A Failure in Generalship and Congress

In late July I posted an explanation on why retired generals spoke out against the Iraq War while active generals do not (The Generals Against Still Speak). Yesterday I was led, by Intel Dump’s Phillip Carter in “Generation Gap.” to an article in the New York Times Magazine by Fred Kaplan, “Challenging the Generals.” This in turn caused me to read the Armed Forces Journal article that started the discussion, “A failure in generalship,” by Lt. Col. Yingling.

Since I disagreed with some of Col. Yingling’s suggestions to bring Congress into the picture, I reread my earlier post to see what I thought back in June/July. Here is how I actually closed that post:

“Is this silence good or bad for America? I have to side with the good option, although I do have reservations in the case of the Iraq War. It is good that our military believes in subordination to our civilian leaders. It is good that our military does not publicly support any one political party or theory.

“There is also the question of who would have listened if the generals did speak out. The Bush Administration, along with a complicit Republican Congress, was extremely effective at squelching opposition through calls to patriotism. Many of us who did try to speak out were called unpatriotic by a public that had little knowledge of the war and who remain largely ignorant today.

“I am certain that senior military officers did speak against the mismanagement of the war but not publicly. However, we all know how Rumsfeld and his neocons theorists ignored and belittled those generals. I have to believe that Bush knew and condoned this action. When Bush says that he relies on his commanders’ advice, history shows that to be a lie.”

I still believe in the points I made on the silence of active generals being mostly a good thing. I also wish some active generals had spoken out against the gross planning errors and mismanagement in this war, but such outspokenness should not become policy.

A failure in generalship, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling

His opening sentence is: “For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency.” He goes on to state, “America’s generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy.” He lays out three arguments:

1. generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic possibilities.
2. America’s generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility.
3. remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress.

I won’t repeat Col. Yingling’s fairly detailed account of the failings from Vietnam to now. I invite you to read the article. I don’t think anyone would disagree with Item 1. It is a role that has been accepted almost from the beginning of this country. I tend to agree with Item 2 and I need to add that it has taken me most of the 30 plus years since the end of that war to realize that the failure of Vietnam was also partly due to our military leaders.

With 30 plus years between us and the Vietnam War, we can now study it as history. History allows us to evaluate, question, and understand events in ways not possible with current events. The Vietnam War has become our most popular historical event since the Iraq War’s failings became evident. Comparisons abound. For the most part, I agree with Col. Yingling’s assessment of the failure of the generals in that war and their failure to learn from that war. But I would caution drawing much of a lesson from failures to learn from the mistakes of Vietnam.

I doubt that any officer now serving can really grasp the utter desolation of the post-Vietnam military after such a military failure while the American public trashed the uniformed services and all their members as both baby killers and military failures. No one in the military in 1975 wanted to even talk about Vietnam, let alone learn lessons by revisiting those failures. That was true from seaman to admiral, from private to general. And had they learned any lessons, there was no audience. So, yes the generals did fail to learn lessons, but the real causes of why they failed to learn are not replicated today. While our troops today may suffer an unfriendly press and a public that sees only disaster in Iraq, the support for those troops is very high, even if that public is mostly ignorant of the extent of the sacrifices our troops and their families must make.

The Iraq War cannot be studied with the benefit of history. We actually very little about the actual advice given by the generals to the civilian leaders. We (I) strongly suspect that they wimped out when confronted by the driven idealogues Bush and Rumsfeld (and the now discredited neocons), Gen. Shinseki being the noted exception. But we (I) really don’t know for sure. To be specific, I am convinced that Gen. Tommy Franks led a modern version of the Charge of the Light Brigade by leading too few against too many and then acting as a cheerleader for the Administration. But I don’t have facts that say he didn’t warn the President or SecDef.

I (we) don’t have the facts and I doubt Congress has facts – maybe better rumors, but not usually facts. That leads me to Item 3 where Yingling suggests Congress should intervene. Col. Yingling notes, perhaps correctly, that the general officer corps is incapable of changing from within and that outside help is needed. But, if Congress is not in the chain of command and can never actually know all the necessary facts, how can Congress effectively intervene? But let’s look at Col. Yingling’s specific suggestions:

1. Congress must change the system for selecting general officers.
2. Oversight committees must apply increased scrutiny over generating the necessary means and pursuing appropriate ways for applying America’s military power.
3. The Senate must hold accountable through its confirmation powers those officers, who fail to achieve the aims of policy at an acceptable cost in blood and treasure.

Suggestion 1 implies that Congress should inject itself into the general officer selection process. Congress has that power (U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 2) but I would hate to see party politics layered on top of military politics. Military politics may be part of the problem, but adding another political layer would only muddy the situation at best, and could destroy a system that does work. Also, our system of government checks and balances often puts Congress in opposition to the Executive. The military chain of command would ultimately suffer if two opposing forces were involved in the selection process.

I agree with Suggestion 2 on oversight but Congress’ lack of oversight during this war is probably more at the heart of our problem than any failing of the general officer corps. Congress failed to exercise oversight on any matters in the Iraq War until very recently when the voters made it painfully clear that Congress was not doing its job. I have faith in the American people to correct a government that is out of control, but the public is a blunt instrument like a sledgehammer whacking a pendulum that won’t return to zero. It doesn’t happen often and the action is not always precise. The pendulum tends to whack the opposite wall and then whack the near wall, only waving at the center as it passes through.

Yingling said something that I think shows his attitude to the military-civilian relationship: “In almost surreal language, professional military men blame their recent lack of candor on the intimidating management style of their civilian masters.” I guess I just don’t consider it all that surreal. I do find it surreal to blame the military subordinates (and the military does value subordination to our civilian leaders) while allowing the senior civilians to be non-professionally intimidating. And, that sentence probably displays my own attitude – I hold our civilian leaders as much responsible for the Iraq debacle (prior to the Surge) as I do any general officer.

Suggestion 3 on inserting Congress into the retirement process is a good idea. The American public and, I think, many non-general officers look at the events at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Graib prisons and the military trials for our troops’ abuses on the streets of Iraq and they never see indictments or convictions of senior officers. Not only are the senior officers responsible for all acts under their command, we also know that none of these events could have taken place without some acceptance or promotion, or at least some knowledge, by those senior officers.

The U.S. military is a society that respects personal honor and there is no honor without accountability. As with the other suggestions, I am not fond of getting Congress involved in the retirement process, but the situation seems to warrant some oversight. I just hope that a Congress that seems to value overpaid and non-accountable corporate executives over decent worker wages would/could determine accountability for military officers.

Challenging the Generals Fred Kaplan

Kaplan zeroes in on the problem of institutional culture and he speaks more directly to the generational gap between junior and senior officers. Kaplan notes that, in a typical year, one quarter to one third of West Point cadets do not re-up after their required five years. This figure ballooned to 44 percent in 2006. Imagine what it must be in September 2007 with the unrelenting tempo of deployments and a President who has so far indicated that there is no end in sight.

Side Note: Recent successes with the Surge seem to be swinging public opinion somewhat in favor of delaying troop withdrawals. So swings the public, so swings Congress. Assume we continue the Surge for a few months longer (I think we should) and that the Iraqi government or its people make some political progress. I doubt this would improve officer, or any, retention because the exodus of service members is tied more to the op tempo than to battlefield conditions. In fact, I would guess that delaying those needed rotations will only cause more service members to leave, thereby further degrading our defense posture.

Kaplan also notes that the gap is not only one of attitude but one of trust. Most senior officers rose in what was mostly a period of peace. Today’s junior officers have much more battle experience and many feel their senior officers have let them down, especially with regards to the op tempo. (One might note that apparently the JCS is now opposing this tempo because of its affect on morale and our lack of defense readiness for anything other than Iraq.) While I and others have been touting the value of the new Army/Marines counterinsurgency operations (FM 3-24), Kaplan points out that 70 percent of training at the Captains Career Course remains in conventional warfare. Kaplan also reports the rough handling Yingling received from his division commander after he first published his article and he discusses the odd non-promotion of Col. H.R. McMaster who successfully employed counterinsurgency techniques in Iraq but also published a book dealing with the failure of the general officers in Vietnam.

The general officer corps is stuck in the mud but is that new or is it news? Because the military is so institutionalized and has always been, a general officer corps that is slow to change seems to go with the territory. And it seems to be at its worst when a peacetime Army goes to war. Much of the senior officer corps was canned before we entered WWI. Gen. Marshall removed many officers and replaced them with junior officers during the early years of WWII. But the problem seems different and probably worse today. Given that our future wars will most likely be insurgent wars and that our generals are not responding quickly enough, the situation might very well be worse. Also allowing our military to be committed to one questionable war in Iraq at the expense of our total national defense seems unforgivable.

I know a little about innovation. As an officer I had a reputation as a maverick, perhaps due to my eight years enlisted service which gave me a sense of what I could get away with. I had also learned that getting the job done often meant bypassing regulations or the “normal” channels. Throughout my career I was deep selected at each promotion (if that’s not an Army term, in the Navy it meant promotion ahead of contemporaries). I received many awards and commendations including the Navy’s highest non-combat medal. I often disagreed with my superiors but never did I even consider going public on that matter. Going public with your disagreements seems to be the gist of these two articles and I am still not convinced that is a good idea, even if it now seems to be the only answer to a stick-in-the-mud senior officer corps.

Kaplan brings up a very good point that today’s military needs innovation and that general officers like to select people for promotion who are much like themselves. And ‘themselves’ are people who have spent 25 years conforming to the institution.

Apparently I was being groomed for admiral at the time I retired. I was told so when I put in my retirement papers but I attributed that to just an attempt to keep me from retiring. After retirement, I talked to some on the selection board and a couple of my admiral bosses and they verified that it was true. Before you think I am boasting, remember that this was 1975 and just about anyone who decided to stay in the service was guaranteed promotions, if not necessarily to the top. However, I knew at that time that I was not admiral material. Partly I was fed up with fighting the system but mostly I knew that I was not political enough to make the grade. My points here are that innovation can work in the military, and that the conflict between junior and senior officers is not new.

I would propose that the Army and the other services can promote innovators by action from within and that it won’t take 25 years. Earlier I referred to the canning of officers in WWI and WWII. I remember a quote (don’t remember the source) of one senior commander in WWII France to the effect that it was a good thing that we took on Germany in North Africa before attempting the invasion of Europe, otherwise it would have ended in disaster. The point was that we learned a lot through the many mistakes made by Britain and the U.S. in North Africa but that we improved greatly in less than three years. An untold part of that success might include the canning of officers who were unfit to command.

Let’s not forget that quite a few of the officers who are now conducting successful counterinsurgency are lieutenant colonels and full bird colonels and that they are not far from promotion to general. Let us not forget that Gen. Petraeus who commands the Iraq operations is of the same innovative fabric as these junior officers and he is a leader. The same is true of Gen. Odierno and, I suspect, of many other officers under Petraeus’ command. During and after Vietnam, there was no audience for lessons learned. Now we have a SecDef and a President who apparently have listened to lessons learned as evidenced by a remarkable change of tactics, strategy, and battlefield commanders in the middle of the crisis.

I have watched generations come from the self-infatuated hippy generation to the current generation. From my aged perspective and in terms of interest in public service, the hippy generation was a low point and each succeeding generation has seen some increased desire to commit to something greater than one’s self. Those men and women currently serving in enlisted ranks and as junior officers exhibit that desire to a level I’ve not seen in my lifetime. I honestly believe that these folks are the ones who will eventually improve the general officer corps, both by pressuring for change now and by making those changes happen when they enter that corps.

I don’t want to end this post by leaving the impression that the military is closed to public display of internal disagreements. In fact the military is far more open to disagreements than most corporations and the rest of federal government. Publications such as the Armed Forces Journal attest to that fact, but I admit that McMaster and Yingling are mostly alone in directly attacking general officers as a group. They do have something important to say and let us hope that their promotions will depend more on their performance