Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Worthy of Song

Hey, I remember these people:

Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, a husband-and-wife team of hawkish military analysts, put their jobs at influential Washington think tanks on hold for almost a year to work for Gen. David H. Petraeus when he was the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Provided desks, e-mail accounts and top-level security clearances in Kabul, they pored through classified intelligence reports, participated in senior-level strategy sessions and probed the assessments of field officers in order to advise Petraeus about how to fight the war differently.

Their compensation from the U.S. government for their efforts, which often involved 18-hour workdays, seven days a week and dangerous battlefield visits?

Zero dollars.

And undoubtedly worth every penny, yet still overpaid.

There's a Python Skit in there somewhere.

And, of course, a song.


2 comments:

Harry R. Sohl said...

This old post was the first thing I thought of when I read that.

The second was that their results were predictably as "surge-ish" as could possibly be.

So now, after years of their advice, we have the Kagans perfectly safe in Afghanistan and schoolchildren getting killed in Connecticut.

pansypoo said...

free? how,......unpubliklan.