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Challenging the Generals

By Larry Johnson on August 28, 2007 at 3:13 AM in Current Affairs

Nifty item in the NY Times Sunday Magazine. An article by Fred Kaplan, Challenging the Generals is a lengthy but worth the investment of time. Kaplan writes:

On Aug. 1, Gen. Richard Cody, the United States Army’s vice chief of staff, flew to the sprawling base at Fort Knox, Ky., to talk with the officers enrolled in the Captains Career Course. These are the Army’s elite junior officers. Of the 127 captains taking the five-week course, 119 had served one or two tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, mainly as lieutenants. Nearly all would soon be going back as company commanders. A captain named Matt Wignall, who recently spent 16 months in Iraq with a Stryker brigade combat team, asked Cody, the Army’s second-highest-ranking general, what he thought of a recent article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling titled “A Failure in Generalship.” The article, a scathing indictment that circulated far and wide, including in Iraq, accused the Army’s generals of lacking “professional character,” “creative intelligence” and “moral courage.”

I encourage you to read the whole thing. A good friend of mine, Dale Ackels, (a retired Army officer at that) has read and commented on Kaplan’s article. Dale is a first rate analyst and spent most of his military career in special operations and is a foreign area specialist (Africa). His remarks offer some important insights that complement Kaplan’s piece.

(the “Tom” in the first sentence is Tom Maerten, a retired Foreign Service Officer and mutual friend who blogs at Vox Verax.)

Tom: I’m much indebted to you for sending me the NY Times piece on LTC Yingling’s article. I’d heard something about it on-line, and still haven’t read it, but I’m familiar with both his conclusions and some of the comments made as a result.

1. The meeting with the CSA at Fort Knox is not the first time young officers have taken their seniors to task over some perceived failure in leadership or general direction. I saw it happen in the Pentagon when Bo Callaway (quite possibly the second dumbest white man of his era) was Secretary of the Army, and it happened indirectly to Westmoreland after the Vietnam War, when he was CSA. He commissioned a study of returning officers with recent combat experience in RVN. What he expected was something he could use to fine tune the post-war Army. What he got was a damning and highly personal indictment of everything he and his peers had done. I don’t know what the other participants said, but if my comments were typical the thing bordered on mutiny. I know the study was never published, and after being introduced with great fanfare it dropped from sight completely. In the intervening 36 years I’ve only seen it referenced once, and that in tones that suggested even mentioning it could be career-threatening. BUT, that movement, that impulse led to Creighton Abrams, Peers, Vessey, Schwarzkopf, Kroesen, Brown (both of them), Vuono, Depuy and a whole host of other men who absorbed the lessons learned in Vietnam and made certain the Army that went into Gulf War I was reformed, rearmed and ready.

The thing that amazed me about Yingling’s piece, and the confrontation at Fort Knox, was the fact they got out. We usually adopt the attitude, “What happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas.” A strong exchange of opinions in this environment usually stays within the walls of the institution where it occurred. This time it didn’t. That tells me someone told Kaplan about it, and that’s probably, on balance, a positive thing. The debate does need to be broadened. I do agree with Kaplan that what happens to McMaster and the Fort Knox five will say a lot about the near-term future of the Army. I’ve been wondering why McMaster didn’t get promoted for 18 months or so, and Kaplan’s explanation is as likely as any.

(On the other hand the Special Forces colonel who led the Northern Front and 5th SFG into Afghanistan is now a major general?? Maybe the crime is being a conventional soldier and acting like an unconventional one? You can be a light fighter or you can be a heavy guy, but you can’t be one and talk like the other?)

2. The Army’s culture war has been a problem since before WW II. Both sides agree on the desired outcome. It’s the how do we get there that’s the problem. With the exception of the Kennedy years the Army’s unconventional warriors have always played second fiddle to the conventional Army, and e-mails I saw from guys in Iraq (in particular) indicate this conflict has been no exception. I think the Big Green Army has always framed the debate in terms of which conflict scenario has the potential be most harmful~to threaten the very existence of the United States as a world power. And for most of my career that would have been a land war on the European landmass, or a general war in Asia. If you set the parameters in those terms unconventional warfare methods and operators will always finish second. The first Gulf War and Iraq vindicated the conventional Army. A theater conflict, with almost unlimited maneuver space, and time to prepare the necessary logistical infrastructure and set the force~it was made to order for those who have resisted increasing the size and capability of our unconventional forces. When VII Corps came thundering out of the desert, 60 miles wide and 120 miles deep, trailing a dust cloud that could be seen from space, it was vindication for those who’ve argued unconventional warfare is not the wave of the future. Under the best of circumstances merely a sideshow in the budget and doctrinal battles fought to prepare the Big Army for the next big test.

I think the truth lies somewhere in between. We need a force with credible capabilities in both arenas. This can’t be a zero sum game. El Salvador, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, the Philippines (all three times), Bosnia (I would guess) and several other recent small-scale conflicts have demonstrated that unconventional methods and/or winning hearts and minds are still valid missions for our forces; indeed that it can’t be accomplished by anyone else. If there is reform afoot in the Army, one of the ways it will manifest itself is in broader acceptance of our nation’s special forces/special operators. There’s room for both.

3. He’s right in that being a foreign area specialist is not the way to promotion. To my knowledge there have only been two promoted to GO in my adult lifetime. If memory serves, I was not one of them. It’s a calling for true believers~and mavericks~and we’ll always be trying to convince our highers (political and military) that the things we know are relevant and worth knowing. South Mog being a classic example. As Ralph Peters calls us, “A regiment of one.”

4. Huba Wass de Czege is exactly as described. I only met him once, at Fort Leavenworth, but I’ve followed his career and voluminous writings, and I think he did pay the price for being a reformer, and doing it just after the Gulf War at a time when the Army didn’t seem to feel reform was required.

5. On the question of holding failed generals accountable. How do you determine who actually failed? Where do you assign blame? To the political leadership who stage-managed this folly, or to the men who may well have expressed their doubts in private, and then went on to meet their constitutionally mandated responsibilities?
Shinseki, Taguba and Petraeus deserve ALL the credit they’re getting for standing up to the political leadership, but it’s impossible to know what most of the others did or didn’t do. I guess we’ll have to wait for Bob Woodward to sort it out, “As Pete Pace knelt to pick up the newspaper on March 31st it suddenly occurred to him that the Secretary might be wrong, but the question in his mind was, ‘What can I, a mere 4-star Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs do about it?’ A question that was to haunt him for the next four years.”

Ah well, I’m starting to have fun with this. Thanx again for sending me the article.
Without the Yinglings, Tagubas, Shinsekis and hundreds of others like them we’re all lost.

  • wethornet

    re: ny times. good article.

    re: dale ackel’s comments. i, a former army officer, judge them to be spot on.

    special forces and a f.a.o. (foreign area officer). in the army that’s known as “two strikes against you.”

  • http://cujo359.blogspot.com Cujo359

    Having never been in the service, it’s sometimes difficult to understand what’s going on in these circumstances. There has certainly been a lot of push and pull between “light” and “heavy” force idealogies, and at the moment we seem to be at a peak in the “light” philosophy.

    I also have to wonder why more generals haven’t resigned in protest. That’s not a criticism, but if the Army is truly breaking under the strain of Iraq and Afghanistan, you have to wonder.

    BTW, the color those quotes are in makes them very difficult to read. I’d suggest using a color that contrasts better with white.

  • http://thumbsnap.com/v/78mn2yFc.jpg 1Watt

    Please change your color scheme, us old vets can’t see very well.

  • readerOfTeaLeaves

    Early lunch break today, and either it’s too early in the day for my eyeballs to read the lighter gray ‘quotation’ font, or else it ought to be bumped to a darker hue please.

    (The concept of the color differences is nice, in terms of better distinguishing the quotations from the commentary; however, the CSS color style for that font ID could maybe move from what appears to be #999999 to #333333 (if you keep it gray). Otherwise, a dark blue would be more helpful please. Particularly given the fact that some of us read off monitors while sitting in rooms with lots of natural light, whereas others read in rooms with crappy off-spectrum flourescent. Either way, that light gray font requires a bit too much work from the old eyeballs. Your webster should only have to change one font ID to correct the problem; they’ve done a really fine job otherwise ;-)

    Your info is always compelling, and the new site design is very, very nice. Fun to watch this blog; your commenters are outstanding.

  • wwz

    #060451 dark blue
    #660033 dark purple

    You shouldn’t have to use php. Just code it.

    dark red :P

  • http://noquarterusa.net/ Leslie

    One impetus for change may be to rethink our foreign policy goals? For example: the belief that we have a right to use our military beyond self-defense or the interests of national security to preemptively attack other nations, whether or not they pose an actual threat?

    OT: How good can General Petraeus be at managing when one of his top aides, who reported directly to him, may be involved in fraud?

  • Paul

    Just adding my voice to the pleas for more visible block quotes. Light gray is very difficult to read.

  • Donovan Fraser

    I agree, hard to see.

  • PrchrLady

    bushie boy opened his mouth once again sometime earlier today, and now is pushing the idea that Iran must be contained now, because it is a threat to the whole ME…

    http://thinkprogress.org/2007/08/28/bush-fear-mongers-iranian-nuclear-holocaust/#comments

    I am sick to death of these yellow bellied war hawks who are constantly pushing and lying us into yet another debacle. How many more must die before he is stopped??? Listen to his generals??? not hardly, why would he start doing that now, when he has a newly designated Nat. Propaganda Office, paid for and citizen expense…Say a lie often enough, and people will begin to believe it…

    I believe he once again is seeing himself in the ‘saviour’ mode… he destroys, and calls it ‘saving’ the world. How sick and delusional does he have to be before someone stops him???

    OT, but talk of Chertoff made me think of earlier headline on Huff Post., where he is pictured next to Harriet Miers… They sure do make a cute and scary couple… he is probably the worst candidates I can imagine as AG, so what else is new??? one more croney. they need to block all bushco appointments.

  • bg

    “to talk with the officers enrolled in the Captains Career Course. These are the Army’s elite junior officers.”

    Maybe it is a good article, but I can’t get past this sentence in the first paragraph. A bunch of brand new captains at the Armor/Infantry career course, most with only 4 years in the Army, would hardly qualify as a group of elite junior officers. (Likely to be cocky as hell, as most young Captains are, but not all of them elite by any stretch of the imagination)

    But I tried to read more, and only another paragraph away the author says, “Challenges like this are rare in the military, which depends on obedience and hierarchy. ” (regarding Captains telling a General officer how they really feel).

    Anyone who has ever sat in a “sensing” session with company grade officers or senior NCOs know that this is actually quite common. And I am not sure what he was insinuating about in regards to MG Mulholland (the 5th SF Group Cdr for the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq).

    Maybe I am being too cynical, but misjudgments like these made the it hard for me to get the main point of the article.

  • chas

    I fundamentally disagree with the premise of the article, which states the problem with the Iraq war disaster has everything to do with the failure of senior leadership in the U.S. Army. No consideration is given to the utter folly of attacking a country that was not a strategic threat to the U.S., and the attempt to occupy a Muslim land of over 20 million inhabitants. Sure, if 400,000 American soldiers occupied Iraq, things might have been somewhat different, but 560,000+ soldiers couldn’t pacify Vietnam, even with heavy air support. No matter how good the Army, trying to occupy a foreign, hostile country with cultural traditions which the occupiers are essentially ignorant of, for no logical reason goes against every historical lesson in the book.

    The reality is that if the senior Army brass had refused to go forth with the invasion by resigning en-masse, it very likely could have stopped the ill-conceived enterprise. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. However, Kaplan’s main point–had we only 200,000 or so more personnel on the ground, the outcome would have been different does not conform with any historical precedent.

  • Sara

    The concern regarding the education/diverse experience of those promoted to General is not new. Wes Clark emphasized the issue in “Winning Moderm Wars” published in 1992. He put the case for Graduate Education, particularly diplomatic history and a combination of anthropology and political science in addition to the Staff College and the War College or Nat. Defense University. He estimated that in the 88-92 period less than ten percent of those promoted had such preparation, and many were discouraged because of the promotion criteria.

    I think we are profoundly handicapped in accessing decisions about Iraq and Afghanistan largely because we have so little well confirmed evidence on how the Bush/Cheney White House processes information and perhaps conflicting strategic and tactical advice or proposals. One gets the sense Bush simply does not see serious disagreement among Military or diplomatic Professionals, Cheney might see more detail, but perhaps not that conflicting with his pre-set assumptions. I believe it was George Packer who published Jay Garner’s story of meeting with Bush about his plan for immediate post conflict Iraq, and Bush changed the subject to a discussion of Cattle Ranching in Florida. If this is any indication of mastery of planning and detail, you have to wonder why Theatre or Field Commanders meeting with Bush or Cheney would bother with serious strategy or even complex options choices. I suspect whatever is the WH Culture, we can’t really evaluate how the “Brass” inputted their analysis until we know the full truth about those receiving these presentations.

    Have just finished reading Mark Perry’s double biography of George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, “Partners in Command” — read largely because of my interest in Roosevelt, and his relationship with Marshall in particular, and others in major commands during WWII. The bio has an eye for current command relationships in Iraq absolutely inviting the reader to make comparisons. They just jump out. Stimson, Sec of the Army, and Knox, Sec of the Navy were both Republicans, Knox having even been VP candidate in 1936. Both saw their role in advocating positions of their services, not making them. (and of course they disagreed, because King and Marshall strongly disagreed.) Roosevelt’s military aid, Leahy, spent his days observing Pentagon meetings — he had access to everything, and most of what FDR heard day by day, came via this channel. FDR was lucky to meet with King or Marshall perhaps twice a month. But virtually every decision paper with attachments went into FDR’s basket, which he read daily, and which formed the basis of questions he put to Leahy — and to any other odd person he thought might have insight. Marshall always was the key architect of the master plan, Always the chief (and last) advisor to FDR, even though FDR kept the circle frothy, by keeping diverse positions in the mix, always forcing Marshall to accomodate different interests.

    One of Marshall’s strongest positions — he did not believe a Democracy could tolerate a long war. It was a political theory, not just a preference. He always sought to sharpen both military and political goals in any operation to the end of building toward a clear end point of combat. Just as sharply, he planned in great detail for the first months after combat, so as to retain what had been won militarily. He rarely smiled, made virtually no jokes, his hobby was weeding his flower garden, he had very few personal friends — only called Eisenhower “Ike” on one occassion, which he immediately took back with a dozen references to General Eisenhower. I strongly recommend as a means of getting into a much higher quality of what the US Army at one time was capable of producing as command.

  • http://bentley-rebar.chryslermuseum.cn Dimitrios

    Nice

  • Pale Rider

    OK–a voice that is now silent needs to be remembered.

    Here’s Colonel David Hackworth, now deceased, and what he had to say on August 5, 2003–over FOUR years ago:

    How long do you think U.S. troops will be needed in Iraq?

    God only knows, the way things are going. At least 30 years. Tommy Franks [recently retired commander of U.S. troops in Iraq] said four to 10 years. Based on Cyprus and other commitments in this kind of warfare, it is going to be a long time — unless the price gets too heavy. We say it is costing the U.S. $4 billion a month; I bet it is costing $6 billion a month. Where the hell is that money going to come from?

    How do you see the combat situation evolving in Iraq?

    There is no way the G [guerrilla] is going to win; he knows that, but his object is to make us bleed. To nickel and dime us. This is Phase 1. But what he is always looking for is the big hit — a Beirut [-style car-bomb attack] with 242 casualties, something that gets the headlines! The Americans have their head up their ass all the time. All the advantages are with the G; he will be watching. He is like an audience in a darkened theater and the U.S. troops are the actors on stage all lit up, so the G can see everything on stage, when they are asleep or when his weapons are dirty. The actor can’t see shit in the audience.

    For many weeks your Web site has described conditions in Iraq as being far more chaotic and unstable than generally reported. Why did the Pentagon try to downplay the problems instead of playing it straight and saying this is a long- term problem for America?

    Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz made a very horrible estimate of the situation. They concluded that the war would be Slam Bam Goodbye Saddam, followed by victory parades with local Iraqi folks throwing flowers and rice and everything nice, then the troops would come home.

    When I examined the task organization, my estimate was totally contrary to this asshole Rumsfeld, who went in light and on the cheap, all based upon this rosy scenario. I never thought this would be a fight without resistance. And there was another guy who thought the same way I did; his name is Saddam Hussein. He looked at the awesome array of forces being set up against him and said, “Wait a minute, no way can I prevail, I tried that in ’91 and just saw in Afghanistan what happened to Taliban and Al-Qaida, I will run away for another day.”

    Saddam is saying, “I am going to copy Ho Chi Minh and the Taliban and go into a guerrilla configuration.” It [the invasion of Baghdad] did go Slam Bam Goodbye Saddam, but we are in there so light that we don’t have sufficient force to provide the stability after the fall of the regime. We can’t secure the banks, the energy facilities, the vital installations, the government, the ministry, the museums or the library. The world was witness to this great anarchy, the looting and rioting that set over Baghdad. There was that wonderful quote by Rumsfeld. “Stuff happens,” he said. He flipped it off.

    Do you see any similarities to the U.S. engagement in Vietnam?

    The mistake in Vietnam was we failed to understand the nature of the war and we failed to understand our enemy. In Vietnam we were fighting World War II. Up to now in Iraq we have been fighting Desert Storm with tank brigade attacks. The tanks move into a village, swoop down, the tank gunner sees a silhouette atop a house, aims, fires, kills and it turns out to be a 12-year-old boy. Now, the father of that boy said, “We will kill 10 Americans for this.” This is exactly what happened in Vietnam; a village was friendly, then some pilot turns around and blows away the village, the village goes from pro-Saigon to pro-Hanoi.

    What kind of weapons would you be using in this war if you were running it? Would you trade the pistols for grenade launchers? Would you bring in more Apache helicopters, more snipers, what?

    You have to use surgical weapons, not weapons that can reach out and strike innocents. The American Army is trained to break things and kill people — not the kind of selective work that is needed. You don’t use a tank brigade to surround a village; instead, you set up ambushes along the route. It is all so similar to what I saw in Vietnam, this tendency to be mesmerized by big-unit operations. But if you fight like a G, everything is under the table, in the dark, done by stealth and surprise; there is no great glory — except the end result. America has never been capable of fighting the G; from [Gen.] Custer who fucked it up, you can fast-forward to today. [In Iraq] they are proving it again. The U.S. military never, never learns from the past. They make the same mistake over and over again.

    What other changes would you say need to happen in Iraq?

    Get rid of the conventional generals; these guys in Iraq are tank generals, but they don’t have any experience in fighting an insurgency. Reminds me of Vietnam when the artillery commanders wanted to build bases everywhere to fire their cannons. These tactics do not work against the G. I said in a recent piece: “Fire these fuckers and get a snake eater.”

    —-

    Folks, General Petraeus is NOT a snake eater.