The Myth of Robert Gates

The Myth of Robert Gates












Finally, Gates has also consistently overstated—most recently in a commencement speech at Notre Dame on May 22—the damage that would be caused by reducing defense spending to the levels recommended by the president and the deficit commission. He accomplished this through the false comparisons of what happened when Pentagon budgets were reduced after the wars in Korea and Vietnam and the end of the Cold War. True, the budgets did come down after those wars, but did Gates expect them to remain at these inflated wartime levels after the end of hostilities? Did the army and Marine Corps, which had over 500,000 boots on the ground in Vietnam, need to remain the same size when we withdrew? Did he expect that the U.S. needed the same amount of troops and defense spending after the Soviet Empire collapsed? Moreover, the “hollow” force, which he claims was created in the post-Cold War drawdown, marched to Baghdad in three weeks and evicted the Taliban from Afghanistan in less than a month. And what Gates fails to note is that in real terms, the base budget and war funding combined are more than $100 billion higher than we spent on average during the Cold War and higher than at the peak of the Reagan buildup.

Gates will be remembered as the only person to have served as secretary of defense in both a Republican and Democratic administration and the individual who calmed the waters after the stormy six-year tenure of Donald Rumsfeld. But close analysis reveals that, for the most part, his actions did not match his rhetoric, that he does not deserve the accolades that are being heaped upon him as he retires and that he will leave Panetta with more challenges than most realize. As Anthony Cordesman has pointed out, “Gates never really came to grips with the challenge of tying strategy to force plans, procurement plans, shaping U.S. deployment or bringing the budget back into balance with resources.”