Correct about the rank, I knew he was four star, I just had a mental disconnect.
I was naming them as a goup, a class, What do you call them as a class, as a group? For instance there is the ...officer corps, the enlisted ranks...
Anyways..
You are lucky. I only know of him from the media, but I like him, he seems like the kind of officer I always liked. Direct, not high maintenance. He seems like he encouraged constructive criticism.
Watch the series, you can see it is discomforting to Keane to say what he said, that Rumsfeld aside, the Army as a institution, was not intellectually ready.
I remember Les Aspin, a reality disconnect delusionist that shouldn’t of been in charge of a tennis camp for chubby trust fund kids.
I think the execution, real world of the operational commands has been excellent. No military has done what ours has done, and at such low cost.
The Army uses the terms lower enlisted (E1 - E4), non-commissioned officers (E5 - E9), company grade officers (O1-O3), field grade officers (O4-O6), general officers (O7 - O10)
Keane was the behind the scenes architect of the Surge as you mention in another post. Don’t confuse this with Phase IV, or post Saddam Baghdad, it came much later after it was clear that the Rumsfeld Plan failed. Keane played a key role because he was retired and could work directly with the White House, bypassing the Pentagon. He was the go between working with Petraeus in Iraq and a few key guys in the White House. Unfortunate that we had to do that to come up with a plan to win.