Military

I am so sorry for the families of those who died yesterday at Fort Hood. Imagine seeing your soldier survive tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, only to come home and be shot. My heart also goes out to the spouses and children who have had this insanity explode in their midst.

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The Army Corps of Engineers is launching a project to prevent flooding in New Orleans. What a concept.

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In the last few days, both the Air Force and the Navy have relieved commanders, and made the actions public. In the Air Force, Col. Joel Westa was dumped as commander of Minot Air Force Base. In the Navy, Cmdr. Doug Sampson lost his post as commander of the USS La Jolla, an attack submarine.

It interests me that both these services-the least traditional and the most-have maintained this rigorous approach to command, while the Army seems to have lost it. I think relief is a useful management tool, when used wisely. Sometimes people are just not working out. It does neither them nor their subordinates any good to leave them in place.

On the other hand, back when relief was common in the Army, it wasn't a necessarily a career ender. For example, I remember reading that Hangin' Sam Williams was relieved as an assistant division commander in 1944, and even was demoted to colonel, but hung on and retired many years later as a lieutenant general. Maj. Gen. Terry de la Mesa Allen is another good example, losing command of one division in mid-1943 but leading another in combat a year later. 

I'd welcome thoughts on how the Army lost the tradition of relief and how it might be restored. This is something I want to deal with in my next book. I suspect the loss has a lot to do with the new policy of one-year tours in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, but I haven't yet gotten to that research. Any good articles or books out there?  

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Some of the smartest, toughest editors I've known, like Peter Braestrup, came out of the Marine Corps. I didn't know Richard Harwood, who was before my time at the Washington Post, but he had a terrific reputation for hard-nosed skepticism, even among people who didn't know he fought in four island campaigns in the Pacific in World War II, including Iwo Jima, where he was wounded.

The downside of Marines in the newsroom is that if you call them a really bad name, they might take a swing at you, as happened last Friday in the Post's Style section. This makes me nostalgic for the good old days of journalism, when being a reporter was fun and newspapers made money.   

(HT to Mr. Andrew Sullivan for video illustration)

Flickr user BL1961

Hung Ba Lee, a native of Hue, Vietnam, who left that country as a five-year-old refugee and was picked up at sea by a U.S. Navy ship, will return to it later this month as the commander of the USS Lassen, a guided missile destroyer.

Congratulations, and thanks, to Hung Ba Le and his family. What more can I say but:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Take that, Lou Dobbs. 

Photo: U.S. Navy/Getty Images

And Mr. Ex does it extremely well. This is an exchange between two people at the top of the game. Do yourself a favor and go check it out. Then buy the book.

The "lede" of this Reuters article on President Obama's trip to Dover Air Force Base last night made my skin crawl:

DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Delaware -- President Barack Obama saw first hand the human cost of the Afghanistan war as he welcomed home on Thursday 18 soldiers and Drug Enforcement Administration agents killed in Afghanistan this week.

Obama, flying in his Marine One presidential helicopter, landed shortly after midnight in Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, home of the United States' largest military mortuary and main point of entry for U.S. service members killed abroad.

No, the president didn't see the human cost of war. He saw some coffins and a quiet ceremony -- that is, a small and sanitary portion of the toll. The human cost of war is far messier. It is blasted lives and unanswered questions. It is broken hearts and minds. It is widows raising children alone, and children who won't know their fathers. It is mothers outliving their sons. It is as painful as life can be.

I know I am probably overreacting to deadline journalism reaching for the closest cliché at hand. But rushed writing doesn't have to be sloppy writing, especially when the stakes are this high.

This is not a knock on Obama, whose quiet trip to Dover and private visit with the families of the dead strikes me as an appropriate gesture on his part.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

My book researcher, Kyle Flynn, a two-tour vet of Afghanistan (with extra points for duty in Oruzgan, the Pashtun answer to Arkansas) and now a graduate student at Georgetown University, offers this interesting analysis of three reasons for the likely timing of the White House decision on how to proceed in Afghanistan:

1. President Obama wanted to see if Pakistan was going to take seriously its operation in South Waziristan, which it advertised publicly for the last six weeks.
2. Nov. 7 upcoming run-off elections in Afghanistan (COIN, credible partner, host-nation, blah, blah, blah)
3. Last but most importantly: Nov. 3, gubernatorial elections in both Virginia and New Jersey. The latter of which is my reasoning why the decision was delayed this long. Corzine is in the fight of his life and Obama is going to piss people off either way. Important special elections also in California and New York.

Kyle concludes: "Let's bet the decision comes early next week after the domestic political issues are settled."

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