"There’s a venerable history of tensions—even very significant ones—between the White House and the military, from President Harry Truman’s firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur to John F. Kennedy’s difficult wrangling with military leaders during the Cuban Missile Crisis. To paraphrase Tolstoy, every unhappy White House-military relationship may be unhappy in its own way. Writing in these pages in November, I described the ongoing White House-Pentagon tensions over Libya, Syria and U.S. drone strikes: “There’s an appearance of consultation, but you know you won’t be listened to,” one recently retired senior general complained of the White House. Another retired senior commander described a White House that viewed the use of military force through a political lens rather than a strategic lens, and was willing, in Syria, to “bomb somebody just to bomb somebody.”
But Gates has added new substance to this critique—and given a much wider platform to the idea that there’s something deeply dysfunctional going on between the Obama White House and the Pentagon. Insofar as Gates’s memoirs reinforce an image of “crass politicization of the wars by the Obama administration,” says Kori Schake, a Hoover Institution scholar of the military who served on President Bush’s national security staff, they are “likely to make the military even more wary…. Gates is revered by the American military … his criticism will cut deeply.”
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/the-pentagons-angry-old-man-102046.html?ml=po_r#.UtLqD555PAw
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