the move at a press briefing Thursday.

Gates reiterated that U.S. troops will not be on the ground in Libya. He also said regime change in Libya was always a political goal, but it will take time.

Speculation for the briefing surrounded the possible naming of Cartwright as the replacement for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen when Mullen leaves the post in October.

Watch the live briefing, which started at 3:00 p.m.

In one curious moment in the testimony, General Burgess [the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency] noted that information made public by international nuclear inspectors suggested that Iran had not yet used its thousands of centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear site to make highly enriched uranium, the kind needed to produce a nuclear weapon.

But when asked whether that was also the assessment of American intelligence agencies, General Burgess hesitated, and then told the senators that “any further discussion on that” should be held in a classified session.

The generals offered a number of significant caveats about their assessment of Iran’s capabilities. When asked, for example, how long it would take Iran to convert its current supplies of low-enriched uranium into bomb-grade material, General Burgess said, “The general consensus — not knowing again the exact number of centrifuges that we actually have visibility into — is we’re talking one year.”

That answer seemed to suggest that intelligence agencies believed that other enrichment sites, like the one discovered last year outside the holy city of Qum, might also be operating.

According to the Times, consensus at the hearing was that it would still take significant effort and time to convert that bomb-ready uranium into a bomb, apparently at least a year’s worth. In his last round of testimony to the committee, Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, said he did not expect Iran to possess a nuclear weapon this year.

The Vice President

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates

Ambassador Susan Rice, Permanent U.S. Representative to the United Nations

Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (via videoconference)

Karl Eikenberry, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan (via videoconference)

Anne Patterson, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan (via videoconference)

Under Secretary of Defense Michele Flournoy

Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

General James E. Cartwright, USMC, Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

General David Petraeus, U.S. Central Command

General Stanley McChrystal, U.S. Commander in Afghanistan (via videoconference)
Lieutenant General Dave Rodriguez (via videoconference)

Lietenant General William Caldwell (via videoconference)

Vice Admiral Michael LaFever (via videoconference)

Admiral Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence

CIA Director Leon Panetta

Deputy Secretary of Treasury Neal Wolin

General James Jones, National Security Advisor

Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Advisor

John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security

Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, Special Assistant to the President for Afghanistan and Pakistan

Robert Nabors, OMB Deputy Director

Adm. LaFever, if you didn’t recognize the name, is the Pentagon’s man in Pakistan.

Vice President Biden

Secretary of State Clinton

Secretary of Defense Gates

Ambassador Susan Rice, Permanent U.S. Representative to the United Nations

Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan

Under Secretary of Defense Michele Flournoy

Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

General James E. Cartwright, USMC, Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

General David Petraeus, U.S. Central Command

General Stanley McChrystal, U.S. Commander in Afghanistan (via videoconference)

Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan (via videoconference)

Anne Patterson, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan (via videoconference)

General James Jones, National Security Advisor

Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Advisor

John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security

Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, Special Assistant to the President for Afghanistan and Pakistan

Earlier in the day, Obama will meet separately and privately with Biden and Clinton. Interesting omission in light of questions about how much the increase will cost: Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

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.”

Gates didn’t mind throwing his own elbows. The 187 number “was based on input from combatant commanders who are actually going to have” to use the planes in combat, and “discussion with the Air Force leadership.” His budget increases the buys for unmanned aerial vehicles so that neither the F-22 nor the F-35 will be “the only aircraft in the attack air arsenal,” as the “only defense surf-air-missiles is not something that has a pilot in it.” And right now, the United States has 1000 “fifth-generation aircraft” compared to China’s 300, a gap that “gets even bigger” when projecting out to 2025.  The idea that a 700-plane lead over China isn’t sufficient air dominance “seems to me to be unrealistic.” Also, the “first training squadron for the F-35 at Elgin Air Force Base” is on track for 2011. Aside from that, Gates thinks Chambliss’ criticisms have merit.

Chambliss is one thing, though, and Schwartz is another. The way Chambliss framed his interactions with the Air Force chief — they’ve been exchanging letters and having private meetings, and Schwartz will testify in the near future on the defense budget — made it sound like Schwartz is unimpressed with Gates’ instruction that “I don’t want to see any guerrilla warfare on these programs.” It’s a thin line between budget subterfuge on the Hill and an honest military assessment for a need for expanding the F-22. Also worth remembering is that Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said last month that the service chiefs and the combatant commanders  “uniformly endorsed the termination of the F-22 at the number we all agreed on, the 187 [planes] and the transition to the F-35.” If Chambliss is presenting Schwartz’s position correctly — and Schwartz grudgingly endorsed the cap in an op-ed recently — that doesn’t sound particularly true.

It’s not clear where the 33-minute estimate comes from, but the film’s overtones invoke a classic episode of “Battlestar: Galactica” called “33,” in which the 50,000 survivors of a robot attack on humanity, on the run in spaceships, have to make a faster-than-lightspeed jump into deep space every 33 minutes in order to evade their pursuers. The exhaustion experienced by the survivors leads them to destroy a civilian vessel with 1000 people aboard that may or may not have been controlled by the robotic Cyclons. Point being: reasoning from fear is a dangerous thing.

For a relatively sober view of the North Korea missile threat, here’s Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

There’s two things that we look at on the North Korean missile. One is their ability to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying a weapon of mass destruction, and the second is their desire to potentially proliferate that and sell it around the world.

On the first, the technology they were seeking after the first two failures was the ability to stage; in other words, transition from one stage of boost to the next. They failed. On the idea of proliferation, would you buy from somebody that had failed three times in a row and never been successful?

Is Cartwright being irresponsible? We’ll find out in … 33 minutes.

“These are not cuts. This is a reshaping of our basic capability, and the capability that our combatant commanders in particular are advocating for…This is a lot about the warfighters, the combatant commanders, the reality of the fights they’re in and the ones they’re trying to prevent and the capabilities they need.”

Marine General [and] Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright says the Review will handle all kinds of tradeoffs. For instance: “If you have bombers in the Pacific, do you also have to have aircraft carriers?” he asks. “Do we always have to have every thing in every service? How much of this do we really need, especially given the situation we face which is a much broader spectrum of conflict over a much great geographic dispersal than we’ve had in the past?”

That sounds a lot like the Pentagon will start asking why duplicative functions exist between the armed services when they’re supposed to complement each other under the concept of “jointness.” If that’s the case, then if the services and Congress don’t like the fiscal 2010 budget, they’ll absolutely hate the QDR and the fiscal 2011 budget that the QDR informs. Reform is starting to seem like the new normal at the Pentagon under Gates.

Me

Wired’s Noah Shachtman

Politico‘s David Cloud

Slate‘s Fred Kaplan

CFR/Commentary‘s Max Boot

American University’s Gordon Adams

The Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Matthew Yglesias

Interesting mix there. I would have expected more conservatives, frankly.

Also, while TPM’s Brian Beutler wasn’t on the call, check out his attempts at chasing Rep. John McHugh’s (R-N.Y)  “$8 billion cut” in defense — something McHugh appears to have invented — down the rabbit hole.