McPeak Speak
Eriposte at Left Coaster covers another manufactured outrage by Obama advisors in Crying Fits and Joe McCarthy.
Retired Air Force General McPeak takes a statement of Bill Clinton out of context so he can claim that Clinton is acting like Joe McCarthy and questioning Obama’s patriotism.
“I think it’s horrible. I’m really disappointed because I worked for President Clinton, you know?” McPeak said when asked by reporters.
About that “I worked for President Clinton”, the preposition “for” tends to make people think that McPeak was one of the few general officers in the Pentagon who didn’t regularly call Bill Clinton a “a draft-dodging communist”, a situation that got so bad that there was a letter circulated by the Secretary of Defense that the conduct would not be tolerated and people might be retiring sooner than anticipated and at ranks lower than expected.
According to his official biography, General McPeak was Air Force Chief of Staff from October, 1990 until October 1994, when he retired. The term of office is two years, so he was twice appointed to the position by the Secretary of Defense for George H.W. Bush, Richard Cheney, an individual known to have had “other priorities” than being drafted into the military.
According to Wikipedia, Merrill Anthony “Tony” McPeak became in involved in politics after retiring from the Air Force, working with the Bob Dole campaign in 1996, and the George W. Bush campaign in 2000, which is a pretty good indicator of how much regard he had for Bill Clinton and the Clinton administration.
In 2003 even McPeak could see how screwed things were and began attaching himself to Howard Dean, John Kerry, and now Barack Obama.
Those who were in the Air Force when McPeak was Chief of Staff won’t forget the period, and the memories are not good ones of the reign of “Admiral McPeak of the Paraguayan Navy”. He restructured the Air Force and downsized it in accordance with the wishes of Dick Cheney. He made fighter pilots the only important people in the structure. He emphasized fighter aircraft over all other types. He pushed many functions down to the Air National Guard, including Air Defense, and many transport and refueling operations into the Reserves. At the same time he elevated the rank associated with many command structures, which has caused a very top heavy organizational model for the Air Force.
But that is not what he’s most remembered for. With all of that disruption and the associated base closings, the single thing every one remembers “Space Commodore McPeak” for is his trip into fashion design. He decided that the Air Force “blue suit” should look more like the Navy uniform with a lot of silver braid and shoulder boards. Reversing those changes was the first thing his successor did, to the immense relief of almost everyone in AF blue.
Fixing the uniforms was easy, but the Air Force may never recover from the other damage he caused, that was made even worse by Donald Rumsfeld.
McPeak is not a good choice as a military advisor, nor a fashion consultant.
[Edited for an egregious typo or bad memory location.]
4 comments
…thanks for covering this. I didn’t spend any time googling up McPeak’s bio because the only thing that struck me about his Medford performance was that he was either being a hatchet man or that he seemed to be displaying a disturbing lack of intellectual firepower that would make one fear for the safety of our country if many like him were at the helm. The odd thing is that I’m not sure whether to feel better or worst now that I know more about his background…
[tried to respond to you over yonder but the intertubes are pretty sticky tonight on the dial-up side…]
Everything is a PITA on the dial-up side.
I was down here among the retired and retiring when he was playing his games with the Air Force and if you want nasty, there’s nothing like retired generals talking about one of their own, especially the bomber drivers who watched him eliminate SAC. He was not a beloved leader and those quoted titles are some of the milder things they called him.
He was a political general, so this isn’t unusual behavior for him. I wouldn’t turn my back on him.
He restructured the Air Force and downsized it in accordance with the wishes of Dick Cheney. He made fighter pilots the only important people in the structure. He emphasized fighter aircraft over all other types.
Maybe these were unwise things to do — I have no idea, and look forward to learning — but that’s not really established here except by association with Cheney. A given military branch like the SAC (at least arguably a relic of the 50s, before ICBMs and SLBMs — though recallable, unlike those) will resent being downsized, their gripes should be taken with a shaker full of salt, it seems to me.
The outfit change does sound dumb, though, you’d thing people at that level would have more important things on their mind. But practically all generals are ‘political’ re the kind of stuff you describe — they implement policy given to them by civilians. That’s what they’re supposed to do, within reason. None of this stuff — fighter supremacy, downsizing SAC — sounds, on the face of it, to be beyond reason.
It requires specialized knowledge to understand the effects of his changes, but let me provide a few examples:
On 9/11/2001 there were no fighter aircraft close enough to NYC or Washington DC to provide a deterrent. All of the bases close to large “target” cities were shut down and their defense was left to the few remaining Air National Guard units.
By promoting among fighter pilots, the air coordinator for the first Gulf War was unaware of the need for AC-130 gunships to exit combat areas before dawn, and “on January 31, 1991, the enemy shot down one AC-130H gunship (call-sign SPIRIT-03). It resulted in the loss of all 14 crewmembers, the largest single air power loss of the war”, because the aircraft remained in the combat zone after there was enough light to spot the large, low-flying, slow-moving aircraft.
The Strategic Air Command was in charge of nuclear weapons, both bombs and missiles, and had rigid rules in place for dealing with and accounting for them. It is nearly impossible to accept that SAC would have allowed 5 nuclear warheads to be unaccounted for as they were moved in error between two bases. Those things didn’t happen in SAC. The command was a PITA, but they didn’t lose nukes.
Yes, the Air Force needed to go on a “diet” after the end of the Cold War, but the function of the Air Force Chief of Staff is to advise the Secretary of Defense on Air Force issues, not blindly follow orders that reduce the effectiveness of the Air Force and the security of the United States.
Because of the changes started by McPeak, the Air Force is stuck with aging airframes that, in the case of the F-15s, occasionally fracture from fatigue. The current AC-130s need to be replaced, but there are none in the pipe line. The F-22 and F-35 that are supposed to replace the F-15 and F-16 are late, way over budget, and in many ways not as capable as the aircraft they are replacing. The B-1B and B-2 that were supposed to replace the aging B-52 fleet can’t hack it, so the B-52 is still flying. The KC-135 tanker fleet is coming apart from old age and the replacement is only now being ordered.
All of these things can be traced back to the reign of McPeak and the decisions he made as Air Force Chief of Staff. Those who came after him are as culpable, because they did nothing to stop the erosion. The current leaders of the Air Force can’t think strategically, so they make tactical decisions that further degrade the service.
My Dad retired from the Air Force and I was in from 1966 to 1974. In all those years two things were never discussed on duty – politics and religion. Unfortunately that can’t be said of today’s service.