Janis Karpinski Quotes

Elements of the Army lied to the family of the dead soldier and the media, and then tried to cover up the lies. Davis was one of the few Congressman who would castigate a scandal caused by the administration of his own party.

He was convicted as a War Criminal, sentenced to death, and then his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. His quote is important because this was the defense that was totally rejected by the Nuremberg Tribunal—a solder is not required to obey an order to commit a war crime and if he does, he is as guilty as the person who gave the order.

Few high ranking officers, or officials of civilian organizations, take the responsibility for subordinates not understanding instructions.

Rush ran the hospitals for the Revolutionary Army and talked to many officers and enlisted men, and also observed much of the British military practices. These suggestions were discussed but never passed as regulations. They are fascinating insights into the problems of the general officers of the time who were generally selected for their socioeconomic status rather than other qualifications. Note the drunkenness limitation for a commanding general was proposed to be limited to only 1 allowed bout of drunkenness every 24 hours. It was, he thought, totally unrealistic to require generals to be always sober when on duty. With the mediocre quality of senior officers, Washington had to depend on foreigners like Lafayette, Von Steuben and others. And Generals who were leading attacks out in front of their men like Benedict Arnold immediately became heroes and one of the reasons he ended up as a traitor was that he thought that he was badly treated relative to the “society” Generals who would not accept him and denigrated his exploits when they themselves had never been close to a battle front.

Compare this quotation with {632907}. Most members of Congress had limited management experience and the only solution to an organizational problem was to fire people. The referenced quotation has people fired to trigger reform and change; in this quotation, it is for the purpose of inspiring public trust. Ironically, there is no evidence in the management literature that suggests that firing for either of these reasons will have the desired objective.

In the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, private contractors wlere hired to provide many services in the war zone including intelligence, security and guard service. In carrying out their responsibilities, some private contractor employees killed and/or tortured suspects or innocent bystandarders against the laws of the United States. If American soldiers had committed these crimes, they would be court marshalled. However, the Code of Military Regulations and other laws applied only to armed forces personnel.

The newly developed M-16 rifle was resisted by the army brass who did not want to give up their old WWII weapons. There was even cases of army sabatoge of tests to avoid changing weapons. Ironically 40 years later, when the M-16 had been technologically eclipsed by the Russians who had twice the firepower rate and the Israelis who developed a more accurate weapon both more reliable, the army did not want to abandon the M-16 and its shortened version M-4.

Elements of the Army lied to the family of the dead soldier and the media, and then tried to cover up the lies. Abazaid is one of the few government high officials who was candid about his agency’s failure.

He lost the vote on this issue, and the Congress created the first committee to investigate and oversee military affairs.

the new CIA in 1947 He turned out to be right. The CIA has been a control problem ever since.

In bureaucracy, as in most other aspects of politics, it is not a serious problem if you are wrong as long as most or many others are. However, if your are alone, you had better be right.

Despite pleas from his second in command not to punish the agents who botched key parts of the Oswald investigation, Hoover disciplined 17 agents with his 1964 memo. No one was more careful to “protect” the image of the FBI than Hoover. He used his powers to classify documents as “Secret” and did so for all the documentation of the FBI negligence and the discipline until 2000 when it became public.

Marshall was Army Chief of Staff at the time. Actually it was the OSS—the precursor to the CIA—that accepted the job of the assassination of Werner Heisenberg, the best physicist left in Germany after so many had escaped from the dictatorship. However, the agent who was to do the assassination made the judgment from actually talking with him and reading all his scientific papers that he was not working on an atomic bomb and really didn’t know of a lot of the critical research that was ongoing. He let the scientist live, and later investigations showed that the agent, Moe Berg, was absolutely right. Neither Heisenberg nor any other German scientists were working on atomic energy. The Germans had put all their scientific eggs in the rocket and jet plane basket.