Attack Stalls ex-Cole Skipper's Career

The Modesto Bee ^ | 24 April 2006 | James Rosen - Bee Washington Bureau

[Diver Dave]

Once on fast track to be captain, Kirk Lippold now works at a desk. Last in a two-part series. WASHINGTON -- For 5½ years, the Washington military and political establishment has not known quite what to do with Kirk Lippold.

Cmdr. Lippold was the skipper of the USS Cole when al-Qaida terrorists committed a suicide bombing in the Yemen port of Aden on Oct. 12, 2000.

The attack, from a small barge that pulled alongside the Cole, blew a 40-by-40-foot hole in the guided-missile destroyer. Seventeen sailors died and 42 were wounded.

After he led an intense three-week effort to prevent the Cole from sinking, the Navy gave Lippold a medal for having saved the $1 billion ship, prevented further loss of life and maintained the moral of his traumatized crew.

[george76]

The Defense Department waves away the protesting generals as just a handful out of more than 8,000 now serving or retired. That seems to me too dismissive. These generals are no doubt correct in asserting that they have spoken to and speak on behalf of some retired and, even more important, some active-duty members of the military.

But that makes the generals' revolt all the more egregious. The civilian leadership of the Pentagon is decided on Election Day, not by the secret whispering of generals.

We've always had discontented officers in every war and in every period of our history. But they rarely coalesce into factions. That happens in places such as Hussein's Iraq, Pinochet's Chile or your run-of-the-mill banana republic. And when it does, outsiders (including the United States) do their best to exploit it, seeking out the dissident factions to either stage a coup or force the government to change policy.

That kind of dissident party within the military is alien to America. Some other retired generals have found it necessary to rise to the defense of the administration. Will the rest of the generals, retired or serving, now have to declare which camp they belong to?

It is precisely this kind of division that our tradition of military deference to democratically elected civilian superiors was meant to prevent.

Today it suits the antiwar left to applaud the rupture of that tradition. But it is a disturbing and very dangerous precedent that even the left will one day regret.

...Charles Krauthammer

[Candor7]

Exactly. Charles says it well. Why should we countenance these generals converting our government into a banana republic? Next in line comes a coupe threat to the presidency from a disgruntled minority of flag rank officers?

These generals should be clapped in irons, or at the very least, lose their pensions.

[rlmorel]

Exactly. I think though, that they don't WANT that. I believe that is one of the reasons the press has become so "anti-embed"...they think that they are losing their "objectivity".

Well, no $hit $herlock. They can't HELP but admire the military when they actually see what these young people can do...and THAT is a BAD thing for the press. Wouldn't want them to lose their "objectivity".

Sheesh. I better stop now.

[XJarhead]

I don't know enough of the facts to say for certain whether or not he failed to do something he should have done.

If the standing orders prohibited certain things, then I don't blame him for following those orders. But there may have been other things that he could have done, but didn't do, that might have made the ship safer. I suspect if they found that he could have done more, they were referring to something other than violating his orders. I'm just saying that the Kirk Lippold I knew was not a lax guy. Maybe he screwed up a bit, maybe not. But he would not have run a slack ship, IMHO.