Butt Chewings All Over the Federal Establishment Today – New York Times

This is one of those news days!  It seems like everyone in government is being taken to the wood shed.

The New York Times has several important stories alleging high level butt chewings of key players in government by the particular Big Cheese that they work for in their agencies.  What a nice change!

The first story we will look at today is entitled If Fed Missed This Bubble, Will It See a New One? in which the Federal Reserve wants even more power than it presently has to regulate aspects of our economy.  Congress is putting Chairman Bernanke through the ringer for missing the last financial meltdown and is not playing nice with him or his supporters among economists.

And in a related piece entitled Promise to Trim Deficit Is Growing Harder to Keep we learn that the President is going to have a hard time keeping his budget cutting promises. I have a suggestion.  Let us insist that our allies defend themselves, pull our troops partially out of the 130 or so countries that they are presently stationed within and cut our defense budget by one third.

Do you think that would help?  Just asking. 

Here is an excerpt from that article:

"The savings Mr. Obama once projected from winding down the war in Iraq are being eroded by a bigger buildup in Afghanistan than he had initially contemplated. Congress has rejected or ignored his proposals to raise revenues by changing tax rules for multinational corporations and capping deductions by wealthy individuals; for Mr. Obama to reprise those proposals could raise questions about the credibility of the numbers in his budget.

Meanwhile, the biggest tool usually employed to chisel away at projected deficits — shaving Medicare payments to health care providers — is already being used to offset the costs of overhauling the health care system.

At the same time, the persistently high unemployment rate has intensified the pressure on the White House and Congress to not emphasize deficit reduction so much that they risk undercutting the already sluggish recovery or even tipping the economy back into recession. In February, Mr. Obama must submit his budget for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1."

In this story, Obama Says Plot Could Have Been Disrupted , we find that the President is taking the intelligence agencies to task for not adequately using the information that they had on hand to stop the attempted 12/25 airplane bombing attempt.  And in a related Op Ed piece entitled How 12/25 Was Like 9/11 we get an insight into how far are intelligence agencies have come relative to these issues since 9/11.  It ain’t far.  Here is an excerpt:

"As President Obama said yesterday, after meeting with his national security team at the White House, “This was not a failure to collect intelligence; it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence we already had.” What, more than eight years after 9/11, and more than four years after the issuance of the 9/11 commission’s findings, are we to make of this systemic failure? And what should be done about it?"

In an Op Ed piece by Thomas Friedman entitled Father Knows Best we learn what we already knew.  This will continue to be a thorn in our side for generations unless the countries that these terror fanatics call home clamp down on their own whackos.  It is an attempt to take our Arab and Muslim friends to the wood shed but I doubt that they are listening.

And finally in this article, we get a real picture of how the inner workings and everyday politics of the armed forces influences foreign policy to a great degree.

The story is entitled Slow Start for Military Corps in Afghanistan in which we find that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is angry at the service chiefs for not providing the best people available for a pet project.  It all has to do with the proper career path for promotion. To get involved with his project is to kill one’s career prospects.

Here is an excerpt:

"WASHINGTON — The military’s effort to build a seasoned corps of expert officers for the Afghan war, one of the highest priorities of top commanders, is off to a slow start, with too few volunteers and a high-level warning to the armed services to steer better candidates into the program, according to some senior officers and participants.

The groundbreaking program is meant to address concerns that the fight in Afghanistan has been hampered by a lack of continuity and expertise in the region among military personnel. But some officers have been reluctant to sign up for an unconventional career path because they fear it will hurt their advancement — a perception that top military leaders are trying to dispel as they tailor new policies for the complex task of taking on resilient insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Each military branch has established career paths, and the type of focus envisioned by the program would take people off those routes.

The difficulties with the program came to light when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, in an unusual rebuke within the Pentagon’s uppermost circle, chided the chiefs of the four armed services three weeks ago for not always providing the best people.

The program — which is expected to create a 912-member corps of mostly officers and enlisted service members who will work on Afghanistan and Pakistan issues for up to five years — was announced with much fanfare last fall. So far, 172 have signed up, and Admiral Mullen has questioned whether all of them are right for such a critical job."

Now that is the Service the way I remember it; isolated, myopic, careerist, opportunist and back-stabbing at the highest levels. I remember it as anything but patriotic.

Maybe the American people will finally get a look at how it really works inside the Armed Forces relative to controlling "special assignments" that are the backbone of a flag officer’s career and the death knell for any one who volunteers for it.

I have seen this a hundred times when I was working for admirals as a warrant personnel officer. 

If you take an assignment like this you are making a three star out of a one or two star.  And you are also killing your own chances for promotion because you have left the proper pipeline to get another promotion for yourself. You are essentially sacrificing yourself and your career and your family’s chances of advancement and more money for the sake of the egocentric bastard who is running the program.

Screw all the flag officers.  They are just not that important that almost one thousand men and women should sacrifice their careers so that the guy on top can get another star.

Things have not changed all that much since I retired from the Service.  Not at all.

CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)