You may have heard or read in the news about a serving officer criticizing the failures of American generals in Iraq. The Army was quick to distance itself officially from this letter -- unsurprising, since the letter calls into question most of the military's "business as usual." Heard as a sound bite, the letter sounds like pure criticism, and something that can safely fall off the news cycle and be ignored.
It's not, though. Lt. Col. Paul Yingling has written a strong, important critique of how the American military works. More to the point, he tossed aside George Bush's pathetic straw man defense and provided a plan for change.
When Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster critiqued the US military, I read and reviewed what he wrote. Similarly, I read and reviewed Lt. Col. John A. Nagl's book on counterinsurgency, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. Not coincidentally, Yingling mentions Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife in his piece.
Yingling opens with a discussion of "the responsibilities of generalship." Choosing war, he tells us, is the province of policymakers and the people. Generals, on their own, are no more qualified to choose war than any other citizen. Their job -- and it's a critical job -- is to prepare for war and evaluate our readiness for war. When policymakers and the people choose to go to war, the generals must give a sober evaluation of whether or not we can achieve success. If they determine that we can't, they have to tell policymakers that, and then the policymakers can figure out whether they can drum up enough support to gain the resources we need -- whether it be in manpower or economic assets -- to meet the requirements of the generals.
No one can perfectly prepare for the next war, but one can try to get as close as possible. Yingling quotes Sir Michael Howard on this point:
"In structuring and preparing an army for war, you can be clear that you will not get it precisely right, but the important thing is not to be too far wrong, so that you can put it right quickly."
As he points out, one can either fight the last war, and lose -- as the French military did in the second world war -- or rethink things and win -- as the Germans did against France in that very same war.
Yingling moves on to Vietnam, the first major failure of American generalship. As he and many others have pointed out, the American military failed to acknowledge a basic shift in the kinds of wars we'd be fighting after World War II and Korea, even in the face of explicit evidence from the French experience in Indochina. Even when President Kennedy saw that war would be heading toward counterinsurgency rather than salients and tank battles, the generals stayed in their comfort zone.
The biggest failures in Vietnam, however, came from generals who explicitly saw the problems and simply said nothing about it:
Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson estimated in 1965 that victory would require as many as 700,000 troops for up to five years. Commandant of the Marine Corps Wallace Greene made a similar estimate on troop levels. As President Johnson incrementally escalated the war, neither man made his views known to the president or Congress. President Johnson made a concerted effort to conceal the costs and consequences of Vietnam from the public, but such duplicity required the passive consent of America's generals.
After the war, the generals made a concerted effort to forget any lessons that might have been learned:
An essential contribution to this strategy of denial was the publication of "On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War," by Col. Harry Summers. Summers, a faculty member of the U.S. Army War College, argued that the Army had erred by not focusing enough on conventional warfare in Vietnam, a lesson the Army was happy to hear. Despite having been recently defeated by an insurgency, the Army slashed training and resources devoted to counterinsurgency.
Through the 80s the American military focused on large-scale warfare with the Soviets. Our subsequent success in pushing the conventional forces out of Iraq were taken as a sign that we were on the right track, as was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Of course, as Yingling points out, we sped the collapse of the Soviet Union by funding an insurgency in Afghanistan. In other words, we attacked our opponents by insurgency, but refused to admit its power or importance. Thus, the 90s saw us continuing to gear up for conventional warfare -- even though the Battle of the Black Sea showed us that the odds were good we'd be fighting against folks with rifles and man-portable antitank weapons, rather than Soviet T-72s and MiGs.
Then, we went to war in Iraq -- and the first, and most critical, failure of generalship struck:
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.
This is important, and stunningly similar to Vietnam. Bush and his apologists like to say that no one knew how bad it would be. Perhaps that's true -- although that represents a massive failure that Yingling addresses later on. But everyone knew, from hard, empirical evidence, taken from recent history, that we would need far, far more troops than we planned to send. As Yingling points out, only General Shinseki, whom the Bush administration did their best to shame, said that we needed a couple hundred thousand more soldiers to safely pacify Iraq. All the other generals stood by as manslaughter was committed in advance by "planners" who suggested we'd be down to only 5,000 troops in Iraq 12-18 months after the invasion.
Troop strength alone was not the only failure. Despite their own modeling showing that the State Department would be unable to pick up many of the tasks required for occupation, the "planners" still assumed State would handle most of the governing duties. Then, after making these two critical missteps, the generals made a huge third mistake by failing to adapt to the counterinsurgency in Iraq. This is unsurprising, given the assiduous avoidance of counterinsurgency theory and training over the last half century.
Finally, in another sick mirror of Vietnam, "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.
So, that's a lot of critiquing. We have a general officer corps that misrepresents things when they don't fit executive policy, that says it is "intimidated" into silence by upper management, that will let our men and women be sent to war with half (or less!) the troops they need, and that have eschewed training in the key areas of modern war.
How do we fix this?
Yingling sets out some key areas where things need to change, and he tasks Congress with exercising its power to make sure this happens. Note that here, a military officer believes that Congress should exercise control over the military, something that George Bush has a problem with. Curious disagreement, isn't it?
Here are the changes Yingling wants us to make:
- Congress should require the armed services to implement 360-degree evaluations for field-grade and flag officers. Junior officers and noncommissioned officers are often the first to adapt because they bear the brunt of failed tactics most directly. They are also less wed to organizational norms and less influenced by organizational taboos. Junior leaders have valuable insights regarding the effectiveness of their leaders, but the current promotion system excludes these judgments. Incorporating subordinate and peer reviews into promotion decisions for senior leaders would produce officers more willing to adapt to changing circumstances, and less likely to conform to outmoded practices.
- Congress should also modify the officer promotion system in ways that reward intellectual achievement. The Senate should examine the education and professional writing of nominees for three- and four-star billets as part of the confirmation process. The Senate would never confirm to the Supreme Court a nominee who had neither been to law school nor written legal opinions. However, it routinely confirms four-star generals who possess neither graduate education in the social sciences or humanities nor the capability to speak a foreign language. Senior general officers must have a vision of what future conflicts will look like and what capabilities the U.S. requires to prevail in those conflicts. They must possess the capability to understand and interact with foreign cultures. A solid record of intellectual achievement and fluency in foreign languages are effective indicators of an officer's potential for senior leadership.
- To reward moral courage in our general officers, Congress must ask hard questions about the means and ways for war as part of its oversight responsibility. Some of the answers will be shocking, which is perhaps why Congress has not asked and the generals have not told. Congress must ask for a candid assessment of the money and manpower required over the next generation to prevail in the Long War. The money required to prevail may place fiscal constraints on popular domestic priorities. The quantity and quality of manpower required may call into question the viability of the all-volunteer military. Congress must re-examine the allocation of existing resources, and demand that procurement priorities reflect the most likely threats we will face. Congress must be equally rigorous in ensuring that the ways of war contribute to conflict termination consistent with the aims of national policy. If our operations produce more enemies than they defeat, no amount of force is sufficient to prevail. Current oversight efforts have proved inadequate, allowing the executive branch, the services and lobbyists to present information that is sometimes incomplete, inaccurate or self-serving. Exercising adequate oversight will require members of Congress to develop the expertise necessary to ask the right questions and display the courage to follow the truth wherever it leads them.
- Finally, Congress must enhance accountability by exercising its little-used authority to confirm the retired rank of general officers. By law, Congress must confirm an officer who retires at three- or four-star rank. In the past this requirement has been pro forma in all but a few cases. A general who presides over a massive human rights scandal or a substantial deterioration in security ought to be retired at a lower rank than one who serves with distinction. A general who fails to provide Congress with an accurate and candid assessment of strategic probabilities ought to suffer the same penalty. As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war. By exercising its powers to confirm the retired ranks of general officers, Congress can restore accountability among senior military leaders.
There you go. Lt. Col. Yingling has given us solid suggestions for fixing the critical problems that have led us to failure not once, but twice in the last half century. The next time a politician uses the dodge that "we shouldn't tell our generals what to do" to defend bad policy, we might all do well to read Lt. Col. Yingling's essay one more time, then find ourselves some new generals.
You can read Lt. Col. Yingling's piece by clicking here.
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