Dan, while most of these points are obviously valid, the West Point graduate issue seems trivial to me. Young officers are leaving the service at the highest rate since...the last time the U.S. was fighting a war for more than three minutes. It would defy everything we know about how human beings react to incentives if young officers didn't leave the service at higher rates when the alternative was another combat tour rather than a peace-time posting.

The West Point data are troubling, speaking as a two-decade veteran of the Army. Those losses come at the critical career point of Captain/Major -- just the point where you start knowing things. And it is a higher loss rate than at any time a war lasted more than 3 minutes -- retention rates during the Korean War, for example, were much higher.

And retention can't be helped by today's announcement that the Army is now going to require 15 months Boots on Ground for Iraq tours as the deployed minimum.

Imagine the turbulence in PS departments is (a) the tenure ladder were extended (and could be randomly extended at the chair's whim whenever it suited her/him) and (b) half of all Associate profs left the department after tenuring.

Oh, and the position of War Czar is taken. It's called "Commander-in-Chief."

"Oh, and the position of War Czar is taken. It's called 'Commander-in-Chief.'"

I wondered if that idea seemed strange to anyone else.

Hemlock:

If "retention rates during the Korean War, for example, were much higher," then obviously that suggests the West Point story is quite troubling. But that fact isn't in the article, which says the data only goes back three decades. If you have a link a link to retention rate info on prior years that would be great. That said, the point of the Boston Globe article, that retention rates are much lower now than they were in the preceding thirty years, should be totally unsurprising given the absence of extended combat deployment during that period.

I have often likened Rove to Rasputin, but now we are looking for a czar? A Czar?

The West Point issue is more troubling because I understand in the 90s the army dumped many officers, and there is a gap in the mid ranks today. If the Captains bail now, there may be a gap in the mid ranks for at least another decade. (Hemlock can speak to this better than I) More damage by President Cheney.

I'm a Republican and I voted straight ticket Democrat in Ohio last year, and hope the GOP gets beat to a pulp in 2008. It will take that to get sanity in the party after the Bush/Cheney/Rove era.

"Czar" is the name the media have given to the position the administration has evidently be trying to fill. It is also a customary, though unofficial, title given to people appointed to deal with specific policy problems that do not fall entirely within the jurisdiction of one government department.

In the American government, a "czar" is really more of a coordinator. For purposes of public relations, he is supposed to have a monopoly on statements about the problem he has been assigned to address (thus, in the 1970s, successive "energy czars" dominated media coverage of the energy crisis, and later "drug czars" got a platform to talk publicly about illegal trade in drugs), but he rarely has authority, statutory or otherwise, to order people or agencies in the government to do things.

The Iraq/Afghan war "czar" would be a little different, but maybe only a little. One immediate problem he would have to address is the reluctance of State and some other government departments to order employees to assist the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. The administration has made numerous public statements declaring the importance of economic and political development as a supplement to military operations in both countries, but the military has limited resources with which to facilitate such development and in the absence of direct Presidential intervention cannot order other departments' employees to help.

The "czar" might be thought of as the instrument of that Presidential intervention -- except that the reason a "czar" is thought necessary is that neither the President nor any of his current associates want to have anything to do with that level of detail in the war effort. They also don't want to be in the position of trying to order civilian government employees (who, unlike military personnel, can quit) to enter a combat zone on behalf of a mission that has been defined with more urgency than clarity. They absolutely do not want another voice within the administration on the big policy questions -- how long do we stay in Iraq, how close do we operate to the Afghan/Pakistani border, how, when we leave, do we leave, and so forth.

What President Bush and his associates appear to want, in short, is something close to a traditional "czar" -- without the public relations responsibilities. He would be responsible for coordinating the efforts of agencies who will not be required to cooperate with him, to get into Iraq and Afghanistan civilians who do not wish to go, on behalf of objectives ill-defined now that he will have no role in defining later.

No wonder Bush is having trouble filling this position. I wouldn't want it either.

I have often likened Rove to Rasputin, but now we are looking for a czar?

Yeah, maybe, but no one ever called Rove "Texas' famous love machine."

I have often likened Rove to Rasputin, but now we are looking for a czar?

Yeah, maybe, but no one ever called Rove Texas' famous love machine.

I simply cannot believe that the government gets the return on its investment on service academy graduates in five years. What this may mean for the future of the service academies is anyone's guess.

McCain's VMI speech.