Defense Chief Advises Cadets on Disagreeing with Leaders

[maddezmom]

Source: NYT

Defense Chief Advises Cadets on Disagreeing with Leaders
Published: April 22, 2008
WEST POINT, N.Y. — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Monday urged the next generation of commanders to “tell blunt truths” to their military and civilian leaders — but he also cautioned them to air their “respectful dissent” only through official channels.

Addressing one of the most sensitive issues in the tradition of civilian control of the military, Mr. Gates said differing opinions among officers should be viewed as a sign of health in the armed forces and that young officers must be able to trust that their military and civilian bosses would not penalize those who offered honest disagreements.

But in speeches to cadets here and to the Air War College in Alabama earlier in the day, Mr. Gates coupled his invitation to be candid with an equally clear warning. He said the armed services must not try “end runs” around the Pentagon or the White House by lobbying Congress when they disagreed with decisions to curtail or cancel high-cost weapons. Mr. Gates referred only obliquely to the fact that some senior military advisers to President Bush and the former defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, have been criticized as being overly compliant in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Instead, Mr. Gates took a longer view, saying tension in civilian-military relations had arisen from Korea to Vietnam to Somalia to Iraq today — all conflicts that he said were “frustrating, controversial efforts for the American public and for the U.S. armed forces.”



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/washington/22gates.html?ref=us

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Gates Assails Pentagon on Resources for Battlefields

By Josh White and William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, April 22, 2008; Page A16

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates yesterday criticized the U.S. military services for not moving aggressively enough to provide critical resources to the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying it has been "like pulling teeth" to get the Pentagon's conventional Cold War bureaucracy to adapt to the needs of current wars.

In speeches to student officers at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Alabama, and at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Gates challenged the future military leaders to think differently about the nature of war and to move beyond their comfort zones, encouraging innovative thinking and new approaches. He expressed frustration with navigating the Defense Department's tangled bureaucracy and said that some officers within the services are "stuck in old ways of doing business," causing warfighters to suffer.

"We can do and we should do more to meet the needs of men and women fighting in the current conflicts while their outcome may still be in doubt," Gates said. "My concern is that our services are still not moving aggressively in wartime to provide resources needed now on the battlefield."

more:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/21/AR2008042100950.html?nav=hcmodule