A Note about Army HRC

by: Brandon Friedman

Tue Jul 28, 2009 at 12:23:15 PM EDT


Throughout all the mayhem over involuntary IRR mobilizations, one thing that always really angered me was that the commander of the Army's Human Resources Command (HRC)--who'd served in that position for the previous two years--had never deployed.  Here you had an organization charged with making decisions about who would be involuntarily pulled from their civilian lives and, in most cases, sent back to Iraq or Afghanistan for a second or third time, and the final say in the matter was decided by an officer who hadn't even gone once.  Legal?  Of course.  That commander's fault?  Probably not.  Appropriate?  Again, probably not.

If Joe has been deployed to combat twice, has a Purple Heart, and is now in school, the last thing Joe wants to hear is an officer who's never gone anywhere telling him that it's his duty to leave his family in order to go back a third time.  It's just antithetical to the whole "lead from the front" thing.  And it pisses soldiers off unnecessarily.

So I'm pleased to hear that the new commander of HRC, Col. Louis Wingate, has served in Iraq twice.  There's nothing about this fact that makes up for the bizarre, disorganized mobilization techniques utilized by HRC, but at least it's something.  And maybe Col. Wingate's experiences in a combat zone will affect his decisions in how HRC runs its shop--for the better.

Brandon Friedman :: A Note about Army HRC
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