Vindication for a General

[Rob Thornton]

I don't know. The beret was allot like "an Army of One" I think. It was about Transformation, and I think that's what I'll remember GEN Shinseki for. He was given an enormous task from the DoD, one that was not terribly well defined and one he did not receive overwhelming support for - at least not until it became clear that DoD and Congress equated $$$ to Transformation, then everybody had a nice slide with a capital "T" in it.

This kind of ties back to Marc's thoughts on symbology. Instituting wear of the beret casued allot of grief, but it got people talking about "why" which in many cases led to other discussions, like "what the hell does an Army of One" mean? That dialoge led to some interesting changes, and not all of those have been popular either - but change did happen which allowed us to examine ourselves and make allot of areas better.

Guys that are the catalyst for change are not always popular. If it goes bad, they get the blame, if it goes good but takes time, their name is lost somewhere along the way. GEN Shinseki had intestinal fortitude on allot of fronts. He did what he thought he had to do, and moved on to the next problem - lots to do and never enough time.

I don't think the CSA job would be all that much fun. The word "commander" is no where in the title. When I was in the Marines we held GEN Al Grey in reverence - the title "Commandant" was supreme. Now hving served in the Army for quite awhile I feel free to compare the two. "Chief of Staff" says consciously or unconsciously -"not commander". However, the responsibilities of that job are staggering. As GEN Casey looks to take it on after having been the CENTCOM CDR for 2.5 years I think it can only be about selfless service to the Army and nation.

I don't think I'd want to walk a mile in any of their shoes. I think they must leave some pretty deep footprints.

As for GEN Shinseki, he did a tough job well. He instituted allot of change at the same time presiding over a high OPTEMPO. We have the SBCTs on the ground, we have a modernization program ongoing that while may not end up giving us everything we thought we wanted - I suspect it will still keep us ahead in allot of areas, and the technologies that proved to be both achievable and the best in terms of usefulness to the soldiers and commanders will be spiraled out into the Force. We also had dialoge about people being the key component of Transformation - we adopted descriptions like; mental agility, adaptive and innovative (we eventually even got to the word 'pentathlete" in our search) to describe the character of who we want to be. We'd never have had the discussion without a catalyst though. Betwen his efforts and the war we have looked ourselves over pretty good, and I think have a good idea where the Army needs to go to meet the needs over the coming decades.