(1) He is a Cold Warrior and a technocrat. This probably gives him little incentive or ability to move the Pentagon away from a Cold War, technocratic mindset.

(2) He is a close personal friend of James Baker. The two men are drawn together by similar personal sensibilities and international connections. That would be James Baker the anti-Semitic intitutional Arabist James Baker,.

(3) He favors dialogue with Iran, presumably assuming that if we offer then something that they want less than nuclear weapons they'll give up their nuclear weapons to get it. No, it doesn't exactly "make sense". But why would you even point that out? What are you, a war monger?

Anyway, yeah. It's now this guy's job to defend the US.