Will the Army ever learn good media relations techniques? Walter Reed as a case study

Military Review, May-June, 2008 by James T. Currie

The Walter Reed episode clearly damaged the Army's credibility. The best approach would have been for Army leaders to understand and accept the reality that WRAMC had issues with its physical plant, with the conditions in which some recuperating Soldiers and Marines were living, and with DOD bureaucratic procedures for designating levels of disability. The Post's accounts never made clear, however, that the Army's medical department was not responsible for these bureaucratic inconveniences. Had the principals involved responded more deliberately, addressing such inaccuracies would have ameliorated the cumulative impact. Instead, their defiance born of dismissive arrogance prevented constructive engagement of the problems themselves. Kiley evinced an attitude that the story was the problem, not the conditions at WRAMC.

On 1 March, the Post reported that the Army had "relieved of duty several low-ranking Soldiers who managed outpatients"--presumably shortly after the initial story had come out. But there was no leadership mea culpa from the Army's medical department. (21) That same day, the higher-level scape-goating began. Weightman was removed as WRAMC commander. However, his firing again compounded the Army's problems because his replacement, Kiley, had been in charge at Walter Reed before becoming Surgeon General in 2004. (22)

The Post's story pointed out that Weightman had only been in command at Walter Reed since August 2006 and had attempted to correct some of the deficiencies he found there. The Post noted that Kiley's appointment "surprised some Defense Department officials because Soldiers, their families, and veterans' advocates have complained that he had long been aware of problems at Walter Reed and did nothing to improve its outpatient care." In an ominous portent, the Post report also observed that Defense Secretary Robert Gates "was not involved in the appointment of Kiley." (23)

By the next day, Army Secretary Harvey was also gone, presumably because of his role in naming Kiley as interim commander at Walter Reed. Secretary Gates was quoted as saying, "The problems at Walter Reed appear to be problems of leadership." Gates, who never served in the military, seems to have understood intuitively that heaping all of the blame on Weightman, while placing Kiley back in charge of Walter Reed, was simply not going to wash.

Kiley, meanwhile, continued to dig in with greater defiance. "I want to defend myself," he said. "It was ... yellow journalism at its worst ..." (24) Almost immediately, Kiley was replaced at Walter Reed by Major General Eric B. Schoomaker, younger brother of the Army's Chief of Staff. (25) However, the damage had been done. The Army had already lost a major general and a service secretary, plus various lower-ranking Soldiers, and the bleeding still had not been stopped.

Secretary Harvey violated a key principle of leadership: find out who is actually responsible before you start firing people. Taking action for its own sake is rarely appropriate, although it seems common enough in Washington. As Secretary of the Army, Harvey should have been more deliberate, realizing that the problems at WRAMC had to have developed over a period of years. Kiley had recently served an entire tour of stewardship, and there had not been enough time since then for those conditions to fester out of nothing.