Word: gateses
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For a fellow who spent only two years as a young officer in the Air Force, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is looking equal parts Clausewitz and Sun Tzu - two of history's greatest military tacticians - as he unfolds his battle plan to remake the U.S. military. Last week he unveiled...
In military parlance, he's "shaping the battlefield" for the fights ahead with Congress, which gets the final word on military spending and doesn't take kindly to economic engines in its home districts and states being summarily axed. Key programs on his chopping block include the Air Force's...
• Secrecy: Gates made more than 100 top Pentagon officials sign oaths promising not to reveal any of the more than 50 decisions they had been debating behind closed doors for the past three months. "There were no leaks," Gates said delightedly after detailing his plans. (See pictures of the...
• Timing: The Defense Secretary dropped his bombshells at the start of a two-week congressional recess. The lack of lawmakers in Washington muted the outrage that would have exploded had all 535 of them been hanging around the Capitol surrounded by cameras and reporters. Not that that has entirely...
• Shifting and Packaging: Gates deftly matched many of his proposed cuts with what's known inside the Pentagon as "plus-ups" - more money for different, but similar, programs. Changes that might seem dubious in isolation make more sense when viewed as part of what Gates calls his "holistic assessment...