Jon Stewart on the Daily Show has Exclusive – Robert Gates Extended Interview Pt. 1 through Pt. 4.
In this exclusive, unedited interview, “Duty” author Robert Gates assesses the political morass in Washington and champions the judicious use of force abroad.
From what I have been reading in the other media, I certainly did not expect to like Robert Gates. The interview that Jon Stewart conducted is absolutely not what I expected. It shows what happens when you have an interviewer who wants to talk about serious issues instead of being focused on creating controversy.
What is wrong with the rest of the media? (What a silly question.)
Part 1
Part 2
In part 2 there is a discussion of the problem of getting the DOD and the VA computer systems to talk to each other about individual veterans.
Gates explained that he failed to get this job accomplished even after spending $1 billion on it. The technical people who would be responsible to get this done told him how impossible it was to do.
When I was at Digital Equipment Corporation, I wanted a very smart technical guy to work on connecting our circuit simulator to our logic simulator. We also had been a single prototype piece of software that had tried to demonstrate similar capability, but had not completely succeeded.
When I got a similar reaction to what Gates probably experienced – a whole raft of reasons why it couldn’t be done – a novel idea occurred to me. I said to the person I wanted to do the job, let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that you really thought you could do this. Now let’s have a conversation about all the roadblocks you expect to face in doing this project, and let’s figure out what you might be able to do to overcome them.
Luckily, by the end of the conversation, it didn’t look so impossible. In fact the project did get completed successfully. We wrote a few technical papers about the project. I went on to work for two other companies in the ensuing years where we did similar projects successfully.
The point was to get the people responsible for the project invested in making it a success. This is as opposed to having the people invested in proving to you that they were right, and it couldn’t be done.
As we say in the industry, “After all, it is just a small matter of programming.” Of course, we usually say that as a facetious remark.
Part 3
Part 4
January 18,2014
I have started to read the Gates book. I am specifically avoiding reading the left wing attacks on the book until I have finished reading the book itself. As I got into the later stages of the first chapter, I was beginning to think that Jon Stewart was had by Gates.
The book starts out with what seemed to be a reasonable premise. As Gates became Secretary of Defense, he took the attitude that it didn’t really make any difference about what you thought of the premises for getting us into the Iraq war, the fact was that we were in the war and he was charged with figuring out a way to successfully conclude it.
That makes sense up to a point. However, when you are dealing with members of Congress who have lost what little faith they may have had in George Bush because of the way he duped them into allowing him to attack Iraq, you might need to take into consideration this past history if you want to understand their motivations and possible lack of trust for any Bush administration appointee. Gates clearly gives no consideration to these issues in some interactions while clearly understanding this in other circumstances.
