Bloodless Coup

Bush Listens to Petraeus on Redeployments, Not Petraeus' Superiors

This is indeed really silly, and terribly inefficient way to run an organization - particularly one as important and powerful as the Department of Defense. Bush wanted "the Surge", his generals didn't, so he got himself some new generals. Now he's not listening to Gates, Mullen or Fallon on the issue of troop deployments. He's siding with Petraues, not Petraues' bosses. Are these the kinds of management skills he learned at Harvard?

This management situation is completely ridiculous. Think of the U.S. government as a corporation (Just for the purposes of this exercise. Nothing to do with privatization). Bush is the equivalent of the Chairman of the Board and Gates and Admiral Mullen play the roles of CEO of the company (DOD and the military). Gates's and Mullen's job, along with the Joint Chiefs, is to think big picture and look at the overall health of the company and where it needs to be putting its assets. Petraeus is the VP of one department. An important department such as marketing. But still just one department. Yet here we have the Chairman of the Board essentially reaching down, ignoring all other concerns such production (Afghanistan), research and development (Pakistan), finance (China) and saying that the only thing that matters is marketing. It's just bad management.