Highest Ranking Woman At Pentagon Resigns

In which I continue to be proven right:WASHINGTON - Michele Flournoy, the most senior female Pentagon official in history, told The Associated Press on Monday she is stepping down as the chief policy adviser to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.In an interview in her Pentagon office, Flournoy said she feels compelled to "rebalance" her personal life after three years in one of the most demanding national security jobs in Washington.From the American Red Cross to the Supreme Court, more and more institutions of power in the nation's capital are seeing women take the lead."By nature it is an all-consuming job and it does take a toll on the family," she said, adding that she considers her time as the undersecretary of defense for policy as "probably the highlight of my professional life." She was the first woman ever to hold the post when she started the job in February 2009, two years after co-founding and serving as the first president of the Center for a New American Security, a prominent think tank.Her husband, W. Scott Gould, is the deputy secretary of Veterans Affairs, responsible for a nationwide system of health care services, benefits programs, and national cemeteries for veterans and their dependents. They have children aged 14, 12 and 9."Right now I need to recalibrate a little bit and invest a little bit more in the family account for a while," she said. "We've been going flat out for more than three years," including the period after the 2008 election in which both she and her husband were part of the Obama transition team - she at the Pentagon and he at the Department of Veterans Affairs.Flournoy said her children understand that their parents' hard-charging jobs are "once-in-a-lifetime opportunities" at an important juncture in American history, but it has required difficult trade-offs."You can make the sacrifice for a period, but at some point the cost becomes too high and you need to rebalance," she said.Good for her. Her family is far more important than working for a bunch of nameless, faceless bureaucrats for the rest of her life. She won't regret the decision to spend more time with her husband and raising her kids when she's older. Now isn't it interesting how when women finally achieve the pinnacle of earthly power, they leave it behind for one reason or another? "Stress", "wanna spend time with the family", "wasn't what I wanted", etc are the common explanations. What's happening is that many women that achieved it all are realizing they just don't want it all, because it isn't what they really wanted in the first place. Virtually every woman on planet Earth wants a family, and the only way to prevent that is to tell them for decades that it's not really what they want, to shame them out of it, to convince them to get a career, or all of the above. By the time they hit their 30s, they get baby fever and desperately want marriage and kids, but the chances of that happening diminished rapidly when she left her late-20s because men prefer young women in their most fertile and attractive years, not aged and infertile women well-beyond their prime. This Pentagon official already has kids and made the wise choice of leaving a decaying institution in favor of her family (whether or not that was her true motivation is irrelevant at this point, she'll be with her family more anyway). And if there's one thing the kids need desperately more of nowadays, it's more time with their families and less time with their teachers, day-care providers, and classmates. Society functioned just fine when women tended the home, her husband, the kids, and/or helped out with the family business. That's not to say that women should never work, only that a majority shouldn't when they're young and most-able to have kids. Later in life when the children are grown is, in my unprofessional and eccentric opinion, perfectly fine if that's what she and her husband want. Nobody ever went to their death bed saying, "By God, I wish I had spent more time at the office."

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