Once, Army Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley's superiors wrote that he was a "must-select" for command and promotion to full colonel. Then Dooley taught a class to senior U.S. officers musing about a "total war" on Islam, which the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Martin Dempsey, shut down. Now, Dooley has his next assignment – deep in the bowels of the Army bureaucracy, far from command.

Dooley's Army career has been in jeopardy after he received an administrative reprimand for his elective course at the Joint Forces Staff College, which discussed using "Hiroshima"-style tactics against Islam's holiest cities as part of a "total war." But the Army didn't fire Dooley. It sent him to bureaucratic limbo instead.

On Nov. 1, Dooley was assigned to Fort Eustis, Virginia at the Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC), Danger Room has confirmed, one of the warren of offices where the Army thinks about the future of land warfare. Specifically, Dooley works in the Lethality Branch of the Maneuver, Aviation & Soldier Division. Dooley doesn't actually use any experimental weaponry: He pushes paper on the development of ground robots, new sensors and other stuff to other Army offices. It took several ARCIC public-affairs officers three days to substantively describe what it is Dooley does.

Dooley's supporters feared the Army would stick him in precisely such a bureaucratic backwater. In October, Rep. Duncan Hunter and Rep. Thomas Rooney warned that the Army's reprimand endangered Dooley's "reputation and his future in the service."

In April, Dempsey's aides who oversee military education shut down Dooley's elective. The course taught senior officers that "there is no such thing as 'moderate Islam'" and considered the "historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, [and] Nagasaki" as applicable in such "total war" against the religion. Dempsey called Dooley's course "totally objectionable."

Dooley's response was to go after Dempsey. He hired a law firm that portrayed him as a free-speech martyr and threatened to sue the Chairman. (It hasn't.) It also published Dooley's earlier performance reviews, ones that called him a "professional, innovative and enthusiastic officer."

Dooley's lawyer, Richard Thompson, declined comment for this story. Now it's on Dooley to figure out if he can resurrect his Army career or let it die a bureaucratic death.