Off With Their Heads!
Bob Gates is the firing-est Defense Secretary ever… and people love it!
When it comes to involuntary separations of subordinates who fail to produce results, Donald Trump has nothing on Bob Gates.
Back when I was still reporting CNN, I once dubbed the crafty former spymaster, “the firing-est Defense Secretary ever.”
Donald Rumsfeld had a reputation as a tough boss, but frankly he was a pushover compared to Gates, whose ability to conceal his iron fist inside a velvet glove is nonpareil.
Scandal at Walter Reed? Goodbye Army Secretary and Surgeon General. Loose Nukes? So long Air Force Chief and Secretary. Long war going on too long? Buh-bye Afghanistan Commander, F-35 over budget? “You’re Fired!”
[Defense secretary Gates fires general in charge of Joint Strike Fighter program- Washington Post, Feb 2, 2010]
“If I’ve set one tone at the Department of Defense, it’s that when things go wrong, people will be held accountable,” Gates told reporters last week.
And it turns out that, except for the victim, almost everybody — especially Congress — LOVES it when people are fired in the name of accountability, no matter how at fault they really were.
(Has anyone noticed that Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s vaunted new Afghanistan strategy — including his call more a troop surge — is not substantially different from the strategy Gen. David McKiernan advocated, but never got the resources to fully implement?)
In 2008 Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri) gushed over Gate’s willingness to sacrifice subordinates when things went wrong, “Not once but twice when I doubted whether or not you would be willing to fire a top commander based on issues within their command, you exceeded my expectations,” she complimented Gates at a Senate hearing.
If you needed any clue to Gates’ propensity to jettison subpar performers regardless of prior success you need look no further than his tenure as President of Texas A&M University, where one of his first acts was to fire the winnings football coach in Aggie history, R.C. Slocum. In 14 years Slocum had never had a losing season, but when the Aggies slipped to 6–6 in 2002, and lost to rival Texas 50 to 20, Gates wasted no time sending him packing.
And of course Gates dispatched him with what has become his trademark practice: generous praise for past accomplishments, while making clear he no longer considered him part of the solution.
“Coach Slocum is one of the most respected and admired members of the Aggie family, and he has much still to offer the university he has served so long with rare integrity and skill,” Gates said at the time.
Gates would later joke privately that during his time at the CIA he’d overthrown governments of small countries with less blowback.
It was a pattern evident in many of Gates firings, such as when he decided it was time for Gen. Peter Pace to exit the stage after his tenure as Joint Chiefs Chairman. While saying he never shrinks from a tough confirmation battle, Gates nevertheless decided Pace was not worth fighting for. And so he convinced President Bush not to reappoint Pace as Chairman.
Gates — like his predecessor Donald Rumsfeld — is a wily cold warrior, who has shown he can be a tenacious infighter. But while Rumsfeld was, in his own way, an idealist, Gates remains much more the cool-handed pragmatist.
Time magazine’s current cover story calls Gates, “a guy who holds his cards close to his vest and knows just when to play them.” The picture on the cover is not particularly flattering, but from what I could see in my time covering him, I’d say the portrait drawn on the inside pages got the nuances of Gates complicated personality just about right.
Tags: F-35, Firings, Gates, Pace