After years stationed in Europe, Shinseki was assigned to his first senior service job at the Pentagon in July 1996, becoming a three-star general and the deputy Army chief of staff for operations and plans. Less than a year later, Shinseki was given his fourth star by the Clinton administration and awarded a triple-hatted post across the pond. During the next 17 months, he was the commanding general of United States Army Europe, commander of Allied Land Forces Central Europe and the commander of NATO's stabilization force in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Army Chief of Staff

From there, he became the service's 28th vice chief of staff in November 1998, a post he held until July 22, 1999, when President Clinton made him the 34th Army chief of staff.

The Bush administration kept Shinseki as Army chief for several years, through the transition and 9/11. But in the run-up to the Iraq war, tensions between the chief and senior Bush Pentagon appointments started to simmer. The two sides disagreed over how many American troops it would take to topple the regime of then-Iraq President Saddam Hussein. Shinseki argued, publicly at times, that a larger force than the one being considered by the Bush administration would be needed.

As Shinseki told the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2003, he felt the mission would require a force of in "the order of several hundred thousand soldiers; but Bush's war planners, led by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, felt a smaller force could get the job done. Shinseki's prescribed force size 'will prove to be high,'" Rumsfeld said. Rumsfeld's then-deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, added that the Army chief's estimates were "way off the mark" With the relationship severed, Shinseki retired from the Army soon after Baghdad fell in April 2003.

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