President Barack Obama’s acceptance of retired Gen. Eric Shinseki’s resignation as director of the Department of Veterans Affairs is a sad end to a brilliant career.

Shinseki is a wounded warrior, a soldier’s general and a decent human who caredfor all who served our nation and were put in harm’s way.

Few understand what he accomplished, and what he attempted to accomplish, in his more than six years at the helm of the VA. For many he is being judged solely by the events that came to light in the last few weeks.

The irony is twofold: First, his worst critics acknowledged that the VA’s structural problems are large, systemic and decades old. Second, Shinseki is the victim of his initial successes and his heroic attempts to address key structural inefficiencies that were preventing our veterans from receiving the very continuum of care they have earned.

Initially, he worked actively alongside the former Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, to shrink the processing time of disability claims of our wounded warriors who were transitioning to the VA system. Just one phase of the process, joint medical evaluation boards, was originally designed to cut that process from 120 days to 15.

Ironically, while these initiatives were initially successfully in reducing the backlog of disability claims, they spun up the transition, registration and integration of service members into a VA system that was better equipped for registration and disability claims processing than providing real access to medical care.

The VA worked aggressively to get the veteran population, along with the VA homeless, back into the system so it could provide them services and assistance for shelter. Veterans have now been turning to the VA in droves for assistance. These are not just recent Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, but Vietnam and early Gulf war veterans with increasing bouts of illnesses and disease.

Shinseki recognized the waste of billions of our tax dollars in running two large non-integrated health care patient information systems, in the Department of Defense and the VA. Both were essentially treating the same patient base but at different stages of their lives.

Panetta and Shinseki tried to move both departments toward a single electronic health record system. This is where truculence and bureaucratic protectionism by what Shinseki called both departments’ "mud layers" took hold and mired down the consolidation attempts.

With the annual VA budget increasing by more than 68 percent since 2009 and while succeeding in getting ex-warriors more quickly through the front door of the VA — with thousands now receiving more timely settlement of disability benefits — the structural and organizational access-to-care deficiencies at VA medical facilities were never addressed.

It was the VA administrative mud layers on the backside that betrayed Shinseki with false reporting and fudged metrics on appointment wait times.

It is now clear that the insufficient resources specifically for primary and specialty doctors have been at the root of this problem; the system could never handle the surging demand for medical services.

Instead of tackling this resource problem head on, administrators chose to disregard scheduling protocols and fudge the numbers to meet their performance goals.

For the illustrious general whose life was dedicated to serving all of our veterans, this was the final irony and one of betrayal and humiliation.