I find it hard to tell if he is a military visionary or a supremely deft bureaucrat.  But he sure has shaken up the Pentagon.

 

The unceremonious sacking of Gen. David McKiernan as commander of forces in Afghanistan was spearheaded by Gates, who is not squeamish about such things, regardless of how humiliating it might be to a 4-star with 37 years of service.  Back in June of last year, Gates fired Michael Wynne, the Air Force secretary, and Gen. Michael T. Moseley, chief of staff, after all those nuclear mishaps and the fact that Gates was frustrated over the Air Force’s slowness in getting more unmanned aerial vehicles deployed.  And a year before that, he jettisoned Army Secretary Frances Harvey after revelations of cruddy living conditions at Walter Reed military hospital in D.C. Heck, Gates had no problem in 2007 dumping the popular Gen. Peter Pace instead of nominating for a second term as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

 

In those earlier incidents, the generals didn’t take matters seriously enough to suit Gates after shocking lapses came to light.  In Pace’s case, Gates said at the time that the renomination hearing would be a contentious referendum on the previous several years of war in Iraq with Donald Rumsfeld, a failed Defense secretary.  Those were examples of Gates the supreme bureaucrat-manager.

 

In the case of McKiernan, it wasn’t anything the man did, more that his style and background seemed, to Gates – and apparently to Central Command Director Gen. David Petraeus – unsuited to the unconventional swamp of Afghanistan.  Gates is equally unsentimental about dumping cherished generals’ programs.  Witness his deletion of the F-22 fighter and the Future Combat Systems ground vehicle.  These are examples of Gates the visionary trying to orient the military towards the wars it is actually fighting.

 

And what of President Obama in all this?  As columnist Peggy Noonan observed recently, Barack Obama kills softly.  His fingerprints aren’t directly on much of what Gates has done.  But it would be logical to suspect Obama is working through Gates to put his, the president’s, imprimatur on DOD.