"Abilene is a long way from AmericaÂ’s centers of power, and GatesÂ’s speeches shun headline-grabbing rhetoric, so what the defense secretary said did not get a lot of notice. But back in Washington, and at military commands around the world, four-star generals and admirals should have been paying attention.
The word going around the Pentagon was that Gates was targeting the pampered lifestyles of the top brass. Asked about this by NEWSWEEK, Gates laughed. “As an old Soviet analyst, I read the speeches of their leaders very, very carefully,” he said. “And people should read my speeches very carefully.” He pointed to another speech, delivered in early August. “There is something in there about examining the rank structure and the phrase
‘and the accouterments that go with it.’
Gates grumbles about perks and posh quarters—generally defended by senior officers as a reward for decades of stressful family moves every couple of years—but those are not his real targets.
The defense secretary’s deeper complaint is about what he calls “brass creep.” Roughly translated, it means having generals do what colonels are perfectly capable of doing. Generals require huge staffs and command structures: three-star generals serving four-stars, two-stars serving three, each tended by squadrons of colonels and majors. This sort of elaborate hierarchy may have been called for in Napoleon’s day, but in an era of instant communication, Gates thinks the military could benefit from a much flatter, leaner management structure.
These entourages are symbolic of a military leadership that, in the view of its civilian leader, is suffering from an inflated sense of entitlement and a distorted sense of priorities. If Gates has his way, the top brass will have to shed old habits and adjust to leaner times. Some of them will become civilians. The number of generals and admirals has increased by more than a hundred since 9/11, to 969 (and counting Reserves, roughly 1,300). Gates plans a first cut of at least 50. He intends to disband an entire headquarters, the Joint Forces Command, created after the Cold War with the noble aim of making the different armed forces work better together, but which has grown into a $250 million-a-year, 6,000-strong operation of questionable usefulness.
When Gates was first called to the Pentagon in late 2006 by President George W. Bush, he spent 15-hour days trying (with some success) to salvage an Iraq War on the brink of disaster.
He found that the military was at war but that the Pentagon was not. The needs of the young men and women slogging around Iraq and Afghanistan took a distant second place to the service hierarchies’ plans for future conflicts—which usually involved expensive new high-tech weapons systems.
Gates found his calling. He would fight the military establishment’s preoccupation with “next-waritis,” as he calls it, to see that the young people in combat got what they needed.”
