The Washington Post reports that last week, President-elect Donald Trump was agonizing over his shortlist of candidates for secretary of state—which included Mitt Romney, Bob Corker, Rudy Giuliani, and David Petraeus. Trump was reportedly unsatisfied with his choices when a new name, that of…
Earlier this morning, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates went on MSNBC's Morning Joe to promote his new book on leadership.
President Obama's proposed defense budget is well below what former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates proposed.
Robert Gates, President Obama's first defense secretary, said this morning on CBS that President Obama's strategy for defeating the Islamic State is unrealistic:
That is how former secretary of defense, Robert Gates writing in the Wall Street Journal, describes what drives Vladimir Putin’s actions in the Ukraine, the Baltics, and any other region where he considers Russians interests and international reputation at stake. He is motivated by a massive…
“I think that cutting the defense budget in significant ways right now is a serious mistake. When we’ve cut the budget before at the end of the Cold War, at the end of Vietnam and other times, it’s been because we thought the world was going to be safer place. No one can make that case right now."…
Michael Graham, writing for the Boston Herald:
Robert Gates, the former defense secretary under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, writes in a new memoir that both Obama and Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State at the time, told Gates that their 2007 opposition to the surge of troops in Iraq was based on political…
Robert Gates, the former secretary of defense, got considerable attention this week when, speaking in Norfolk, Virginia, he said American officials should make it clear to the government of Israel that "they do not have a blank check to take action that could do grave harm to American vital…
The presidential candidates should listen to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta when he reminds us that there is still a war being fought in Afghanistan. And we should remember what Panetta’s predecessor, Robert Gates, had to say about Afghanistan in 2010, too.
Robert Gates, the former defense secretary, reportedly blasted the national security team in the Obama White House for blabbing about the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. "Shut the f--- up," Gates told Tom Donilon, who is now Obama's national security adviser, according to a book by New York Times…
Jerusalem—Jeffrey Goldberg reported last week that former defense secretary Robert Gates thinks that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “ungrateful” for all that Washington has done for Israel. The purpose of the story, leaked by senior administration officials, is to blame Netanyahu for…
The Israeli press is still trying to figure out what to make of Robert Gates’s parting shot at Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. According to Jeffrey Goldberg’s column earlier this the week, Gates thinks that Netanyahu is “ungrateful.”
Opinion polls consistently show that the U.S. military is the most trusted institution in America. Republicans have benefited indirectly from that hard-won reputation because since the 1970s they have been seen as the strong, hawkish party, while Democrats have had to fight the stigma that they are…
THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned that President Obama will announce his decision about U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan this week—most likely Tuesday or Wednesday.
In the next month, after more than four decades of distinguished public service including almost five extraordinary years at the Pentagon supervising the successful surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert Gates will retire. He departs as the very model of a Washington “wise man,”…
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said yesterday that "Iraq [should] host U.S. troops beyond the end of the year to maintain stability and keep Iran at bay," according to the Wall Street Journal.
At a commencement address at the University of Notre Dame, Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned against allowing America's might and military to decline. "As we make the tough choices needed to put this country’s finances in order and to secure our future prosperity – including the sacrifices that…
CNN reports that Defense Secretary Robert Gates is concerned about the security of the Navy SEALs, after the Obama administration credited the elite force with killing Osama bin Laden in Pakistan:
In February, Defense secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sounded a cautionary note at a congressional hearing on the defense budget. "We shrink from our global security responsibilities at our peril," Gates warned members of Congress. "Retrenchment…
In proposing to cut another $400 billion from U.S. defense budgets over the next ten years as part of his deficit reduction counter-offer, Barack Obama’s words were few. Yet they were revealing.
"In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”
On February 22, several days into the Libyan regime’s campaign of terror, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was asked whether the U.S. was going to stand by while Moammar Qaddafi and his military slaughtered their fellow countrymen.
Defense secretary Robert Gates says the United States has not had discussions with its NATO partners about how to handle the unfolding crisis in Libya, and he believes that the United States could not quickly enforce a no-fly zone in the country to keep military jets from shooting on the citizens…
A small group of us had an interesting meeting this afternoon at the Pentagon with Defense secretary Bob Gates (unfortunately the most interesting parts were off the record; Steve Hayes will write up the other, still somewhat interesting, parts when we get a transcript). Then I came back to the…
Most of the press accounts of China’s test flight of its new J-20 “stealth fighter” took their spin either by gauging whether it was a middle-finger welcome salute to Defense Secretary Robert Gates during his trip to Beijing, or whether Chinese leader Hu Jintao knew about the insult beforehand.
What if you could prepare for a state visit in Washington that boosts your public image while at the same time humiliating your rival and intimidating your neighbors?
In the past four years, administrations of both parties have had to surge ground troops to war theaters in order to make success possible in missions central to the national security of the United States. Just last week, the Obama administration announced an additional 1,400 Marines would be…
As Politico reports, today Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will step forward to offer a list of procurement programs the administration is putting on the chopping block in the coming year. It won’t be the first time that Secretary Gates has moved to cut high profile programs that, in his…
Another very interesting nugget from the Foreign Policy profile of Defense Secretary Robert Gates:
Defense Secretary Robert Gates tells Foreign Policy magazine that he'll step down sometime before January 2012, but says he'll be sticking around until we "know whether the strategy is working in Afghanistan"