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Thank you, John. Hackworth is putting it mildly, actually. The "Warrior" mentality has all but disappeared from the psyche of the officer corps. It started actually, with the firing of Johnny Hyland by Zumwalt in 1972 -- and the assignment of of a politically correct submariner (Chick Clarey) into the critical CINCPACFLT slot...right in the middle of an intense air war in SEA. Among Zumwalt's many failed actions, this was probably the most egregious. If the truth were known, McNamara started the mind-set for management types to essentially out-suck the warriors for influence on the E-ring. And, of course Clinton put the spike right through the warrior's hearts with the appointment of such travesties as Lake, Cohen, Shelton, Boodra, Johnson and Trost...to name just a few. The Pentagon has been replete with losers for almost two decades. And, a reversal of that magnitude cannot be accomplished overnight...or without blood all over the decks. The only way to reverse this trend, in my humble view, is to have ready a cadre of warriors in the wings to replace the failed leadership in enfeebled reaction to the oncoming horrific terror attacks destined for us in the near future. (This is essentially what had to happen in 1942, as the career suck-ups pukes were shown for the shallowness of their thinkig and profiles -- and we dipped into the junior numbers to get the warriors..!!!!!!) Our officer cadre is growing shabbier by the day, as the best and brightest are leaving in droves. We are promoting to 0-6 and Flag, a gaggle of leadership and competence mediocrity that in former times would have had a good chance of being riffed as 0-5's on 20 years. My credentials for the above analysis as fol: 10 naval aviators, living and deceased in the family; 2 Blue Angels -- Cdr. Cliff Skelton (early retirement) and Cdr. "Irish" Raney, current Ops Officer in Teddy Roosevelt; and on and on. I served as Personal Aide to Adm Thomas H. Moorer, USN (Ret) during his first years as CNO, 1967-69, immediately upon returning from a combat tour in South East Asia. Enjoyed deep selection, but took early retirement in 1974 as an 0-6 in protest of the failed leadership in the air war in SEA and Watergate, while running the 35 shop at CINCPACFLT. /s/ Capt. Daniel K. Pope lV, USN (Ret) ie: dk/coro

If the truth were known, McNamara started the mind-set for management types to essentially out-suck the warriors for influence on the E-ring.

Maxwell Taylor was the Army's in-house Whiz Kid in the 50's, brought back to be Chief of Staff IIRC by Kennedy, who reconstituted Franklin Roosevelt's "brain trust" by calling in all the rest of the Roosevelt-era Whiz Kids: Macnamara, Galbraith, Schlesinger, the Bundy brothers, various others.

I read a paper on varieties of human intelligence once that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, that documented how Harvard, even in the 40's and 50's, had created just the culture you describe, and which Hackworth vilifies, in which people were completely power-driven and whose most notable characteristics, as students, was that they sucked up infinitely more than regular college students to their professors. Roosevelt made this culture normative for the United States Government through the creation of the "brain trust" and its "whiz kid" protege's.

The upshot of the Atlantic Monthly article was that people who have problem-solving and creative intelligence, and people who are socially helpful and adept, all tend to get shoved aside by the power junkie/suckup types, who don't value cooperation (they compete instead) and don't value concrete results -- only differential, competitive "results" that put more daylight between them and their competitors. People like that aren't real leaders as much as they are self-absorbed schemers and power-seekers.