Robert Gates: “What is essential for our national security is that we have two long-term partners in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

I think part of the problem is that at the end of the Cold War, we were affected by triumphalism or hubris, whatever you want to call it.

I soon learned that the only way I could get significant new or additional equipment to commanders in the field in weeks or months, not years, was to take control of the problem myself through special task forces and ad hoc processes.

I think the president is — based on what I read — is getting the sense that, as he put it, that Putin is 'tapping' him along.

He wants Ukraine, basically, to be a client state of Russia.