99+ Robert M. Gates Quotes on Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War - Quotes.pub

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Of the estimated forty million men and women who have served in the armed forces since the Civil War, fewer than 3,500 have received the Medal of Honor, the highest honor the United States can bestow, some 60 percent posthumously.

When it comes to predicting future conflicts, what kind of fights they will be, and what will be needed, we need a lot more humility.

I consider myself a Republican.

When I was the director of Central Intelligence in the early ’90s, I tried to get the Air Force to partner with us in building drones. And they didn’t want to, because they had no pilots.

One of the big changes in the Congress since I first came to Washington is that all of these folks go home every weekend. They used to play golf together; their families got to know each other, go to dinner at each other’s homes at weekends – and these would be people who were political adversaries.

I don’t think any president that I worked with has ever said ’pretty please.

I mean, when you get down to very low numbers of nuclear weapons, and you contemplate going to zero, how do you deal with the reality of that technology being available to almost any country that seeks to pursue it? And what conditions do you put in place?

I’m a big advocate of drones.

The reality is, the United States has global interests. Our defense budget is about the same as the defense budgets or military budgets of every other country in the world put together.

It has become clear that America ’s civilian institutions of diplomacy and development have been chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long – relative to what we spend on the military, and more important, relative to the responsibilities and challenges our nation has around the world.

No policy has proved more successful in making friends for the United States, during the cold war and since, than educating students from abroad at our colleges and universities.

Well, Israel, obviously, thinks of the Iranian nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel.

I had no difficulty as Secretary of Defense moving from the Bush administration to the Obama administration.

I read in the press, and therefore it must be true, that no secretary of defense had ever been quoted as arguing for a bigger budget for State.

If there’s ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience.

One of the toughest battles in intelligence is combating conventional wisdom.

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.

Defense is not like other discretionary spending.

You know, if I were an – if I were a Taliban, I’d say, ‘What did al-Qaida ever do for me except get me kicked out of Afghanistan?’

Things have gotten so nasty in Washington.

Some people have said, in so many words, that I’m kind of wooly-headed in believing that the Iranians would see not having nuclear weapons as more in their security interest than not.

I’ve seen, all too often in my career, people coming in to lead agencies and organizations and trying to impose change from the top down. Never works. You never have enough time.

The United States has been a global power since late in the 19th century.

I had learned at Defense, a firm deadline was necessary to move the bureaucracy.

I’ve spent my entire adult life with the United States as a superpower and one that had no compunction about spending what it took to sustain that position. And it didn’t have to look over its shoulder because our economy was so strong.

Strong Quotes

There is no international problem that can be addressed or solved without the engagement and leadership of the United States and everybody in the world knows that, its just fact of life. So sometimes I think we could conduct ourselves with a little more humility.

Well, what I’ve said is that the war in Iraq will always be clouded by how it began, which was a wrong premise, that there were in fact no weapons of nuclear – weapons of mass destruction.

Most governments lie to each other. That’s the way business gets done.

I wish I could set deadlines for the Congress, but that’s just not the way the Constitution is written.

I have always voted for who I believed was the best person.

I will always be an advocate in terms of wars of necessity. I am just much more cautious on wars of choice.

I know that if everyone is a hero, then no one truly is. I concede the term is thrown around far too casually.

I think that Iran with a nuclear weapon is extremely destabilizing. I think it could precipitate a nuclear arms race in the region.

Development is a lot cheaper than sending soldiers.

I have tried to maintain civil relationships with everyone I meet – and, even if I violently disagree with them, try to be respectful.

Well, I’ve ruffled a few feathers at all the institutions I’ve led. But I think that’s part of leadership.

No president is well-served by groupthink or by everybody singing from the same sheet of music they think he’s on.

We should never lose sight of the ethos that has made the Marine Corps – where ‘every Marine is a rifleman’ – one of America’s cherished institutions and one of the world’s most feared and respected fighting forces.

A wild and crazy weekend involves sitting on the front porch, smoking a cigar, reading a book.

Reading Quotes

There will be boots on the ground if there’s to be any hope of success in the strategy.

we had our hands full with the wars we were already in without looking for new ones.

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Quotes

The president kept returning also to the matter of cost. He observed that the cost of the additional troops McChrystal was requesting would be about $30 billion; yet if he froze all domestic discretionary spending, he would save only $5 billion, and if he cut the same by 5 percent, that would save only $10 billion. He said that if the war continued “another eight to ten years, it would cost $800 billion,” and the nation could not afford that given needs at home. His argument was hard to disagree with. The costs of the war were staggering.

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Quotes

Israeli credibility is equally suspect, if not more so, in the Middle East, Europe, and maybe significant elements of the U.S. public. An act of war based principally on information provided by a third party is risky in the extreme. U.S. and Israeli interests are not always the same.

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Quotes

A fourth was that in matters of national security, Congress absolutely hates to challenge the president directly in a way that would saddle them with clear and full responsibility if things went to hell.

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Quotes

in most of these cases, integrity and courage were ultimately rewarded professionally. In a perfect world, that should always happen. But sadly, in the real world it does not, and I will not pretend there is no risk. You will, at some point or another, work for a jackass. We all have. That is why speaking up often requires courage. But that does not make taking a stand any less necessary for the sake of our country." Page 467

Inspirational Quotes / Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Quotes

And when the Soviet Union was collapsing in late 1991, Dick wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world. He and I had always had a cordial

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Quotes

As I said earlier, for the first several months under Obama, it took a lot of discipline to sit quietly at the table as everyone from the president on down took shots at Bush and his team. Sitting there, I would often think to myself, Am I invisible? During those excoriations, there was never any acknowledgment that I had been an integral part of that earlier team.

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Quotes

Never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricane he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that, once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Quotes

I told President Obama he was about to buy a helicopter that in several respects was not as good as what he already had, that each would cost between $500 million and $1 billion—but that he could microwave a meal on it in the middle of a nuclear attack. As I expected, he thought the whole thing was a pretty bad idea.

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Quotes

I was deeply disturbed by the meeting. If I couldn’t do what I thought was necessary to take care of the troops, I didn’t see how I could remain as secretary. I was in a quandary. I shared Obama’s concerns about an open-ended conflict, and while I wanted to fulfill the troop requests of the commanders, I knew they always would want more—just like all their predecessors throughout history. How did you scale the size of the commitment to the goal? How did you measure risk? But I was deeply uneasy with the Obama White House’s lack of appreciation—from the top down—of the uncertainties and inherent unpredictability of war. “They all seem to think it’s a science,” I wrote in a note to myself. I came closer to resigning that day than at any other time in my tenure, though no one knew it. During

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Quotes

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