***Full Disclosure : I, Greywar, have wholeheartedly despised the most recent crop of General and lesser officers in general for quite some time. I am in fact quite biased on this issue.***

     That being said I am less than stunned and mainly saddened to see this from Army Chief of Staff Schoomaker :

"The Joint Chiefs of Staff have openly expressed their objections to the surge option. General Peter Schoomaker, the Army Chief of Staff, has warned that the active-duty Army will soon "break" and that he has told the President that he opposes a surge to Iraq. General James Conway, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, has expressed the same reservations." (emphasis mine - GW) From TCS Daily.

 

     General Schoomaker came back from retirement to be the ACofS and for that I give him credit but the credit stops right there. Schoomaker followed General Eric Shinseki as ACofS. Shinseki's brilliant idea to "fix" the Army was to give us all new and useless hats (simultaneously denigrating a long standing symbol of elite Army troops like the Special Forces, Rangers, and Airborne troops) and introducing one the modern eras greatest boondoggles : The Stryker (the "y" spelling makes it more combat effective you see (unfortunately it doesn't make it's armor thick enough to withstand an RPG hit)). 

     Somehow Shinseki looked at the M1 Tank not as the most beautiful and powerful weapon to ever grace the battlefield but rather as a mobility problem. He also believed that giving normal REMF support troops the same hat that elite troops wore would somehow make those REMFs into elite troops themselves via some arcane miltary alchemy. While I appluad Generals taking action to fix things, the things he tried to fix were either not broken (the M1 tank) or the fix had nothing to do with the actual problem (hats don't make better soldiers, higher standards do). In short he was a delusional Perfumed Prince and not a General.

     I don't blame Schoomaker for this of course but I do blame him for maintaing these moronic "initiatives" in the face of overwhelming outcries from the troops themselves (you know, the people who actually do the soldiering). Schoomaker followed the Army tradition of the last 20 years (General Swartzkopf notwithstanding) of doing nothing and mouthing platitudes. Everytime a new ACofS or Sergeant Major of the Army has taken office in for the last 20 years of so they have done absolutely nothing. Nothing!?! You are the most powerful officer (or NCO) in the U.S. Army and you can't find one thing that is broken? Does anyone think that is remotely plausible?

     From the above it looks like Schoomaker is reaping the "rewards" that come from being a Eunuch mouthpiece for politicians and not a General Officer. It is far too late to find your balls now General. You had many chances when you took office and wasted all of them.

     Unfortunately it will be the soldiers and not the General who suffer most as a result from his continued tradition of milquetoast leadership.

 

"When in charge, take command. Some leaders who feel they don't have adequate information put off deciding to do anything at all. The best policy is to decide, monitor the results, and change course if it's necessary." - General Norman Swartzkopf's 10th rule of leadership.