President Barack Obama has been having a run of bad luck lately, but he caught a big break when Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that he would stay on at the Pentagon for at least another year.

Gates is a career intelligence officer, and former head of the CIA, who had retired into private life as president of Texas A & M University when, in 2008, President George W. Bush brought him back into public life to take over as defense secretary from the tempestuous Donald Rumsfeld.

Gates presided over the "surge" in Iraq, which was successful enough for the U.S. to lay down a timetable for withdrawal and a handover to the Iraqi government. From a moment when it looked as if we would never be able to leave, we now, thanks to Gates, and even more so to President Bush and to Gen. David Petraeus, have a way out.

A month after his election, Obama asked Gates, a Republican, to stay on and Gates agreed that he would - for a year. It provided rare and critical continuity, spanning the governments of two different parties and two radically different styles of governing.

Almost alone among top officials of the Obama administration, Gates is not reticent about demanding accountability. He did not endorse the sitting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the traditional second term, instead bringing in Adm. Mike Mullen, who holds the post now. He removed the secretary of the Army because of the neglectful treatment of recovering soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He forced the resignations of the secretary of the Air Force and its chief of staff for careless handling of nuclear weapons. And Gates removed a popular Army general from command of the Afghanistan Theater because the general was too tradition-minded for the strategy that Gates and Petraeus have in mind.

The only real black mark against Gates thus far has been his bean-counter mentality, putting a higher priority on watching spending than on preparedness. Witness his short-sited decision to kill the F-22 Raptor fighter program. The Raptor is the foremost fighter in the world, and its command of the skies (assuming we had an adequate number of them) would do more to prevent future wars against us than all the diplomats in Foggy Bottom.

Since the surge in Afghanistan is largely Gates' brainchild, it's important that he stay on to manage it. Gates was adamant that he would not stay on past the end of Bush's second term. In the end, he did, but hinted broadly that it would only be for another year. Now he's on board at least through 2010. Obama should hope he'll stay even longer.