Every organization has a sclerotic bureaucracy. The military in no exception.
Sounds like a good idea to me
Reagan 69; Obama 47.
Benedict Arnold was 39 when he conspired to give the defensive plans of West point to the British.
Napoleon himself was just 43 when he lost 360,000 troops in Russia and 46 at the Battle of Waterloo.
George McClellan was 35 years old when the became the highest ranking general in the United States Army.
Braxton Bragg was 44 when the Civil War began and was such a bad commander that his subordinate Confederate commanders hated him and his own troops tried to kill him.
Winston Churchill was just 41 when he concocted the Gallipoli campaign but 66 when he took office in 1940.
Mark Clark was 48 when he commanded the Fifth Army during the 28th Division’s disastrous crossing of the Rapido River in Italy. Veterans of his own command demanded a Congressional Inquiry into his command after the war.
Institutional memory bye bye
easier for a demagogue to control, yeppers
“Sounds like a good idea to me”
Extremely bad idea. Army Chief of Staff Marshall forced elderly officers over a certain age to retire in the buildup before U.S. entry into World War Two after the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor 7 December 1941. Fortunately, General Marshall made an exception in the case of Colonel George S. Patton and waived the age restriction for him. Col. Patton was promoted in rank to Brigadier General and given the task of organizing the U.S. Tank Corps for the U.S. Army in a desert training center around Ft. Irwin, California. Patton then planned the first major American amphibious invasion with the Allied attack upon French Northwest Africa in 1942. His leadership set the example for future U.S. amphibious invasions in the war.
Blind age prejudice against older military officers without regard to skill, luck, and sheer audacity is extremely harmful to the capabilities of the American armed forces. Any attempt to foolishly squander such human capital on the sacrificial stone of blind and ignorant policy should be and must be opposed with all the derision it deserves.
There was a point after World War 1 where the British had more admirals than ships, a problem in bureaucracy and “rank inflation”.
That our military suffers it now, as we enter a second decade fighting militant Islam, bodes poorly for the nation.