Word: longing
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...American national-security policy? Or is he merely a first-rate apparatchik, a gifted infighter and faithful servant? In this Administration, Gates is the key broker on the question that haunts every U.S. President: how and when to wield military force. But in the last years of a long public career, that makes him the face of a war in Afghanistan that is going badly and getting worse. "Gates has too much experience in D.C. not to get out when he's on top," says an old friend and admirer. But has he waited too long this time? (See photos...
When Gates, who took over the Pentagon from Donald Rumsfeld in 2006, accepted Obama's request to stay on and work for the new Administration, many people assumed he wouldn't last long - and that even if he stayed, his clout would shrink in a White House suddenly populated by left-leaning staffers suspicious of anyone associated with George W. Bush foreign policy. And yet Gates has achieved "two victories in one year," in the words of an in-house fan. In December he won passage of a watershed Pentagon budget that shifted spending from theoretical, conventional wars...
Gates replied, "That's like going back and saying, 'If you'd known the mujahedin would morph into what they became, would you have supported them against the Soviet Union?' My view is, having done this for a long, long time, you never know. You make the best call you can with the information and judgment you have...
...height of the Iraq surge, Gates gave a speech to the Marine Corps Association. He began in Johnny Carson fashion with a long, meticulously timed story about Nixon's Secretary of Defense Mel Laird on a trip to see the Pope...
...Spanish troops had to call back to Madrid to seek permission to medevac him," a Pentagon aide told me. "The soldier lived. But Gates was furious." He also heard that while wounded soldiers in Iraq were guaranteed a medevac within the "golden hour," in Afghanistan they could wait as long as 1 hr. 41 min. Gates saw that there were Air Force helicopters sitting on the tarmac at the Bagram base, on call for search-and-rescue missions to recover downed airplanes - something that hadn't happened in years. Why couldn't they be used to evacuate soldiers...