In his first weeks in office, Defense Secretary Robert Gates made a declaration that symbolically set him apart from Donald Rumsfeld, his hard-charging predecessor.
“Frankly, I get tired when I stand up too long,” he told reporters as he ushered in the Gates custom of sitting during news conferences.
Rumsfeld, the Pentagon’s dominating voice and icon during his nearly six-year tenure, had stood at such events. In fact, he rarely sat down, preferring to stand at his desk as he ran two regional wars: one the global war on terrorism and the other a far-reaching transformation of the military.
The preference for sitting has come to symbolize the Pentagon’s new top dog. And if a spot check of officials by The Examiner is a gauge, the bureaucracy is totally infatuated.
They describe him as always polite and businesslike. Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England runs the building day to day, while Gates tries to pull some type of victory out of Iraq. Gates has told visitors that time is short, and he is focused on three main objectives in addition to Iraq: Afghanistan, caring for the troops and continuing the military transformation begun by Rumsfeld.
Gates has kept most of Rumsfeld’s civilian staff. But he has moved decisively to replace the generals who ran — and spoke for — Iraq policy. Those moves culminated Friday when Gates replaced his chief military adviser, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Adm. Michael Mullen, chief of naval operations. Pace will retire in September.
Where Rumsfeld lectured the press, Gates compliments it for bringing issues to his attention, such as poor outpatient care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Where Rumsfeld sent out hundreds of memos (dubbed snowflakes) to prod the bureaucracy, Gates refrains from a torrent of paper, preferring to orally send edicts down the chain of command.
“He follows an orderly staff process,” said a senior civilian officer who, like others interviewed for this article, asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of talking about their boss. “When he has concerns, he usually addresses them verbally with the principals involved. A breath of fresh air.”
Gates was a university president presiding over the relatively tranquil campus of Texas A&M when President Bush in December asked him to return to a capital embroiled in bitter partisanship over the Iraq war.
A former CIA director, Gates has embraced no new major defense programs other than the 2006 strategy review that resulted in more troops going to Baghdad, and adding 92,000 troops to the Army and Marine Corps.
“I think he is doing very well,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution. “The question, however, is has he been dealt such a bad hand in Iraq that it won’t matter, and that his good instincts and skills will be overwhelmed by the war that he, as secretary of defense, will ultimately be most remembered for and measured against?”
