I’m a recently retired military officer who refuses to look for work involving any government agency or contractor. I’m heading back to school to train for an entirely different life. 25 years was enough - so stuff your insults up your ass!
I saw a copy of the briefing and understand the trade-offs involved in the decisions that needed to be made. There was no good answer possible, only a variety of bad. Since the briefing was classified, I can/will not document or repeat it. However, if you know anything about managing and fielding a weapon system, you can guess the trade-offs pretty easily.
Gates made a reasonable decision, but he had no call to criticize the USAF for doing as directed. He was venting his frustration, but scoring political points while doing it. He was also justifiably pissed at the senior USAF staff - a quick poll in my office of retired and current O-4/5/6s suggested total agreement with firing 50-100 Generals and getting new blood into a clueless bureaucracy.
Still, he is the one who chose what course to follow. The truth is the USAF is grossly under-capitalized for it to do what the country expects - and it isn’t going to get any more with the wars going on.
I am only surprised that Gates, who had been SECDEF for about 18 months when he fired the top of the Air Force, is responsible for the decisions that lead up to that firing. Of course he approved a lot of recommendations from briefings that came up to him but 90% of what a cabinet secretary signs are routine things that he does not have time to pay attention to. That he later questioned something that he previously concurred in is not per se an indication of incompetence, or hypocrisy, but merely the bureaucratic reality that he has to rely on his staff until he has reason that leads him to do otherwise.
That is the sense in which I meant my question about whether you had information that he had deliberately and consciously made a decision (as opposed to a routine approval of a recommendation) which he then welshed on because it turned out badly.