Last week, while I was busy writing about two fascinating scenarios for the future of U.S. influence, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was delivering the latest in a long line of brilliant speeches, this time in Chicago. In it, he nailed down exactly the kinds of concrete changes that must happen in order to retool the institutions of American foreign policy for the radical challenges of the next two decades.

The speech underscored that, even as Gates emerged victorious this week from a Washington budget battle, there’s a more massive challenge looming.

At first glance, the battle in Washington was over whether or not the military should order more F-22 Raptor fighter jets. At more than $350 million each, 187 have already been budgeted, and a row erupted over how many more, if any, the country actually needs. Gates said none. President Obama backed him, declaring in a memo sent to the Senate Armed Services Committee, “I will veto any bill that supports acquisition of F-22s beyond the 187 already funded by Congress,”

Gates dug in his heels, and won on Tuesday. The Senate shot down the increase.

But this instance of bold leadership in the face of tightly riveted interests in Washington is actually best understood in a wider context. As the lone cabinet holdover from the Bush administration, Gates could well be the premier official working to reshape American influence for the coming age. Last week in his Chicago speech, he dismissed any naive accusations about his 43 years in Washington, saying, “I did not molt from a hawk into a dove on Jan. 20, 2009.”

Instead, he called for a fundamental reshaping of the Department of Defense’s priorities – especially the way the Pentagon buys weapons. “Above all,” he said, the Pentagon must “prepare to wage future wars, rather than [continue] the habit of rearming for previous ones.”

The would-be spoilers Gates faces are no small fries: Congress, the defense contracting industry, and Gates’ own Pentagon. Congress, of course, holds the purse strings, and it wasn’t just Republicans, but stalwart members of the president’s own party – like senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry – that were pushing to earmark $1.75 billion for new F-22s. That manufacturing an F-22 reportedly requires industrial lines spread out over 44 states was hardly a coincidence.

Meanwhile, the interests of industry are obvious. Lockheed Martin, Honeywell and other defense giants depend on such government contracts. Finally, the Pentagon, as the largest industrial organization on the planet, is prone to its own pathologies and bureaucratic tendencies. To employ a naval metaphor, an aircraft carrier doesn’t turn on a dime.

However, retooling the instruments of American foreign policy for the future needs to reach much further than just these Cold War-era fighter jets.

To that end, the F-22 debate is hardly the first time Gates has gone out on a limb fighting against the dysfunctional tendencies and broken bureaucracies of U.S. foreign affairs institutions. In the fall of 2007, while still working for George W. Bush, Gates gave one of the more telling public talks by a White House cabinet member of the past decade. Speaking at Kansas State University, Gates essentially made an eloquent case for a budget increase. Only thing was, he was pleading for more money for the State Department, not the Pentagon.

“Having a sitting Secretary of Defense travel halfway across the country to make a pitch to increase the budget of other agencies might fit into the category of ‘man bites dog,’ or for some back in the Pentagon, ‘blasphemy.’ It is certainly not an easy sell, politically.”

The reason for Gates’ advocacy? The meager budget for the State Department that had been dwindling for decades. He hauntingly pointed out that, at $36 billion, State’s entire budget was less than what Defense spends on health care. The number of foreign service officers at State, about 6,600, is less than the personnel it takes to man a single aircraft carrier strike group.

This comes after decades of decline in funding for the State Department. At the same time that President Obama ordered reinforcements into Afghanistan, talk of a civilian surge ended up being empty, because there were simply no civilians to fill the ranks – ironically leaving Gates and the Pentagon to do so. To that end, a general consensus has emerged that the most serious threats facing the country in coming decades will be transnational – the very kind that demand the expertise of a diplomat, not necessarily a grunt with a gun.

By no means should it be Gates’ responsibility to fix the massive imbalance between his department and the nation’s diplomatic corps. But one thing is clear: In his budget request, and more widely, in his strategic thinking about the country’s tools for exerting American influence in the future, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is miles ahead of almost everyone else in Washington.

Nearly six decades ago, on leaving office, President Dwight Eisenhower used his parting speech to the nation to offer a warning: Beware the military-industrial complex. Sen. John McCain invoked the former president in arguing against the F-22 increase this week, and rightfully so. As the scenarios I examined last week pointed out, the international order the U.S. will face in coming decades will be “unrecognizable” compared to the system devised after World War II.

However, if a larger reform movement fails to make use of the momentum Gates has set in motion this week – to restore the power of the nation’s diplomats as well as rebuild and reshape the State Department – there is a real danger that the country could find its influence ebbing in a world it can’t see.