Much of what he believes is central to the US defense effort remains important in the policy debates or is assumed within the policy debates, so it is important to revisit his time as secretary and his self-justification for his policies.
It should be noted that neither of his successors have followed Gates’ leadership path, either in terms of bullying people out of the way, or pushing all his force structure and procurement chips on key investments in the land wars or in supplying tools to narrowly defined current tasks and challenges.
For Gates’ successor, Leon Panetta, the challenge was defined as buying, equipping, training and deploying “agile forces,” something that an MRAP heavy force certainly cannot be characterized as being. “There is a strategic and fiscal imperative that is driving the department to a smaller, … leaner and more agile force – that’s the reality.”
There were clear differences between Gates and Panetta. A major reflection of the difference was Gates’ decision to put the F-35B on “probation.” Panetta lifted “probation” when it became evident that probation made no sense. Here Panetta recognized the key role of allies (never a high priority for Gates except to fill in the force deployment gap) and of the Marines as the leading edge of expeditionary forces in the United States and a leader in shaping 21st century “agile forces.”
Secretary Chuck Hagel has decided to reshape the forces and make them more technologically empowered and better equipped for tasks such as the Pivot to the Pacific. Hagel has cast our military spending choices as a tradeoff between a larger, but less well-equipped force and one that is smaller but more technologically advanced: “The balance we strike between capability, capacity, and readiness will determine the composition and the size of the force for years to come.”
Gates was named Secretary of Defense largely to save the Iraq mission. This is clear from his coverage of his meetings with President Bush and his description of his own priorities. He was a key leader in shaping the surge effort in Iraq, which President Bush came to believe was essential to the success of the mission. In crafting the surge policy, Gates made several personal determinations about what equipment was needed in Iraq. He saw anyone who opposed his procurement or investment decisions as being representatives of bureaucratic resistance — or worse.
Indeed, in leading the surge, he determined that senior civilian and military leaders were largely in the way because the Department of Defense was no longer the Department of War. This is a constant theme of the book. How Gates led the way forward to equip the force to win rather than to prepare for wars we are not likely to fight was his self characterization throughout.
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According to Gates: (I conducted) 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.
He then followed the surge in Iraq with a similar template for Afghanistan.
One can understand the argument that there was a need not to get thrown out of Iraq, which clearly was the threat without a surge, but has either surge led to our winning either conflict?