Gates Thanks Troops, Bids Farewell
(June 25, 2011) |
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WASHINGTON, June 23, 2011 – It's 110 degrees in the shade,
and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is answering questions
from about 200 soldiers at a bleak U.S. installation near
Kandahar, Afghanistan, in mid-June.
At the end of the
session, he tells them he has one more thing to say: “I've
come out here to thank you for the last time for your
service and for your sacrifice. More than anybody except the
president, I'm responsible for you being here. I'm the
person that signed the deployment papers that got you here.
And that weighs on me every day.”
It's tough for the
secretary to get through this statement. He steps away from
the microphone, and there are tears in his eyes. The
soldiers in the audience -- from the 4th Infantry Division's
1st Brigade -- are moved, as well. Gates receives prolonged
applause. As he hands out commemorative coins to the troops,
they thank him for his service and all he has done for them.
“I've told friends that I would be more than happy if
the only legacy I took away from this job is those kids out
there in the field knew they had someone who was looking
after them, all the time,” Gates said in a recent interview
with American Forces Press Service during his last trip to
visit deployed troops.
Gates will retire as defense
secretary June 30. The U.S. Senate has confirmed CIA
Director Leon E. Panetta to take his place.
It has
been a sacred trust for the secretary to ensure the troops
fighting the nation's wars have what they need to succeed.
“If I had the knowledge that those [privates first
class] and lance corporals, petty officers and airmen knew,
that way up there in the chain of command there was somebody
watching their back all the time, trying to figure out what
they needed, that was most important to me,” he said.
When Gates became defense secretary at the end of 2006,
Iraq was gripped by a growing insurgency, and U.S.
casualties were mounting. The Army and Marine Corps were
being stretched almost to the point of breaking to maintain
the level of forces in Iraq and, to a lesser degree, in
Afghanistan.
Something had to be done -- quickly. The
secretary said he had to make four decisions very soon after
taking office that still have ramifications.
“The
first was the decision, which I actually discussed in my
interview with President [George W.] Bush, to increase the
Army by 65,000 and the Marine Corps by 27,000 to bring
relief,” Gates said. The Army and Marine Corps, he added,
simply weren't big enough at that time to handle all the
missions assigned to them.
The second decision was
part and parcel of the Iraq surge, and that was extending
all Army deployments in U.S. Central Command to 15 months.
“That was a really difficult decision and the [Joint
Chiefs of Staff] chairman, [Marine Corps Gen.] Pete Pace,
the vice chairman, [Navy Adm.] Ed Giambastiani, the Army
chief of staff, everybody was telling me that I had to do
this to provide some stability for the troops,” he said.
Gates was convinced that the only way he could give the
troops a year at home, given the surge, was to extend the
deployed tour to 15 months. “If we didn't do that,” he
explained, “we would be down to six or seven months at home
and still have a year to 15-month tours.”
Gates knew
this decision would be hard on the troops and their
families, and even today, he thinks officials underestimated
how painful and difficult that was for everybody.
“That decision is a burden that I've never put down,” he
acknowledged.
The secretary's next decision was to
“regularize” the use of the National Guard and to try to get
it to the point where they were being deployed as units.
“I particularly personalized it with the [explosive
ordnance disposal] guys,” the secretary said. “You know, if
I'm in that kind of a business, I'd sure as hell like to
know the guy next to me, and have trained with him and have
confidence and trust in him, instead of some guy from a
different state I just met two weeks before we deployed.”
Gates' final decision at that time involved the
cessation of the so-called stop -loss policy which
involuntarily extended service members' time in the
military, the secretary recalled.
“I said, ‘We have
to get rid of stop-loss,' and I kind of tied it to the
increase in the end strength of the Army,” which had almost
25,000 soldiers stop-lossed, he said.
“I felt that
stop-loss was a break in the contract, a breach of trust,”
Gates said. “As far as I'm concerned, once we announce a
decision, it's a commitment to the troops. Then, for
bureaucratic reasons, someone will come back later and try
to make exceptions -- extending this or doing that. That's
breaking our word to the troops. No wonder none of them
trust any one of us up the chain of command, because we
can't be counted on to keep our word once we've given it to
them.
“So, I have felt very, very strongly about that
the whole time I've been in this job,” he added. “Once we've
made a commitment to these men and women, we have a huge
obligation to keep.” |
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service
Copyright 2011 |
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