Petraeus had Bush's ear. Will Mike Mullen have Obama's?

"I've said during this campaign, and I stick to this commitment, that as soon as I take office I will call in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, my national security apparatus, and we will start executing a plan that draws down our troops, particularly in light of the problems that we're having in Afghanistan, which has continued to worsen," Obama said on a "60 Minutes" interview shown Sunday.

A senior defense official confirmed that Obama had made a short call to the chairman in the days after the election, another sign that Obama wants to establish a rapport with Mullen.

All of this will have a bearing as Obama makes decisions about military strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and if he keeps his promise to remove troops from Iraq within 16 months. A new agreement between the US and Iraq, not yet finalized, aims to remove all US troops by the end of 2011. This is twice the amount of time than what Obama had promised in his campaign.

Mullen said in a press conference this week that it would take two to three years to remove the roughly 150,000 US troops from Iraq, and that the timing of that withdrawal should be based on security conditions on the ground.

The three assessments were ordered up by the respective officers so they could be ready to give advice to the new president. It is unclear what any one of them would say, but they are expected to point up some contrasts.

"There will be tension between trying to get more forces to Afghanistan quickly and the requirements that the commanders in Iraq feel that they have in order to get through a very important year in Iraq," Eric Edelman, the senior policy official at Defense, said last week.

Mullen appears to be quietly asserting himself. Noting this week that there will be differences among the reports, he said it will be his job to provide the new president with conclusions that take the other assessments into account.

"While there is a level of independence in each of those, which I think is healthy, I expect ... to take the outputs of those [reports] and integrate them from my perspective as chairman, in terms of my recommendation for future strategy with respect to Afghanistan," Mullen told reporters Tuesday.

Not everyone agrees that the strategy review under way will say anything about Obama's relationship with the Pentagon. Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, dismisses that notion, saying Obama will receive advice from a number of military advisers, including Mullen.

"That this could become a litmus test for the role of the chairman simply isn't realistic," he says.

Yet many officers believe otherwise. Senior Pentagon officers have long hoped their views would be given more credibility. Gen. James Conway, commandant of the Marine Corps, for example, has pushed publicly to have marines redeployed from Anbar Province in Iraq so that more marines can be deployed to Afghanistan where he believes they could be of more use.

"The president may not always accept the chiefs' recommendations," says one senior officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But it's best for the nation if security issues are decided upon after a healthy dialogue between the [Defense secretary], the president and the chiefs."

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