Robert Gates: The Bureaucrat Unbound

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And that was the problem. The Cheney-Rumsfeld axis, which essentially ran national-security policy in the first half of the Bush Administration, was stuck in the Cold War. Rather than fight the enemy we had — the stateless terrorists of al-Qaeda — they sought more conventional enemies. Attention quickly — too quickly — shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq. And then, once the conventional armored push to Baghdad was completed, the ongoing war effort became — amazingly — a bureaucratic orphan. "Every time we tried to do something for the troops in the field in both Afghanistan and Iraq, we had to go outside the regular Pentagon bureaucracy to get it done," Gates recalled. "For example, there was no institutional home" for figuring out how to combat roadside bombs — but there were plenty of people working on how to counter missiles from North Korea.

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On the day after he took over, Gates summoned General David Petraeus — no favorite of Rumsfeld's — from near exile at Fort Leavenworth, Kans., where he had supervised the writing of a new counter insurgency-warfare manual. Gates was about to travel to Iraq and wanted to know what the big questions were. "The biggest question is whether we have the right strategic concept to fight the war," Petraeus told him. "Instead of concentrating all our efforts on transitioning to Iraqi control, we need to go out and secure the population." (See pictures of Basra getting back to business.)

Gates seems uncomfortable talking about military intellectual stuff like counterinsurgency doctrine. He insists that logic, not doctrine, has driven everything he has done as Secretary of Defense. The highest priority was supporting the troops. "He resourced the important bureaucratic knife fights," said one senior Army officer. "He sided with us on MRAPs [mine-resistant vehicles] and unmanned drones, and increased intelligence, and more helicopters. Those should have been no-brainers, but it had been a real struggle to fund them before Gates." A military intelligence officer who was an Iraq specialist told me he had been pleading for more resources throughout the Rumsfeld years: "Iraq was Rumsfeld's fourth highest priority, after China, North Korea and Iran," he said. "But Gates called me in and asked, 'What do you need?' And he gave us everything we requested." Senior combatant commanders say these decisions, no less than the new tactics and increase in troops, helped change the course in Iraq.

And that, according to the Secretary of Defense, is the rationale for his new Pentagon budget; Bush had funded his wars outside the usual budget process, via so-called supplemental appropriations. Gates has included the war funding in his base budget, "so the programs will be institutionalized and the various services will fight for them." He insists that he is not abandoning the fancy hardware and future gizmos that his predecessors and Congress loved. "The things we've cut," he told me, "wouldn't have been in the budget even if we had $50 billion more to spend. They were programs that simply were unnecessary or weren't working."

The negotiating over the budget is likely to turn brutal, although Obama aides insist the President will veto the budget if Gates isn't satisfied with the result. And then there are the wars — especially Afghanistan, which Gates has said he hopes will turn around in the next year, but which has obviously become a more difficult enterprise than anticipated. Gates originally had planned to retire after a year or so, but he seems to have settled in, found a level of comfort and influence with the Obama Democrats that he never quite expected. "I don't do maintenance," Gates told me. "I would never do a job just to sustain the status quo. I like to go into an institution that's already good and do everything I can to make it better."

The Pentagon was good at some things, dreadful at others. It is better now, but there are lives at stake every day. Gates keeps track of those killed and wounded on his watch. He knows the exact numbers. He can get misty talking about the troops he's met downrange, young people the same age as the carefree students he supervised at Texas A&M, "which makes this all so much harder," he says. They — not future fights with China, not last week's tactics in Afghanistan — light up his eyes. He won't be abandoning them anytime soon.

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