Word: pentagons
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...cleaner quickly went to work. He walked into the Pentagon alone. Inheriting many former Rumsfeld aides, Gates told them on his first day that he wouldn't be firing anyone. There was no time for confirmations, and he was leaving that day for Iraq. Gates brought a sense of relief, a feeling that an adult was back in charge.(See photos of world leaders on vacation...
...director of central intelligence. And he's the only Secretary of Defense ever to be asked to stay on in a rival party's Administration. He has thrived through a combination of endurance, pragmatism and bureaucratic savvy. And during the past year, on issue after issue - Pentagon reform, missile defense, Afghanistan and now the Pentagon's move to repeal the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays in the military - Gates has become the most important player in the Obama war Cabinet. It's a remarkable feat, considering that he's the only Republican on the Democratic national...
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...
...well as being a writer, Gates is the consummate technocrat, a comforting presence who puts a face on the predictability of uncertainty. His Wichita monotone and old-fashioned speeches about service and duty exude a sense of calm and control - just what the Pentagon needed at the end of 2006 as an antidote to Rumsfeld. Gates had left government in 1992 after the elder Bush's defeat and became president of Texas A&M before being summoned back to Washington by George W. Bush. At Gates' confirmation hearings, Democratic Senator Carl Levin asked whether the U.S. was winning...
...that he's past worrying about climbing within that bureaucracy, he has the confidence to break it. At the height of the Iraq surge in 2007, which Gates supported, more than 100 soldiers a month were dying. It's almost impossible as an outsider to understand why the Pentagon would not want to build the mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, known as MRAPs, that would have saved many of those soldiers' lives. Instead of budgeting for MRAPs, the Pentagon was still spending money on outdated weapon systems. So Gates bypassed the normal procurement process, created a special task force, went...