{"id":9742,"date":"2011-05-18T20:25:25","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T00:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=9742"},"modified":"2011-05-19T10:33:51","modified_gmt":"2011-05-19T14:33:51","slug":"bob-gates-to-washington-shut-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/9742\/bob-gates-to-washington-shut-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Bob Gates to Washington: Shut Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has had an uneven tenure at the Pentagon. In his time serving both the Bush and Obama Administrations, Gates has often been a voice of prudence.\u00a0At other times, however, he has sounded like a facile opinion columnist, as when he paraphrased Douglas MacArthur to a group of West Point cadets earlier this year, saying, “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia<\/span> or into the <\/span>Middle East<\/span> or <\/span>Africa<\/span> should have his head examined.” Defense secretaries craft policy in reaction to specific conditions throughout the world. As such, it’s unwise for one of them to opine in such absolute terms — particularly when their words could be used to unjustly assail one of their successors.<\/span><\/p>\n

Gates is right, however, about the aftermath of the assasination of Osama Bin Laden. As Politico reports<\/a> today:<\/span><\/p>\n

The amount of information released about the raid on Osama bin Laden\u2019s compound has raised concerns about jeopardizing future missions, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said Wednesday.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy concern is that there were too many people in too many places talking too much about this operation. And we [had] reached agreement that we would not talk about the operational details,\u201d he told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. \u201cI am very concerned about this, because we want to retain the capability to carry out these kinds of operations in the future.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The code of silence shouldn’t be limited to operational details, however. In the aftermath of Bin Laden’s death, it would have been best for the military and intelligence community to act as if there was little real intelligence to be gleaned from Obama’s Abbottabad hideout, thus keeping from the enemy the fact that our knowledge of terrorist identities and operations was growing exponentially.<\/p>\n

Since that cat’s already out of the bag, it’s essential that no information of a more specific variety gets out. The intelligence we collected represents a great asset. But keeping members of a worldwide terrorist network on the run because they’re unsure about what we know is an even bigger one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has had an uneven tenure at the Pentagon. In his time serving both the Bush and Obama Administrations, Gates has often been a voice of prudence.\u00a0At other times, however, he has sounded like a facile opinion columnist, as when he paraphrased Douglas MacArthur to a group of West Point cadets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1297,2707,731,571,190,536,2708],"class_list":["post-9742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-al-qaeda","tag-defense-policy","tag-national-security","tag-osama-bin-laden","tag-robert-gates","tag-terrorism","tag-u-s-military"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9742"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9744,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9742\/revisions\/9744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}