Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that President Barack Obama "double-crossed" him by ordering drastic cuts to the Pentagon during his years at the White House.
"I guess I’d have to say I felt double-crossed," Gates, who served from 2006 to 2011,
told Bret Baier on Fox News on Friday. "After all those years in Washington, I was naïve."
In a special Fox report on the nation's military under the president, Gates told Baier that Obama had promised him that no "significant changes" would occur in the Pentagon's budget for some time.
"Well, I think that began to fray," he said of the president's pledge. "'Fray' may be too gentle a word."
Gates, who was first appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, said that he was ordered to make even more reductions to the military's budget, even though draconian cuts had already taken place.
But he told Baier that he encouraged President Obama to make them more gradual — to no avail — to keep from drastically depleting the military's effectiveness.
"I think he acknowledged that what I was pitching at a minimum was: 'The world doesn’t seem to be getting better. Before you head down a path of deep cuts in defense, why don’t you take it kind of slow,'" he said. "It was one of those things where I lost the argument."
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