As Politico reports, today Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will step forward to offer a list of procurement programs the administration is putting on the chopping block in the coming year. It won’t be the first time that Secretary Gates has moved to cut high profile programs that, in his estimation, the United States military can do without. And, as he makes his case today for doing away with systems like the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, it’s worth keeping in mind that Gates’s track record leaves open the question of whether these recommendations are based on anything other than his own estimation.

In April 2009, Gates first took the “unorthodox approach,” as he described it at the time, of announcing plans to kill a weapons system before the White House submitted its official budget request. Then it was the F-22, the C-17, and an array of other programs with deep support in Congress.