Mullen is favored for the job by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, who needs help managing a senior working group that he chairs. England deeply respects Mullen's grasp of budgetary and programmatic detail, an appreciation he developed while serving two tours as Navy secretary.

Sources also report that Mullen will be succeeded as chief of naval operations by Northern Command head Adm. Timothy Keating, while the current vice chief of naval operations, Adm. Robert Willard, will become head of the U.S. Pacific Command.

Since Adm. Mullen's shift into the vice chairman's slot is at best a lateral move -- and some would say a subtle demotion -- there is speculation that the widely-liked Mullen is actually being groomed to replace Gen. Peter Pace when he departs as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the fall.

Pace's early departure is said to be related more to the triggering of certain retirement benefits than his close association with the discredited former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Some of these rumors may turn out to be wrong, but let's say for the sake of argument that they come true. What's wrong with this picture? What's wrong is that all the officers involved hail from the Department of the Navy.

Before Donald Rumsfeld became defense secretary, there was an unspoken rule that top jobs in the joint command structure would be distributed more or less equally among the three military departments comprising the defense establishment.

But Rumsfeld showed up already having a disdain for the Army, and he developed a similar dislike for the Air Force after it repeatedly rebuffed his advisors' harebrained transformation schemes. The Navy didn't care for those schemes any more than the Air Force did, but it had the good sense not to push back, so it gradually became Rumsfeld's favorite service.

O.K., let's concede the point that the Navy may have a stronger intellectual tradition than the other services. So maybe as a group the uniform leaders of the Navy Department looked more appealing than those of the Air Force and the Army during a time of military ferment.

But was the situation really so lopsided that Navy Department alumni should end up with the chairmanship and vice chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs and leadership of Northern Command, Southern Command, Pacific Command, Central Command and Strategic Command -- while the Air Force gets the lead slot on only two combatant commands?

Neither of the Air Force joint slots has a regional focus and one of them, Joint Forces Command, looks like an orphan as Rumsfeld's transformation movement is scaled back.

Of course, it wasn't Rumsfeld's fault that an Air Force nominee to head the Pacific Command, Gen. Gregory Martin, ran afoul of the Senate Armed Service Committee during his confirmation hearings.

Martin would have broken a long tradition of Navy dominance at Pacific Command, so Rumsfeld didn't always favor the sea services. Nonetheless, there was a discernible bias on his watch against the Army and Air Force that remains in place today, as anyone who tries to find a senior Air Force officer on the Joint Staff will quickly discover.

Maybe, just maybe, a lack of expertise at the highest levels of military leadership concerning what air power, space and cyberspace can bring to the joint war-fighting effort has something to do with where the military finds itself today.

(Loren B. Thompson is chief executive officer of the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based think tank that supports democracy and the free market.)

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