Symbolically perfect. Here’s the guy who presided over the evisceration of the enlisted corps. Massive manpower cuts combined with increasing requirements that made a mockery of the idea that airmen should have time to themselves. And how does he choose to be sent off? With a massive waste of time. The entire Air Staff stood clapping in a hallway, most of them for a man they never met.

These idiotic “clap-outs” have been recently branded as “traditional.” But they are anti-tradition. The real tradition is that when you relinquish a position of high authority, you slip out the back and let your successor have the limelight. These Nixon-esque waves to adoring crowds are unbecoming.

Behold, time thievery at its worst. And now it falls to the next half dozen CMSAFs to fix what this one allowed to happen.