A junior officer attacks the generals
A failure in generalship
By Lt. Col. Paul Yingling
[link]
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.
As Thomas Ricks notes at WaPo:
Yingling’s comments are especially striking because his unit’s performance in securing the northwestern Iraqi city of Tall Afar was cited by President Bush in a March 2006 speech and provided the model for the new security plan underway in Baghdad.
He also holds a high profile for a lieutenant colonel: He attended the Army’s elite School for Advanced Military Studies and has written for one of the Army’s top professional journals, Military Review.
Colonel Yingling goes on to say:
Having spent a decade preparing to fight the wrong war, America’s generals then miscalculated both the means and ways necessary to succeed in Iraq. The most fundamental military miscalculation in Iraq has been the failure to commit sufficient forces to provide security to Iraq’s population. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) estimated in its 1998 war plan that 380,000 troops would be necessary for an invasion of Iraq. Using operations in Bosnia and Kosovo as a model for predicting troop requirements, one Army study estimated a need for 470,000 troops. Alone among America’s generals, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki publicly stated that “several hundred thousand soldiers” would be necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Prior to the war, President Bush promised to give field commanders everything necessary for victory. Privately, many senior general officers both active and retired expressed serious misgivings about the insufficiency of forces for Iraq. These leaders would later express their concerns in tell-all books such as “Fiasco” and “Cobra II.” However, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq with less than half the strength required to win, these leaders did not make their objections public.
And:
After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America’s general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public. The Iraq Study Group concluded that “there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq.” The ISG noted that “on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.” Population security is the most important measure of effectiveness in counterinsurgency. For more than three years, America’s generals continued to insist that the U.S. was making progress in Iraq. However, for Iraqi civilians, each year from 2003 onward was more deadly than the one preceding it. For reasons that are not yet clear, America’s general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq’s government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq. Moreover, America’s generals have not explained clearly the larger strategic risks of committing so large a portion of the nation’s deployable land power to a single theater of operations.
And insi9ists that Congress, alone, has the power to correct this.
And somebody needs to promote this guy because he’s calling it exactly right. General Eric Shinseki remains the sole general so far who demonstrated competency, which caused Bush to dismiss him.
I’d seriously consider Shinseki as our next Secretary of Defense.
April 27th, 2007 at 9:12 am
That read is one great find.
One small quibble on the headline: A lieutenant colonel is not a “junior officer” although he is of course junior to a general. Junior officers usually refer to “company grade” officers –lieutenants through captains. Then there is field grade: major, lt. col, colonel. And finally general officers.
Enough nattering about style instead of substance.
The failure of general officers in Vietnam was obvious, particularly that of William Westmoreland, a publicity hound and political suckup whom paratroopers remember refused to postpone his 101st Airborne Division’s demonstration jump on a fiercely windy day in 1958 because some congressmen were in the reviewing stand. Five troopers were dragged to death for Westy’s ambition. He “made up for it” by leading the next jump himself to great publicity.
Of course Westy managed to mangle a war as soon as he got the chance, breaking starch six times a day as he helicoptered around presenting medals.
Duty, honor, country. It is very important that soldiers in a democracy follow that West Point creed. It is vital that general officers do. This means that you never disobey your civilian masters, but you do speak truth to them. And if they lie to you, you don’t quibble. You quit. You speak truth up the line and down. That way the men you command respect what you tell them to do even if they do not understand or agree with it, and, in turn, you respect and obey the commands you pass on. In the military, this has to work both ways. The truth has to be told. It is a matter of life and death.
That makes former General Colin Powell’s dissemination of lies to the UN doubly tragic. (Cynics might remember, however, that he failed in finding and telling the truth when tasked as an Americal Division officer to find out what had happened at My Lai in the year before Seymour Hersh broke the story after a mere non-career enlisted man had the honor to do his duty and report the massacre to military criminal investigators.)
At any event, from Westmoreland’s at least arguably fiddling with enemy troop strength figures to make them seem less than they were which proved to be just a bit of a problem when the enemy showed his real strength during the Tet Offensive (and which led to the libel suit against CBS), to Powell’s spouting of what he had to know was nonsense in support of getting Operation Elect Bush underway in 2002, we have seen the military’s most hallowed general officers (with exceptions such as Eric Shinseki) overcome with ambition, diddling the truth in service to an administration which can grant them favor instead of the nation they have sworn to serve.
This is yet another way that these cowardly, corrupt, and malignant morons from Bush on down have broken the ground forces of our military. Physically they have totally overextended them, and that is going to hurt grievously for at least a generation, just as Vietnam did. Morally, it is just as bad in Iraq as it was in Vietnam.
And all for what? So that the slacker-in-chief could prance around in a flight suit he had disgraced and pretend to be a war president. Enough lies, enough charades, and, no surprise, most everybody seemed to forget the yellow streak he displayed on 9/11, sitting stunned, as if in a puddle of pee, in that classroom, before skedaddling to a atom-safe bunker in the heartland of the nation he is far down the road to crippling as surely as his political, oedipal, and oily ambitions have crippled this nation’s combat arms.
I’d say the inside-the-beltway prestige press is about the only American institution that has failed our country even more grievously than the military chiefs and Congress in checking the wretched excesses of this disastrous administration.
April 27th, 2007 at 10:34 am
Amen!
April 28th, 2007 at 8:01 am
The Colonel is in my opinion absolutely correct. All of the Generals in Iraq are I believe graduates of “The War College”. What they learned and are practicing in Iraq has not worked. Either these Generals are pompous incompetents or they lack common sense and are following flawed training, or both the former and the latter. Generals’ Patton and Puller are surely rolling in their graves.
April 28th, 2007 at 10:43 am
We don’t know what the US generals told the civilian administration about Iraq. It isn’t the job of generals to inform Congress and the media, but the President.
I think that asking the military to conquer various tank armies (like Saddam’s), to deter the Soviet Union, and to patrol the seas is enough. Asking these very same leaders to be fluent in Arabic, skilled at civil affairs, and polished public speakers is too much. The job of a military is more to destroy enemy nations than to build them. If the civil-political job must be done overseas, it is probably not the Army that should do it.
If the US Army had tightly focused on counterinsurgency in the 50’s and 60’s, the US might have won in Vietnam but lost Europe to the Soviets. I don’t think you can have both in one organization.