The facts are that Major Hasan, a Muslim, shot and killed 13 fellow Service members at Fort Hood. It is also a fact that he was one of the weaker students at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.
Someone noted that Major Hasan may not be about terrorism, may not be about a too PC Army, but may just be about bureaucratic inertia:
- Unwillingness to get rid of an officer in which a lot of training time and money had been invested;
- The unwillingness of doctors to sanction other doctors; and
- Some political correctness about Hasan being a Muslim-but the latter will not turn out to have been the primary cause.
This also has serious implications for the Health Care Reform effort. As it is there is insufficient competition in the Health Care providing industry, thus allowing the less competent to carry on. Once it becomes part of a larger Federal bureaucracy, the tendencies for problem health care providers to slip through will increase.
Regards — Cliff
4 comments:
...And to readers unfamiliar with the military or its promotion system, I want to add a point about "not rocking the boat."
I've seen cases where EGREGIOUS security violations have gone more or less unpunished..by and large, things like gender, race, and religion were non-factors, but it basically boiled down to someone higher up who didn't want to make waves for the command or himself.
If you don't report it, it didn't happen.
If it didn't happen, it must mean everything's okay at that command.
If everything's okay, they must have a great skipper at the helm (or insert appropriate Air Force or Army term).
This doesn't explain everything but it's important to mention..
..it goes against the built-in incentive structure for any one person to make an issue of any one other person's performance...it's WAY easier to bury your head in the sand.
That's probably not too different from a big corporation or another gov't bureaucracy, but hey, the military is what I know (really all that I know) so I had to pipe up..
It has long been the tradition of the services to take an officer who is not up to standard and to narrow his scope of work increasingly until they find a job that fits the persons capacity and then give them a 10 on their OER and hope that some Board will eventually not promote them.
Where is the old Strategic Air Command philosophy when we need it?? We need folks like Whip Wilson (aka "Sundown") who was known to have fired an installation Catholic priest for numerous unspecified failings.....and a physician whose attitude he didn't "like." It wasn't that folks "reported" stuff to him. He LOOKED for it because he knew a weak link would break the chain. In SAC, lots of aspiring DO's, CV's, CC's, and other command wannabe's just disappeeared and were never heard from again. And if you had ANYTHING in your background that even SUGGESTED security risk......new employment elsewhere was your only choice.
But..today nobody is REALLY bad......they are just misguided, or of another belief system that we must respect, or different in some other way...and well..you know about the need for diversity.....
Regards,
Neal
Neal, I'm glad you piped up there...when I commented, I was like, I know there's an Air Force Chief Master Sergeant who reads this blog, and I want to hear it from his angle.
Lance said it well, too...eventually you get to what they do for Homer Simpson when the nuclear inspectors come -- "Mr. Simpson, sit in the basement and watch this bee to make sure it doesn't leave the jar." Because every OER makes it sound like the guy walks on water, however, I've never understood how they differentiate the really good guys from the incompetent ones.
With one particular security incident, the CO's reasoning for non-punishment was "I don't want to throw my guy under the bus." Funny, I always thought that expression applied when you took people who DIDN'T do anything wrong but screwed them over because it saved you, NOT when you're punishing someone for an actual screw-up.
Post a Comment