Will bring to the job: A 38-year career in the Army and a reputation as a hero to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for having told the Senate Armed Services Committee, more than a month before the United States invasion of Iraq, that occupying that country would take “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers.” That was far more than the secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, said were needed. He was also prescient about how ethnic tensions would contribute to unrest after Saddam Hussein was toppled. The testimony effectively ended his career, with the deputy secretary of defense, Paul D. Wolfowitz, complaining that he had been “wildly off the mark.” The Pentagon named his replacement more than a year before his scheduled retirement. But as Iraq descended into chaos, his estimate became one of the most-quoted observations about the war.
Is linked to Mr. Obama by: A shared view that the Iraq war was botched by the Bush administration.
In his own words: “Beware the 12-division strategy for a 10-division Army. Our soldiers and families bear the risk and the hardship of carrying a mission load that exceeds what force capabilities we can sustain, so we must alleviate risk and hardship by our willingness to resource the mission requirement.” (His retirement speech, June 11, 2003.)
Used to work as: Army chief of staff from 1999 until his retirement in 2003; commander of the forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1997-98; various posts with the Army in Germany and Southern Europe; two tours in Vietnam, as a forward observer with an artillery battalion and later a base commander. He was seriously wounded twice in Vietnam. He was also an instructor at West Point.
Carries as baggage: He has drawn criticism from people who thought he should have pushed his warning on Iraq more forcefully, even though as Army chief of staff he was not in the chain of command for conducting the war. In April 2006, asked about the criticism, he told Newsweek, “Probably that’s fair. Not my style.”
Biography: Born Nov. 28, 1942, in Lihue, Hawaii, of Japanese ancestry ... master’s degree in English at Duke University ... after graduation from West Point received the Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Start and the Purple Heart ... he and his wife, Patty, have two adult children, Lori and Ken.