Army Taps Controversial Generals: What McMaster & Mangum Mean For The Future

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/02/army-promotes-controversial-generals-what-mcmaster-mangum-mean-for-the-future/

Army Taps Controversial Generals: What McMaster & Mangum Mean For The Future
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
on February 19, 2014 at 4:00 AM

(UPDATED 6:30 pm) HUNTSVILLE, ALA.: The ever-beleaguered Army has a reputation — not undeserved — for being bland, conformist, and bureaucratic, an organization where brilliant mavericks are forced to retire at colonel and the guys who make general don’t rock the boat. Just ask any of the long-serving and long-suffering officers convening here in Huntsville, home of the massive Army Materiel Command, for the Association of the US Army’s annual winter conference.

But it looks like 12 years of war and three years of budget chaos may be able to shake things up. One sign of the times is that the Army plans to promote two generals who are smart guys with enemies.

H.R. McMaster is the most notorious name here, and we’ll get to him — but let’s take the less famous one first: Maj. Gen. (soon to be Lt. Gen.) Kevin Mangum. A helicopter pilot who once commanded the 160th SOAR, the Army’s elite Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Since 2011 he’s headed the Army’s aviation center at Fort Rucker, Alabama, the central temple to which all Army helicopter personnel return again and again throughout their careers.

In recent months, however, Mangum has had the unglamorous and grueling job of making the case for major cuts. As the high priest of the cash-strapped Army aviation community, he’s had to sell his flock on a 2015 budget plan — one still awaiting White House approval and certain to face a fight on Capitol Hill — that would retire almost 900 helicopters over the next five years.