The folks in uniform
Over at MilitaryWeek, Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski has some interesting things to say about the Bush/Cheney theme of “Leadership Matters.”
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.
The whole column is pretty good – as are the numerous links off of it. Check it out.