This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 24th, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When President Obama accepted the resignation of General Stanley McChrystal, both men affirmed the principle of civilian control of the military.

McChrystal offered his resignation after troubling comments aimed at the White House from his

staff and himself emerged in a story about the war in Afghanistan.

And sad though it may be this event may serve to refocus attention on an Afghan mission

badly in need of coherence.

So says Chris Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.

Well, it's very rare for a senior military leader to be relieved of command in wartime and although President Obama has now done it twice

because he relieved General McKiernan last year and replaced him with

General McChrystal.

This was, General McCrellan was not relieved for cause per se.

He was not relieved because of any particular dispute with the civilian leadership.

They were looking for new blood, so to speak.

This was clearly, this incident of replacing

General McChrystal was in response to this Rolling Stone

article, which I encourage everyone to read. It's really quite striking. I think

what's most important is that even people who are inclined to be very critical of

President Obama and kind of reflexively jump to the defense of military

leaders, there was very little of that this time around.

It was clear just from the nature of the conversations that were going on in his presence.

Again, not always out of his, in fact, very rarely words out of his mouth, but his staff was clearly very disdainful of the civilian chain of command

...