Fallon Chimes In

I have been looking for this story as an answer to the curious reporting last week. Navy Times is running an article on Admiral Fallon's response to some recent questionable reporting, and he doesn't sound very happy.

Fallon was clearly irked by the stories about his supposed disagreements with Petraeus over the pace of that withdrawal and all-around disdain for the Army general published in outlets ranging from The Washington Post to various blogs. One story cited an unnamed senior official who said “bad relations” between Fallon and Petraeus was the “understatement of the century.” Another quoted Pentagon sources as saying Fallon openly derided Petraeus during their first meeting last March after Fallon took the CentCom reins.

The latter story particularly galled Fallon, who called it “scurrilous,” adding that the characterizations of a dysfunctional relationship with Petraeus are “just absurd.”

That Gareth Porter article pissed me off too, clearly a hit job by someone who I doubt has ever met the Admiral, much less researched his character in any way. I have reviewing this guys articles on Navy affairs and cannot find a single one that makes any sense at all, each of them with made up details that simply don't add up.

With sources that claim clairvoyance to thinking or have access to the minutes of discussions on other continents, call me a healthy skeptic.

While I see the hitjob against Fallon for what it is, the Navy Times article appears to reinforce my belief that Fallon has a different vision for the region than one of Bush. I found this comment telling:

Fallon, to whom Petraeus reports, does not deny that the talks leading up to Petraeus’s report and recommendations for future strategy included some lively arguments. “Everybody’s going to have a difference of opinion,” Fallon said. “We are where we want to be right now. How we got there is our business.”

Fallon became popular because of how he changed the tone between the US and China after that EP-3 incident in 2001. Few people outside the Navy remember that incident today, lost in the pre-9/11 world, but it is noteworthy that interaction between the US Navy and China derive directly from the fallout of that incident, and Fallon ran the show.

It is also noteworthy how Fallon ran the GWOT in the South Pacific, a theater in the larger war most Americans know virtually nothing about, but where the US and allies are kicking the snot out of the bad guys. By expanding influence in places like Singapore and leveraging soft power in the Philippines, the US has quietly concentrated pressure on extremest in the theater without generating much if any headlines, a model difficult to apply to the Middle East with troops engaged in mass on the ground.