Free Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show by Edmund R. Schubert

right man to command the International Fleet during the final campaign. I was told that there would be a search for an adequate replacement, but I knew better.
    “I knew that any ‘search’ would be perfunctory or illusory. You were betting everything on me. However, I also know how the military works. Those who made the decision to rely on me would be long since retired before I came back. And the closer we got to the time of my return, the more the new bureaucracy would dread my arrival. When I got there, I would find myself at the head of a completely unfit military organization whose primary purpose was to prevent me from doing anything that might cost somebody his job. Thus I would be powerless, even if I was retained as a figurehead. And all the pilots who gave up everything they knew and loved on Earth in order to go out and confront the Formics in their own space would be under the actual command of the usual gang of bureaucratic climbers.
    “It always takes six months of war and a few dreadful defeats to clear out the deadwood. But we don’t have time for that in this war, any more than we did in the last one. My insubordination fortunately ended things abruptly. This time, though, if we lose any battle then we have lost the war. We will have no second chance. We have no margin of error. We can’t afford to waste time getting rid of you—you, the idiots who are watching me right now, the idiots who are going to let the human race be destroyed in order to preserve your pathetic bureaucratic jobs.
    “So I reprogrammed my ship’s navigational program so that I have complete control over it. You can’t override my decision. And my decision is this: I am not coming back. I will not decelerate and turn around. I will keep going on and on.
    “My plan was simple. Without me to count on as your future commander, you would have no choice but to search for a new one. Not go through the motions, but really search.
    “And I think you must have guessed that this was my plan, because you started letting me get messages from Lieutenant Graff.
    “So now I have the problem of trying to make sense of what you’re doing. My guess is that Graff is trained as a shrink. Perhaps he works as an intelligence analyst. My guess is that he is actually very bright and innovative and has got spectacular results at…at something. So you decided to see if he could get me back on track. Only he is exactly the kind of wild man that terrifies you. He’s smarter than you, and so you have to make sure you keep him from getting the power to do anything that looks to you like it might be dangerous. And since everything remotely effective will frighten you, his main project has been figuring out how to get around you in order to establish honest communication between him and me.
    “So here we are, at something of an impasse. And all the power is in your hands at this moment. So let me tell you your choices. There are only two of them.
    “The first choice is the hard one. It will make your skin crawl. Some of you will go home and sleep for three days in fetal position with your thumbs in your mouths. But there’s no negotiation. This is what you’ll do:
    “You’ll give Lieutenant Graff real power. Don’t give him a high rank and a desk and a bureaucracy. Give him genuine authority. Everything he wants, he gets. Because the whole reason he is alive will be this: to find the best possible commander for the fleets that will decide the future of the human race.
    “To do this he first has to find out how to identify those with the best potential. You’ll give him all the help he asks for. All the people he asks for, regardless of their rank, training, or how much some idiot admiral hates or loves them.
    “Then Graff will figure out how to train the candidates he identifies. Again, you’ll do whatever he wants. Nothing is too expensive. Nothing is too difficult. Nothing requires a single committee meeting to agree. Everybody in the IF and