The Associated Press

Thu, May 15, 2008 (6:27 p.m.)

The Pentagon's slow response to wartime challenges such as protecting troops against roadside bombs stemmed in part from a mistaken belief within the defense establishment that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would be short, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday.

In remarks prepared for delivery to the Business Executives for National Security, Gates cited three areas in which he has pushed for speedier solutions to battlefield issues: a need for more pilotless drones for surveillance, more bomb-resistant vehicles to protect troops and improved treatment of the wounded.

"We must put our defense bureaucracies on a war footing with a wartime sense of urgency," Gates said, according to a text of his prepared remarks provided by the Pentagon. He was delivering the speech at a ceremony in which he was receiving the business group's Eisenhower Award for his wartime leadership.

Gates became the Pentagon chief in December 2006, succeeding Donald H. Rumsfeld. The Afghanistan war began in October 2001 and the U.S. initially invaded Iraq in March 2003. Gates said that the outcome of each conflict is "far from foretold" and that each will persist "for a long time to come."

In his speech, Gates made no direct mention of Rumsfeld or others who held leadership positions in the early stages of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But he made clear his view that the defense establishment has been too focused on the future, at the expense of more immediate solutions.

"A lesson I learned fairly early on was that important elements of the defense establishment were not at war," he said in his prepared remarks. "The needs of those in combat too often were not addressed urgently or creatively" because too many people in the Pentagon were "preoccupied with future capabilities and procurement programs, wedded to lumbering peacetime process and procedures, stuck in bureaucratic low gear."

He cited a variety of "leadership shortcomings" that limited the Pentagon's ability to adapt quickly in Iraq and Afghanistan, including "an assumption that the war would soon be over." He cited the example of fielding a new, more bomb-resistant armored vehicle for troops on both battlefields.

"I believe that one factor that delayed fielding was the pervasive assumption I referred to earlier _ and this applies to all the issues I'm discussing today _ that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would not last long," he said in his prepared remarks, and "that regimes could be toppled, major combat completed, the insurgency crushed and most U.S. troops withdrawn fairly soon."

In the case of the bomb-resistant vehicles, the effort to field them quickly and in large numbers also was limited by the fact that they cost more than $1 million each, meaning they "could potentially compete with other, longer-term procurement priorities geared toward future wars," he said.