What Robert Gates once called "inconceivable to me" -- his remaining as defense secretary beyond Inauguration Day -- is looking a bit more conceivable to the rest of Washington.
The 65-year-old former spymaster has turned publicly mum on the circumstances under which he would stay, even briefly, after President-elect Barack Obama takes office. But one of the leading scenarios for a wartime transition at the Pentagon has Gates holding the fort, at least for some months.
If Gates does stay on, the announcement could come soon.
A national security spokeswoman for Obama, Brooke Anderson, said Thursday she had no comment on Gates or on whether the president-elect has held discussions with any candidate for the Pentagon job.
By keeping mum, both camps may preserve the option of walking away without hard feelings.
The apparent logic in keeping Gates for an extended transition -- but perhaps not for a full presidential term -- is that it would allow time for a secretary-in-waiting, who might come aboard in January as Gates' deputy, to assemble a new team of senior defense policy officials before the top boss departs.

Is it time for America to declare success in Iraq? That depends on whom you ask. While the nation has been consumed with its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the war -- the early focal point of the presidential campaign -- has moved to the back burner.
In May 2007, at the start of the troop "surge" that is credited with quelling much of the violence in Iraq, Congress established 18 benchmarks that it would use to determine whether America was succeeding there. Now, a year and a half later, whether those benchmarks have been met depends on whom you talk to.
White House officials say Iraq has met most of the goals, rendering the benchmarks irrelevant. But others say Iraq still has a lot of work to do.
The Government Accountability Office released a report in the summer that cited little improvement in the political and economic areas and noted continuing military problems despite a significant decline in overall violence.

The top U.S. military officer said Saturday that the Pentagon could double the number of American forces in Afghanistan by next summer to 60,000 -- the largest estimate of potential reinforcements ever publicly suggested.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that between 20,000 and 30,000 additional U.S. troops could be sent to Afghanistan to bolster the 31,000 already there.
U.S. commanders have long requested an additional 20,000 troops to aid Canadian and British forces in two provinces just outside Kabul and in the south.
But the high end of Mullen's range is the largest number any top U.S. military official has said could be sent to Afghanistan. Mullen said that increase would include combat forces but also aviation, medical and civilian affairs support troops.

Though he campaigned as an economic centrist, the Obama budget that went to Capitol Hill last week marks a dramatic return to the high-tax ideology of the pre-Clinton Democratic Party. His budget includes a net tax increase of over $1 trillion over the next decade. If that were not bad enough, the same document reveals that more than $325 billion of the advertized $770 billion in family tax cuts is actually new spending. And it gets worse from there.