Originally Posted by
SASless
XX.....did you serve in he Military....ever?
From post 22 we find this:
Well, thank you for your kind words. I am new here, as the display says. I mean no harm.
For the cabal, I am a former Marine. Not a combat “peripheral” support troop pouge, MOS 2531. Radio Mule with a rifle. Not a wing wiper aviation guarantee pee-pee, but Infantry Line Company under a mustang'r E-8 come O-3 wild-ass mean SOB lunatic Co. Commander of India 3/1, 1968, who would just as soon knock you on your butt as look at you, and regularly did just that to elaborate on who's nuts were bigger. You didn't move fast enough when I spoke so your lip is now fat. Little talk, all walk. Probably retarded. I have mixed feelings to this day, but I breath....so...
Which I think makes XXmet of about your vintage in 'Nam, roughly.
Comment on the LTC in question. (I am retired O-5, Navy not Marine).
He was commissioned in 2004, at which time we'd been at war just about three years in Afghanistan and 1 in Iraq. My guess is he's deployed once to each. Maybe more than once. The number of cluster humps that crop up now and again in each theater are things within his experience.
Note: we have been doing war, and war-like stuff, in Afghanistan for longer then he's been serving. The current serving members who came in as I was doing my last tour and then leaving, and those who came in after that, have had the "opportunity" to go to at least two garden spots: Iraq and Afghanistan, and many of them have gone multiple times.
My read on his complaints
vis a vis senior leadership: he's been around long enough, and got command. That means to me that he went to the months long Command and Staff school, either with the Marines or at Navy, Army, or Air Force Command and Staff .. With that in mind he'd be very familiar with the failures in leadership on high (in Viet Nam) that McMaster wrote about in
Dereliction of Duty. And with some of the high level bad choices made in Iraq. Those are not being hidden, they are common currency.
I think he's aiming his public critique at those with stars, and above, and their staffs, and the State Department.
The entire planning process (strategic and theater level both) left the military operators in Afghanistan at the field level with a heck of a turd to try and polish, with the usual consequences: dead Marines because the higher ups dropped the ball on (in this case) how to do a phased withdrawal.
(Easy Street's hypothetical conversations ring a bell)
Should he have done this while he was the CO?
That's a hard call.
Every so often, as a commissioned officer, you run into a situation where you have a judgment call to make - do I bet my stripes on this? Do I stand up to the chain of command and call BS? I did it a few times but I didn't to it in the press: I went up the chain of command with my "why this is wrong" stuff. Didn't always go well. Once or twice it was appreciated, in the longer term.
He felt he was in such a situation - and I think those feelings were grounded in his loyalty to The Marines, writ large.
(IIRC, his current command position is a training unit; this critique might have a whole different tone if he was currently the CO of a rifle battalion).
For XXmet: I think I parse your position as "if you have issues with orders and command, run them up the chain of command via the correct procedures; you are an officer, you are supposed to know how to do that."
That's a valid take.
A couple of years ago a Navy Carrier CO got a lot of press when he went off script about how COVID was impacting the readiness of his ship. A different case of "Is this the bet your stripes moment?"
But I think it's in the same general family of "I see something wrong, what do I do about it?"
If this guy is willing to resign his commission over principle, or something along those lines, I hope he got his wife's support before he did this. She's got a stake in their future (IIRC, he has family).
FWIW: my dad was Signal Corps, Army, in the 1940's.
I don't know what the young Marines in his command think of this, but I am sure about one thing: they are watching and they are paying attention to what happens next. What are the consequences of him doing this? They'll pay attention to that as well.