Duty

Memoirs of a Secretary at War

From the former secretary of defense, a strikingly candid, vivid account of serving Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When Robert M. Gates received a call from the White House, he thought he’d long left Washington politics behind: After working for six presidents in both the CIA and the National Security Council, he was happily serving as president of Texas A&M University. But when he was asked to help a nation mired in two wars and to aid the troops doing the fighting, he answered what he felt was the call of duty.

A wonderful book

This book documents the talents, skills, abilities and accomplishments of one of the best public servants of our time. It should be required reading for anyone interested in a career in public service. Also required reading for those interested in understanding the challenges and complexities of governing!

Details of a secretary of defense daily positive and negatives Bureaucracies.

More details on how generals should relate more with men and women actually doing the fighting and not what West Point and Annapolis teachers in classrooms.

great insight

well organized and insight into the mind of a SecDef. enjoyed the narrator and the bonus track at the end.

Balanced and Honest

The author tells a great, bipartisan story and is open about his missteps. This book was long but worth the listen!

A distinct air of falseness

In both the professional reviews and the user reviews here, everyone seems to be impressed by Gates' candor and even-handedness. If I agreed, I wouldn't bother cluttering the site with another me too review, but I don't. To be sure, Gates takes us behind closed doors, both of the Pentagon and the White House, and is open about those he disliked, most often members of Congress. But in Gates's telling, very serious people are always very serious, and most leaders (especially himself) just love the troops and always find visiting wounded soldiers the most heartwarming of experiences. I kept thinking of the anecdote in Leibovitch's This Town in which Richard Holbrooke told Obama that he faced a momentous decision comparable to Johnson's over Vietnam, to which the president apparently responded "do people really talk like that?" In Gates' Washington, they do.

It's not that I didn't enjoy the book, or that I don't recommend it. I enjoyed listening to it, and found myself eagerly turning it on whenever I had downtime, which is really my standard for a good audiobook. More than anything else, it takes you back to a strange period of our recent history, when whether or not to support "the surge" was the biggest political question of the day. Additionally, Gates offers up a unique vantage point on a number of issues beyond the central themes of the Iraq and Afghan wars and internal reform at the Pentagon, from the repeal of DADT to negotiating missile defense with Russia. I do think at times the book felt repetitious, and I would have preferred it have been shorter. A note on the narration: it's slow. I recommend listening at 1.5X speed.


What follows is less a review and more a response to the book:

Ultimately, I found myself generally liking Gates, but still disagreeing with him and somewhat disapproving of his style of leadership. It seems to me that he does not present well and then dismisses the arguments of those he disagrees with. A small example first: on supplying mine resistant vehicles to troops in Iraq, he basically attributes the resistance at the Pentagon to a fear that money spent on MRAPs would mean less available for other expensive procurement programs. I don't doubt that this was a factor, and ultimately I think Gates was largely correct about the value of MRAPs, but there are many strong arguments that the enormous investment in them was a boondoggle with a little payoff and that the process was mismanaged. But if there's one group of critics that Gates seems to enjoy dismissing altogether, it's members of Congress, especially democrats. Again, I don't entirely disagree with him that many congressmen played politics with war funding bills, but it also seemed to me that when these congressmen grandstanded over being lied to by the Bush administration and even military leaders, they had a lot to point to. Obviously there was the WMD claim of 2003 (a topic Gates glosses over early in the book, saying he too, as an ex-head of the CIA, believed what he'd read in the newspaper), but beyond that there was the constant refrain that yes we were winning and no the administration had not underestimated the troop requirements, right up to the start of the surge.

If there's one thing Gates seems to hold dear (besides the troops, who he cares about more than anything, has he mentioned that recently?) it's being a team player and never ever leaking anything--leakers are a pestilence, and generals and admirals who publicly disagree with administration strategy are almost as bad. In differentiating himself from his predecessor, Rumsfeld, Gates makes clear that he welcomes vigorous debate before a decision, but that after a decision is made, he expects that subordinates either publicly support it fully or quit. I agree this can be appropriate on some matters (at its best, the view is Lincolnesque), but applied too broadly it seems to me to justify the very behavior by congressmen (using hearings to score political points rather than to honestly gather information) that Gates abhors. It also encourages the insular group think that led us into war in the first place. I got the sense from that book that Gates' big advantage over other Bushies was that he was just plain smarter, and was more often right for that reason. But in many ways he was no more open to opposing views than was Cheney.

The view that Gates most often misrepresents and dismisses in the book was the case for early withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. Surely, he keeps arguing, nothing could be worse for US security than losing the war(s). Maybe the Iraq War itself was a mistake, but the worst thing now would be leaving without finishing the job. This was classic late-Bush administration justification. But the argument of those favoring a preemptive withdrawal--and let me be clear, I wasn't one of them; I strongly opposed the war at the outset, but was guardedly in favor of the surge, although I'm still not sure whether I was right on the latter point, while I absolutely was on the former--was not that it would be better to let Iraq fail than to spend the blood and treasure to save it. It was (of course I'm simplifying here, there were many people with many related reasons) that Iraq was already lost, and however long we stayed we were just delaying the inevitable slide into chaos that would happen after our departure. As this book comes out in 2014 and we get word of the fall of Fallujah, this argument is again looking prescient. And honestly, having read Duty, I'm not entirely sure whether Gates disagrees with it or never really understood it.