U.S. Defense Secretary warns against repeat of Iraq war

Gates warns against repeat of Iraq war

Thom Shanker
New York Times
February 25, 2011

WEST POINT, N.Y. - Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in one of his last addresses to the Army, bluntly said on Friday that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan.

"In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it," Gates told an assembly of West Point cadets.

That reality, he said, meant that the Army would have to reshape its budget, since potential conflicts in places like Asia or the Persian Gulf were more likely to be fought with air and sea power, rather than with conventional ground forces.

"As the prospects for another head-on clash of large mechanized land armies seem less likely, the Army will be increasingly challenged to justify the number, size and cost of its heavy formations," Gates warned.

"The Army and the rest of the government must focus on capabilities that can "prevent festering problems from growing into full-blown crises which require costly -- and controversial -- large-scale American military intervention."

Gates was brought into the Bush Cabinet in late 2006 to repair the war effort in Iraq that was begun under his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, and then was kept in office by President Obama. He is expected to leave his post later this year. He did not directly criticize the Bush administration's decisions to go to war. Even so, his never-again formulation was unusually pointed. Gates has said that he would leave office this year, and the speech at West Point could be heard as his farewell to the Army.

A decade of constant conflict has trained a junior officer corps with exceptional leadership skills, he told the cadets, but the Army may find it difficult in the future to find inspiring work to retain its rising commanders as it fights for the money to keep large, heavy combat units in the field.

"Men and women in the prime of their professional lives, who may have been responsible for the lives of scores or hundreds of troops, or millions of dollars in assistance, or engaging or reconciling warring tribes, may find themselves in a cube all day re-formatting PowerPoint slides, preparing quarterly training briefs, or assigned an ever-expanding array of clerical duties," Gates said. "The consequences of this terrify me."

Politicians here are saying the same sort of thing, that no future war will ever require such a large Navy or a huge number of infantry. We have been constantly reducing the size of our armed forces for decades, focussing on a smaller force but focussing on recruiting the best and investing more effort in their training.

The flagship Ark Royal was decommissioned last month and we're reducing the quantity of aircraft carriers in our fleet in general.

As technology gets better, the less we need to send people in to fight. Drones will be the norm in the future.