A military perspective on Gen. McChrystal’s gaffes

General Stanley McChrystal is in quite a pickle, after comments from him and his aides insulting Obama administration officials were published in Rolling Stone magazine, by writer Michael Hastings, who spoke on our show yesterday:

“I was with General McChrystal when he checked his Blackberry, and he said, ?oh no, not another email’ from Holbrooke, Richard Holbrooke, who’s the special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. And then he said, ?I don’t even want to read it.'”

Jack Jacobs is a retired U.S. Army colonel, and he believes that there was a culture of indiscipline in McChrystal’s headquarters and a major malfunction in the ranks between President Obama and the general. Ret. Col. Jacobs says that the president has not been perceived as being at the top of the chain of command, so he has to now establish the fact that he is, in fact, the commander in chief. “If I was the president, I would just call everybody in all at once and tell them how to do it,” Jacob says, “Just get everything straight. The president has done a very poor job of being commander in chief.”