Word: four-star
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...remains to be seen if the intellectual godfathers of the Bush plan - scholar Fred Kagan at the American Enterprise Institute, and retired four-star Army general Jack Keane - will admit that the 20,000 number is less than they called for. When asked by TIME last week how many troops would be the absolute minimum to accomplish the counterinsurgency goals, Kagan replied that it was the number cited in their proposal - which was at least...
...Institute as a military analyst. Kagan argued for a surge last fall in the pages of the Weekly Standard, the neocons' house organ, after the military's previous surge, Operation Forward Together, failed in late October. Kagan turned to former Army Vice Chief of Staff Jack Keane, a retired four-star general who still has street cred at the Pentagon, to help flesh out the plan and then sell it to the White House. The neocons don't have the same juice they had at the start of the war, in part because so many of them have fled...
...commander in Iraq determines that such steps would be effective." When it became clear to the internationalists that the Kagan-Keane surge was winning White House attention without any calls for more troops from generals on the ground, they counter-counterattacked. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former four-star, said a surge had been tried in Baghdad--and had failed last fall--and would only further delay Iraqis in taking control of their own security. Powell added, a little pointedly, that he had not heard any generals ask for more troops--an oblique way of hinting that...
...problem, say the uniformed and retired critics, is that outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld hand-picked every four-star commander, personally interviewed every significant three-star appointment, and, in a break with his predecessors, even selected some two-stars for a grilling. The result, many critics argue, is a group of generals who were too reluctant to stand up to Rumsfeld and possibly face getting tossed aside like Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, who was sidelined after saying that the Iraq war would require "hundreds of thousands" of troops...
...defense source says the new command, which is part of Rumsfeld's ongoing worldwide reassessment of the military's division of labor, may be headed by Gen. William "Kip" Ward, a respected officer who is the Army's only four-star African-American general. Ward has boots-on-the-ground experience in Africa: he was a commander during the U.S.'s ill-fated mission in Somalia in 1993 and also served as a military representative in Egypt in 1998. Ward is currently the deputy commander at European Command, and as such oversees U.S. military relations with 43 African countries...