America's Active-Duty Military and Obama: Guardedly Pessimistic

The Military Times polled active-duty service members on how they felt about President-elect Barack Obama. Six out of ten are uncertain or pessimistic. More uncertain than pessimistic, when you look at the numbers:

How Active-Duty U.S. Military Feels About President-Elect Obama
Uncertain	35%
Optimistic	33%
Pessimistic	25%
Don't Know	8%

Follow-up questions showed that America's soldiers were concerned about Obama's time in the military - zero - and his experience leading men and women in uniform - also zero.

It's probably just as well that most of them aren't old enough to remember the Vietnam War, when 'experts' in Washington would give detailed orders to troops in the field. Like taking a hill, regardless of cost, and then retreating: just to show what American soldiers can do.

That sort of clueless micro-management was being used as an example of how not to run an organization, thirty years later, in management journals.

And now America has a young, charming, apparently-idealistic, president; in the middle of a war; with hundreds of thousands of lives at immediate risk; and the fate of western civilization in the balance; and he's a Chicago college professor with absolutely no military experience at all.

Pleasant dreams.

In the news:

• "2008 Military Times poll: Wary about Obama"
  Military Times (January 2, 2008)

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Afterword

Somebody, reading this, may think, 'what do those soldiers know? They're just uneducated minority dupes of the military-industrial complex.'

"Everybody Knows that America's Poor and Minorities are Fighting America's Wars, Right?," part of the "911 Was an Inside Job! Our Boys Need to Know!" post, might be an interesting reality check.