Army Officer Accuses Generals of 'Intellectual and Moral Failures'

[Uboat509]

Call me cynical if you like but I don't think that increased congressional oversite is the answer to ANY problem. Every issue is viewed though a number of partisan filiters and the decisions are made based on what is best for the party rather than what is best for the country. How many sh*t sandwiches has the military had to swallow because they were made in a powerful congressman's district? I am all for the civilian leadership of the military in so far as they tell us which wars to fight. But I have a problem with someone who has little or no practical military experience and a partisan agenda telling us how to fight those wars or who is best suited to lead us when we do.

SFC W

[Old Eagle]

I'm with Uboat on this one. I thoroughly enjoyed Paul's article. I think that it will spark healthy debate, as it has here. I disagree, however, with the prescription of more congressional interferrence in DoD. Already, the workload of congressionally mandated reports, many that nobody reads, is abusive. I was in the bureaucratic process that forwarded promotion lists to congress for advice and consent in the days after Tailhook. Their intrusive micrimanaging of the promotion process served no one well, and trashed the careers of several great officers. Some oversight.

[NDD]

Well, at the risk of over-stating the obvious, the problem is a 900-pound guerrilla (get it? ) and the Colonel has addressed but part of it. He stayed in his lane and didn't go off on a tangent.

Sir,
Being an old SF soldier, I loved the article. I disagree about your proposed solutions, but can't offer anything better without hurting myself thinking.

As has been said, I salute your for your integrity. Would there were 1,000 such. In each division.

Sorry I've been gone so long, anybody miss me?

[Culpeper]

Well, at the risk of over-stating the obvious, the problem is a 900-pound guerrilla (get it? ) and the Colonel has addressed but part of it. He stayed in his lane and didn't go off on a tangent.

Sir,
Being an old SF soldier, I loved the article. I disagree about your proposed solutions, but can't offer anything better without hurting myself thinking.

As has been said, I salute your for your integrity. Would there were 1,000 such. In each division.

Sorry I've been gone so long, anybody miss me?

Yeah, where have you been?

[SWJED]

Sorry I've been gone so long, anybody miss me?

... welcome back.

[NDD]

Many thanks. Working hard, trying to do the right thing. Looks like things are going well...

[Tom Odom]

Many thanks. Working hard, trying to do the right thing. Looks like things are going well...

Sorry I've been gone so long, anybody miss me?

I did now that you're back...

Welcome back!

Tom

[Tacitus]

I am all for the civilian leadership of the military in so far as they tell us which wars to fight. But I have a problem with someone who has little or no practical military experience and a partisan agenda telling us how to fight those wars or who is best suited to lead us when we do. SFC W

This sounds alot like the sort of thing that Union General George McClellan vented at President Abraham Lincoln. Who is this pipsqueak civilian Lincoln telling me how to run a war? He didn't like Lincoln telling him "how to fight the war", namely to get moving.

It turned out that Lincoln had a better understanding of what it would take to win the war than alot of the generals. He just had to keep firing them until he found some who could get it done (Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, etc.) The inital crop just wasn't cutting it.

I just always bristle a little bit when I hear this "leave the war to us, the professionals" line. That is not a proven strategy for success, any more than completely disregarding the advice of the generals. Wisdom and good judgment are not predestined by God almighty to automatically reside in a man wearing some stars, or a man sitting behind a desk in the oval office.

[Uboat509]

I just always bristle a little bit when I hear this "leave the war to us, the professionals" line. That is not a proven strategy for success, any more than completely disregarding the advice of the generals. Wisdom and good judgment are not predestined by God almighty to automatically reside in a man wearing some stars, or a man sitting behind a desk in the oval office.

The battlefield is no place for partisan agendas. I have a HUGE problem with interference by politicians, most of whom have no practical military experience. Wisdom and good judgment are not predestined by God almighty to automatically reside in a man who has the initials MD after his name but that is still who I am going to see when I am sick. A doctor can most certainly be wrong but he is still more likely to be right than someone who has little or no medical training. Part of the reason we are where we are now is because the political leadership refused to admit that the strategy we were using was not working, and quashed any military member who said otherwise. There are few absolutes in life, a politician can be military genius and a general can be a political hack but that is probably not where you want to put your money.

SFC W

[Steve Blair]

The battlefield is no place for partisan agendas. I have a HUGE problem with interference by politicians, most of whom have no practical military experience. Wisdom and good judgment are not predestined by God almighty to automatically reside in a man who has the initials MD after his name but that is still who I am going to see when I am sick. A doctor can most certainly be wrong but he is still more likely to be right than someone who has little or no medical training. Part of the reason we are where we are now is because the political leadership refused to admit that the strategy we were using was not working, and quashed any military member who said otherwise. There are few absolutes in life, a politician can be military genius and a general can be a political hack but that is probably not where you want to put your money.

SFC W

But you saw a fair number of partisan agendas within the higher military ranks in Vietnam, and they sure slipped onto the battlefield. Westmoreland's vision of the war was incorrect in many ways, but that was allowed to stand. The military fought most of JFK's ideas regarding unconventional warfare.

Personally, I am deeply suspicious of anyone on either side (political or military) claiming to have the one true answer. We'll have to see how the current generation of captains and field-grades grow up, but it's worth remembering that many of our general officers have precious little battlefield experience...but that's also not a guarantee of success or failure. Many of the Vietnam-era generals had combat experience in Korea or even World War II and many of them misread that situation as well.

Experience is one thing...it's another thing completely to be able to understand and apply that experience. Grant was good at that...McClellan was not. And Grant was considered the failure before the war.

[Tom Odom]

Personally, I am deeply suspicious of anyone on either side (political or military) claiming to have the one true answer.

Ditto here. See Eric Hoffer for further explanation.

Tom

[Lastdingo]

Experience is one thing...it's another thing completely to be able to understand and apply that experience. Grant was good at that...McClellan was not. And Grant was considered the failure before the war.

I believe it#s OK nto to foresee enought o do everything right from the beginning of a new kind of conflict.

Burt it's not tolerable when generals repeat mistakes that were already done in comparable, earlier conflicts. This happens today - they had enough time to learn and to adapt, but many still seem to fail.
It's tie to fire generals - not only in those armies that are engaged in Iraq, but also in other NATO armies as well. It should be possible to find a lot of duds in the general ranks.

[Tacitus]

Greetings U-509,

I am by no means defending the competency of the civilian management of this war. Far from it. Our republic is founded on the idea of civilian control of the military. If war is the continuation of politics by other means, I’m not sure how you would go about removing politics from the conflict. Politics here, abroad, in the Pentagon, in foreign capitals, you name it. The fighting is not an end in itself, there is some sort of ultimate political objective being sought, and men will naturally disagree on that.

If you have a problem with this kind of civilian interference, then I guess you have to fault Madison, Hamilton, Washington and the rest of the Founding Fathers who set this system up. Short of a military coup, I’m not sure how this would be altered.

So what should the generals do, given civilian supremacy in our republic? If the military leadership feels their considered judgment is being ignored, and they can’t in good conscience carry out a policy they have no confidence in, then if they want to make a statement I suggest the joint chiefs resign en masse explaining their actions in a letter to the American people.

I guess that is the sort of moral leadership that Colonels Yingling and McMaster (at least in Viet Nam) feel is missing. Instead, I guess generals on active service think “you deal with the political masters you have, not the ones you’d like to have,” and blame it on the politicians later if things go south. Sounds like a political calculation on the generals’ part to me, so they can’t claim to be as pure as Caesar’s wife when the branches of our government engage in their own political activities.

This is a frustrating war for many reasons. But it is a little self-serving for our military to just blame our problems on civilian interference. You'd think after losing a guerilla war in Viet Nam, our military would have given alot of thought about how to deal with this kind of war in the future. That doesn't appear to have happened. Most military reforms come after losing wars. If Viet Nam didn't get the military's attention about guerilla war, I'm really not so sure Iraq will, either.

[Uboat509]

I'm not saying that there are not problems within the military. On the contrary I deal with the frustration every day of dealing with commands that do not understand the situation on the ground. I am fully aware of the problems within our own military. I just believe that there are no problems within our military that cannot be exacerbated by partisan meddling.

So what should the generals do, given civilian supremacy in our republic? If the military leadership feels their considered judgment is being ignored, and they can’t in good conscience carry out a policy they have no confidence in, then if they want to make a statement I suggest the joint chiefs resign en masse explaining their actions in a letter to the American people.

I have always felt that this was a strawman argument. Has this ever worked? Look what has happened to Shinseki. Granted he was not resigning in protest, but he was speaking out against policy he had no confidence in and he was publicly vilified for it. The same has happened pretty much any time in recent history that I can think of that an officer spoke out like that. This whole concept is built around the idea that John Q Public will see the resignation and realize that only the most dire of situations could make a professional like that resign. It never works that way. Whoever resigns will find themselves now on the outside vilified by whichever party they spoke out against and largely unable to effect things, at least not they way they could have had they remained. And they will be replaced by someone who is more amenable to the policy who will then explain to John Q Public how their predecessor was wrong and nothing will change. In that situation I feel it is better that they remain and try to change the things that they can change rather than resign and become largely irrelevant.

Keep this in mind. Most of our fellow Americans have never served a day in their lives in the military. Many don’t even know anyone who has. Let’s say a general does resign in protest. He will give his reasons why and the policy makers he resigned in protest of will give their reasons why he is wrong and John Q Public will have no idea which argument is more plausible precisely because they have not served. They simply do not have the knowledge to make an informed decison.


SFC W

[Bill Moore]

I think the heart of the problem isn't so much incompetence, but rather our political and military culture. While not wanting to sound disloyal, I think our concept of loyality in politics and the military is putting our nation at risk. Would we be where we're at in Iraq if dissenting opinions and rational debate were allowed, and better yet encouraged? The same could be said about Vietnam.

Unfortunately, our political system is partisan to the extreme, even in the time of war. This led to wise independents and democrats being left out of the planning and decision making process to some degree, and in the extreme case left competent democrats and independents out of Bremer's organization, where political reliability was valued more than competence. It made us look like a corrupt third world nation. I imagine JFK and LBJ demonstrated similiar behavior.

Mr. Rumfield said he encouraged intellectualy debate, but several articles and books apparently that were professionally researched seem to refute that. GEN Shinseki is a perfect example. He had the moral courage to offer a dissenting opinion that should have led to a rational debate, but instead his comment was casually dismissed, and Mr Rumfield did not attend a true hero's retirement, which obviously sent a message to the force. We could have had mass resignations of senior officers across the force, but what would that have accomplished? More talking heads on Fox and CNN? Would Rumfield have been fired? Unlikely, because President Bush is extremely "loyal" to his men. Wouldn't we all like to have a boss like that? However, at what cost to the nation?

I don't know this to be true, but I think we may have seen a different outcome at this point and time if the administration and the military welcomed and rationally debated the merits of a particular course of action strictly based on the merits of the projected outcome, instead of political advantage or perhaps ego. Imagine if we really had a political and interagency concensus on post war Iraq that was well thought out, and had branch plans and sequels?

Loyality within the military is a double edged sword. It is absolutely required for a disciplined unit, and for that special trust that is essential, but it unfortunately it can also have a corrupting influence when loyality to the boss (your career) supercedes loyality to the nation. Unfortunately, I don't think we'll find ways around social/organizational behavior challenge anytime soon, but maybe self awareness of it is a start.

[Ken White]

"Keep this in mind. Most of our fellow Americans have never served a day in their lives in the military. Many don’t even know anyone who has. Let’s say a general does resign in protest. He will give his reasons why and the policy makers he resigned in protest of will give their reasons why he is wrong and John Q Public will have no idea which argument is more plausible precisely because they have not served. They simply do not have the knowledge to make an informed decison."

Well said and totally true. I'd even say that the Pols will win that spin battle. Not to mention that he who resigns in protest will likely be replaced by someone of less competence who will go ahead and do what the political masters want anyway -- probably less well than the guy who fell on his sword. No easy choices.

It's an imperfect system, we're lucky that it works as well as it does in spite of all the impediments foisted upon it by an uncaring and unknowing public, a pathetic Congress which meddles in things it does not understand and the 10% of poor and marginal performers that exist in all grades from E1 to O10 (just as they do in all fields of civilian endeavor).

Will also add that in addition to the vast majority who have not served, there are some who served but didn't like it for a variety of reasons. That is perfectly understandable and certainly alright but some of them seem to want to carry a chip about it for a long time afterwards. What fascinates me is that some of them -- William Arkin comes to mind among others -- presume a few years service showed them all there is to know about the Green Machine. I've never understood either the chip or the presumed 'knowledge.'

But then, I'm old and slow, can no longer take two salt tablets and drive on...

Keep the faith.

[wm]

I heard, anecdotally, that everyone selected for 07 and 08 during FY04/05 went in for a personal interview with the SECDEF himself before they were nominated to Congress. If this anecdote is true, I believe that such an event was the first of its kind in the history of the American military.
It also makes one pause to reflect on the nature of the senior leadership we have been left with?