Rose additional funding provided by these funders. And by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. From our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose robert gates is here, hhe has had a distinguished career in Public Service spanning six decades and served under eight president s from Lyndon Johnson to barack obama. He took the top job in 1991 under george h. W. Bush, president of texas a m university from 2002 to 2006 when president george w. Bush appointed him secretary of defense. President obama asked him to stay at the pentagon making him the First Defense secretary to serve in both a republican and the democratic administration, he left his post in june, 2011. At his farewell ceremony president obama awarded him the president ial award of freedom. The highest honor. This is a man i have come to know and respect. A humble american patriot. A man of common sense and decency. Quite simply one of our nations finest public servants. Rose today the United States face as wave of Foreign Policy challenges, including the pressing question of how to respond to the potential use of chemical weapons by the Assad Government in syria, the government warned him of the consequence conditions consequences he could expect. I want to make it clear to assad and those under his command the world is watching, the use of chemical weapons is and would be totally unacceptable. And if you make the tragic mistake of using these weapons there will be consequences and you will be held accountable. Rose i am pleased to have bob gates back at this table. Welcome. Thank you, charlie. Rose so what are you doing since you left government . Well, i am working on a book, a mental with a of my time under president s bush and obama as secretary of defense, and doing some speaking but staying as far from washington, d. C. As i can. Rose when you look at writing a book, i mean, how hard is that for you to take the time anand think of all of the events and make sure that you get it right as you recollect it . First i have given myself a little out at the beginning by saying this is a purely personal reminiscence of what i experienced and what i saw, i am not trying to write the defensive history and others will have a different perspective on things, but it was we were at war every day of the four and a half years i was in office, and as i write in the book it wasnt just the wars in iraq and afghanistan, it was daily wars with the congress, with other agencies, with the white house, and also i would say with my own building, with the pentagon. Rose fighting over what within the pentagon . Trying to make the First Priority of the pentagon to be successful in the wars we were already in, the pentagon bureaucracy is structured to plan for war, not to wage war, and so getting badly needed equipment to the troops fast in months rather than in years or decades was just contrary to the nature of the building and it required a lot of effort to get them to do what i thought was the right thing, whether it was fixing walter reed and the way we treated our Walter Reed Hospital and the way we treated our Wounded Warriors to Armored Vehicles to Intelligence Surveillance and recon sanls vehicles and drones, medivac and so on, it was it was a struggle. Rose as close as i have seen you tear up is when you talk about the responsibility of those men and women in harms way. And you have said your legacy you hope is that they. Rose . Had their back to try and get them home safely and to care for them if you could. Well, that is absolutely right and nothing means more to me i gave a speech at a Little University in jackson, tennessee a few weeks ago, a couple of months ago, and it was an evening event and is my wont i had lunch in a down scale barbecue place and sitting there munching down on my ribs and a working man came up to me, his clothe, he was clearly involved in physical labor and so on, and he said, werent you the secretary of defense . I said yes. And he said, well my on is a marine and than thank you for hg his back. And as i told the people with me, that kind of thing means more to me than any medal or any recognition that anybody else could give me. And i the things i write about in the book is one of the reasons i decided it was time to leave was that i had come to care so much about the troops and about protecting them that i worried that i was not giving the president the kind of advice that i should, and as i write, i got to the point where i couldnt talk about them or to them without choking up. And so that was one of the reasons why i decided it was time to leave. Rose meaning your heart was overwhelming you . Yeah. I just their service, their sacrifice, what they were putting up with, the fact they are all volunteers, it just became overwhelming to me. Rose does the country do enough for them . I think the country works very hard to do the right thing by them. It is so different from when i first entered government and in the years after vietnam. There are so Many Companies now that have special programs to try and train veterans that give them really good jobs and so many communities have organized so many things to help Wounded Warriors and to help them reintegrate, one of the things that is really, really made me feel good is the number of universities around the country that have put together veterans programs in their university to help the veterans, a place where they can get together and a place where they can get counseling and advice and Financial Assistance and so on, it is all i think everybody is trying to do the right thing. Yet in some ways there is never enough. There is a lot of them, you know, there have been maybe a million and a half, 2 Million People serve over the last ten years, so it is a big challenge, but i think peoples hearts in the right place. Rose i do too and i think there has been a real celebration since vietnam when they came back from the wars since then. And the interesting thing, charlie is kind, there kind of has been a reach back to the vietnam vets as well. Rose yes. To sort of say in a way for the country to say, you know, we are sorry, we didnt do that right. Rose right. Exactly. And the other thing that is apparent to me is that because of iraq and afghanistan, we have asked them to serve more times, longer and they are coming back with more improved medical care which means that more are injured than have ever been before. I think this is one of the things for which we were unprepared, is the quality of battlefield medicine, the shortened times for medical evacuation to a field hospital, getting them to germany to the hospital at lamb stool and bringing them on to the United States as soon as they have stabilized has led to. Many of these young men, and they are mostly young men, a few women, but mostly young men, surviving wounds that would have surely killed them in any prior war, even ten or fifteen years ago, and i remember the first time i but at walter reed and i went, met with the first quadruple amputee, he lost both legs and both arms, and all he wanted was to drive a car again. And i saw him again, maybe six months later, with pro they tick arms and legs, prosthetic arms and legs, it is amazing what science and medicine is doing for these young people. But nobody should estimate, underestimate the magnitude of the rehabilitation challenge and the courage that it takes, day in and day out to try and come back from these terrible wounds and that is where there is not enough we can do for these kids. Rose are we over stretched . I dont think so. I think we were over stretched at the end of 2006. And particularly in the early months of 2007, during the surge in iraq, i think one of the hardest decisions i made, maybe the hardest decision that i made as secretary was extending the length of deployments in iraq and afghanistan from twelve months to 15 months, and we did it for about a year and a half. And two years, and the alternative was to cut short their time at home. So if they were only to serve twelve months in the theatre then they might only be home for nine months or eight months or something, and so the recommendation of all of the generals and others was do the 15 and let them have the year at home, but there is no doubt in my mind that those tours were incredibly difficult for the troops and it was because we just didnt have enough troops that were deployable to do both an increase in afghanistan and to do the surge in iraq. Rose do we need a different kind of army . Military i think that the army is constantly evolving. I think all of the services are. My major concern is that we get fixed on the idea that technology is the only answer to our military challenges, that we are only going to fight certain kinds of wars in the future. You know, we say we would never fight another counterinsurgency after vietnam but guess what, we did, and as i look back at all of the times we have used military force since vietnam, when it comes to predicting where we will use our military next, we have a perfect record. Rose we are always wrong. I have never gotten it right, not once. Rose why . Because the world is unpredictable. And so my mantra when i was secretary was, we need a force that is equipped and trained to provide the maximum possible versatility across the broadest possible range of conflict, because we cant predict what the next conflict will be like and, therefore, we have to train and have as much flexibility and versatility as possible. We cant just prepare for one kind of conflict. Rose you also have said, i think on leaving, that i dont want to be secretary of state when you are fighting these kind of ground wars, you know, with increasing budget demands on the pentagon. Well, i think there is no question but that the Ground Forces are going to get smaller, but as i pointed out the people, even with the budget cut that president obama asked for of 400, almost 485 billion in 2011, even with the cuts in the army that that would have involved, the army would have still been roughly 30 or 40,000 troops bigger than it was when i became secretary in december of 2006. Because i increased the size of the army by 65,000 in 2007, and then gave them an additional temporary increels of 2000 in 2008, or in 2010, rather, increels of 200,000, so i worry we think the answer is always go to be high tech, because it is cleaner, it is it dictates a different kind of war than we fought in iraq and afghanistan and i hope those are the kind of wars, if we have to fight, that that is what we dont have to go through what we went through in iraq and afghanistan, but i remember. One of my favorite quotes is from general joe still well, from world war two, who basically said how a war starts, it always ends in mud. Rose Ground Forces fighting each other. And so you just dont know. And because you dont know, you need to preserve flexibility. Rose you cant occupy with machines, can you, from the air . Well, and w we learned that. You said talking about the challenge today, what is it that we face . And how is it different than we faced before . Because you talked about, you know, this toxic mix of rogue nations, criminal networks and nuclear and biological and chemical weapons. How do you see this challenge . And secondly how do we meet this challenge . I think one of the challenges that we face is that nonstate entities have the potential to acquire these weapons, and states that are deeply unstable internally have acquired these weapons. The president s concern about syria and chemical weapons is a good example, but hezbollah, which iran and syria have supported on israels northern border in lebanon have somewhere in the order of 40,000 rockets and missiles, some of them pretty well advanced. I think one of the worries is that somehow maybe hezbollah could get ahold of some of those chemical weapons. From syria . If syria lets them go in some way. But i think you face a number of countries that have these capabilities and they are not there was a certain when you were dealing with great powers, if you will, you had more confidence in terms of the control systems, in terms of reduced risk of these weapons getting out of the hand of the government or of the military, and i think that the worry that people have now, i think, you know, people always ask us, you know, what is your biggest nightmare . Well, it is a weapon of mass destruction falling in the hands of the terrorists, and we were very fortunate with al qaeda, we know al qaeda was trying their darnedest to get Nuclear Weapons and chemical weapons and so on. So far, they appear to have paid in that. Rose where did they come the closest . We had a bad scare i am trying to remember, maybe in 2009, 2010 when we thought one of those groups along the pakastani border may have gotten some nuclear material, but it turned out it was a false report it was not true but it is the kind of thing that is the kind of thing of your nightmares is that what you worried about even more so than the fact they would use them against, say israel . If their goal is to acquire Nuclear Weapons there would be three very negative consequences one is you would have a Nuclear Armed iran with missiles that could reach israel and that can reach israel today and that will be able to reach europe in the nottoodistant future and ultimately the United States. Second, you would have, i think, a nuclear tarmd iran would ignite a Nuclear Arms Race in the most volatile part of the world, and third, you i think a Nuclear Armed iran would be significantly more aggressive in placing like iraq and afghanistan and throughout the region in terms of trying to throw their weight around. So i think that this is one of those situations where the only acceptable alternative, the only Good Alternative is that the economic pressures bring enough popular unhappiness in iran because of economic disasters that are going on there, that the regime decides it is in its own best interests and for its own security. Rose that assumes rational thinking on their part. I think that they are not irrational. And, you know, to say that they are rational actors all the time, i dont accept that either, but when it comes to these kind of things, the one thing they dont want is a war with the United States. And so i think that this the only good outcome to this situation is if the iranian government, the ayatollahs decide it is in their own best interest to come to some sort of deal where we have enough confidence in the monitoring of the peaceful or civilian Nuclear Program to know if they decide to cheat or if they decided to break out and go for a nuclear weapon, and whether they would agree to the kinds of intrusive measures mess for that confidence, i dont know. Rose do you think they want them for want the capacity to make them . Charlie, i dont think it matters, because our intelligence isnt good huff to draw that distinction, isnt good enough. If you have the capacity to make, arm a Nuclear Capability, whether you have a piece of bomb in that corner and another one over there and another one over there, or you have one all put together, we are just not that good and so there is a certain point at which you have to assume that they have a Nuclear Capability and depending on how much they are enriching and how much information you get about their ability to weaponize the enriched uranium and so on. Rose but you dont believe, like the president doesnt believe that containment is a policy . The monitoring of uses is the way to go if you force them to do that but containment is not a policy . I think the president has been very clear that containment is not a policy. And i think, you know, containment, containment was not nuclear containment, with russia and china, containment when it came to russia was countering their expansive capabilities. Rose right. Our own when it came to their Nuclear Capability we were talking about deterrence. Rose right. And so i think first we want to contain iranian influence in the region, but i think the question that people are that what the president is really addressing is, or would we be content with deterrence . Right. And there i think the difference in the ayatollahs and their religious, their they cratic approach to the world, their threats to destroy israel make them a more worrisome, significantly more worrisome possess sorry of Nuclear Weapons than other nuclear states. Rose because they have a different decision al type structure. Yes. Rose from russia, and the soviet union from going into europe once again, deterrence is mutually assured destruction. And so then, does the question of value and life, different because of a culture that can produce suicide bombers mean that there means that will not work in the end or do you say no nationable and the leadership of no nation would ever, ever bargain initiate an action that assured their own destruction . Well, one thing about the iranian leaders that they have in common with the leaders of terrorist groups like bin laden, they are not strapping on the suicide bombs, they are very willing to see young people and handicapped people and so on strap these things on, but their lives mean a lot to them, and that is something in our hip pocket it seems to me. They want to stay alive and they want to stay in power. Rose i want to talk about that. One quick question about what you believe with respect to iran. You believe that an attack by rael will be a terrible thing to happen, because it would only delay the inevitable acquisition of Nuclear Weapons and that kind of capability . Delay not destroy . First of all it wont destroy the Nuclear Program, and i would say that within the framework of a limited attack neither could we. We might delay it more o