In an era in which Washington is increasingly disparaged, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is the ultimate Washington man.
It is manifest in his appearance: He favors dark suits, white shirts and neatly combed white hair.
His background: He’s spent four decades serving eight presidents.
And how he operates: He’s careful, conservative and consensus-oriented.
In his four years in the Pentagon, Gates has become an indispensable force in the debate over two deeply unpopular wars. He’s been a savvy manager of the Pentagon bureaucracy and earned a reputation as the most ruthlessly efficient defense secretary in decades.
“He’s an extremely effective bureaucratic operator, and I mean that in a good way,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a senior official in the George W. Bush administration and professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. “He’s straightforward, levelheaded and disciplined . . . a judicious guy at a time when we needed judicious.”
As Gates prepares to leave office this week, the criticism of him is that he has been more of an implementer of his bosses’ policies than a bold visionary intent on changing the military.
Gates bristled at the critique in a recent interview: “There hasn’t exactly been time to be a bold visionary in the middle of two wars.”
His legacy as defense secretary will probably be defined not by grand ideas but by his pragmatic stewardship of two wars and by how the longtime Washington insider wielded power.
Here are some lessons:
Lesson One: Buy time
Shortly after he took over as defense secretary in 2006, Gates told Gen. David H. Petraeus, then his Iraq commander, how he wanted to operate. “You have your battle space, and I have mine,” Gates said.
Petraeus’s fight centered on the insurgents and death squads roaming the streets of Baghdad. Gates’s fight was to buy more time in Washington for the president’s and Petraeus’s war strategy to show results.
His primary weapon was the Defense Department review. In January 2007, as the first 30,000 surge troops were heading toward Iraq, Gates scheduled a September review to evaluate whether the new war strategy and additional troops were producing tangible progress.
He employed the same tactic three years later in Afghanistan when President Obama dispatched 33,000 troops to Afghanistan.
The reviews helped the Bush and Obama administrations determine whether the military was making progress, and they helped to reassure Congress. “They give people a sense that we have actually got our hands on the steering wheel and are not just coasting,” Gates said.
The reviews served one other critical purpose: They put off critics agitating for immediate troop reductions and a major scaling back of U.S. goals. In short, they bought Gates’s commanders some precious time.
“I have consciously used them for that purpose,” Gates said.
Lesson Two: Let them see you cry
Gates had a hard-earned reputation for toughness, having fired or replaced at least seven top officials during his tenure. But he also was not afraid to show a softer side.
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