Some headlines and sound bites that made the worldwide rounds on Monday must have stopped Air Force people in their tracks. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was quoted as denouncing the Air Force for not doing enough to help the war effort. That’s the way I heard it on a national CBS Radio broadcast here in Washington. I don’t know how it sounded on other broadcasts and telecasts, but the written headline on the CBS Web site was this: “Gates: Air Force Lagging in War Effort.” The CNBC Web site’s item read: “Pentagon chief rips Air Force over war.” The CNN Web site headline was, “Defense secretary scolds Air Force over war effort.”

Those must have seemed to be pretty discouraging words to Air Force personnel everywhere, especially the thousands deployed downrange.

The comments stemmed from the first paragraph of an Associated Press report of a speech Gates had just given to student officers at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Alabama: “Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday the Air Force is not doing enough to help in the Iraq and Afghanistan war effort, complaining that some military leaders are ‘stuck in old ways of doing business.’”

Gates did indeed complain about the bureaucracy, as the second part of that sentence indicates. But the first half, which has him criticizing the Air Force for not helping enough in the war, is a case of overreaching. Gates did not use those words. They were an extrapolation from what Gates did say about the difficulty he was having getting resources to the war zone. Those statements of his were strong enough, but they stopped well short of giving rise to the inference, as the AP characterization of them seems to do, that the Air Force was somehow shirking its duty as others were fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s not an uncommon occurrence — and one that I was guilty of on occasion as a reporter — when the media try to give broader meaning to, or simplify, nuanced statements by newsmakers.

In truth, Gates’ speech to the young officers was unusually blunt. He criticized officers in the Pentagon for dragging their heels. “I’ve been wrestling for months to get more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets into the theater,” he said. “Because people were stuck in old ways of doing business, it’s been like pulling teeth. While we’ve doubled this capability (unmanned aerial vehicle deployment) in recent months, it is still not good enough.” He went on to say he was appointing a task force to get more resources to the warfighters quickly.

Although Gates was alluding primarily to the Air Force in this passage — he even noted with obvious disapproval earlier in the speech that the Air Force wouldn’t co-fund a UAV program with the CIA in the early 1990s — the indictment seemed to cast a wider net. The other services also deploy UAVs, and intelligence and surveillance involves all services.

“The Air Force is not immune from criticism, but it certainly isn’t alone in criticism,” Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell was quoted as saying by the Los Angeles Times. That paper had a generally straightforward account of Gates’ speech, incidentally, as did The Washington Post, The New York Times and Stars and Stripes (which perhaps should have tied Gates’ remarks to the Air Force a little more).

In any event, Gates had another key message and to their credit all the news outlets I saw took heed of it. In the Air Force base speech and another later in the day to West Point cadets, Gates exhorted young officer recruits to forcefully challenge ingrained ways of doing things in the military. “[I]f as an officer — listen to me very carefully — if as an officer you don’t tell blunt truths or create an environment where candor is encouraged then you’ve done yourself and the institution a disservice,” he told the cadets.

It’s advice Gates himself seemed to be following that day, even if some media reports had him doing it a little more strongly than he may have intended.