Sending In The Marine Tough-Talking General May Be Just The Thing To Force The Joint Chiefs Of Staff Into Future
He’s blasted the military’s top-heavy bureaucracy, enraged the Air Force by appearing to put down air power, and at times collided with his service’s boss, the Marine commandant.
For this crockery-breaking candor, the Clinton administration may soon give Gen. John J. Sheehan a job usually reserved for calm, conciliatory personalities: chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Sheehan, the imposing 6-foot-2-inch Marine who now runs the powerful Norfolk, Va.-based Atlantic Command, has clearly caught the attention of the reform-minded Defense Secretary William S. Cohen. And aides say President Clinton would like the splash he’d get by replacing retiring chairman Gen. John Shalikashvili with a Marine, which would be a first in the post’s half-century history.
But before filling the post later this spring, Cohen and Clinton must first wrestle with a few questions: Is picking a boat-rocker the best way to lead the military services toward the change they sorely need? And is Sheehan’s brand of reform the same as theirs?
Whatever the choice, insiders say, it will reveal much about the path the new defense secretary plans to take in his attempt to reshape the Pentagon for a new age.
Sheehan, 56, a Boston native and decorated Vietnam veteran, faces a field of skilled and sophisticated rivals for the job. They are believed to include Air Force Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, vice chairman of the joint chiefs; and Gen. Ronald R. Fogleman, also of the Air Force.
Yet while others would be tiptoeing in a competition like this, Sheehan hasn’t changed his outspoken ways. To the contrary.
Sheehan has stepped on the toes of the chief of his own service, Marine Commandant Gen. Charles Krulak, by calling for a slimming of the corps’ top ranks just as Krulak was seeking more generals. (Krulak got his way.)
And he has riled those who see the Air Force as the pre-eminent service in the new age of war by arguing that ground troops will continue to be needed to resolve every war.
“Combat in urban areas does not require airplanes,” Sheehan said in February. “Combat in an urban areas … requires tough infantrymen.”
Sheehan has “sort of a typical Northeastern kind of personality: He can break the crockery; he can get people excited,” said retired Gen. Carl E. Mundy Jr., the former Marine commandant. Sheehan also has a record, Mundy added, of getting things done.
In the Persian Gulf War, Sheehan oversaw the amphibious planning for the 17,000 Marines who landed off Kuwait. He also won favorable notice as the operations officer at the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the successful intervention in Haiti in 1994; he’s still involved with the Haiti deployment in his job at Atlantic Command.
In his current job, which he has held since fall 1994, Sheehan has authority over 80 percent of U.S. combat forces. When an overseas crisis develops, the Atlantic Command chooses the forces that will go, knits them together, and sends them to the scene.
Military experts who want the Pentagon to shake off its old Cold War ways are rooting for Sheehan from the sidelines. But even some admirers say that his understanding of the system’s weaknesses is keener than his notion of how to remedy them.
“He’s a drive-by defense intellectual: He sprays everybody with his keen insights and observations, then he’s gone,” says John Hillen III, a former Army officer now with the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “His thoughts are incomplete.”
If Sheehan is chosen, it will mark a shift from a low-key style found not only in Shalikashvili, but also in predecessors Gen. Colin Powell and Adm. William Crowe.
One former defense official who knows all the candidates said Cohen’s decision may simply come down to which style he believes will be most effective in navigating the course to reform.
xxxx STEPPING ON TOES In the past year or so, Gen. John Sheehan has: Proposed that with no rival superpower in sight at the moment, the military should consider skipping the entire next generation of tactical fighters, saving billions of dollars. Annoyed fellow Marines by arguing that Army units - rather than Marines - should be used on some aircraft carriers. Denounced the huge concentration of 150,000 military personnel around Washington, pointing out that there are only 129,000 sailors in the entire Atlantic fleet. Decried what he sees as the excess staffing of NATO, contending that only 15 percent of the command headquarters costs are needed for their core operations. Declared that the kind of low-cost, casualty-free overseas peacekeeping missions that some lawmakers and average Americans hope for simply “can’t be done.”