In all the media coverage of the firing of Gen. David McKiernan in Afghanistan and his replacement by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, I was struck by this tidbit in the Wall Street Journal account:

In his two-and-a-half year tenure, Mr. Gates has also fired the secretaries of the Air Force and Army, the chief of staff of the Air Force, the officer in charge of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the top officer at Central Command. His predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, fired no senior officers during his tenure.

Don Rumsfeld fired no senior officers? That seems at odds with his reputation as someone who was a tough, demanding boss not afraid to alienate senior officers. But it’s more or less true, unless you count the failure to reappoint the decision to announce early the replacement for Gen. Eric Shinseki as Army chief of staff as a “firing.” That’s how it was perceived and thereby Rumsfeld widened the rift between himself and the army. It is very much to Gates’s credit that he can actually fire more senior leaders without creating a poisonous climate in the Pentagon.

In this case, Gates (and his boss in the Oval Office) are showing some of the moxie of an Abraham Lincoln or a Franklin Roosevelt by not being afraid to cashier a commander who hasn’t necessarily done anything wrong but who also hasn’t impressed anyone as the right kind of leader to win a war. Rumsfeld, by contrast, stuck with the discredited leadership team of Generals George Abizaid and George Casey in Iraq long after it became apparent they were leading us toward defeat.

Anyone who is familiar with the military will tell you that McChrystal has a much more impressive reputation than McKiernan, who is widely viewed as a decent enough armored officer but as the wrong kind of leader for a complex counterinsurgency. As important as McChrystal’s appointment is the designation of Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez to be his deputy. In all likelihood Rodriguez will head a corps staff in Afghanistan just as Ray Odierno did in Iraq. McKiernan resisted the creation of a corps staff and that, among other issues, sealed his fate.

Some in the military are already wringing their hands about whether it was necessary to inflict such a “humiliation” on McKiernan who was already under a bit of a cloud for his role in mishandling the switchover from conventional combat operations to nation building and counterinsurgency when he was the ground-forces commander in Iraq in the spring of 2003. The conventional thing would be to wait to replace McKiernan until he had served a more normal tour lasting another year (he’s been on the job less than a year). In the early days in Iraq the military kept to that kind of peacetime personnel system–with disastrous results. It is very much to Gates’s credit that he is imposing the kind of urgency in Afghanistan that Rumsfeld never did in Iraq.

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