Bureaucrats and Warriors

(Written October 2, 2014, edited 9/23/15)

—by Robert Arvay

for The Bold Pursuit

During my twenty years in military service, I learned to assess military personnel by placing them in one of two categories:  bureaucrats and warriors.  Whenever a bureaucrat was our commander, not a warrior, all the paperwork got done, but combat readiness deteriorated.  Unit cohesion began to fall apart.  Morale plummeted.  By contrast, commanders who were warriors learned to go around the paperwork and ensure combat readiness.  Equipment was issued and properly maintained, and the soldiers were well trained and highly disciplined.  Morale increased, as did confidence and esprit de corps.

I did my best to be a warrior.  This could be risky when the commander was a bureaucrat.  I remember that at one point we had an urgent need for equipment, without which our combat readiness would suffer.  The commander, too timid to make demands on the supply system, kept dragging his feet, continually demanding yet one more requisition be filled out.  I finally realized that we were never going to get approval through normal channels, so I obtained the equipment by “other means.”  My fellow warrior veterans know exactly what I mean by "other means."  I just hope that the bureaucrats in supply replaced the broken lock.  I speak metaphorically of course.  Of course.

Secret Service Director Julia Pierson resigned after a long sequence of failures at her post.  More is yet to come, not for Pierson, but for Obama.  The reasons that led to Pierson’s resignation parallel the failures of Obama.  Hers have ended.  His have not.

Julia Pierson was a bureaucrat.  Faced with what well could have been an imminent threat to the White House, when the clear and present danger of an armed intruder crashing through the door of, and penetrating deeply into, the building was absolutely— well, clear and present— after all that happened, Pierson praised the Secret Service for their “restraint.”  No machine guns opened fire from the roof, no snipers eliminated the threat, and if not for an OFF DUTY agent conducting a tour for visitors, there is no telling how far into the complex the intruder might have gotten.  Had he been carrying a bomb, the damage could have been devastating.

Contrast this with an anecdote that used to be told about Air Force General Curtis LeMay, the man who firebombed Tokyo during World War 2, and who famously advised President Kennedy to bomb Castro’s Cuba “back into the stone age” to eliminate the threat it posed.

LeMay was driving his son’s car, according to the story.  The civilian vehicle did not have military identification markers on it.  In his own car, those markers always allowed LeMay to cruise right past the armed security forces at the base’s main gate.  He neglected to stop when the guard signaled him to do so.  When LeMay sped through the gate, an Air Force enlisted man opened fire.  A bullet smashed the side view mirror of the car, inches from LeMay’s head.  Suddenly realizing his mistake, LeMay stopped, and was detained until positively identified.

The next day, the guard had orders transferring him to Viet Nam.  This quickly brought accusations that the general was unfairly retaliating against the man for doing his job.  LeMay, according to the story, responded that the guard had not done his job, because, as the general was quoted as saying, “He missed.”

General Curtis LeMay did not praise the armed guard for “admirable restraint.”

Julia Pierson, on the other hand, was a bureaucrat.  She had always performed well in the bureaucracy, and make no mistake about it, annoying as they can be, bureaucrats are a vital component of national security.  When bureaucrats do their jobs right, the troops get fed three square meals every day, they get paid on time, they get sent to the right places exactly on schedule.  Without those things happening, chaos would bring down the house, as it did the Iraqi army after the Americans left.

Pierson was not a warrior, and the position into which she was placed, by Obama himself, is a warrior position.  Any Marine Corps drill sergeant in charge of a boot camp squad could run the White House security corps with a degree of effectiveness and efficiency that would never have permitted the intruder to get past the top of the fence.  He would have bled to death on it from multiple bullet wounds.

The problem is that the sergeant would then have been court-martialed for violating the rights of the intruder, for excessive use of force, and for not properly filling out the paperwork before opening fire.

When called to testify, however, he would have answered every question directly and forthrightly, never dodging and weaving and whining about how he really had meant to lock the door but could not (as Pierson complained) find a housekeeper to do it.  No.  He would have boldly stated the facts, and let the chips fall where they may.

As he would be led away in chains, to the gleeful applause of liberals, he would have one regret:  that his replacement would practice admirable restraint and get the president killed.

.