Use to be Army General meant something great now its just who kisses the right but.

Ever notice msnbc blocks certain words like "without the periods"

N.a.z.i

But.ts

Guess they dont like people talking about them and know those words that might mean MSNBC?

That was my reaction, I've known lots of men and women in business that were petty tyrants. It's hard to tell if this is a he-said-she-said thing but in any case, I'm all for people acting professionally in professional settings....

Aren't there meds available for bi-polar disorders?

The General is probably a republican or a tea bagger.....

We can't afford to rebuild our infrastructure. We can't afford to provide a national healthcare system for even our most vulnerable citizens. We can't afford to educate our children or pay the pensions of police or firefighters. We can't afford Social Security or Medicaid or Medicare. These are all denigrated as "entitlements", we can't expect government to provide for us if we cannot provide for ourselves. Forget about it, there is no money for any of that. Raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires? That's socialistic.

But spending 10 billion a year on useless, already obsolete technology? Oh. yeah! Spending 400 million dollars (including R & D) on a SINGLE new strike fighter? Gotta do it! Paying LIFETIME pensions and healthcare for every Congress memeber? Must be done! Billions of dollars a year in "foreign aid" to countries like Pakistan? Don't question it. And then we give corporations BILLIONS of dollars in tax subsidies to take jobs OUT of the country. The oil companies making BILLIONS of dollars in QUARTERLY profits need BILLIONS of dollars of those same tax subsidies.

Teachers make too much money. First responders make too much money and their pensions should be unfunded. We don't need a minimum wage. A college education is "snobbery". Government should control a women's reproductive choices. Continued trillion dollar wars are "necessary". But most importantly we can't cut a penny from a military program which will supposedly protect us from a country that can't successfully launch an ICBM or even feed it's people. Or a country with more computer viruses than a porn site addict?

Happy 4th of July. USA! USA!! USA!!

Bluelake - It's not that we can't afford those programs. Our government simply isn't capable of running or implementing them. If they got rid of the folks like this general and all the other piss poor managers at all levels of public service there might be a chance.

Bluelake and Skup, it's about priorities. Those in power do not put a priority on education and infrastructure because there is not an immediate return to their reelection campaign contributions. Who ever heard of a school teacher giving a congressman's campaign fund a $100,000 donation for passing an education bill?.

Skup- I generally respect your posts but I have to disagree. The people in our government can be just as capable and effective as people in the private sector at running or implementing these various programs. They are after all just citizens, just people no more or less intelligent. I grant you that how these people are managed in public or private endeavor, is crucial. I do not believe, however, that the profit motive MUST be attached to all such endeavors.

Plus I have heard every single right wing republican say that no, we can't afford these programs. No, no, no there is no money for these programs. So which is it?

Larry- Great point!

Bluelake,

You are absolutely right that our spending priorities are completely out of whack. What makes it worse in this case is that ballistic missile defense is a complete waste of tax dollars - the biggest boondoggle in the history of the United States of America. When "Star Wars" was first proposed by Edward Teller and then sold to the country by Ronald Reagan, leading scientists (including Nobel prize winning physicist Hans Bethe) pointed out that any ballistic missile defense system could be easily defeated by an enemy's missiles if those missiles were equipped with enough fake warheads to serve as decoys and swamp out the defense system, so that a few real warheads would always still get through. This debate took place during the '80s, but as usual sound science took a back seat to big money, in the form of defense contractors rabid for multi-billion dollar Star Wars contracts. After 30 years and more than $100 billion dollars, all we've got to show are a few carefully rigged "successful" tests of kinetic kill vehicles, and a few enormously expensive chemical lasers that can only be used once before needing to be recharged with their chemical "fuel". This ridiculously expensive boondoggle program needs to end right now - we simply can't afford it anymore, and it is too easy to defeat by the simplest countermeasures.

This generals actions sounds like the way i heard Bush was. Anyone who didn't agree or work to prove his theory that Saddam was producing WMD's was chastised, threatened or taken out of the loop. You can't really lead like that if you only accept imput from those who agree with you.

Otter96-A great post. You fleshed out my objections to "Star Wars" perfectly. I had forgotten about Edward Teller. A Hungarian refugee from the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe Teller was insanely anti-communist. Emphasis on INSANE. He lobbied for every wildly expensive, nuclear weapons program that came down the road. Every arms escalation, Teller was in front of Congress warning of the impending take over of the free world by those ruthless Communists. The end of the "Cold War" didn't sit well with Teller and he went over the edge, constantly refusing to abandon even the most expensive and useless "defense systems". Teller and Reagan are gone now but the American ultra right will never stop waving the paranoia of Soviet (Russian) hegemony. Never stop blowing billions of dollars on useless weapons systems. Eisenhower must be spinning in his grave. He warned us. We ignored him.

Bluelake - My wife and I have worked in, for and around the federal government for 25 years and my comment was based on our personal observations. I know that there are good people in public service, however, they are outnumbered by the bad ones. I've seen numerous times when a person in a management position has made decisions that would have got them fired from any private organization. In the government it's easier to move them onto a new project, usually with a glowing review to facilitate the move. They need to change how they manage personal from the ground up staring with how they pay employees. Anytime you have a fixed pay scale (GS) you're going to end up with the lowest common denominator. When you set pay based on the position vice performance and promote based on time served vice merit your not generally going to attract motivate workers. The vast majority of folks in management positions have come up through the GS scale. This is the main reason I'm apposed to public unions. Anyway i'm starting to ramble on so I'll just leave it at that.

BTW, anything that comes from a politician is generally going to be rhetoric. Right wing politicians are expected to say there is no money for those programs because that's what the vast majority of right wing Republicans want to hear. It doesn't make it true.

Skup- I won't argue, most of what you say rings true. I have worked in state government at various levels, even receiving a CS rating at one point. But having worked in the private sector now for many years I can honestly say that I have seen incompetent managers and their underlings escape any threat of termination by using a number of techniques to cover their asses. The private sector is not immune to retaining stupid, corrupt or ineffective managers or workers. I think it's a matter of scale. If you look at the recent banking disasters with corporations "too big to fail" it is incredible that so many of the "big boys" were able to skate from any form of punishment. Huge organizations, governmental or private tend to just isolate or perpetuate incompetence and not always through union rules.

Anyway, if it's as hot where you are as it is where I am, stay cool. See you around the Vine.

Bluelake and Otter - Respectfully, you're wrong about Missile Defense. It works. It works not just scripted missions but in ones where the system is in the hands of the warfighters and they only know generalities. If you understood engineering or physics, you'd know that it's not hard to hit an object with another object. We've been doing that in space since Gemini. Hitting the object you want despite debris, decoys and other items; we've been working around that successfully for years too with air to air and smart weapons. Like I said, if you understand basis principles of engineering, physics and ballistics; it's not too much to figure out.

As for the costs and the need. Yesterday the Iranian Revolutionary Guards General in charge of their missile forces said they could hit 35 US bases around the region (including in our ally's countries). Do you know what stops them from pulling the trigger? A robust ballistic missile defense in the region which would pick off a large number of their missiles. A defense that if used would likely result in a counter strike by those F-22's and other military assets some of you don't think is necessary.

Get over it people. There are some governments in the world who don't like us. They openly have said they consider the US and the western world are their enemies. In those places, you couldn't have discussions like this.

JJ MacCrimmon,

Please read http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1985/feb/14/why-star-wars-is-dangerous-and-wont-work/?pagination=false, which was written by physicists in 1985. With all due respect, the authors of this piece understand more about engineering and physics than either you or I do, unless, by some chance, you are a Nobel prize winning physicist, which I doubt. I think the following paragraph from this piece written 25 years ago is particularly prescient, and accurately describes the political momentum that prevents rational discussion of Ballistic Missile Defense as it is being fielded (and funded) today:

"When a trillion dollars is waved at the US aerospace industry, the project in question will rapidly acquire a life of its own—independent of the validity of its public justifications. With jobs, corporate profits, and civilian and military promotions at stake, a project of this magnitude, once started, becomes a juggernaut, the more difficult to stop the longer it rolls on."

In physics, I doubt that a paper written nearly 30 years ago is necessarily valid when it deals with a concept that isn't in use. BTW, did you know that the 3 top physics and advanced technology university programs in the US all are currently contributing actively to the BMDS? To them, this is a technical and engineering challenge that they are turning from theory into reality.

If anything, political momentum should have shut this program down years ago. What keeps it going is demonstrated results by the systems. This isn't industry generated results to make them look good, these are real shots against targets which are very challenging.

Do I have a Nobel? Nope, nor do I need one to know about whether this works or not. I don't blind myself to fanciful opinions by gifted amateurs, when I see the results of my work at the end of each workday. Thank you for your opinion, but it's dated and invalid.

To the contrary, one of the most laughable things about the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) boondoggle is that every one of the points raised by the 30 year old Bethe editorial are still relevant today. BMD will never be able to defend a U.S. city against a full scale ballistic missile attack, due to its vulnerability to decoys. BMD's existence encourages opponents to diversify their delivery systems (to, e.g., suitcase bombs, cruise missiles, etc.) and to increase the number of warheads and decoys on their ICBMs, all of which are destabilizing and actually make the U.S. less secure.

Has some progress been made in 30 years? Of course. A limited number of kinetic kill tests have achieved a limited success rate under test conditions that come nowhere near the conditions that would be encountered in an actual attack. A limited number of high powered, single-use chemical lasers have been mounted on 747s and could, in theory, shoot down a few ICBMs in their boost phase. At best, BMD will be able to defend a limited area (e.g. a critical military base) against a small-scale attack by a poorly equipped state or terrorist group (e.g. North Korea). Is this valuable? Absolutely! But is it worth $10 billion a year for the past 30 years? Absolutely not! That we have spent so much over the past 30 years and achieved so little is iron-clad proof of the point made about "industrial momentum" in the Bethe article: so many defense industry jobs (in so many Congressional districts) and so many military careers are invested in BMD that the program has become impossible to scale back to a level commensurate with its very limited demonstrated achievements.

Several of the professors who co-authored the Bethe editorial worked on BMD-related research, so it is not at all surprising that leading universities are still involved in such research. But spending a limited amount of money on BMD-related research is a far cry from a full scale trillion-dollar effort to field a workable system, which is what the Pentagon is doing now and has been doing from the beginning of the program.

Finally, it has to be said that someone working on BMD, as you appear to be, is hardly the most objective evaluator of the system's performance or cost-effectiveness. When evaluating the cost-effectiveness of defense R&D efforts, the federal government needs to listen to voices other than the defense contractors who do the R&D and have a huge financial incentive to present their results in the best possible light. The lack of effective outside review of Pentagon R&D programs by experts without financial interest in the programs is one of the greatest weaknesses of the U.S. defense R&D setup, and is one of the most important reasons why boondoggles like BMD get started so easily and are so hard to scale back or stop.

skup (1.12) - I agree with your assessment on merit pay systems versus a longevity system. They tried that in DoD and it was an abysmal failure. Don Rumsfeld implemented the NSPS merit system and the only ones that benefitted from it were the managers. They "standardized" it to make it easy for the managers to "assess" the performances. Money was put into a pay pool and doled out according to merit. Everybody got the same rating and the same number of shares despite the efforts put forth by the members. However, the managers gave each other glowing reports and dipped into the pool and received larger shares. They hated to see it go away but the members were glad for its demise.

Forget the contractors, O'Reilly could have been getting kick backs of some kind. The people to listen to are within the military.

General Nutjob.

Some people just can't handle power. It goes to their heads.

The program should have been cancelled years ago. It has cost close to half a trillion over the years and maybe someday it will work.

A more efficient solution would be to retalliate to a missile launch by nuking the agressor back to the stone age.

Yeah Ed, because protecting potentially hundreds of thousands (or more) of Americans from an initial strike isn't worth the money.

What the last guy most likely meant: O'Reilly "possessed a high degree of expertise in managing manipulating purchases". A more efficient solution would be to assign a better manager to the project. Projects fail (or become wasteful) when communication among the team breaks down.

A military attaché strict on his employees huh? When you find somebody who cares you can tell them I said shove it. It goes with the job and in this case if they don't like it go look for work elsewhere. Bleeding hearts crying about military employee relations? Boo hoo! War is not handing your enemy roses people and it's not the higher echelon kissing lower ranked a$$ either. Unfortunately for the pussies of the World hazing in this case could work wonders.

bob - Of course the contractors would be on the general's side. He keeps the money flowing in their direction. But the contractors would have little idea what goes on within the military side of business.

ED - Gotta agree with you on the cancellation of the effort. This has been a failing effort since the early '80s when I worked on it. Congress has zero-funded the program several times because the technology was not mature enough to advance.

bob-- As long as the money is flowing you won't here a peep out of the contractors. Plus...the representatives of those military contractors are as corrupt as this guy is "insensitive".

Thinker: My point exactly what experience did this person have to manage technicians who were mostly independent contractors? I don't think the scientists are military personnel, only work for them. Which would explain the resentment from individuals unaccustomed to military command structure.

Perhaps if you read the actual report, you'd notice that he eliminated 1300 contractor positions. What the report fails to note is that many of the other contractors (engineers, scientists, analysts and staffers) had to take 20 to 40% pay cuts to keep their jobs. This wasn't because they were paid grossly large sums, it's because he has a record of taking an axe to programs to look good in the short term.

Oh and Bob: - most of those contractors are very familiar with military command structure and behavior. Most defense contractors are former military and got into this because they still wanted to serve their country but have a more stable home life.

With all due respect the military should not run on consensus.

Ed, BS. Bosses that treat their employees as trash are insecure, bipolar, or down right mean nasty people that like to show their authority. A good boss gets the best from their employees without demeaning his workers and has the intelligence to make proper decisions. The only time the good boss has to criticize his employees is when that employee doesn't perform his job properly. That's the way it was with my boss and that's the way I treated those under me. We did very well thank you.

Now for this general, he seems like a head case that needs help but don't hold your breath. It's the military and there are not many over him in rank and those that are distance themselves from the problem.

I don't know about firing him. He should be replaced and forced to retire. The report did list some very good qualities he possessed. He just should not be in a supervisory position.

Okeeboy, I know what you mean. I had a leader, CW04 Gunner Bland and he was like that. We were all payroll clerks. If the higher ups would have decided everyone needed some combat experience, Gunner would have told us to just go out about 4 or 5 clicks and find a place to hide for a while. Then come back and report you found nothing. He knew we weren't combat marines and he wouldn't have wanted us to get hurt. He took care of his men and his men gave him 110% loyalty. We would have done anything for him.

Brian...ever worn the uniform? I'm guessing not. There is a far cry difference between a training environment and routine daily operation. Military training environments are designed to be challenging both phyiscally and mentally.

You have to remember that Lou Gossett and Lee Emery were training civilains to be naval officers and marines. When you are in training they do treat you like crap, but once you graduate they treat you differently. Even in the military there is no place for leaders like this man. I had an uncle by marriage that served in Patton's army. The view of him in the movie was not what most men thought of him. They liked in the movie to show him at the front leading his men. If Patton would have gone to the front like in the movie, he would not have lived long. His own men would have shot him. Real leaders were men like Omar Bradley and Dwight D. Eisenhower. They earned their men's respect by leading, not by bullying.

Sorta like Hitler. His generals knew they were losing the war but they were afraid to tell him or to offer solutions to the problems because he would have them killed.

I am sure you'd be his right hand man, Dwight.

Dee: self employed. I'm the one paying the bills. Don't like ...find another job.

This guy is on the hot seat because he didn't get results. But being an a$$hole was one reason why he didn't get results. Had he gotten results the powers to be would have left him alone even if he was an a$$hole, I've seen that a lot too.

Serving has nothing to do with being a leader or a good boss. The only negative I see is too many officers are brainwashed with constant bombardment that they are leaders and must make decisions. I have had a boss very similar to this mindset recently. He has improved and no longer belittles me when I disagree or voice a contrary viewpoint. These days I am told I have the wrong mindset and if I want to get promoted I need to start seeing things this way (which oddly enough is his way). My opinion and perspective does not change unless you can prove to me where I am wrong in my thought process. I have been a 1st line and 2nd line supervisor. Whoop to do. I thought I did well but my employees may be of a different opinion. I agree he should be removed from supervisory and placed in a technical position. Unfortunately that means retirement as a Friday Night Special and he comes back as a GS15, you know in keeping with the tradition - No Colonel left Behind.