Posted on 01/02/2013 5:27:38 PM PST by xzins
/johnny
The clowns on here who compare a basic training drill sergeant to a three-star general have absolutely no clue what they’re talking about. They’ve obviously never worked under a genuine petty tyrant with no ability to do anything about it due to his rank. This guy is an embarrassment, so, naturally, nothing really happened to him.
I had a battalion commander pick up a chair in the middle of a staff briefing and throw it against the wall and stalk out.
West point grad.
Different army. He was an SOB, but he was our SOB.
Now, it appears, evewyone’s widdle feewers would get huwt.
Panetta and the girlies wouldn’t have liked Curtis LeMay either.The colour blue wasn’t just for the uniform.
Back in the mid to late 2000’s, I worked at a MDA site in Colorado Springs and one of the main executives was this West Point ring knocker who retired as an Army Colonel. The guy was so full of himself. When he took over originally as a commander, he had a couple of sysadmins fired and escorted off the base for daring to wear blue jeans to work ! Afterward, he issued an edict that no one was to wear blue jeans to the building, period. This included evenings, nights and weekends. If you close to this ring knocker in some kind of capacity, not only was blue jeans off limits but you better be wearing a long sleeve button down shirt. Short sleeve was unacceptable.
One other item, in conjunction with the base, he instituted a highway safety phone line where you can report anyone’s driving and if the driving was unsafe, you were called in for a meeting with the base commander and the ring knocker if you worked in his group. However, it was discontinued after several years and before my time.
He wasted a lot of money on a lot of aesthetic items for the building like glass doors which easily broke during wind storms. Fancy water fountains and tiling. For the building’s cafeteria, he even dictated the prices charged for food and drinks and insisted on sales tax being charged even though sales taxes are not normally charged on military bases. Even with all of the money wasted on making the facility fancy, it was routine for the bathrooms to be shutdown for maintenance issues. Even with the bathrooms shutdown, you better not wander off too far to use a different one.
Luckily in my position, I worked for the USAF and had nothing to do with ring knocker so I wore blue jeans everyday. The AF guys didn’t exactly like this ring knocker either. On my last day working there, when I out-processed, I had to take my paperwork to Pass and ID across the base, turn in my badge then I had to go back to the building to turn in a piece of paper and parking was horrendous. I parked in the ring knocker’s protocol parking spots. There were like 30 of them right by the building to enter the base and were empty just about all the time. That day I also had cutoff shorts and sandals on.
What I understood, this ring knocker was one of General O’Reilly’s favored boys too.
Oh, one of the ring knocker’s favorite things to do was like on a Thu afternoon or Fri morning call for a mandatory meeting like at 4pm on Fri afternoon and then half of the time, he cancels it or shows up late.
You don't get your clearance pulled (in most cases) for an LOR. You will get a UIF but there is a disposition date on the file of 2 years...but in most cases they don't take away your clearance. I think its (in the AF) 36-2907 that deals with UIF's and LORs.
The most meaningful ass chewings I ever received were delivered in cool, calm, even tones, and it's a style I always tried to emulate when verbal reprimands were in order.
No. Panetta has no such power. All rank above O-8 is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Only the Senate can allow anyone to retire above O-8. Panetta can only suggest.
You wrote: “They’ve obviously never worked under a genuine petty tyrant with no ability to do anything about it due to his rank.”
Excellent characterization: “genuine petty tyrant.” That’s what they are and most of them are cowards. And there reputations usually precede them upon reassignment.
In my career twilight tour as an XO, my retiring Sgt Major gave me a heads up that our incoming CO had the notoriety of having had no less than seven Marine Captains resign during various stages of his tenure as a Marine Infantry Battalion Commander.
I told the Sgt Major: “That’s OK because the Commandant of the Marine Corps and I have something in common. We were both at our terminal grades.”
“...their reputations...”
I was line division officer as my first job in my first squadron. The CO made my men go out every evening and “dress down” the propellers on all nine of our P-3 aircraft so that the four prop blades boxed the compass. These bastards were huge and heavy and it made me laugh that the CO was such a dick. We would have followed him exactly nowhere.
We deserve to lose. This guy gets in trouble for yelling, and nobody gets in trouble when four Americans die in Benghazi. I hope there was an EO Officer at their funerals.
My favorite ever Skipper (C.O.) was mellow and truly a nice person. However, I was in the ship’s wardroom the day he picked up a San Diego phone book and threw it at the Ops officer (who had it coming). I was an E-3 fly on the wall. When I determined that no other objects were going to be outbound I walked over, picked up the phone book and returned it to its proper place. The Skipper just smiled at me.
on the opposite side of the coin, I was an E-2, and I had E-5’s working for me...
talk about a balancing act...
Have come across several Army officers whose style of ‘leadership’ was like this. Their preferred approach was to wire brush as many underlings as possible.
In my career it was probably equally divided between those with an authoritative style and those with a more participatory style. The real question for the military should be, within certain limits, of course, with either style, simple effectiveness.
If a commander carries off that hard-nosed, SOB style, but is also ultimately effective in all aspects of command, then he is not a lone ranger. He stands amongst a huge group of commanders throughout history who have effectively used the same leadership style in a military setting.
In the same way as an authoritative leader can be ineffective, so can a participatory leader. That style can be a cover for weakness and indecisiveness, which are both terribly detrimental on a battlefield.
The military’s objective is to win the nation’s wars. Period. It is not for social experimentation, for allowing people to enhance the self-esteem, or for providing jobs to make the UE3 look a bit better at the end of the month.
Feelings oriented commentators, in my humble opinion, are ignorant. That’s the bottom line.
An effective SOB is effective, even if he is an SOB. Unless laws are broken, that should be the bottom line when it comes to the one institution in this nation that simply cannot afford to lose.
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