Back in December 2008, I
thought I saw a subtext in one of the core themes in Gates' writings about Pentagon procurement:
Defense Secretary Robert Gates' precis of the Pentagon's new National Defense Strategy in Foreign Affairs, A Balanced Strategy, can be read as an extended inversion of Donald Rumsfeld's fatalistic "you go to war with the army you have." Gates' mantra: have the army you'll go to war with. Here as in many speeches,
he spotlights the imperative to reform the Pentagon bureaucracy so that
it responds more swiftly to the immediate needs of soldiers in the
field -- and can think past ingrained assumptions about what kinds of
conflict the U.S. needs to prepare for in the future. Hence his
subtitle: "Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age."
Five years later, no sooner did I crack open (okay, conjure on-screen) Gates' new memoir when I came across the same inversion of Rumsfeld's infamous mantra, this time in Gates' own voice. At the outset, elaborating on his book's title,
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, Gates enumerates several "wars" he had to fight in office, ending with this:
And finally, there was my bureaucratic war with the Department of Defense and the military services, aimed at transforming a department organized to plan for war into one that could wage war, changing the military forces we had into the military forces we needed to succeed (Kindle locations 52-54).
That "war," in Gates telling, emanated from what seems to be the book's core autobiographical claim: that Gates was driven by, indeed obsessed with, safeguarding the welfare of the troops that Bush's bungling (he doesn't put it that way, but the substantive indictment is clear) put and kept in harm's way. Some of what he did on the troops' behalf is compressed by Fred Kaplan in a
remarkable review of Gates' book:
