Military Guys: How typical is it for someone with no combat experience to be a division commander?

[Cruzan]

i.e. Petraeus.

[MadMaddie]

1. And there it is...

Typical of this Administration..

[MonkeyFunk]

2. Eisenhower

was a 5-star general and Supreme Alllied Commander without seeing any front-line action.

[Recursion]

6. And Admiril Tirpitz never saw a naval gun fired in anger his whole life n/t

[UTUSN]

3. Uh, I dunno. I was a deck ape. Except during General Quarters. n/t

[Lex1775]

4. Pretty typical actually.

The Colonel I served under while I was in the Big Sandbox had come up from the supply side of the house. Had absolutely ZERO experience commanding front line units. He had to have at least one combat command under his belt to get a Pentagon job. I think he got awarded three medals just for sitting in his office and occasionally driving around the perimeter or giving us a pep talk once a week.

[Recursion]

5. Depends on how the wars in the past 20-25 years shook out

Today, there's really not much of an option; there are few field-grade or flag officers who are the right age to have been leading a tactical unit in '90 or '89. The last of the Vietnam generation filtered out as I was getting in (late 90's) and there was a gap in combat experience between them and the younger officers who had done Iraq 1.

For what it's worth, he seems to have handled combat well once he got to it.

[HawkerHurricane]

7. Really depends on the time period.

If there's a big gap between wars (or only small wars), you end up with people with no direct experience with combat at the top. Using my own experience (realizing that I was a enlisted man) I signed up in 1984, was still in training during Lebanon and Grenada, missed Gulf War 1 because I was working at a training unit, missed Afghanistan because my unit was rotating back to the states on 9/11 and needed a refit, and made it to Operation Iraqi Liberation for one tour. So, I had served 19 years before being involved in a 'war'. If I were an officer, and got my promotions 'on schedule', I'd be a major ship captain or small ship squadron commander before ever seeing 'combat'.

[PsN2Wind]

8. Rumsfeld retired as a Navy Captain

from the friggin' reserves after doing a couple of years active.
I saw lots of active duty pilots with thousands of hours and hundreds of traps retiring as LCdrs. The higher up you go the more it becomes political. Too bad David Hackworth isn't still alive to check out the General's chest salad and report on it.

[Doubting Thomas]

9. in the USAF

back around 1960, our shop supervisor "Air Electronics Officer" was a captain who had been a triple ace flying Thunderbolts over Europe. He also flew fighter-bomber missions in Korea before the Chi-coms got into it, then taught combat flying maneuvers stateside and trained some Sabre-jet aces.

The base commander was a full bird colonel who had never seen combat, but went up rapidly serving in Washington, DC during WWII & Korea.

Politics.