Word: pentagonals
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...Gates is a different sort of Defense Secretary. He warned the legislators that each decision was "zero sum." Any money that went to things he didn't want would come out of programs necessary to support the troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Read "Can Robert Gates Tame the Pentagon...
...Undaunted, the legislators pressed their case - especially the Republicans, who seemed convinced, as one said, that the Pentagon budget was part of a nefarious Obama Administration plot: "Fiscal restraint for defense and fiscal largesse for everything else." Congressman Trent Franks of Arizona was very concerned about anti-missile defense - a gold-plated pipe dream, if there ever was one - and especially a product dramatically called the Kinetic Energy Interceptor. To which Gates replied, in a manner so casually dismissive that Franks seemed to shrivel in his seat, "I would just say that the security of the American people...
...Much of which is attributable to the fact that, in the self-proclaimed twilight of his public career, Gates has emerged as that most exotic of Washington species - the bureaucrat unbound, candid and fearless. He tells members of Congress what he really thinks about their pet programs. He upends Pentagon priorities, demotes the military-industrial hardware pipeline and promotes the immediate needs of the troops on the front line. He fires high-ranking subordinates without muss or controversy - an Air Force secretary and chief of staff who didn't agree with him on the need to end production...
...from Afghanistan to Iraq. And then, once the conventional armored push to Baghdad was completed, the ongoing war effort became - amazingly - a bureaucratic orphan. "Every time we tried to do something for the troops in the field in both Afghanistan and Iraq, we had to go outside the regular Pentagon bureaucracy to get it done," Gates recalled. "For example, there was no institutional home" for figuring out how to combat roadside bombs - but there were plenty of people working on how to counter missiles from North Korea...
...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 services will fight for them." He insists that he is not abandoning the fancy hardware and future gizmos that his predecessors and Congress loved. "The things we've cut," he told me, "wouldn't have been in the budget even if we had $50 billion more to spend. They were programs...