BF2S Forums Robert Gates awarded Medal of Freedom

Shocking wrote:

Macbeth wrote:

And Gates did serve in the military, but only briefly (see wiki quote).

The "He was never in the military." was a quote from you before you edited.

So basically the fact that he wasn't Rumsfeld is the only thing you can really say about him otherwise he was an slightly above average official. Well okay. I guess I was right.

It's rare to have an official who does his job and does it right. Maybe having Rumsfeld precede him in the position made Gates more popular because his predecessor was such a disaster.

erm sorry but what?

no, in the case of gates lifting stop loss, that was his call. cant forget rumsfelds policy of expecting maximum results with a minimal amount of troops and logisitcal support.  gates changed that too.

put it like this, during my deployment we were losing soldiers in our task force left and right to ieds.  as a dumb fuck private i always wondered why we never had uav flying over the ied alleys with constant surveillance. that shit would certainly have saved a lot of lives.  rumfseld didnt wanna do that shit, among other things.  i stringly blame rumsfeld for a lot of the policies that needlesses lost american lives.  rumsfeld was a chicken hawk.

Well I would imagine that stop loss sucked yeah but as you said it probably doesn't have a lot to do with the sec. of defense. (besides it's been utilized in many conflicts before)

What I'm on about is that he (Rumsfeld) managed to piss off the military staff around him enough to be called to resign by multiple people due to his apparantly abysmal military planning.

What Mike Jackson had to say about him was, for me personally, most convincing;

In a September 2007 interview with The Daily Telegraph, General Mike Jackson, the head of the British army during the invasion, criticised Rumsfeld's plans for the occupation as "intellectually bankrupt," adding that Rumsfeld is "one of those most responsible for the current situation in Iraq," and that he felt that "the US approach to combating global terrorism is 'inadequate' and too focused on military might rather than nation building and diplomacy."

The man must've been really completely brash & undiplomatic to fuck up his relations with everyone around him, not only his own military staff but his most important allies as well.

Last edited by Shocking (2011-07-03 13:46:18)

Macbeth wrote:

And Gates did serve in the military, but only briefly (see wiki quote).

The "He was never in the military." was a quote from you before you edited.

So basically the fact that he wasn't Rumsfeld is the only thing you can really say about him otherwise he was an slightly above average official. Well okay. I guess I was right.

That's not what I said. I said quite a bit more about him than that. That's just what you chose to take from it.