Defense Secretary Robert Gates took his campaign to change the Pentagon's weapons-buying habits directly to the uniformed military Wednesday, telling an audience of young officers that military brass for too long viewed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as "exotic distractions."
According to the Wall Street Journal report on this speech, Mr. Gates said that since his arrival at the Pentagon two years ago, he has repeatedly found the senior military leadership looking beyond current wars to future threats.
"I kept running into the fact that the Department of Defense as an institution -- which routinely complained that the rest of the government was not at war -- was itself not on a war footing, even as young Americans were fighting and dying every day," Mr. Gates said.
Mr. Gates has criticized the lack of responsiveness of the uniformed military leadership in the past,...
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