An Officer Corps That Can’t Score

[davidbfpo]

The relatively new blogsite 'War on The Rocks' has two articles on the Lind article, both essentially are retorts.

One 'Gardening in a “Barren” Officer Corps' is on SWJ Blog, is from a naval perspective and here is one passage:

Lind errs on the side of being insulting to some of the dedicated men and women in uniform, but that does not really worry me. They have thick skin. More seriously, he leads his civilian readers astray, leaving them with an inaccurate depiction of a military completely unused to debate.

Link:http://warontherocks.com/2014/04/gar...officer-corps/

The second 'Our Debating Military: Here If You’re Looking' is by another naval officer, it ends with:

If, as Mr.Lind describes, our officer corps had a comical “hulk-smash” reaction to suggestions of US Military weaknesses or institutional flaws, we’d have long ago beaten ourselves to rubble in the haze of an insatiable rage.

Link is to the full article:http://cimsec.org/debating-military-youre-listening/

[TheCurmudgeon]

While I am never adverse to self-reflection, and I think the Army has its share of issues in the personnel system, I cannot accept the basic premises of Lind’s argument. In the first line he says:

The most curious thing about our four defeats in Fourth Generation War—Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan—is the utter silence in the American officer corps.

OK, you have to accept that there is a thing called “Fourth Generation Warfare” and that all four of those campaigns are examples of it. Lebanon and Somalia were significantly different than Iraq and Afghanistan in that we (the U.S.) were not truly in charge of mission parameters. Further, where Somalia and Lebanon were peacekeeping/stability operations, Iraq and Afghanistan were more complex.

Next, there is no discussion of the how the nature of the mission affected our ability to perform. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, during “Phase III” or the actual ground war, we performed admirably. Fight and Win America’s wars, that’s what we do. What we never cracked the code on was COIN. I would argue that the failure there was largely the fault of the civilian politicians who created a mission that was beyond not only the capabilities of the military but also beyond any logical expectation of success. Assuming that is the case, we will gain nothing by trying to change something that may not be broke … or at least not broke for the reasons Lind cites.

[carl]

Lind is far more right than he is wrong, especially when he speak about the Boyd's highest plane, the moral.

Lind talks about the officer corps telling each other they are part of the best military ever and get upset if they are disagreed with. There is much disagreement with that but to me a lot of that is based on nit picking definitions and talk about being "insulting". Those counterarguments are basically saying no we didn't lose and stop being mean to me.

Another counter argument is 'it was those civilians' who lost, not us (shades post WWI Germany). That kind of argument even more clearly throws light on the moral failings not of the officer corps as a whole, but of the multi-star officer corps, and this failing is serious, loss of the country serious. All those civilian actions and ideas didn't arise in a vacuum. They came in an atmosphere where the multi-stars had had much influence over decades and where they could have told the emperor he had no clothes. They never did. The multi-stars could have said we can't win in Afghanistan if the Pak Army/ISI isn't taken care of and they never did.

This hasn't stopped and may not stop until we lose a major war. We see it every day from things like the little, reflective belts, to the big, the F-35 and women in combat roles. The terrifying problem is, for all the debate articles like Lind's will stir, the only real way that things can change is for the officer corps, especially the multi-stars to be thoroughly discredited. That can probably only happen if we are badly beaten in a big war which will mean thousands and thousands of dead and the country defeated.

(Now don't let my comment be read as a bash at individual good officers in the US military, of which there are multitudes. It is a bash at the officer corps as an institution, an institution that all those good officers can't seem to fundamentally change. They can only work miracles at a low levels if the big green machine doesn't notice them. The machine grinds on.)