Dominance of Navy in high posts causing resentment among other branches

[n2doc]

Gates again turns to Navy for Joint Chiefs
The Defense secretary's pick causes unease especially with the Army, which is doing the bulk of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By Peter Spiegel, Times Staff Writer
June 10, 2007

WASHINGTON — In choosing to recommend an admiral as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has for the second time given a high-profile job to someone from the Navy — a service that has, for the most part, worked only on the fringes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The choice of Adm. Michael G. Mullen comes just five months after Gates surprised many in the military, including some members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by picking an admiral to become the new head of Central Command. Adm. William J. Fallon is the first Navy officer to head the Pentagon headquarters responsible for the Middle East, which now oversees the two major wars.

Pentagon watchers said the choice of the so-called sea services — including the Marine Corps, whose Gen. James E. Cartwright was chosen as the Joint Chiefs' new vice chairman — for the military's most difficult assignments was a testimony to the Navy's growing reputation as the most intellectually rigorous of the services.

"There's no obvious reason a Navy guy would be put in charge of Centcom, or why we would have two sea service people replacing two other sea service people at the top of the Joint Chiefs," said Loren B. Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based military think tank. "But the reality is that they seem to be able to work with big ideas and big political leaders better than the other services."

The decision has caused some consternation within the other services, particularly the Army, which is doing the bulk of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. There also have been grumblings within the Air Force, whose only current regional command is in North America.

One command coveted by the Air Force was the headquarters of what is generally regarded as the second-most difficult regional command: the Pacific. For that position, Gates once again turned to the Navy, tapping Adm. Timothy J. Keating.

Although four-star Army generals are the ground commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, some Army advocates say that the service has been unfairly shortchanged because it was disparaged by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld as a hidebound organization unable to adjust to modern, expeditionary warfare.

Asked what accounted for the lack of Army officers in high-profile interservice, or "joint," commands, retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey said simply: "Rumsfeld bias."

Rumsfeld and his civilian aides "set in motion for five years a series of decisions that discredited Army leadership," McCaffrey said. "It strikes me as extremely unusual that the principal load-bearing institution of national defense is the U.S. Army; Rumsfeld thought it was irrelevant at best."

more:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-navy10jun10,0,4049769.story

[glowing]

1. key line... willing to tote the politcal line...

[OregonBlue]

2. I wrote to members of the Armed Services Committee yesterday about this very thing.

The only reason I can see for using all Navy is if they hope to expand this into a naval war with strikes on Iran. When will the Dems grow a spine and start rejecting these nominations.

[jmowreader]

3. This is even more sinister than you think

Think back to the beginning of the war. At that time General Shinseki, Chief of Staff of the Army, said he couldn't do Bush's war on the number of troops Bush was willing to authorize for it. He got fired for it, the army went in undermanned, and you've seen the results.

The reason Bush wants to fill all the high-ranking slots in the DoD hierarchy with squids instead of army guys, is the sailors do not understand as well as soldiers do what the actual capability of the Army is. You get a four-star Army general, he's spent 32 years or so in every level of command from platoon (50 men) through company (250 men), battalion (about a thousand, plus support assets), brigade (3000 maneuver troops plus about 200 support soldiers), division (between 10,200 and 22,000 depending on the division) to corps (around fifty thousand soldiers). He's been to the National Training Center. He's been to the Joint Operations Training Center. He's been to Wildflecken, been to Team Spirit in Korea. He may have even been out to the Letzlinger Heide Training Area or the Juterbog Training Area in East Germany and watched Soviets train as a member of an international inspection team. This general will KNOW what a division can do, what it can't do and how many soldiers it takes to accomplish a certain mission.

A four-star admiral has been on ships. He knows what ships can do. Knows how to fight ships, how to resupply them, how to build task forces with ships. Ships are not men. Ships require men to operate, but they're not men.

If Bush tells an Army general to have a division do something it doesn't have the firepower to accomplish, the general will tell Bush it can't be done. An admiral very well could send 10th Mountain out to do something 2nd Armored has to do...and when it gets the shit shot out of it, there's a two-star whose office is over the creek running through the middle of Building P-10000 on Fort Drum who's standing by to be relieved over his "failure."