Quote Originally Posted by 1258dave View Post
Name a GO who has been held responsible for anything. A CPT loses a piece of gear, or a Soldier, there is a 15-6 etc, but if a GO is losing the war nobody appears to care.
I don't think that is productive criticism.

It is a fairly simple matter to determine whether a piece of gear is lost through negligence. If it is, then the individual is held accountable. If not, then it's "written off." The assignment of a very specific duty (maintain accountability for this item), the breach of that duty (failed to maintain accountability of the item, demonstrated by the inability to produce it upon demand, in a timely manner), results in an easily quantifiable liability (cost of the item, minus depreciation, if dictated by regulation), and a means of fulfilling it (statement of charges, etc, as dictated by regulation).

In order to assign blame for "losing the war" to a GO, it seems that we would need to nail down the following and I would assert that reasonable people could disagree on most, if not all of these...
1) Was it winnable to begin with?
2) How do we define "winning?" (part of the current debate regarding Afghanistan)
3) To which GO(s) do you assign any or all of the blame to, since you've got multiple GO's having RIP/TOA'd*?

Even if the first two questions are answered in the affirmative, you often don't know whether you're winning or losing until after the fact.

I think we generally recognize the reality that warfare is an incredibly unpredictable and chaotic enterprise for which we are rarely prepared. Other threads in this forum lament a CYA mentality among our leaders for things like body armor and safety precautions. Imagine how out of control this would be if we held inquisitions to assign blame to our GO's when public sentiment turns ugly on a war. If we're going to go that route, I'd say that we test it upon the civilian leaders first and see how it works.

* - I presume that RIP/TOA can be used as a verb, just as "Google" can be.