Army Officer Accuses Generals of 'Intellectual and Moral Failures'

[SWJED]

27 April Washington Post - Army Officer Accuses Generals of 'Intellectual and Moral Failures' by Tom Ricks.

An active-duty Army officer is publishing a blistering attack on U.S. generals, saying they have botched the war in Iraq and misled Congress about the situation there.

"America's generals have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq," charges Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, an Iraq veteran who is deputy commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. "The intellectual and moral failures . . . constitute a crisis in American generals."...

The article, "General Failure," is to be published today in Armed Forces Journal and is posted at http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2007/05/2635198. Its appearance signals the public emergence of a split inside the military between younger, mid-career officers and the top brass.

Many majors and lieutenant colonels have privately expressed anger and frustration with the performance of Gen. Tommy R. Franks, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno and other top commanders in the war, calling them slow to grasp the realities of the war and overly optimistic in their assessments...

Armed Forces Journal - A Failure in Generalship by LTC Paul Yingling.

For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq's grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war.

These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America's general officer corps. 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. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America's generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress...

Key Quote:

"As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war"...

[Ski]

Not a good sign to say the least. I suspect he will be cashiered at the worst, reprimanded or just left to die on the vine.

[milesce]

I'll be very curious to hear the opinions of the professionals on this board to this article. It's fascinating stuff, and it accurately reflects what I've been told repeatedly by the junior and midlevel officers I've talked to say, but being on the "outside" it's tough to know if these are widely held views.

[tequila]

Wow. Hard to believe LTC Yingling wants to stay on AD after this ... hard to imagine the fury he must be feeling to burn his career this way.

[Van]

That LTC Yingling would publish this says a lot of good things about his candor, integrity, and belief in selfless service. His is doing what Patton and Eisenhower lacked the fortitude to do in the '20s and '30s (Forging the Thunderbolt: History of the U.s. Army's Armored Forces, 1917-45, Mildred Hanson Gillie).

It also speaks volumes about his frustration and concern for the future of the country as well as the Army.

What also indictates a systemic problem in the Army is that the most likely response from the senior leadership will be to formally or informally punish him, rather than to consider the statements, decisions, and actions by the senior leaders that caused LTC Yingling to write his book and examine what led up to it. Easier to punish a whistle-blower than to fix what got the whistle blown.

This demonstrates that the senior leaders have not learned a fundemental lesson of the media age; when things go wrong, don't cover up, tell the story early, and tell it yourself. Failure to follow this maxim consistently leads to scandal and public embarrassment.

To be completely fair, I haven't read the book (but will) and I don't know LTC Yingling or if there were circumstances that might have caused him to write from 'less than pure' motives (passed over for promotion, black marks in his record - not saying there are, but that I don't know).

[Steve Blair]

He's echoing some of the things that Don Vandergriff has said (both on and off AD) regarding the Army personnel system. This is also the kind of thing you used to see in the old Army& Navy Journal. IMO it's long overdue.

[RTK]

To be completely fair, I haven't read the book (but will) and I don't know LTC Yingling or if there were circumstances that might have caused him to write from 'less than pure' motives (passed over for promotion, black marks in his record - not saying there are, but that I don't know).

I know the man and that is not the case. LTC Yingling maybe one of the smartest individuals I've ever worked around or with. A BN command selectee and SAMS graduate, LTC Yingling is without a doubt one of a handful of officers I would follow anywhere.

[SWJED]

Here is a link to a Combat Studies Institute interview of LTC Yingling conducted last September.

[Tom Odom]

if I had to condense [my advice] into a pithy little bullet it would be: don’t train on finding the enemy; train on finding your friends and they will help you find your enemy.”

Love this guy!

Tom

[Tom Odom]

Even better...

RH: The berm was an Iraqi idea?
PY: It was. We got that advice from Mayor Najim and Major General Khorsheed as well as from some Iraqi legislators whom we were in touch with. Although we didn’t quite understand it and it wasn’t something doctrinally that we anticipated doing, it was very good advice. One of the lessons I learned from this was to step outside of my Western skin and see the problem through the Iraqis’ eyes and take their advice when conducting operations because they have a perspective that we just can’t fully appreciate.

[marct]

He is making some very serious accusations but, on the whole, I have to agree with a lot of them. I would hope that he will not end up hanging out in the breeze, but I expect that he will. I'm still digesting the article, but I have to agree with what he says about the personelle selection system.


Marc

[Tom Odom]

My last on the interview...which you really do need to read to get a sensing of where the AFJ article comes from as in this:

PY: The thing the Army institutionally is still struggling to learn is that the most important thing we do in counterinsurgency is building host nation institutions – building security forces, building local government capacity – and yet all our organizations are designed around the least important line of operations: combat operations. There is a real danger in over-determination based on the organization’s design. There’s the old saying, “If you give a man a hammer, he sees every problem as a nail.” Similarly, if you give a unit tanks and Bradleys, they see every problem as a movement to contact. That’s an oversimplification, but it is a problem. I’ve now had two combat tours where I was involved in developing ISF and I’ve been to every Army school you can go to as an officer, and no one has ever talked to me about that challenge. No one has ever given me any classes on how to do that. Thankfully there are a lot of great Elizabeth Hellers (ph) out there and other smart people who are just figuring things out because there are problems and they just have to be solved. The institutional Army, though, has not caught up in either professional education or organizational design with the challenges of counterinsurgency. So as I go into battalion command, I’m going to focus my troops on those tasks and give them the mental models that will allow them to anticipate those problems and solve them. Eventually the institutional Army will catch up and they’ll get that stuff into schools and there will be MTOE positions for security force development and civil-military operations; but until that day I think individual commanders will have to solve that problem on their own, because when we get into theater we certainly have to solve it. Waiting until we get there to understand that those are the problems we have to solve creates a lot of heartache. Our task as senior leaders is to anticipate those challenges and train for them before we have to go fight. That’s my big takeaway on the US side. On the Iraqi side, there’s just no substitute for having great Iraqi leaders whom we were just lucky enough to have. In Malaya the British said, “First you need a man, then you need a plan.” Well, Mayor Najim and Major General Khorsheed were the men and the plan was clear-hold-build, and certainly the most important part of that was the men. We could have done everything exactly as we had done it, but without those two the results would have been very different. In that sense, we were very grateful for their leadership and that was probably the most important part of all this.

[sullygoarmy]

I've got to agree with RTK. Both as a SAMS guys and a future battalion commander, he has some pretty good credentials. I am very impressed with his candor. Since he was involved in Desert Storm, OIF I and most importantly, OIF III with 3 ACR and COL McMasters, he has a broad wealth of experience to call on. I don't see "sour grapes" as the motivation for this article. To be honest, I think he hit the nail on the head.

McMasters and his excellent book, "Dereliction of Duty" does a great job painting the picture of how poorly the General officers of the Vietnam era and the SecDef performed and the resulting diaster for our troops. I'm sure LTC Yingling was influenced by McMasters and felt like his article is highlighting what many junior and mid-level officers see as a major problem today. Take alook at the CSI interview provided by SWJED...its a great read. Alot of good lessons learned in there and you can sense the undercurrent of frustration with the higher ups.

I'm interested to see what the Army reaction is going to be. I'm hoping that cooler heads will prevail and you won't see any repercussions against him. I'd be surprised, however, if he still took command of a battalion this summer. If he is punished in some way, however, it merely proves his point.

Brave man for speaking out like this. I'm finishing up "The Praetorians", the sequal to "The Centurions" and I see alot of the same themes. Generals not wanting to adjust to the new realities of war, unable to demonstrate the mental agility to shift focus and the resulting chaos in which the troops must slog through, paying with blood because of the higher leadership's ineptitute.

[RTK]

If he is punished in some way, however, it merely proves his point.

Exactly.

He's only putting to paper what has been said in most every TOC and chow hall in the last 4 years.

[Merv Benson]

While he is obviously passionate about his point of view I think he would have been more persuasive if he had made his argument based on the competing strategies rather than personalities. Gen. Abizaid and Gen. Casey were believers in the "small footprint" strategy. To some degree that strategy worked in Afghanistan and was a failure in Iraq. The failure was not recognizing that the different battle spaces required different strategies.

While Yingling's passionate argument may effect his career, there have been some generals who have advanced because of their willingness to challenge positions of superiors. Norman Schwartzkopf did it as a young officer in Vietnam and Rifle De Long did it as a field grade officer with General Zinni. When you do it, it is important that you be right, obviously.

[goesh]

Yingling says, "Don't train on finding the enemy, train on finding friends and they will help you find your enemy". Fine, and as a dumb civilian, I ask, what does this friendship cost? What's the payback for them for helping to find enemies? Let me guess, they only want equal participation in Democracy, equal rights, equal opportunity, a purple finger and an Iraqi Thomas Jefferson. Of course they want security and I believe any cultivated friendship with a Sunni will have the payoff of identifying Shia' thugs and terrorists or anyone aiding said Shias. That should get the newly found friend first chance at new infractructure and jobs, right? Finding friends circumvents the dynamics of tribalism and religious sects but doesn't solve the problem, nor the problem of AQ playing each against the other. The cooperation of the Anbar Sheikhs is not a reflection of the democratic process or religious compromise. I can't be convinced to the contrary at this point in time. The selling point of COIN as a dynamic component in unifying Iraq into some homogeneous, cohesive, quasi-democratic entity capable of being a strategic friend to the US is still on the proving grounds. I want and hope it succeeds but you folks remain mission specific at this time and are not at the strategic table of foreign policy. I pray you are given a chair at that table. I presume Yingling will be talking to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who should be most receptive to him, and I'm not being sarcastic here either, just bitter.

I see that Yingling deployed again in March O5 for a another year's duty in Iraq. I'm wondering why it took such an obviously intelligent man another year to compile his thoughts and feelings into a report and said report manifests just as efforts are under the way to pull the plug on the whole shooting match. As a former L/Cpl and in going along with the format of openess and full disclosure, I would be interested in seeing a nice published report compiled by the rank and file of the Enlisted Men/Women on the Officer Corps in general serving in Iraq and Yingling in particular. They ain't fragging Officers, I know that much but not a whole lot more.

[Dr Jack]

From LTC Yingling's article:

The choice of making war to achieve a better peace is inherently a value judgment in which the statesman must decide those interests and beliefs worth killing and dying for. The military man is no better qualified than the common citizen to make such judgments. He must therefore confine his input to his area of expertise — the estimation of strategic probabilities…

Civilian policymakers have neither the expertise nor the inclination to think deeply about strategic probabilities in the distant future…

This is somewhat reminiscent of a conversation from the movie Dr. Strangelove –

General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war?

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No, I don't think I do, sir, no.

General Jack D. Ripper: He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

[Van]

Dr. StrangeloveGeneral Jack D. Ripper: I can no longer sit back and allow ... international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Generally, I prefer Sam Adams or bourbon.

But this is the dichotomey of being an officer in a system of civilian control of the military. Even if the officer is objectively right, he or she is still subordinate to civilian authority under the constitution.

Civilian policymakers have neither the expertise nor the inclination to think deeply about strategic probabilities in the distant future…

But the civilian policymakers are still in charge. LTC Yingling arrived at the conclusion that the current crop of general officers was failing in their duty to advise the civilian policymakers and took it upon himself to correct the problem. From the snippets I've read so far, he's done a very good job. Now to see what comes of it.

This makes an interesting exercise in game theory. He'll win big or lose big as far as an Army career goes. Do the rewards of success versus the cost of failure justify the strategy? Under what odds? With any kind of recognition for the book, failure in an Army career will be greatly mitigated by public speaking gigs and future writing, but that is also a gamble.

Re: my previous remarks about LTC Yingling's motivation for writing; I was stating my ignorance, not attempting to impugne LTC Yingling's character. No offence to anyone intended.

[RTK]

What's the payback for them for helping to find enemies?

Is it so hard to believe that many of them are sick of going to funerals and figure by helping us out they may actually save their own life or the lives of their family?

I presume Yingling will be talking to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who should be most receptive to him.

I doubt that very much.

[J Wolfsberger]

RTK,

I doubt that very much.

They'll be receptive because of the opportunity to collect sound bites they can deploy in the War on Bush. Learning anything from what he has to say, now that's a different matter...