Obama double-crossed me: Ex-US defense secretary
Former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates says President Barack Obama “double-crossed” him by ordering budget cuts to the Pentagon during his tenure.
“I guess I’d have to say I felt double-crossed,” Gates said in an interview with Fox News on Friday. “After all those years in Washington, I was naive.”
Gates, who served from 2006 to 2011, was reportedly told to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from the US defense budget after already having slashed it.
He said Obama had promised him that there wouldn’t be any “significant changes” in the defense budget for some time but that promise was quickly broken.
"Well, I think that began to fray," Gates said of the president's pledge. "'Fray' may be too gentle a word."
Gates noted that he tried to persuade Obama that deep cuts to the Pentagon would endanger US troops and was inadvisable because potential threats were increasing.
"I think he acknowledged that what I was pitching at a minimum was: 'The world doesn’t seem to be getting better. Before you head down a path of deep cuts in defense, why don’t you take it kind of slow,'" he said. "It was one of those things where I lost the argument."
In the same interview, Gates laughed while recalling the Obama administration’s inability to comprehend military solutions to the crisis in Libya during 2011.
He became particularly upset when he discovered that White House staff members were “talking about military options with the president without Defense being involved,” regarding Libya.
“I don’t want any military plans or options going to the White House that I haven’t seen,” Gates said, recalling his instructions to the Pentagon at the time.
The former secretary of defense, who was first appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, did not want so-called experts to make the final call on plans of where to deploy the military.
Since leaving his post as defense secretary, Gates has been on the warpath against the Obama administration.
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