Wake Up And Smell The Brasso
First, every one of these “support the troops,” “you can’t say anything bad about people in uniforms,” clowns needs to read Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling’s Armed Forces Times article, A failure in generalship and take a hint – flag officers aren’t the troops.
Review what happened to Lieutenant General John Riggs and General Eric Shinseki when they gave their honest opinions about what was going on while they were still serving officers, and you come to the obvious conclusion that there isn’t a single honest flag officer [general or admiral] on active duty. You toe the political line or you are out. That is the Rumsfeld Department of Defense – honesty will be punished, integrity will not be tolerated.
The Hedgemony could care less about the troops, just look at what they have done to pay and benefits the last six years, but they are more than willing to use deference for the uniform to get their way. They didn’t want questions asked about what they have been up to so they have been installing military officers in posts all over the government.
Lieutenant General Douglas E. Lute, War Tsar, Vice Admiral John M. “Mike” McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, General Michael V. Hayden, Director of Central Intelligence Agency – there was nothing coincidental about it. They wanted people who could be controlled and wouldn’t complain. More importantly they wanted people who couldn’t be criticized.
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You don’t even have to be critical of the brass to draw howls of outrage from the right-wing chorus: all you have to do is point out that the flag officers are, or even might be, objectively factually wrong in their statements. If “supporting the troops” means pretending that Petraeus is infallibly accurate in his statements, there’s something deeply wrong with the nut-case Right’s notion of “supporting the troops” … no matter how much or little one admires Petraeus.
(I still think a War Tsar should make appearances in a series of “Tsar Wars” movies…)
Lousy bosses are lousy bosses no matter what kind of suit they wear. If you look at bios of general officers you can see the point at which they gave up and started kissing up to the higher ups. They will sit at a grade for years, then they start rocketing through promotions.
I would be happier about Petraeus if I thought he was stupid. He wrote the book on counter-insurgency so he knew the timeline was total garbage when he accepted it, and he knew that you can’t change people’s attitudes after years of abuse.
So what happens to the cashiered generals and flag officers who wouldn’t toe the line?
Most just shut up and retire a grade lower than normal. That’s why you see all of the retired generals coming out and complaining. The retired flags are speaking for the few in service flags trying to preserve their personal integrity.
First off we have way to many generals and admirals. A full general should command an army, which about 100,000 soldiers. We only have a total of 2 million people in uniform of all types, which says we should have a maximum of 20 four-star flag officers in all of the services, but we are thick with them. We are top heavy with no one in the lower middle range. we are short of the O-3s and O-4s [captains and majors] among officers, and the E-5s and E-6s [sergeants and staff sergeants] among non-commissioned officers. These are the people who lead the troops in battle.
We have plenty of people to devise plans, but are woefully short of the people to carry them out, because they burn out from frequent deployments.
The military needs to withdraw and rebuild. They need to dump a lot of the dead wood at the top and bring in people who know what the orders and plans mean on the ground for the troops.