Archive for the ‘Military meritocracy’ Category

December 23rd, 2008

Really. Maybe this is a stretch, but maybe it is connecting the dots.
The chatter has now made it to Newsweek that Obama is considering appointing William White, chief operating officer of Manhattan’s Intrepid Museum Foundation, as the next Secretary of the Navy. White is openly gay, so placing him in the Navy Secretary’s [...]

December 23rd, 2008

Wes Clark’s disappearance might say something a little disturbing about the military brass.

November 30th, 2008

Time for some “change we can believe in” in the ideological composition of the senior officer corps.

December 29th, 2007

In response to my moan about the wreckage that’s been made of the military over the past four years, (based largely on Andrew Tilghman’s reporting), a hawkish reader, formerly, following his family tradition, an Army E-6, writes:

The sorry part is how soon into the war this was a 100% straight-line mentat- predictable computation.
When I watched [...]

December 18th, 2007

The army is so short of officers it now has to promote 98% of its captains to major. The folks who ought to be moving up the ranks of senior noncoms are being pushed through OCS. And 20% of the recruits get in only by waiving some of the enlistment standards. This is really, really, really bad news.

June 22nd, 2007

How will General Petraeus be remembered?

January 12th, 2007

Eugene Volokh can’t see the difference between affirmative action, which seeks to increase the number of minorities in places where they are under-represented, and military recruitment selectively aimed at African-Americans, who are currently over-represented in the enlisted ranks.

July 14th, 2006

The Mahmudiya rapist/murderer had racked up three convictions by the age of 19. He only got into the Army because of a decision to loosen standards in order to meet recruiting targets. The Army took a long time to rebuild after Vietnam, but it won’t take nearly as long to wreck it again.

April 9th, 2006

From the latest Nouveau Parisien, a thorough and depressing account of how far the ideologues’ takeover of the U.S. foreign policy establishment has gone.

September 21st, 2005

Grade inflation in competition means that the low-scoring judge is the boss.