Word: pentagonal
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...capital for a lakeside home near Seattle, wrote a book and sat on corporate boards before moving to Texas, where he served at Texas A&M University for seven years, the last four as its president. "An obstinate bureaucracy can be a formidable antagonist," Gates said of the Pentagon in From the Shadows (1996), his memoir, "especially when giving up money is involved." Attempting to change the Pentagon has defeated nearly every one of Gates' predecessors. If he prevails, he will have done more to transform the Pentagon than anything his immediate predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, a self-proclaimed king...
...purchased by the Bush Administration. For years, the Air Force has wanted to double the fleet, while Gates has made clear that he thinks 183 is sufficient. A month ago, some Air Force officials were saying privately that maybe 60 more F-22s would suffice. The Pentagon's acquisition boss, John Young, recently detailed why more F-22s might be a poor investment. The F-22s that exist are ready to fly only 62% of the time and haven't met most of their performance goals. "The airplane is proving very expensive to operate, not seeing the mission-capable rates...
Gates has tangled with the Air Force before. Shortly after arriving at the Pentagon in late 2006, he pushed to boost production of unmanned aircraft for use in intelligence work, only to run into the Air Force's long-standing love of manned fighters. But Gates' hunch was vindicated in Afghanistan and Iraq, where cheaper, unmanned Predator and Reaper drones have been flying around the clock but expensive F-22s have yet to appear. Air Force Major General Charles Dunlap Jr. has written that drones are "game-changing" because of their unprecedented ability to loiter for hours, waiting...
...recent Pentagon-funded reports have questioned the Navy's carrier-centric strategy. The vessel's huge cost and half-century life span give potential foes like China a "static target" to threaten, a 2007 report said. A smarter option, the study suggests, is to build a Navy of many smaller and simpler ships, which would complicate enemy targeting and give U.S. commanders better intelligence. Nonetheless, the Navy has just begun spending $11 billion to design and build the first in a new class of carriers, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, scheduled to join the fleet...
...best for counterinsurgencies, in which intelligence is most often gleaned only by personal contact. General Peter Chiarelli, the Army's No. 2 officer, disputes the idea that FCS "is a Cold War relic." But not everyone agrees. Retired Army officer Andrew Krepinevich Jr., who advises the Pentagon as president of the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says the U.S. already can do from the air what the Army wants the FCS to do from the ground. Such redundancies, Gates says, are things the country can no longer afford...