Without Hesitation by General (Ret.)
Hugh Shelton
Hugh
Shelton grew up in Speed, North Carolina, and married his high school
sweetheart. He attended North Carolina
State University and enrolled in ROTC.
He went on active service in February 1964, and never looked back. He rose through the ranks, a conscientious
and apolitical special forces specialist, ending up as
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1997 until three weeks after 9/11.
Shelton became a Green Beret and served in the secret Project
Delta force during 1967, leaving just before the Tet
offensive. He was a competent and
fearless soldier. He loved to sky dive,
almost dying in front of his wife on his first public exhibition when his
parachute malfunctioned. And this love of free falling through the air was what
kept him going in spite of everything.
Without
Hesitation is an excellent tour of the nuts and bolts of war fighting
in the twenty-first century. It is also
an exoneration of the competence of the professional military and intelligence
services, putting the responsibility for the disasters of 9/11, Afghanistan and
Iraq right where it belongs, on the politicians. If anyone is naïve enough to still believe
that Bush thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, this book shows that
Bush was determined to get rid of Saddam Hussein “at a time of our choosing.” Rather than wasting time reading the
self-serving lies of Bush and Rumsfeld, Shelton’s life is a lesson in paying
attention to detail and the disasters that result from decision-making by self-serving
ignoramuses, incapable of admitting mistakes.
Shelton is not a great writer,
and he had to have the help of two professionals to get this 500 page book into
readable shape. For anyone interested in contemporary foreign policy and
national defense, this book is indispensable for getting up to speed. Shelton’s
book reminds me a lot of Robert Murphy’s Diplomat
Among Warriors. Murphy was the chief State
Department official who trotted around the globe meeting with foreign leaders
on behalf of the United States. He was
the last civil servant to perform this function before the President and
Secretary of State started doing this work themselves.
While Without
Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior is
an appropriate description of Henry Hugh Shelton’s life, because of the context
in which his journey takes place, a more appropriate title might be Warrior Among Diplomats. He is the professional military counterpart
to the Secretary of state. Shelton spent
much of his time as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs flying around the world in his
own Boeing 707, planes that had been Air Force One during the Kennedy, Johnson,
Nixon and Carter administrations, meeting with his military counterparts in
other nations. How many people know that
the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has his own private jet? The institutional
conflict between the need for secrecy for security purposes and the need for
transparency for democratic decision-making, means
most people are woefully ignorant of the actual mechanics of modern
combat. Shelton’s book is an attempt to
educate people, but, given the Bushes expertise in counterprogramming, I fear
Shelton’s book will not get the exposure it needs and deserves.
Someone once said that every soldier above the rank of
colonel is a political appointment; Shelton is the exception that proves this
rule. Shelton is a straight arrow, a mustang, who
could only have risen to the highest military office because of luck and war. Boris Yeltsin was once asked how he got to be
President of Russia. He answered, “By
accident.” Shelton is such an accidental
leader, but the United States needs many more such accidents.