Army’s Crooning, Blogging, Gaming Brain Is The Military’s New Top Officer

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By Spencer Ackerman May 25, 2011 | 6:26 pm | Categories: Military Life


Sorry, Gen. Cartwright. Hope you like the weather in Mons, Adm. Stavridis. You’ll be staying in Norfolk a little while longer, Gen. Odierno. Because Gen. Martin Dempsey, who’s been chief of staff of the Army for five minutes under two months, will be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

This has been an odd, unusual process of selecting the next top military officer. But the AP says it’s all over, and Dempsey is President Obama’s choice for the next top military officer. This is very good news for blogging, gaming, and training foreign forces. And however Dempsey’s erstwhile rivals feel about getting passed over, the real loser is PowerPoint. Maybe counterinsurgency, too.

It’s extremely rare for someone to go from running the one of the services’ intellectual centers — the Army Training and Doctrine Command, in Dempsey’s case — to being chairman in a matter of months. It’s rarer still for an officer to be given one of the service chiefdoms for a few weeks before getting kicked upstairs.

But as we wrote in December when he got the Army nod, Dempsey is an unusual officer. He’s taken to the blogosphere to explain his thinking about the military’s future — specifically, that it should train foreign armies if it wants to avoid the next bloody land war. That needs to become “a core competency for our force in the future,” he told senators in his March confirmation hearing. He’s said to be “sick of the word ‘counterinsurgency,” since it defines the Army’s task in terms of its adversaries, rather than a positive agenda. All that is going to be music to the ears of Obama as he seeks military advice on dialing down the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and moving to an era of tight defense budgets.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/armys-crooning-blogging-gaming-brain-is-the-militarys-new-top-officer/#more-47819