In His New Memoir, Robert M. Gates, the Former Defense Secretary, Offers a Critique of the President

The emperor has no clothes...
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“As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his,” Mr. Gates writes. “For him, it’s all about getting out.”

“Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War” is the first book describing those years written from inside the cabinet. Mr. Gates offers more than 600 pages of detailed history of his personal wars with Congress, the Pentagon bureaucracy and, in particular, Mr. Obama’s White House staff over the four and a half years he sought to salvage victory in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The “controlling nature” of the Obama White House and the national security staff “took micromanagement and operational meddling to a new level,” Mr. Gates writes.

Under Mr. Obama, the national security staff was “filled primarily by former Hill staffers, academics and political operatives” with little experience in managing large organizations. The national security staff became “increasingly operational,” which resulted in “micromanagement of military matters — a combination that had proven disastrous in the past.”

A former C.I.A. director who served eight presidents in all, Mr. Gates is most critical of what he views as the inappropriate growth in size and power of the National Security Council staff.


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/w...gy-memoir-asserts.html?hpw&rref=politics&_r=0