As he prepares to leave the Pentagon after a four-and-a-half-year stint as defense secretary, Robert Gates has been making the rounds to his old stomping grounds, delivering farewell addresses designed to make his audiences squirm.
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He did it again today, before the American Enterprise Institute, the think tank that, as he put it, has been ‘inextricably tied to the war in Iraq, the conflict that pulled me out of private life and back into the public arena’ (a move about which Gates clearly feels both honored and ambivalent).

His message to the assembled neocons was this: Like it or not, the defense budget is going to be cut over the next 10 years; he’s already weeded out the particularly wasteful or redundant weapons systems and bureaucratic structures; so we’re going to have to slice into ‘force structure’-Army divisions, Marine expeditionary units, Air Force wings, Navy ships-the meat and muscle of U.S. fighting power.

Rather than take the easy way out and ‘salami slice’ a certain percentage of all costs off the top, a technique sure to leave a ‘hollowed-out’ force (plenty of troops and weapons but too little money for operations, maintenance, or training), Gates said the Congress, the president, and […]