The Quiet Fury of Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates

An anonymous reader writes "Activities, technologies, equipment, or other matters regarding the U.S. Department of Defense are a common topic on Slashdot, both as stories and in discussions. Despite that, we seldom see stories regarding the senior leadership of DoD as we do for technologists, the political branches, and lately the NSA. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who served under both Presidents Bush and Obama, has released a rather biting memoir of his tenure as the Secretary of Defense. The Wall Street Journal has an excerpt: '... despite everyone being "nice" to me, getting anything consequential done was so damnably difficult — even in the midst of two wars. I did not just have to wage war in Afghanistan and Iraq and against al Qaeda; I also had to battle the bureaucratic inertia of the Pentagon, surmount internal conflicts within both administrations, avoid the partisan abyss in Congress, evade the single-minded parochial self-interest of so many members of Congress and resist the magnetic pull exercised by the White House, especially in the Obama administration, to bring everything under its control and micromanagement. Over time, the broad dysfunction of today's Washington wore me down, especially as I tried to maintain a public posture of nonpartisan calm, reason and conciliation. ... difficulties within the executive branch were nothing compared with the pain of dealing with Congress. ... I saw most of Congress as uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned, and prone to put self (and re-election) before country.' — More at The Washington Post."

Comments

Re:waah waah waah

[interkin3tic]

You're shooting the messenger. The point is not "feel bad for me," the point is "Your government sucks. They're not making you secure or being strong on defense, which is why a lot of you voted for them in the first place. They're making you less secure. Vote for less blowhards."

Not sure his message is going to get anywhere, seems to me that most voters know how bad politics in Washington are, they just think that THEIR incumbent who they voted for is one of the good guys.

Re:Why couldn't he say this 10 years ago?

[SirGarlon]

He never said any of this publicly while holding his position because he didn't want to lose his job.

I feel the need to come to Mr. Gates' defense here. Let's put his situation in context: the Secretary of Defense is directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of human lives. Gates' predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, had fucked up so egregiously that the United States was on the verge of losing the war in Iraq, and had already wasted thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian lives through his arrogant blundering.

Somebody had to clean up that mess and make the best of the situation. Gates was the one President Bush picked. If you were in that situation, with hundreds of thousands of lives hanging in the balance and no option that could create peace quickly or with certainty, the future of two countries at stake, wouldn't the responsibility of your position weigh just a teensy bit more heavily on you than where your next paycheck was coming from?

I am not sure I would have the balls to take that job, even if I were competent to do it. Staying on as president of Texas A&M sounds like a much easier career option.

I submit to you that Gates may have wanted to keep his job, not out of pure self-interest, but because he had accepted the duty and felt obligated to see it through.