Speaking Truth To Power, At A Cost

This article by Fred Kaplan appeared in the Sunday New York Times magazine, and it has to do with the push-back our generals are starting to receive from some junior officers on the Iraq war. Kaplan notes the courage it takes for people like Lt. Col. Paul Yingling to write an article published in last May’s Armed Forces Journal titled, “A Failure In Generalship” in a culture that is at best only occasionally receptive to bottom-up feedback.

As Kaplan tells us…

Yingling’s article…noted that a key role of generals is to advise policy makers and the public on the means necessary to win wars. “If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means,” he wrote, “he shares culpability for the results.” Today’s generals “failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly,” and they failed to advise policy makers on how much force would be necessary to win and stabilize Iraq. These failures, he insisted, stemmed not just from the civilian leaders but also from a military culture that “does little to reward creativity and moral courage.” He concluded, “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

…

In response…General (Richard) Cody (the U.S. Army’s vice chief of staff) acknowledged, as senior officers often do now, that the Iraq war was “mismanaged” in its first phases. The original plan, he said, did not anticipate the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, the disruption of oil production or the rise of an insurgency. Still, he rejected the broader critique. “I think we’ve got great general officers that are meeting tough demands,” he insisted. He railed instead at politicians for cutting back the military in the 1990s. “Those are the people who ought to be held accountable,” he said.

I think that’s a bit of a copout, but still in response, I’d like to offer the following information concerning the Secretary of Defense in the administration of President George H.W. Bush (1989-1993), one Richard B. Cheney by name…

"In his budget proposal for FY 1993, his last one, Cheney asked for termination of the B-2 program at 20 aircraft, cancellation of the Midgetman, and limitations on advanced cruise missile purchases to those already authorized. When introducing this budget, Cheney complained that Congress had directed Defense to buy weapons it did not want, including the V-22, M-1 tanks, and F-14 and F-16 aircraft, and required it to maintain some unneeded reserve forces. His plan outlined about $50 billion less in budget authority over the next 5 years than the Bush administration had proposed in 1991."

"Over Cheney's four years as secretary of defense, encompassing budgets for fiscal years 1990-93, DoD's total obligational authority in current dollars declined from $291.3 billion to $269.9 billion. Except for FY 1991, when the TOA budget increased by 1.7 percent, theCheney budgets showed negative real growth: -2.9 percent in 1990, -9.8 percent in 1992, and -8.1 percent in 1993. During this same period total military personnel declined by 19.4 percent, from 2.202 million in FY 1989 to 1.776 million in FY 1993. The Army took the largest cut, from 770,000 to 572,000-25.8 percent of its strength. The Air Force declined by 22.3 percent, the Navy by 14 percent, and the Marines by 9.7 percent."

Kaplan’s article discusses the apparent ebb and flow of military promotions and purges dating back to before World War II under one-time chief of staff George Marshall, and it also discusses what is seen as a “trust gap” between junior and senior officers, according to Col. Don Snider, a longtime professor at West Point…

…There has always been a gap, to some degree. What’s different now is that many of the juniors have more combat experience than the seniors. They have come to trust their own instincts more than they trust orders. They look at the hand they’ve been dealt by their superiors’ decisions, and they feel let down.

The gap is widening further, Snider told me, because of this war’s operating tempo, the “unrelenting pace” at which soldiers are rotated into Iraq for longer tours — and a greater number of tours — than they signed up for. Many soldiers, even those who support the war, are wearying of the endless cycle. The cycle is a result of two decisions. The first occurred at the start of the war, when the senior officers assented to the decision by Donald Rumsfeld, then the secretary of defense, to send in far fewer troops than they had recommended. The second took place two years later, well into the insurgency phase of the war, when top officers declared they didn’t need more troops, though most of them knew that in fact they did. “Many junior officers,” Snider said, “see this op tempo as stemming from the failure of senior officers to speak out.”

And as a result...

On the lower end of the scale (versus the high command), things have changed — but for the worse. West Point cadets are obligated to stay in the Army for five years after graduating. In a typical year, about a quarter to a third of them decide not to sign on for another term. In 2003, when the class of 1998 faced that decision, only 18 percent quit the force: memories of 9/11 were still vivid; the war in Afghanistan seemed a success; and war in Iraq was under way. Duty called, and it seemed a good time to be an Army officer. But last year, when the 905 officers from the class of 2001 had to make their choice to stay or leave, 44 percent quit the Army. It was the service’s highest loss rate in three decades.

Kaplan goes on to note individuals such as Col. H.R. McMaster, who succeeded for a time in Tal Afar because he “flooded the area with soldiers” and maintained stability, to a point. McMaster has authored new counterinsurgency strategy, and Lt. Col John Nagl, another innovative officer, wrote an article for Armed Forces Journal called “New Rules for New Enemies,” with Lt. Col. Yingling that states: “The best way to change the organizational culture of the Army is to change the pathways for professional advancement within the officer corps. The Army will become more adaptive only when being adaptive offers the surest path to promotion.”

“Guys like Yingling, Nagl and McMaster are the canaries in the coal mine of Army reform,” (a) retired two-star general I spoke with told (Kaplan). “Will they get promoted to general? If they do, that’s a sign that real change is happening. If they don’t, that’s a sign that the traditional culture still rules.”

And how important is it that our military changes its traditional culture to the point where it rewards innovative officers and encourages generals to speak out when a plan for war is bound to fail?

This Editor and Publisher Online article notes the truly dire state of the morale of our troops, in particular…

"As military and political leaders prepare to deliver a progress report on the conflict to Congress next month, many soldiers are increasingly disdainful of the happy talk that they say commanders on the ground and White House officials are using in their discussions about the war," she writes.

"And they're becoming vocal about their frustration over longer deployments and a taxing mission that keeps many living in dangerous and uncomfortably austere conditions. Some say two wars are being fought here: the one the enlisted men see, and the one that senior officers and politicians want the world to see. 'I don't see any progress. Just us getting killed,' said Spc. Yvenson Tertulien, one of those in the dining hall in Yousifiya, 10 miles south of Baghdad, as Bush's speech aired last month. 'I don't want to be here anymore.'"

An excerpt follows. The entire story can be found at www.latimes.com

*

The signs of frustration and of flagging morale are unmistakable, including blunt comments, online rants and the findings of surveys on military morale and suicides.

Sometimes the signs are to be found even in latrines. In the stalls at Baghdad's Camp Liberty, someone had posted Army help cards listing "nine signs of suicide." On one card, seven of the boxes had been checked.

"This occupation, this money pit, this smorgasbord of superfluous aggression is getting more hopeless and dismal by the second," a soldier in Diyala province, north of Baghdad, wrote in an Aug. 7 post on his blog, www.armyofdude.blogspot.com.

"The only person I know who believed Iraq was improving was killed by a sniper in May," the blogger, identified only as Alex from Frisco, Texas, said in a separate e-mail.

(As RT sings in “Dad’s Gonna Kill Me,” “at least we’re winning on the Fox Evening News.”)

And as you read this heartbreaking story (on overload with this stuff today I know, but it’s necessary), you may find yourself wondering how Willard Mitt Romney’s five sons sleep at night.