Thursday, September 24, 2009

Gates: "Secretary of War" or "Secretary of Defense"

Rusty is right - there is a lot more to this article than you think.
Every secdef talks about changing the Pentagon, then almost immediately gets stymied by bureaucratic resistance. Only this time, Gates' talk is turning into action—a Gates Doctrine, if you will. Its core tenets: Base policy on the wars that are most likely to happen and the technology that's most likely to work. Stop trying to buy the future when you can't afford the present. With a White House veteran's feel for Washington, a love of policy, a penchant for secrecy, and an old man's sense of the ticking clock, the silver-haired administrator has become the most dangerous person in the military-industrial complex. "I've referred to myself as the secretary of war, because we're at war," he says in a nasal Kansas twang, raising his voice over the roar of the plane's engines. "This is a department that principally plans for war. It's not organized to wage war. And that's what I'm trying to fix."
Read it all.

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