Leading piss from a boot with directions on the heel

Leading piss out a boot with directions on the heel. Seems like a simple enough task, doesn’t it? Unfortunately I am supporting a Colonel without the ability to perform that task. Pontificating and grandstanding in a large meeting is not leadership. Asking questions that show your lack of basic logistic situational awareness, when you own the logistics, is not leadership. Asking questions, when you have no intention of listening to the answers, is not leadership, it is arrogance. To run a military operation without a basic understanding of the limitations and challenges of the logistics environment is pure folly! I’ve worked before for people who wanted their way without any desire to understand the reality on the ground. The disturbing thing this go-around is that I am supporting a war effort. Screwing up logistics in this environment could kill people and loose territory. I can’t help but be shocked when the person who’s job it is to have a well grounded understanding of the logistics picture doesn’t even understand who is responsible for what.

Now, having gone off on that tear, I must be honest about my situation. I have already have enough years toward retirement. This particular blowhard can not do anything to impact my career. My task, under these circumstances, is to do my job well and ignore his bullshit to the best of my ability.

It’s funny, when I travel around this country I can’t help but love it and feel great hope and promise for the future. Then I run into idiots, like this particular colonel, and I hope and pray they do not screw up the whole enterprise! We have the chance to do some real good here. It would be a crime to screw it away because of a lack of effective soldiering at the senior officer level. This happened here once before, in 1842. If anyone ever wondered about the line from the Rolling Stones song Sympathy for the Devil “And I lay traps for troubadors who get killed before they reach Bombay” read up on Major-General William George Keith Elphinstone, CB (1782–April 23, 1842). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Anglo-Afghan_War