Obama, Failure of Leadership
By Larry Johnson on May 30, 2010 at 5:28 PM in Current Affairs
We tried to warn you during the primary–Barack Obama lacked the experience of command, having never actually been in charge of anything other than feathering his own nest. (Be sure to read Linda’s piece below and watch the video.) There is a reason that folks with military experience, whether senior NCOs or officers, do better than your average civilian on the leadership test. They are trained from the beginning to lead.
What does that mean? You are taught through action to be responsible for the people under your command. A newly minted Army Lieutenant, for example, is put in charge of up to fifty people (aided of course by a platoon Sergeant, who is the real manager) and has quite a list of tasks:
So, what are the duties and responsibilities of a PL? Here are a few:
Manager: A Platoon Leader is a manager and leader. He or she must get things done through other people. Most PLs supervise between 20-50 soldiers.
Training: PLs plan, resource, execute and assess training at the platoon level. They write operation orders, request training resources, conduct mission briefs and assess training. They also prepare risk assessments and do After-Action-Reviews (AARs) with their soldiers and with their supervisor, the company commander.
Morale: Platoon Leaders are responsible for the morale in their platoons. They set the tone for their platoon. Their leadership style, level of competence and attitude directly determine whether morale is good or bad.
Discipline: Platoon Leaders work with their platoon sergeant to enforce the Army standards. PLs do not have command authority to administer the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), but they do make recommendations to the company commander. More importantly, PLs administer corrective actions to remedy poor performance. This includes corrective training and formal or informal counseling.
Property Accountability: Most PLs are responsible for $1 million or more worth of equipment. This includes vehicles, sensitive items, radios and much more. They typically “sign” for this equipment and must maintain accountability for it at all times.
Maintenance: PLs are responsible for the operational readiness of their equipment. They must adequately maintain their equipment to ensure it is ready to deploy at moment’s notice. This includes scheduled maintenance, unscheduled maintenance and services.
Soldier Readiness: PLs must ensure their soldiers are ready to deploy at moment’s notice. This includes physical fitness, medical readiness, weapons qualification, profiles, etc. Platoon Leaders manage their soldiers on an individual basis and know the strengths, weaknesses and shortcomings of each soldier.
Soldier Development: The PL works with the Platoon Sergeant to develop his or her subordinate Non Commissioned Officers and Soldiers. The Platoon leader gives classes and oversees the NCO Professional Development (NCOPD) with his or her Platoon Sergeant.
The military trains leaders by doing. They are not asked to run a Company (i.e., a unit of about 150 people) until they have demonstrated they are competent to lead a platoon of 50. Similarly, an Army officer is not asked to command a Regiment/Brigade until he or she has proven they can successfully manage a Battalion.
So what’s my point? Barack Obama has never had any experience of significant command in his entire life and that lack of experience is on display in his abject failure to manage the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico.
Some have suggested that it is unfair to accuse Barack for the aftermath of the explosion on board the BP oil drilling rig. While Obama is not culpable for the explosion, he does share significant blame for not organizing the Federal Government to respond and intervene in the massive clean up and containment effort.
Barack Obama, along with previous Presidents, is responsible for failing to ensure that the Federal Government held oil companies accountable for having safe, functioning drilling procedures and safety systems. But that is a longterm problem. The real failure is in crisis response and management.
Obama failed early on to recognize that the oil leaking into the Gulf could be catastrophic. What should he have done? Several things (and I list these in no particular order):
1. Take over incident management. Bring together all relevant agencies and organizations, including private companies, to handle the two critical issues–clean up/containment and capping the leak. Instead of doing this Barack and his team have drifted for more than forty days and allowed BP to be in charge. BP is interested in only one thing (understandably)–saving its corporate ass. That priority is not necessarily the priority of the American people.
2. Mobilize all military and civilian engineering resources to tackle the clean up/containment and capping of the leak.
3. Request and coordinate assistance from other nations/companies with experience in offshore drilling operations. I understand why other oil companies are not going to rush to the aid of a competitor. That’s why the Federal Government can play a role.
4. Create and sustain a sense of urgency about the response to the incident.
What is the Barack the golden child doing? He’s going on vacation. He’s spending more time on a golf course than on the beaches of America’s southern coast (in fact, he’s probably spent more time in the sand traps of the golf course at Andrews Air Force base). He’s doing photo ops with college and professional sports teams.
Worst of all, he does not know what is going on. A 24 year old platoon leader in the Army knows who is on his or her team. Barack? He was clueless on Friday when asked about the resignation/firing of Elizabeth Birnbaum, the Director of the Mineral Management Services aka MMS. Here is how the NY Times reported Obama’s reaction:
In an afternoon news conference, President Obama said he “found out about her resignation today” but did not “know the circumstances in which this occurred.” He made clear in unusually strong terms that Ms. Birnbaum had failed to change her troubled agency with “sufficient urgency.”
MMS, in case you have been sleeping in a cave, had the lead for overseeing and regulating the oil drilling operations. It had failed miserably. The inspector general of the Department of the Interior reported:
Employees of the federal regulatory agency that oversees offshore drilling accepted lunches, football tickets, hunting trips and other gifts from the oil and gas companies they were in charge of policing . . .
The probe, which zeroed in on the Lake Charles, La., office of the embattled Minerals Management Service, also found at least one MMS inspector was negotiating employment with an energy company while simultaneously inspecting its platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
So Barack wants us to believe he is all over the case of BP yet, when it comes to the person under his command responsible for overseeing BP operations, he does not know if she resigned or was fired?
That boys and girls would not be tolerated of anyone in the chain of command of a military unit. If you are in charge you are expected to know what in the fuck is going on. It is that simple.
Instead of going off to Chicago for vacation, Barack should have been on TV declaring that neither he nor the relevant Federal officials are taking any time off. If this is a crisis and the fate of sea life and the economy in the Gulf of Mexico are really at risk then act like it.
The stupidity of Barack and his team was further displayed by the reflex action to suspend all drilling operations. I still believe in “Drill Baby, Drill.” Why? Unless you are willing to walk or ride a bike every where you go we need oil and it ain’t going to fall magically from the sky. That said, it is the duty of the Federal Government to ensure that oil companies perform the task of extracting the oil in a way that the environment is protected. This is not an impossible task.
But President “Brain Surgeon” suspends all drilling operations. Well, guess what? Think that will drive up the price of oil? Yes. Think that higher oil prices will contribute to a slow down in the economy? Yes. The blow out of the BP rig already is going to hurt America’s economy. Obama is aggravating the damage.
This is a boy in a man’s body (and I don’t mean “boy” in the racist sense). He is inexperienced, emotional, thin skinned and drowning. But some of us knew this going in. The only good news? It looks like many of the Obama disciples are waking up from their dream of a Messiah and recognizing that Barack is not up to the task of leadership. If you have not been trained or mentored to be a leader you can’t lead. That’s Barack–untrained and certainly not ready for prime time.
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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