Word: gateses
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In truth, Gates has been bulletproof ever since George W. Bush lured him from Texas A&M University to replace the disastrous Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. His mission, Gates said, was "to put Iraq in a better place," which is a spectacular understatement. Iraq was falling apart in...
And that was the problem. The Cheney-Rumsfeld axis, which essentially ran national-security policy in the first half of the Bush Administration, was stuck in the Cold War. Rather than fight the enemy we had - the stateless terrorists of al-Qaeda - they sought more conventional enemies. Attention quickly - too...
On the day after he took over, Gates summoned General David Petraeus - no favorite of Rumsfeld's - from near exile at Fort Leavenworth, Kans., where he had supervised the writing of a new counter insurgency-warfare manual. Gates was about to travel to Iraq and wanted to know what the...
Gates seems uncomfortable talking about military intellectual stuff like counterinsurgency doctrine. He insists that logic, not doctrine, has driven everything he has done as Secretary of Defense. The highest priority was supporting the troops. "He resourced the important bureaucratic knife fights," said one senior Army officer. "He sided with us...
And that, according to the Secretary of Defense, is the rationale for his new Pentagon budget; Bush had funded his wars outside the usual budget process, via so-called supplemental appropriations. Gates has included the war funding in his base budget, "so the programs will be institutionalized and the various...