SLD has a must read.
If you don't read anything else today, take a few minutes to go to their site and read the article on Lyndon Johnson and his Joint Chiefs of Staff. Oh and while you're doing it compare the courage shown by those men with the members that have served since Bush Jr.'s first term all the way up to today.
Its downright chilling to see the similarities...or rather the lack of them.
If you don't read anything else today, take a few minutes to go to their site and read the article on Lyndon Johnson and his Joint Chiefs of Staff. Oh and while you're doing it compare the courage shown by those men with the members that have served since Bush Jr.'s first term all the way up to today.
Its downright chilling to see the similarities...or rather the lack of them.
'Good Stuff'. A solid personal account that shows just how bad Johnson and McNamara were. Get a hold of an old copy of "Four Stars : The Inside Story of the Forty-Year Battle Between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and America's Civilian Leaders" and "The Whiz Kids: The Founding Fathers of American Business - and the Legacy they Left Us" for a pretty clear account of the scope of what Johnson's and McNamara's legacies truly are.
ReplyDeleteJohnson was a pol who could out 'Chicago Way' any Chicago politician who ever lived including the current Teleprompter-in-Chief.
I'm working up my Memorial Day post for this evening, and may link to this SLD post (H/T SNAFU! of course)
i just keep thinking back to the start of Gulf war 2 and how once again the service chiefs were over ridden by McNamara's boy Rummy. after that we had Pace (a Marine) basically sitting up and begging everytime Rummy spoke. just like back then i wonder what would have happened if we followed the advice that was given and then embargoed by our current version of whiz kids.
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ReplyDeleteI think Rumsfeld was 10 times the SecDef that McNamara was. The problem in that case was there weren't enough military types at the top by then (thanks to Goldwater-Nichols politicizing promotion to flag rank even more than previously IMHO) who were as strong as Rumsfeld. If you want to know what went wrong and where in Iraq, read Paul Bremer's book: a lame finger-pointing CYA that should have been titled "My Lost Year in Iraq". I also blame the Dems feckless support for what neded to be done (but a scorpion cannot change his nature so we won't go there). McNamara was a number-crunching hack who thought that you didn't need to know anything about what you were managing if you knew the numbers, and worse, he thought managing = leading. You can thank McNamara for the stink of 'business think' that reeks within DoD to this day.
ReplyDeleteBack to the story at SLD, the Chiefs discussed resigning en mass after that little episode (but outside 'The Tank' - one Admiral I think was quoted as saying if it "didn't happen in the tank--it didn't happen") but they decided, for better or worse, that Johnson and Big Mac would just get a bunch of 'yes men' to replace them. I think they should have done it - Johnson the bully was at heart a moral coward and at that time, I believe the public would have sided with the JCS.
Going back to the SLD article, I just couldn't bring myself to go down that road today at my place (just got back home and posted).