Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the only holdover from the Bush administration, told Foreign Policy magazine in an interview posted Monday that he hopes to retire by the end of 2011.  In an interview with Fred Kaplan, Gates said:

“The point of all of that is I think that by next year I'll be in a position where, you know, we're going to know whether the strategy is working in Afghanistan. We'll have completed the surge. We'll have done the assessment in December. And it seems like somewhere there in 2011 is a logical opportunity to hand off.

I think that it would be a mistake to wait until January 2012. First of all, I think we might have trouble getting the kind of person they want if there's a possibility that they might only be in the job for a year. You know, who knows what the election situation will look like. But also I just think this is not the kind of job you want to fill in the spring of a presidential election. So I think sometime in 2011 sounds pretty good.”

Now, this is not causing the stir at the Pentagon the way you might think it would, namely because everyone here has heard this from Gates before. After all, this was the same secretary who proudly boasted about carrying a clock that counted down to the end of the Bush administration – and by extension his tenure as Secretary of Defense. Then he stayed on.

Then there was word that he would stay for just a year into the Obama administration. That year came and went, and he stayed on.  And even in this interview, he leaves some room open to extend his tenure.

Gates, who will be 67 in September, became secretary of defense in December 2006, after the ousting of Donald Rumsfeld amid dismal mid term election results.

What I found most interesting is that his reasons for staying are not his push to reform the budget, which we had assumed drove him to extend his term, but the war in Afghanistan. We had thought that he stayed to fundamentally shape the budget, which takes several budget cycles to even begin to reshape. But it seems his decision to stay is driven by the deadlines of the war, when the Obama administration signaled it may consider a change of course.

His announcement comes as he just proposed a second round of cuts to the Defense Department budget, including the elimination of Joint Forces Command. He faces a lot of opposition in Congress, particularly in from memberswhose districts face job cuts in an already frail economic climate. If Gates is seen as a lame duck, will opponents to his proposals simply wait him out? Or will they fear that he will keep extending his term until he sees the changes through? When it comes to Gates and his tenure as the Secretary of Defense, anything is possible.