John Shalikashvili

John Shalikashvili (born June 27, 1936, Warsaw, Poland—died July 23, 2011, Tacoma, Washington, U.S.) was a U.S. Army officer who served as supreme allied commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Europe (1992–93) and as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1993–97).

Shalikashvili was descended from Georgian aristocracy. His maternal grandfather was a general in the tsarist Russian army, and his father was an officer in the Polish army until its defeat by the Germans in 1939, after which he joined a German-backed battalion of ethnic Georgians. Shalikashvili and his mother fled to Germany in 1944 to escape advancing Soviet troops. When Shalikashvili was age 16, he and his family immigrated to the United States, settling in Peoria, Illinois, where he learned English, partly by watching John Wayne films. He was drafted into the army as a private in 1958 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1959.

Following service at a variety of domestic posts throughout the 1960s, he was sent to Vietnam in 1968. By then a major, Shalikashvili served as a senior district adviser to South Vietnamese forces. Rising steadily through the ranks, he spent most of the 1970s and ’80s serving in various capacities in Europe. In 1991 Shalikashvili took command of Operation Provide Comfort—the campaign to airlift food and medical supplies to Kurdish refugees in Iraq in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War. He won praise for his leadership of the multinational force that not only helped supply the Kurds but also protected them from aggression by Ṣaddām Ḥussein’s Iraqi forces.

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In 1992 Shalikashvili took up the post of supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, dealing with the changes wrought by the end of the Cold War. The conflict in the former Yugoslavia threatened to spread throughout the Balkan region, while the collapse of the Soviet empire had created a power vacuum in that area. Shalikashvili performed ably in this role, and, when Gen. Colin Powell announced that he was going to step down as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Pres. Bill Clinton tapped Shalikashvili to succeed him. At Shalikashvili’s Senate confirmation hearings in September 1993, he seemed more willing to employ the threat of force as an instrument of policy than Powell had, but he also stressed his belief that U.S. troops should be committed only to regions where the United States had a clearly defined interest. He was unanimously confirmed by the Senate on October 5, 1993, becoming the first immigrant—as well as the first soldier to rise from the enlisted ranks—to hold the top command in the U.S. military.

As chairman, Shalikashvili and the Clinton administration were criticized for failing to use the threat of force to head off the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. The following year, however, U.S. troops were deployed to the Balkans, where the situation had become tenuously stable after the warring parties had agreed to the terms of the Dayton Accords. The U.S. forces, under NATO command, were key in preserving the fragile peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the mission was one of the major successes of Shalikashvili’s term as head of the Joint Chiefs.

He retired from the military in 1997 and went on to serve on the boards of a number of corporations. Shalikashvili entered the political arena in 2004, when he acted as an adviser in the presidential campaign of Democratic nominee John Kerry. In the late 2000s he became a vocal critic of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which theoretically lifted a ban on homosexual service in the armed forces, provided that individuals kept their sexuality private, and resulted in the discharge of thousands of people. He argued that, although he had supported the rule during his time as chairman, the culture within the military had evolved since that time and that the enforcement of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” led to a drain on talent the armed services could not afford.