Outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dempsey Is Leaving At A Time When The U.S. Military Is Facing Numerous Challenges

U.S. President Barack Obama (C) sits down to a meeting with Defense Secretary Ash Carter (L) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff U.S. Army General Martin Dempsey (R), for an update on U.S. efforts against the Islamic State (ISIS), at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia July 6, 2015. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

James Kitfield, Politico: Martin Dempsey’s World Is Falling Apart

The outgoing Joint Chiefs chairman bids farewell to an alliance beset by crises.

BERLIN—As his convoy sliced lights flashing through the busy streets of Berlin on a recent morning, Gen. Martin Dempsey could see a good part of his own career. He could see through the tinted windows of his limousine the bombed out ruins of the World War II-era Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, and the Brandenburg Gate where the Iron Curtain once placed Germany on the front lines of the Cold War—and where as a young Army lieutenant Dempsey helped guard the border against massed Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces. Soon the convoy would arrive at the German Ministry of Defense where Dempsey would be awarded the Knight Commander’s Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany, and lay a wreath to the war dead of Germany’s modern army next to the same building where Adolf Hitler and his Nazi minions once plotted the conquest of Europe.

At the end of a long and storied career in uniform Dempsey was in a reflective mood, and the one reality he could not escape was just how much war and conflict there still was to be fought, and how many memorials to the fallen had yet to be erected.

WNU Editor: This Politico article and analysis focuses on the career and "policy failures" of outgoing Joint Chiefs chairman General Martin Dempsey .... but the person that they should focus on (in regards to policy failures) is his boss .... President Obama.