Leadership Matters
Believe it or not, "Leadership Matters" is a key theme of the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign.
As a political slogan, it is very nice. Highly paid political consultants, advertisers and Extremely Smart People in Washington picked a fine one. Pithy, eye-catching, looks sharp in red, white and blue.
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Leadership is rarely seen in the senior officer who doesn't know his core skill area, whether that is flying airplanes, killing the enemy in ground combat, whether engineering or accounting. Incompetence can, of course, be remedied by the ability and willingness to learn. Incompetence without an observable ability to learn was bad news. Any sign that the suspect officer had simply no clue that he might be in severely bad kimshee and hence might possibly need to learn something was even worse news.
Some smart person ought to have mentioned this to George W. Bush when they approved the "Leadership Matters" theme.
An absence of leadership qualities in our military leaders gives rise to terms like "Seagull" Colonels and Generals, a species known to swoop in, make a lot of noise, crap all over everything, and then fly away. But our seagulls had an advantage over Bush and Cheney. Regardless of the mistakes made and not remedied, regardless of the illogic, stupidity and sheer idiocy of our present unit's existence under a seagull commander, at least we could be 100% sure they wouldn't be around for long.
High level incompetence seems to be the natural sea-state of our militarized foreign policy, launching forth with the proud Guardsman George W. Bush at the helm and Dick "Other Priorities" Cheney as navigator.
This track record of sheer stupidity, hubris and other seagull qualities is marred only by the existence of rare officers, like retired Marine General Tony Zinni, who knew their job, led their men and women, and spoke the truth to power about the inanity of the plan to invade Iraq early on. Looking further for aberrations to the rule, we find retired Army General William Odom, conservative through and through, who speaks the truth about Bush's fantasy adventure in Iraq, politely but publicly calling it "a strategic error."
militaryweek.com |
