Robert Gates

[laughs]

He was startled, and next to him was Bob Gates, who had also been with CIA, and he just smiled.

And on the far end was Brent Scowcroft, who was kind of scowling at me, holding my head up in the air.

[laughs]

Just like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Who were a couple? Bob Gates.

Remember Bob Gates? He was the CIA director and then defense secretary under both Bush and Obama.

He wrote a memoir in the 90s called, like, Out from the Shadows or something.

And it was, like, it was boring and super careful.

I would be like – I don't know if I'd question their motivations, but I would – I would have a certain impatience with that.

Is there an example that comes to mind? I remember when, for those who don't remember the Arab Spring, when Hosni Mubarak, the president of Egypt, was trying to cling to power and cracking down, a lot of the senior officials, Bob Gates, Hillary Clinton, people much more senior than me, experienced than me, were kind of very sympathetic to Mubarak and very unsettled by the prospect of change.

And I just kind of couldn't I was like, we give these people billions of dollars in military a year and we're just going to not do anything when they use.

And by the way, when the military came back into power, I still had that mindset, you know, like we should cut these people off.

You know, the, the Vietnamese are a genuine martial race in my opinion.

And, uh, One thing I found really interesting, I made the point before, in my opinion, Robert Gates was the shadow president, at least on foreign policy and war and peace matters.

You know, it was Gates, you know, through, you know, Obama, because Obama was, you know, formerly the president.

You know, we armed and equipped Vietnam with some pretty serious hardware, especially cutting edge command and control stuff.

Well, firstly, thank you very much for having me back.

Secondly, I ascribe to the Robert Gates aphorism about analysts that he said, when intelligence analysts smell flowers, they immediately think funeral and not wedding.

Exactly.

But I think there's plenty of empirical evidence to back up this pessimistic assessment because you only have to look back at 25 years ago.

I came to government in 2007 as a White House fellow.

And at the time, there was the surge in Iraq and Secretary Bob Gates had made a commitment.

The primary killer of service members in Iraq was roadside bombs.

And there was a technology a V-shaped hull to a vehicle, MRAPs, that was really saving lives because it deflected significant parts of the blast from the people inside the vehicle.