General Dempsey "The 9/11 General" Chosen as New Chairman of the Joint Chiefs By Obama - Good or Bad?

By Nicholas Contompasis

General Dempsey is what I call a 9-11 General. The irony of his ascending into the military stratosphere of General just days before the al-Qaeda attacks was pure luck, or was it?
The timing of President Obama's appointment of Dempsey as head of the military smacks of bad news, something he'd rather not have known or would get little press due to the holiday. Big wigs have always covered their tracks by releasing the stuff they'd rather have shoved under the carpet when nobody is looking, on holidays or late Friday nights.
If you haven't been paying attention, since the bin-Laden assassination, both the head of our military and the CIA have been replaced. Could it be that the truth of who pulled the trigger on Osama has been leaked out and it wasn't our inexperienced President. By now its obvious who did the kill. Leon Panetta of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs share the honor, with a reluctant President and aid Valerie Jarrett opposing the hit.
Because of that Obama has cleaned house, which is the only way he can strike back at our military.
I wonder what General Petraeus, soon to be head of the CIA, thinks of General Dempsey's new job, since he'll be working with him very closely?
Anyway, Obama wants to change the military, that's a fact, but for the better? If this appointment is part of his grand scheme to minimize the greatest fighting force in the world, we're all in for a heap of trouble.


Army’s Crooning, Blogging, Gaming Brain Is The Military’s New Top Officer

By Spencer Ackerman

Sorry, Gen. Cartwright. Hope you like the weather in Mons, Adm. Stavridis. You’ll be staying in Norfolk a little while longer, Gen. Odierno. Because Gen. Martin Dempsey, who’s been chief of staff of the Army for five minutes under two months, will be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
This has been an odd, unusual process of selecting the next top military officer. But the AP says it’s all over, and Dempsey is President Obama’s choice for the next top military officer. This is very good news for blogging, gaming, and training foreign forces. And however Dempsey’s erstwhile rivals feel about getting passed over, the real loser is PowerPoint. Maybe counterinsurgency, too.
It’s extremely rare for someone to go from running the one of the services’ intellectual centers —  the Army Training and Doctrine Command, in Dempsey’s case — to being chairman in a matter of months. It’s rarer still for an officer to be given one of the service chiefdoms for a few weeks before getting kicked upstairs.
But as we wrote in December when he got the Army nod, Dempsey is an unusual officer. He’s taken to the blogosphere to explain his thinking about the military’s future — specifically, that it should train foreign armies if it wants to avoid the next bloody land war. That needs to become “a core competency for our force in the future,” he told senators in his March confirmation hearing. He’s said to be “sick of the word ‘counterinsurgency,” since it defines the Army’s task in terms of its adversaries, rather than a positive agenda. All that is going to be music to the ears of Obama as he seeks military advice on dialing down the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and moving to an era of tight defense budgets.
Oh, and another thing he’ll encourage: social media and gaming.
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