Slate - Secretary Gates Declares War on the Army Brass

[jonSlack]

Slate - Secretary Gates Declares War on the Army Brass by Fred Kaplan

On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave a speech that suggested what an interesting—perhaps even great—secretary of defense he might have become, if only he had more time and a less dreadful mess to clean up.

The speech was delivered to the Association of the United States Army, an organization that's happy to hear applause lines and boilerplate; but Gates used the occasion to call for a radical restructuring of the Army—its training, personnel policies, basic strategy, and missions.

He issued the call about halfway into the speech, when he noted that future wars will be more like Iraq and Afghanistan—"asymmetric" conflicts that don't play into the American military's traditional prowess for large-scale, head-to-head combat.

[Rank amateur]

Lots of nice things to say about a council member too:

Nagl may be, at least indirectly, the source of Gates' most dramatic remark—that "arguably the most important military component in the War on Terror is not the fighting we do ourselves, but how well we enable and empower our partners to defend and govern their own countries."