Obama vs. the Generals - POLITICO Magazine::
Dempsey grew more circumspect in subsequent congressional testimony, but “his body language,” says retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, Dempsey still suggested he was thinking, “I can’t believe how dumb this is.”
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates was explicitly critical in a September speech: “I believe that to blow a bunch of stuff up over a couple days, to underscore or validate a point or a principle, is not a strategy.”
According to most of those I interviewed, Gates’s scathing words reflect an unhappiness with the commander in chief that is widely shared in the military. “The military does not take kindly to people asking them to do things without thinking them through,” Eaton observes. “Military guys get kind of bemused when civilians tell them it’s OK to blow people to smithereens using bombs, as long as you don’t kill them with chemical weapons.”