No thinking person ever accepts an appeal to expertness unchallenged.
What term would you use to describe the cadre, the group of flag rank officers who are charged, promoted and accept the title and responsibility of being General officers? ( A rose by another name, that kind of thing?).
And who is responsible?
You might want to check out this five part series with MG Jack Keane where he outlines the origins of the surge in Iraq — the successful military strategy he helped design, and the near zero, non, zip thought,planning, thinking that existed in the Army vis a vis post Baghdad.
http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=MWU5ZDNlNmE0MzYxMWRhYWM1NWExYTY0MjEzMDNkYTI=
They are called General Officers, not the General Staff Corps. But, beyond sematics, the Army Staff does not have operational responsibilities. They execute the Army’s Title 10 functions to raise and equip the force. The other services perform similiar functions for their service.
Operational responsibility rests with the Combatant Commands, not with the services. These are joint organizations, manned by officers from all of the services. Your example of Somalia can help make my point, especially since I have personal experience of that operation. At the time of the Blackhawk Down fight, the combatant commander of CENTCOM was a Marine General. His J-3, or Operations Officer was an Air Force Major General. The Commander of Joint Task Force Somalia was an Army Major General. His J-3 was a Marine. The Joint Special Operations Task Force (Rangers, SF and 160 SOAR) were under a separate command, SOCOM who reported directly to the Secretary of Defense. All of these folks, including Corporals in the Ranger Regiment well understood that the mission they had was quite risky and needed additional support. That’s why they asked for AC-130’s, tanks, and Bradley’s for just the circumstances that came into play on that October day. But, another genius politician, Les Aspin, was the Secretary of Defense, and he denied their request. He thought that the mission was to hand out MRE’s, although he had signed the orders that sent the Rangers on their dangerous errand.
I know Jack Keane, Jack Keane is a friend of mine. He is a General,not a MG. Jack Keane’s beef is with the civilian leadership at the top, though there were certainly flag officers who were quite content to go along with the nonsense issuing from Rumsfeld, Feith, and Bremer. There was no Phase IV planning because Rumsfeld personally saw to it that it was not done. He did this by removing that responsibilty from the CENTCOM staff and assigning the responsibilty to a Joint Staff planning group in Qatar. He then gave that planning group a different set of instructions that had nothing to do with Phase IV.