The Hill News

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) praised Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in a tweet Monday following the revelation that Gates may look to retire in 2011.

"I think that it would be a mistake to wait until January 2012," Gates said in an interview with Foreign Policy, published Monday. "This is not the kind of job you want to fill in the spring of an election year."

McCain later tweeted:

SecDef Dates [sic] retiring in 2011 - we've had our disagreements but he has done an outstanding job during two wars.

The two have clashed on the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays serving openly, which Gates has favored repealing. 

“At this moment of immense hardship for our armed services, we should not be seeking to overturn the ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy,” McCain told Gates at a February 2010 hearing. At that time, McCain called the policy "imperfect but effective."

Gates had been the director of the Central Intelligence Agency before he became the Secretary of Defense during President George W. Bush's second term. He was the first of his predecessors in the position to remain after a new president was elected.

"I will have been in the job longer than all but four of my predecessors. And those four are Robert McNamara, Don Rumsfeld, Cap Weinberger, and Charles E. Wilson," he told Foreign Policy.