It’s rare when the government actually fires someone. Most of the time it uses all the dirty tricks it has at its disposal. Same with big companies too. They’re all similar in how they operate nowadays. So it always comes as a big relief that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates actually had the cajones to do it the old fashioned way, and fire a couple of scumbags. My hat’s off to Gates for being up front about what happened and practically executing these two guys is a beautiful thing.
The top Air Force guys who screwed up big time and are being handed their heads are Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne and his Chief of Staff Michael Moseley.
There are just so many times you can get caught steering contracts to retired generals and get away with it. That’s pretty normal stuff so the idea is, do as much illegal stuff as you want and we’ll all have a don’t ask don’t tell mechanism with dealing with it.
However, when you send Taiwan major stuff you’re not supposed to have sent there, obviously someone’s up to no good. Looks like the Defense Secretary, who’s always the last to know what’s really going on under him, somehow found out. Now that’s really weird.
And for him to do nothing, although that’s normal, it looks like Gates must not be normal. I guess he’s realizing there’s going to be an election soon, so it’s good to make a few headlines on your own for something you didn’t do wrong.
How Moseley and Wynne got off the hook when they illegally gave a contract to Strategic Message Solutions (SMS), a company connected to a retired general, I can’t say. They just got little notes put in the files for the kind of thing most of us would get fired and prosecuted for.
Last year Gates fired Army Secretary Francis Harvey. I guess he’s finally learning how it’s done.
