Gates - what kind of reformer was he?

At his last day on the job, Bob Gates continued to take shots at the Pentagon, this time taking care to separate the dedicated civilian bureaucracy (meritorious) from the slow and incompetent generals (deleterious). (My comments are based on his speech with Obama, heard live, not on any press reports.)

This issue is hard for us to understand - why is the SecDef a complainer instead of a doer? He fired some generals and service secretaries early on, why not more? Often?

The best answer I can come up with is that no one was learning and he felt sorry for them. The firings did not "smarten up" the men with stars on their shoulders. The harassment and disdain Rumsfeld expressed for the generals - "You don't get it, do you?" - was merited in spades and never understood by the general population.

Gates, whose stated goal in coming out of retirement was to reform our dangerously stupid military culture from the top down, at some point surrendered to Rumsfeldian cynicism. Gates gave up, but unlike Rumsfeld, he lied to himself about this surrender. In a speech recently, he mentioned planting "seeds of reform" in the lower officer ranks. What a pretty story. I promise him that these seeds will be stamped out by the men he failed to fire.

So what kind of reforms were these?