Steve Womack may be a congressman—we can’t all be perfect—but let’s not forget that he’s also served his country in the military, having directed the University of Arkansas’ Army ROTC program at Fayetteville and retiring as a colonel in this state’s Army National Guard in 2009 after 30 years of service. He not only knows the rules but has made quite a few of them. And has learned that there are always those who will try to game the system. Which has kept him on his toes.
No wonder The Hon. and honorable Steve Womack got a well-deserved promotion to chairman of the board of visitors of this country’s military training school at West Point, which he describes with more than a little justification as “the premier leadership-development institution in the world.” And if there’s anything the world needs now, as it regularly has in the past, it’s American leadership.
It took a while for a peace-loving president named Thomas Jefferson to realize, among a number of other things, that trading with world powers would be enough to assure this still young republic’s future. Those world powers, notably Great Britain and Napoleonic France, played him like a fiddle, and the result was not peace but war. Once again these (not so) United States of America have a chief executive who seems to believe that he can make a mutually satisfying deal with the world’s leading tyrants and all will be hunky-dory. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now, which is why the country still needs a strong military. Or at least a stronger one than it has now.
West Point has given this country such outstanding leaders in war and peace as U.S. Grant, Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower, all quite different kinds of leaders but with the same devotion to God, country and the school’s own long gray line. So congratulations to both Steve Womack and West Point as both go marching on.