He can criticize Obama all he wants after retirement.
Maj Gen Paul Vallely: We need to demand resignations of Obama, his cabinet, and members of Congress
With regard to Joseph Collins’ article “What civil-military crisis?” [February], the statement that a proposed “code of conduct” for senior officer retirees “would not bind retirees who are private citizens with full civil rights” generates a point of order that is substantively important to the debate over the propriety of post-retirement political stances by general and flag officers.
Retired general and flag officers are not, in fact, “private citizens with full civil rights.” Rather, retirement pay is more akin to retainer pay than a vested pension. Retired officers are not truly retired. Their names are simply moved from the active-duty list to the retired list. Commissions endure for the officer’s lifetime, and retired officers remain subject to recall until death; to wit, Gen. Peter Schoomaker had been retired for almost three years when he was recalled to serve as chief of staff of the Army in 2003.
Moreover, Uniform Code of Military Justice jurisdiction remains attached to the officer for his lifetime (though the Defense Department has voluntarily self-imposed restraints on the recall of retirees to active service to stand trial by court-martial, more as a function of system efficiency than legal mandate.) Because retired officers retain their commissions for life, they are never again truly “private citizens,” except in the most colloquial usage of the term. Moreover, because they are subject to recall at the secretary’s beck, and because the UCMJ technically still governs conduct until death terminates jurisdiction, retired officers never enjoy the full panoply of a nonofficer’s civil rights.
Internalizing this distinction — that an officer never stops “being” an officer, both legally and, in most instances, culturally — informs the debate on the wisdom and propriety of post-retirement political conduct.
Finally, the creation of a new “code of conduct” for senior retired officers is not necessary. All that is necessary to ensure appropriate retired conduct is extension of the express applicability of DoD standards of conduct regulations to retired officers, including the requirement to file annual public financial-disclosure statements that they were required to file on active duty. The regulatory modification, when coupled with a few well-publicized examples of secretarial discipline for failure to comply, would speak volumes about the imposition of civilian control over the post-retirement conduct of commissioned officers.
Lt. Col. Butch Bracknell, Marine Corps
Joint Center for Operational Analysis,
U.S. Joint Forces Command
Norfolk, Va.
From the Armed Forces Journal
http://www.afji.com/2010/03/4500267/
Perhaps you know more about the subject than Col. Bracknell.