[AmericanThinker] If you're not familiar with the term "Perfumed Prince," take a look at Air Force LTG Jay Silveria, Commander of the Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs.Silveria achieved the national spotlight by chewing out the entire class over racial slurs posted on five cadets' quarters. Months later, it turned out that one of the targets was actually the perpetrator.
Here are some bullet points from a field manual.
Get the facts, before you act.
Solve problems at the lowest level.
Concede a mistake.
Praise in public, reprimand in private.
General "Knee-Jerk" violated all of them. When confronted with his error, he replied that this had to be said anyway. Apparently, he was conflating the Charlottesville protests with his own command, not to mention a likely disdain for his commander in chief.
But here we have an intelligence failure. Charlottesville may well have been a false flag operation. So was the "hoax" at Silveria's academy. Intelligence must be timely and adequate. Silveria was spot-on with time but dismally inadequate despite plenty of open source information, aka "news".
The general ranted himself into an ambush.
Wonder why we don't win wars?
Colonel David Hackworth coined the term "Perfumed Princes" to describe the leaders who sidestepped the Vietnam disaster and infested the senior ranks, playing the academic or business manager while they squeezed out soldiers on the soggy end.
But Silveria's rant went beyond careerism. Silveria ordered everyone to video his rant on their cell phones to make sure his spiel went prime-time. Everyone from Senator McCain to Joe Biden heaped the praise. The Washington Post opined, "Too bad Trump can't emulate the military when it comes to matters of race."
"Eau de Diversity" is the fab fragrance of the Perfumed Princes as required by the political elite.
Martin Dempsey, 18th chairman of the Army chief of staff, 2011-2015, persisted with the hyphenated American being our strength to the end of his career. Never mind that the attack at Fort Hood in 2009 was perpetrated by a Muslim-American Army psychiatrist-major. Of this, Gen. George W. Casey, Jr. chimed in at the time, "as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse."
The tragedy was that Hasan's behavior had been scaring the pants off his colleagues in Army mental health, of all places, for years. But they understand. Diversity comes first.
The tragedy was that the Army maintained that firing some 140 rounds in a medical processing center while yelling "Allahu akbar" was "workplace violence" until 2015, when a funding bill forced the Perfumed Princes to reclassify the incident as "combat-related." Until then, all the dozens of victims had been denied appropriate benefits and the Purple Heart, thirteen awarded posthumously.
Marine staff sergeant Joseph Chamblin was punished for having urinated on a Taliban corpse five years ago. The conviction was overturned this November, after discovering that then-general Amos had interfered in the judicial proceeding. Amos wanted this sort of thing "crushed."
Chamblin maintains that he made the incriminating video as a propaganda ploy, "because if an infidel touches the body, they're not going to Mecca or paradise." This is right out of Brigadier General John Pershing's successful tactics in the Philippines, 1909-1913, not to mention Clausewitz's concept of "the will" and of knowing one's enemy. Of course, the opponents are "diverse," or they wouldn't be at war to begin with.
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