On April 4, 2003, Col. Joseph Dowdy-whose 1st Marine Regiment was then fighting its way through a tangle of Iraqi villages south of Baghdad-was called to the tent of Gen. James Mattis and told he was being relieved of his command. A career Marine, Dowdy was stunned: Mattis's action in the midst of a battlefield fight was nearly unprecedented and, as Dowdy knew, would mark the end of his military career. Adding to the humiliation, Mattis told Dowdy to remove his sidearm and hand it to him. "We're going to give you a rest," he said.
Dowdy had known that his job was in danger, the result of complaints from Mattis and his staff that he wasn't moving his regiment quickly enough. But it's not as if Dowdy was taking his time: his troopers had been involved in bitter firefights against tenacious "Saddam Fedayeen" killers every day for the previous two weeks. But Dowdy had no choice in the matter, so while he objected to Mattis's action he packed up his gear, called his wife, returned to the U.S. and retired from the Marine Corps.
That Mattis acts quickly and decisively is part of his lore-it's what good Marines do. But while quick and decisive might work on the battlefield, they're not always a good fit for a secretary of defense.
Mattis learned this earlier this month, after he fired John H. "Jay" Gibson II, the Pentagon's first-ever Chief Management Officer and its third highest ranking official. The reason for the firing, as
The Wall Street Journal's Gordon Lubold
reported on September 5, was for "lack of performance."
The firing was immediately controversial, spurring under-the-radar resentments among senior defense officials in the Pentagon's E-Ring where military and civilian managers huddle to run the world's largest bureaucracy.
"This doesn't make any sense," a senior Pentagon official told TAC. "Jay was CMO for seven months; he hadn't even gotten his staff in place."
Comment: If Spaniards would be so foolish as to vote for Valls, they can't say they didn't know what they were getting themselves into:
- French PM Manuel Valls booed before and after minute of silence in Nice
- French Interior Minister Manuel Valls sent packing by angry crowd doing 'la quenelle' at Rennes train station
- French Interior Minister Manuel Valls has a paranoid conspiracy theory: 'Comedian Dieudonne is financed by Iran'
- Who is Manuel Valls? France's Socialist Sarkozy
Also check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Kurdistan and Catalonia: The Politics of Self-Determination