On 60 Minutes Sunday Bob Gates was interviewed. Hes been a faithful patriot to this country having served under George HW Bush as CIA director and Defense Secretary for George W Bush and Obama. I think we will greatly miss him. I particularly like his comments about the Pentagon. He has been very frank in his desire to modernize and streamline the military.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/051...z1MkBI5LMB

President Barack Obama made a “very gutsy call” to send Navy SEALs into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden, outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in an interview broadcast Sunday.

"I worked for a lot of these guys. And this is one of the most courageous calls – decisions — that I think I’ve ever seen a president make,” Gates told CBS in a wide-ranging interview aired on “60 Minutes.”

Gates, a veteran government official who also once served as CIA director, said he was very concerned about the quality of the intelligence that had located the Al Qaeda leader in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, ahead of the May 1 raid.

“My worry was the level of uncertainty about whether Bin Laden was even in the compound. … There wasn’t any direct evidence that he was there. It was all circumstantial. But it was the best — information that we had — since probably 2001,” he said.

Gates, who was nominated by President George W. Bush at the end of 2006 and kept on by President Obama, described his 4-1/2 years at the Pentagon as the hardest job he’s ever had.

“We have been at war in two places every single day I’ve been secretary of defense. And I’ve been secretary of defense longer than World War II lasted, longer than the Civil War lasted, so it’s been tough,” he said.

“I think the hardest thing for me to deal with … is leading a department that is organized to plan for war but not to fight a war. And so everything that I’ve wanted to do to try and help the men and women in the field I’ve had to do outside the normal Pentagon bureaucracy. And I’ve had to be directly involved on a week-to-week basis to make sure that it got done. That’s been very frustrating.”

Obama has nominated CIA director Leon Panetta to replace Gates. If confirmed, Panetta is set to take over July 1.

The new secretary will face the task of managing a still-stalemated NATO operation in Libya, political pressures to withdraw a significant number of troops from Afghanistan at a critical time and the need to trim hundreds of billions of dollars from Pentagon spending. There’s also the question of what will happen in Iraq after the final withdrawal of U.S. troops at the end of this year.