Army Officer Accuses Generals of 'Intellectual and Moral Failures'

[Shek]

Phil,

Thanks for the cogent post. However, I do have a few quibbles with some of your points.

1. I totally agree that the services must make sure that they prepare for the next war and not the last. Thus, the decision of the Army to make Fulda Gap the focus of its rebuilding efforts in the 1970s was right on target. However, the issue that I have is the fact that the Vietnam experience was deleted from the hard drive as if it were a virus. No more Vietnams! You can see this in the catharsis that COL Summers' book provided, as well as the Weinberger and Powell Doctrines (ODS was an opportunity as well to try and eliminate the pale of Vietnam, with Bush 41's pronouncement that we've slayed the Vietnam demon).

Heck, how many officers were happy when Governor George W. Bush became president elect in December 2000 because he had stated "we don't do nation building" (I know that I was happy that we would jettison the Bosnias and Kosovos and get back to what we should be focusing on, which was warfighting - a reaction that I think was a product of the professional sentiment that we didn't want our jurisdiction to include the low end spectrum of full spectrum operations). So, I think that the decision to prepare for the Fulda Gap and to delete the institutional memories and lessons should be separated into two separate actions.

2. I think the criticism of actions many of the generals Vietnam is on target. This falls into the fight the war you have and not the war you want. I still agree that the concentration should have been on the more immediate risk to the national security, the Soviet threat, but if the policy makers decide on committing US forces, then we need to make sure we fight the war we have to the extent possible.

I think the following quote is quite interesting on the ability of the general officer corps to adapt to the COIN environment of Vietnam, http://www.wooster.edu/history/jgate...-ch5.html#fn16

General James L. Collins, Jr., has been quoted as saying that, "had we had an organized body of literature" dealing with the Philippine campaign, "we would have saved ourselves a good deal of time and effort in Vietnam." General Bruce Palmer, Jr. made a similar comment in 1989, saying "I wish that when I was the deputy chief of staff for operations at Department of the Army in 1964-1965, we had studied the US Army's campaigns in the Philippines during the insurrection." They may be correct, but one suspects that the availability of such a history would have made little difference, for it would have told Americans no more about successful counterinsurgency campaigning than the literature already available in the writings of the 1950s and 1960s. Palmer claimed that a 1988 article about the Philippine war in Military Review "would have been of tremendous help to us in sorting out our thoughts [on the situation in Vietnam]."[16] Palmer apparently had no knowledge of an excellent 1964 article on the war, also printed in Military Review.[17]

The American problem in Vietnam was not a lack of information, historical or otherwise; it was the frequent failure to act upon the sound information, useful ideas, and valid suggestions that were readily available. A detailed and candid study of the French experience in Indochina seems to have been totally ignored, for example.[18] One suspects that nothing one might have written in the mid-1960s about the earlier war in the Philippines or the ongoing war in Vietnam would have convinced U. S. Army leaders of the importance of the non-military aspects of irregular warfare and the counterproductive effects of the use of massive firepower. People in high places rarely listen to what they do not want to hear.

3. You are totally on target with the following statement.

The general officers he takes to task were the colonels and LtCols of the 1980s and 1990s. Maybe that's where the problem lay--in their inproper training and education by the previous set of leadership.

However, this only highlights the fact that the problem is the GO corps as a body, as they are the ones making the decisions and grooming these leaders. In other words, as a body, the GO corps in a sense is "the system," and this is the dynamic that needs to be transformed.

To close, let's separate Congress from the equation and look at his proposals and whether they have merit.

1. A 360 degree evaluation system.
2. Advanced Civilian School and a foreign language.
3. The need to publish to demonstrate one's intellectual prowess.
4. The need to talk means, ways, and ends during confirmation hearings, akin to an oral examination.
5. Retire GOs at the rank at which they last demonstrated competence (you're promoted based on potential and then demoted based on performance).

(Given that #4 and #5 must involve Congress since they hold the necessary hearings, I understand that we can't fully separate them out of the equation)

So, what are the merits of these proposals. If we deem that there is merit, then the question becomes why hasn't the Army adopted those proposals with merit within the profession, as they have been on the table as options for at least a decade. If we can't adopt the proposals, then who outside should get involved to make sure that improvements in the system are adopted?