Slashdot Mirror
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."
resist the magnetic pull exercised by the White House, especially in the Obama administration, to bring everything under its control
Jesus, just by winning a couple of elections that guy thinks he's in charge.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Yes! This guy's job is to overcome inertia and work through the bureaucracies at the top in order to get things done that need to be done - with paid administrative staff and budgets and great health care, transportation, etc. And he just whines about how much work there is to do and how hard it is. What a complete baby!
I have no sympathy for an elite bureaucrat who does nothing but complain about how much work his super-perked job actually is and how his superiors are incompetent (his job is to get things going). He can work just as hard at 2 -3 jobs at near-minimum wage and forget about having any real effect on society, like millions of people that he is actually working for.