Military

CNN is reporting:

Abdel Aziz Rantisi, the leader of the militant group Hamas in Gaza, was killed on Saturday in Gaza City by an Israeli missile strike, Israeli officials and Palestinian security sources said.

Rantisi was appointed to head Hamas in Gaza after Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was killed last month in an Israeli missile strike in Gaza City.

Next?

Strategy Page outlines some thoughts on the recent upward swing in the trend of Navy Ship Commanding Officers being relieved.

My parents, who live near Naval Station Jacksonville, Florida, were shocked when the Captain of the USS John F. Kennedy was relieved last fall. Many of their neighbors serve on the ship or at the nearby Naval Station. Big news in a company town.

Read on:

The U.S. Navy is experiencing an extraordinary number of ship captains getting relieved from command. In the last 14 months, 23 captains have been relieved. That’s 5.4 percent of ship captains a year. At the end of the Cold War, in the late 1980s, the rate was about 3-4 percent a year. So why has the relief rate gone up 50 percent? 

Only a small percentage of reliefs have to do with professional failings (a collision or serious accident, failing a major inspection or just continued poor performance.) Most reliefs were, and still are, for adultery, drunkenness or theft. With more women aboard warships, there have been more reliefs for, as sailors like to put it, “zipper failure.” There may have been more than are indicated, as sexual misconduct is often difficult to prove, and a captain who is having zipper control problems often has other shortcomings as well. Senior commanders traditionally act prudently and relieve a ship commander who demonstrates a pattern of minor problems and who they “lack confidence in.” 

Read more at Strategy Page.

I finished reading Rick Atkinson’s excellent book In the Company of Soldiers, which will be reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times.

The book itself is not as engrossing or as interesting as his Pulitzer Prize winning An Army at Dawn, but it’s a fascinating read, particularly it’s profile of Major General David Petraeus.

For General Petraeus, ambiguity is everywhere, the very essence of command. How do you parse the difference between what can be done and what should be done? Even when Petraeus awards Purple Hearts to some of his wounded troops he lauds them for the fact that they ”walked point for our nation” while they ”performed brilliantly in countless ambiguous situations.”

Atkinson knew Petraeus before the war, and knew he would be, as it were, the very model of a modern major general. For starters, there was the sheer, riveting force of his personality. This West Pointer (class of 1974) is alternately described as ”smart, articulate, and driven” and ”intense, good-humored and driven.” Accidentally shot in the chest during a training exercise in 1991, he nearly died. But his surgeon, Dr. Bill Frist (now the Senate majority leader), operated for over five hours, and a friend remembers how Petraeus cut short his convalescence: ”He said, ‘I am not the norm. I’m ready to get out of here and I’m ready to prove it to you.’ He had them pull the tubes out of his arm. Then he hopped out of bed and did 50 push-ups. They let him go home.”

Firefight in Fallujah. I was wondering how this was going to go. The Army pretty much stayed clear of the town, letting the IP deal with local discontent. The Marines went on patrol through the town center, and one died in an ambush. But when a Marine gets killed in an ambush, no one should be surprised when 300 other Marines show up to ask how it happened. And they’re pissed.

From Lex

Lex drops some thoughts in his weekly Friday Musing – the best is at the end though:

And I’ll tell you something privately, just you and me: I’m proud of what we did. If I live to be a hundred years old, I don’t know that I’ll ever have the chance to do something so important, be a part of something so selfless, change the lives of so many people so positively, ever again.

Priceless.

And we’re proud of you for what you and your men have done…

While at the Vietnam Memorial last week, I was struck by this note left behind at the panel bearing the name of Colonel Peter J. Stewart:

Colonel Stewart was declared missing in action eight years before I was born – to this day, his family does not know what happened to him. You can read more about his crash here.

I have thought of him often this week…