Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
In my corporate years, occupying the lower tier of “senior management”, it became obvious that the entire upper two or three levels were essentially fungible with nearly everyone in middle management. IOW, all of the bigwigs could have been easily replaced by subordinates multiple levels down, with due allowance for certain specialty qualifications, and the firm would have never missed a beat. I can’t imagine the military would be much different.
It isn’t. In everyone of our wars, a good part of the early years are spent in a costly process in lives of getting rid of senior leaders who simply can’t hack it in war time. Many of the senior officers in the Pentagon now sport “participation ribbons” in some of our wars, but often you find the participation did not involve combat. Even if it did, combat as a platoon leader usually tells us little how the Second Lieutenant will function as a General in war time three decades down the road. The Armed Services are bureaucracies, and the cream rarely rises to the top in any bureaucracy. But for the beginning of World War II, Patton would have retired as an obscure Colonel.