Clueless

A friend of mine, Joe Bergeman, once told me a story about GM executives. During the 1980s, Detroit automobiles were notorious for poor quality and design. The Japanese cars were rapidly gaining market share due in large part because their cars were more reliable than Detroit’s. As a way to try to understand the problem, the executive would ride to work or wherever in a GM car, and thus thought he or she understood the ownership experience of such cars. According to Joe, part of the problem was that the executive would be driven to work by a chauffer. The chauffer would drop off the executive, and if anything was going wrong, it would get fixed during the day and the executive never saw the problem. Even executives that weren’t chauffeured could get car problems easily fixed. Thus, the executives really had no clue as to what was wrong with their cars and why people were buying Japanese cars. Everything seemed fine to them.

Likewise our senior military leaders. We had a visit today by a military bigwig in the National Guard command, one of the biggest wigs, in fact. His visit was not announced until yesterday, and his itinerary is not published, as security measures. If he were to get killed, captured or ambushed it would be big news and would reflect badly on the security situation in Iraq.

I wonder what he thinks he’s doing here. Talking to combat commanders is important, of course, but that’s what phones are for. I suspect he thinks he’s getting a feel for what soldiers are experiencing. He probably is, a little bit. He is outside briefly as he goes from location to location, so he smells the air and feels the heat and breathes the dust, but only for a minute between leaving an air conditioned building and getting into his air conditioned up-armored SUV, so there’s that.

Eating with the troops is a time honored political tradition for leaders to get in touch with the soldiers. Remember President Bush sneaking into Iraq for a photo op with soldiers on Thanksgiving Day? Same deal.

So, for lunch today we had lobster, not our usual lunch fare, believe me. They had a special serving line set for the bigwig and his straphangers, which included items that weren’t being served to the soldiers today. A bunch of soldiers and airmen were rounded up to sit at tables near him, but he sat with leadership, not with the run of the mill soldiers and airmen. Not sure why they round up special troops to sit near a visiting bigwig, since the chow hall is full of such troops anyway.

The bigwig’s security contingent was in civilian clothes, and thus were probably contract security, not soldiers. He came and left through a door that is usually locked and not available to soldiers. He stood up and just left his plate instead of depositing it in the trash like everyone else does. He wasn’t even wearing the same uniform as us. He was wearing the new version.

Plato offered the allegory of the cave. People living outside the cave looked in, and thought they knew all about the people living in the cave, because they could see in. What they were seeing, however, was shadows of the people living in the cave, thrown onto the cave walls by flickering firelight. No real understanding at all.

So, no doubt Mr. Bigwig will head back and give his opinion of morale and living conditions in Iraq. Senators and Representatives from the US Congress have made similar visits. Fun and exciting for them, expensive for the taxpayer, misleading to policy makers, and useless to the troops. Everything is fine, just like American cars made in the 1980s.