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From Noah Shachtman, summing up Robert Gates’s influence on the Pentagon so far:

After three years under Gates, the Defense Department is finally learning the right lesson: You wage war with the enemies you have, not the ones you wish you had.

In other words, quit obsessing about theoretical future world wars with China or Russia and figure out how to win today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan instead.  The rest of Noah’s profile of Gates is good too.

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