August 13, 2010 2:45PM # The Financial Times on Robert Gates By [Christopher A. Preble](https://www.cato.org/people/christopher-preble) --- SHARE Kudos to the *[Financial Times](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/70e6298a-a640-11df-8767-00144feabdc0.html)* (subscription may be required) for figuring out what most other journalists and editorial writers haven’t seemed to grasp concerning Robert Gates’s economy initiative at the Pentagon. > \[H\]is aim is not to cut the overall budget radically; it is merely to achieve savings in the military bureaucracy and thus, against a background of broader fiscal constraint, *protect spending on new weapons and other outlays.* (my emphasis) The reforms in and of themselves are “commendable,” the *FT* notes, but they don’t amount to very much in the grand scheme, and they therefore do not go nearly far enough. Indeed, as [I](https://www.cato.org/2010/08/10/bob-gates-against-the-world/) [and](http://security.nationaljournal.com/2010/08/gates-drops-a-bomb-on-norfolk.php#1614720) [others](http://www.dodbuzz.com/2010/08/11/gates-tries-hard-wont-stop-cuts/) have noted, U.S. military spending will continue to rise if Bob Gates gets his way. This isn’t good enough. The *FT* editors agree: > The US needs a much more searching review of its military spending, one that aims to do more than merely curb its growth. Anyone interested in a comprehensive proposal (three, actually) for substantially reducing U.S. military spending by revisiting the roles, responsibilities, and missions that are currently assigned to Gates’s department can find it [here](http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/1006SDTFreport.pdf). [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).