Exit Strategy

Defense Secretary Robert Gates hopes to step down next year, he says in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine.

"I think that it would be a mistake to wait until January 2012," Gates says in the interview. "First of all, I think we might have trouble getting the kind of person they want if there's a possibility that they might only be in the job for a year. You know, who knows what the election situation will look like. But also I just think this is not the kind of job you want to fill in the spring of a presidential election. So I think sometime in 2011 sounds pretty good."