Gates Proposes Change in Strategy - Nancy A. Youssef and David Lightman, McClatchy News Service (Miami Herald)

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who often complains that the Pentagon isn't on a war footing even as it fights two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he plans to start a new era with the new budget he'll present to Congress this week.

''I kept running into the fact that the Department of Defense as an institution -- which routinely complained that the rest of government wasn't at war -- was itself not on war footing, even as young Americans were fighting and dying every day,'' Gates said on a three-day tour of military installations last week, adding: ``These proposals, then, begin the effort to establish an institutional home in the Department of Defense for today's war fighter as well as tomorrow's.''

The question before Congress is whether his budget focuses too much on the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and not enough on potential threats from countries like China, Iran and North Korea.

The debate begins Wednesday at a Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing on the readiness of U.S. ground forces...

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