McChrystal and Military Discipline

McChrystal is lucky to not be in jail...

From Wikipedia, Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice:

"Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct."

Maximum punishment:

Dismissal, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and confinement for 1 year.

Instead of punishment, McChrystal will "retire" from the military.

It appears that actions have no consequences. Nobody is responsible. Everybody claims "the buck stops here" but when it stops it is quietly put away and nobody says or does anything. Odd.

For a dissenting viewpoint, here's a bit from an opinion piece by Thomas E. Ricks in the NY Times:

In the longer term, the Army has to return to its tradition of getting rid of leaders who are failing. The Navy has shown more fortitude; in the first two months of this year alone it fired six commanders of ships and installations. On Tuesday, it fired the skipper of the frigate John L. Hall, two months after it collided with a pier at a Black Sea port in Georgia. The Navy stated simply, as it usually does in such cases, that the officer’s superior had lost confidence in him. That is all that is needed.

The Marine Corps has also largely kept the tradition of relieving officers — most notably during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 when its top ground officer, Maj. Gen. James Mattis, fired the commander of the First Marine Regiment. During his tenure, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has fired secretaries of the Army and the Air Force and an Air Force chief of staff.

Back in World War II, the Army had no qualms about letting officers go; at least 16 of the 155 generals who commanded divisions in combat during the war were relieved while in combat. George Marshall, the nation’s top general, felt that a willingness to fire subordinates was a requirement of leadership. He once described Gen. Hap Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, as a fine man, but one who “didn’t have the nerve to get rid of men not worth a damn.”

Marshall had plenty of nerve: in 1940 and ’41, as war loomed, he forced into retirement several hundred officers he deemed too old and slow to be effective. When the commandant at Leavenworth, Brig. Gen. Charles Bundel, told him that updating the complete set of Army training manuals would take 18 months, Marshall offered him three months, and then four months, to do the job. It can’t be done, Bundel twice responded.

“You be very careful about that,” Marshall told him in a telephone conversation.

“No, it can’t be done,” Bundel repeated.

“I’m sorry, then you are relieved,” Marshall said.

We tend to remember those who were nearly relieved but ultimately weren’t, most notably Gen. George Patton, who came closest to being fired during the war after slapping two American soldiers suffering from combat fatigue. But that sort of exception illustrates another aspect of the lost tradition of relieving commanders: the military had some flexibility in enforcing it. Patton was seen by his superiors as having unusual weaknesses but equally rare strengths, so he was kept on.

Go read the whole article, Ricks speaks directly about McChrystal's indiscipline as well as that of Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and the special envoy, Richard Holbrooke.

Ricks is very caustic about the rot inside the US military:

The tradition of swift relief provided two benefits that we have lost in today’s Army: It punished failure and it gave an opportunity to younger, more energetic officers who were better equipped to adapt to the quickening pace of the war. When George Marshall heard of a major who really was doing a general’s work, he stepped in to make the man a brigadier general overnight. Under this audacious system, a generation of brilliant young commanders emerged, men like James Gavin, an innovator in airborne warfare who became the Army’s youngest three-star general.

But that tradition was somehow lost in the Korean War and buried conclusively in Vietnam. Nowadays, dynamic young leaders can’t emerge as quickly, because almost no one is fired. In a much-discussed 2007 article in Armed Forces Journal, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling wrote that “a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

My experience in the workaday world was that guys at the bottom paid a price for mistakes and failure. The bosses were given a "lateral promotion" if they screwed up. And the real clincher is that big pay for the guys on top is "appropriate" because they bear the "heavy burdens" of responsibility. What a joke! Look at the greed SOBs on Wall Street who have created an economic mess that leaves 15 million unemployed. They walked away with tens of millions of bonuses and "separation pay" for causing the economy to implode.