Tom Ricks has a great guest post up about the military's propensity to create a lot of its own problems:
Never have so few been supervised by so many doing so little. For the last ten years, the terms "field grade oversight" and "adult supervision" have been used entirely too often. Whether it be the Rangers blowing up a radar tower in Desert Storm, the rescue of Scott O'Grady in Bosnia, the Ranger parachute assault outside Kandahar in 2001, or the stereotypical deployment of the 82nd Airborne Division commanding general to accompany even a brigade minus mission, U.S. military commanders increasingly accompany the smallest elements of their command in combat. There are times when a lieutenant colonel or above needs to lead Hal Moore-style, being the first one on the ground. But the overwhelming majority of combat situations do not warrant this senior presence. Field grade officers do not need to be leading fire teams, squads and platoons. They need to do their job, staying away from room clearing. And ensuring subordinates are getting what they need. C'mon man!
Read the rest here.
Man if you do the ol'Find and Replace with this article and replaced "Army" with "Navy" it would be the same thing. The best line was about the Senior NCO's, replaced that with CPO Mess and everything he wrote in that paragraph fits the modern Navy CPO mess to a "T". Not like what I was raised by my family who grew up being taught by older WW2 and Korea vets. Ditto for the Naval History failings and it shows when you have no one in OPNAV offices making a serious attempt to squash stupid ship names like Gifford, Murtha, Chavez; let alone personality failings of officers screening for command. That if one reads even an iota of biographies on some of the best leaders from Vietnam, Korea and even Vietnam you run across guys that drank, smoked and every so often chased women. Which seems to be risk adverse in the modern fleet. Lets not even talk about the PFA/PRT where we have folks who can run the Boston Marathon, but they can't past an ORSE or even an INSURV. Just like the man asks here we have a Navy that has been at war now for 10+ years and what do have to show for it?
D'oh, Early morning meant: "That if one reads even an iota of biographies on some of the best leaders from WW2, Korea and even Vietnam you run across guys that drank, smoked and every so often chased women."