Richard
04-01-2013, 11:55
David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, John Allen, and James Mattis - agree or disagree, it's an interesting read and one must consider one's views on differing degrees of what is/isn't "greatness" in such arguments. For example, my father-in-law fought under Patton and considered him great; my uncle fought under Bradley and considered Patton over-rated; both considered MacArthur to be much less capable than either Patton or Bradley, or even Eisenhower or Nimitz.
The question - just what kind of military leaders are America's politicians seeking?
Richard :munchin
How America Lost Its Four Great Generals
Commentary, Apr 2013
Part 1 of 3
The quasi-official ideology of the U.S. armed forces holds that generals are virtually interchangeable, that individual personalities don’t matter much, that ordinary grunts are in any case more important than their leaders, and that what really counts are larger systems that make a complex bureaucracy function. There is some truth to all of this. But for all of the bureaucratic heft of the services and the heroism of ordinary soldiers, it is hard to imagine the Civil War having been won without Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan—or World War II without Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, Arnold, LeMay, Nimitz, Halsey, and all the other senior generals and admirals.
Likewise it is hard to imagine the War on Terror having been waged without four-star commanders such as David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, John Allen, and James Mattis. They are among the most illustrious generals produced by the last decade of fighting. They are the stars of their generation. From Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond, they emerged from anonymity to orchestrate campaigns that, after initial setbacks, have given the United States a chance to salvage a decent outcome from protracted counterinsurgencies; they have also literally rewritten the book on how to wage modern war successfully. Yet aside from the similarities in the challenges they faced and the skills they displayed in rising to the task, these men share another, more troubling resemblance: They are either gone from the military or (in the case of Mattis) about to go as of this writing. And for the most part they are leaving under unhappy circumstances. A strong case can be made that all were shabbily treated to one extent or another. Petraeus was hounded out of the CIA and McChrystal out of high command in Afghanistan under a cloud of scandal; Allen saw his reputation unfairly marred by scandal before deciding to call it quits; and Mattis is said to have been pushed out early after clashes with the White House. Certainly none of them was afforded the respect and honors that successful officers at the pinnacle of their career ought to expect—in part to drive younger officers to follow their example and seize the day when their time comes. The treatment of these four remarkable generals at the hands of President Obama and his aides, whatever the merits of each individual case, is likely to rankle within the armed forces and leave those forces less prepared for future challenges.
Of the four, Petraeus was first among equals, the dominant general of his generation. McChrystal effectively worked for Petraeus in Iraq after the latter took over the war effort there in 2007. Allen did work for him as deputy commander at Central Command, the operational headquarters for U.S. military efforts in the Middle East. As Petraeus’s successor at Centcom, Mattis was nominally his predecessor’s boss during his time in Afghanistan, but only nominally: Because of the success he had achieved in Iraq in 2007 and 2008, Petraeus had effectively become answerable only to the commander-in-chief.
The story of Petraeus’s role during the surge is well known and would not need much recitation were it not for the persistent attempts by revisionists to deprecate his achievement. His critics argue that (1) the Sunni Awakening (in which Iraqis fighting against the United States instead turned on al-Qaeda) was primarily responsible for the turnaround and independent of the surge orchestrated by Petraeus, and (2) that the impact of the surge was in any case overblown because it did not solve Iraq’s deep-seated political problems.
What should we make of these criticisms?
The Awakening did begin in the fall of 2006 before Petraeus took over command in Iraq. But there had been previous revolts among the Sunni sheikhs of Anbar Province who had chafed under the heavy-handed dominance of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Those revolts had been bloodily repressed by AQI and ignored by previous American commanders, who had assumed that supporting tribal fighters was antithetical to prospects of building a modern democracy in Iraq.
By contrast, Petraeus saw the potential of the Awakening from the start and supported it to the hilt, providing funding, weapons, and even planning risky prisoner releases to bolster the credibility of the sheikhs among their own people. The success of the Awakening was not a refutation but a confirmation of his approach to counterinsurgency, which depended on winning the support of local notables as much as executing more traditional measures of battlefield success.
This was only one of many “lines of operation” that Petraeus pursued in contrast with the less ambitious and less successful approach of his predecessors. He and General Ray Odierno, then the day-to-day commander in Iraq, pushed U.S. troops off the massive “forward operating bases” on which they had secured and isolated themselves. Troops were directed instead to live in population centers so they could provide security to the Iraqis around the clock, seven days a week. Petraeus also pressured Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (a Shiite) to approach the Sunnis, and to remove the most notorious anti-Sunni ethno-sectarians from his government. Petraeus oversaw the detention and killing of more insurgents than ever before without causing a backlash among the Sunni population, because his troops acted on precisely targeted intelligence. He instituted “counterinsurgency behind the wire” in detention facilities, to make sure that hard-core detainees in coalition custody were not able to cultivate new recruits behind bars. He targeted Iranian intelligence operatives who were supporting insurgent groups (among them the notorious Mahdi Army) fighting coalition forces. He also communicated clearly and without spin to the American public and Congress about the extent of the success he was achieving and the problems that still remained. And on and on. The scale and scope of Petraeus’s activities as commander of Multi-National Force–Iraq were exhaustive and exhausting.
It is true that Petraeus did not solve all of Iraq’s problems, but that was not his charge. By any reckoning, he achieved far more than anyone could have imagined possible in early 2007, when Iraq appeared to be on the brink of all-out civil war. From 2007 to 2008, the surge reduced violence by 90 percent and restarted the Iraqi political process, which had all but ceased to function.
Petraeus’s achievement in turning around a desperate situation in Iraq has few parallels in the annals of counterinsurgency. It will guarantee his place in military history, even though he did not have a comparable degree of success in Afghanistan during his year in command.
Petraeus was sent in July 2010 to Afghanistan to replace Stanley McChrystal, another remarkable general. McChrystal had established an outsize reputation as the commander (from 2003 to 2008) of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), home to SEAL Team Six, Delta Force, and other top-tier special-operations forces. McChrystal displayed a dedication that was legendary even in the hard-charging world of special operations: He set up his global headquarters, not at the congenial Fort Bragg in North Carolina, but at a dusty air base in Balad, north of Baghdad, where he stayed for the bulk of the next five years. He ate only one meal a day, slept on a cot, and exercised relentlessly even in punishing heat and dust. Along the way he remade JSOC into the finest man-hunting organization in the world.
(Cont'd)
The question - just what kind of military leaders are America's politicians seeking?
Richard :munchin
How America Lost Its Four Great Generals
Commentary, Apr 2013
Part 1 of 3
The quasi-official ideology of the U.S. armed forces holds that generals are virtually interchangeable, that individual personalities don’t matter much, that ordinary grunts are in any case more important than their leaders, and that what really counts are larger systems that make a complex bureaucracy function. There is some truth to all of this. But for all of the bureaucratic heft of the services and the heroism of ordinary soldiers, it is hard to imagine the Civil War having been won without Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan—or World War II without Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, Arnold, LeMay, Nimitz, Halsey, and all the other senior generals and admirals.
Likewise it is hard to imagine the War on Terror having been waged without four-star commanders such as David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, John Allen, and James Mattis. They are among the most illustrious generals produced by the last decade of fighting. They are the stars of their generation. From Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond, they emerged from anonymity to orchestrate campaigns that, after initial setbacks, have given the United States a chance to salvage a decent outcome from protracted counterinsurgencies; they have also literally rewritten the book on how to wage modern war successfully. Yet aside from the similarities in the challenges they faced and the skills they displayed in rising to the task, these men share another, more troubling resemblance: They are either gone from the military or (in the case of Mattis) about to go as of this writing. And for the most part they are leaving under unhappy circumstances. A strong case can be made that all were shabbily treated to one extent or another. Petraeus was hounded out of the CIA and McChrystal out of high command in Afghanistan under a cloud of scandal; Allen saw his reputation unfairly marred by scandal before deciding to call it quits; and Mattis is said to have been pushed out early after clashes with the White House. Certainly none of them was afforded the respect and honors that successful officers at the pinnacle of their career ought to expect—in part to drive younger officers to follow their example and seize the day when their time comes. The treatment of these four remarkable generals at the hands of President Obama and his aides, whatever the merits of each individual case, is likely to rankle within the armed forces and leave those forces less prepared for future challenges.
Of the four, Petraeus was first among equals, the dominant general of his generation. McChrystal effectively worked for Petraeus in Iraq after the latter took over the war effort there in 2007. Allen did work for him as deputy commander at Central Command, the operational headquarters for U.S. military efforts in the Middle East. As Petraeus’s successor at Centcom, Mattis was nominally his predecessor’s boss during his time in Afghanistan, but only nominally: Because of the success he had achieved in Iraq in 2007 and 2008, Petraeus had effectively become answerable only to the commander-in-chief.
The story of Petraeus’s role during the surge is well known and would not need much recitation were it not for the persistent attempts by revisionists to deprecate his achievement. His critics argue that (1) the Sunni Awakening (in which Iraqis fighting against the United States instead turned on al-Qaeda) was primarily responsible for the turnaround and independent of the surge orchestrated by Petraeus, and (2) that the impact of the surge was in any case overblown because it did not solve Iraq’s deep-seated political problems.
What should we make of these criticisms?
The Awakening did begin in the fall of 2006 before Petraeus took over command in Iraq. But there had been previous revolts among the Sunni sheikhs of Anbar Province who had chafed under the heavy-handed dominance of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Those revolts had been bloodily repressed by AQI and ignored by previous American commanders, who had assumed that supporting tribal fighters was antithetical to prospects of building a modern democracy in Iraq.
By contrast, Petraeus saw the potential of the Awakening from the start and supported it to the hilt, providing funding, weapons, and even planning risky prisoner releases to bolster the credibility of the sheikhs among their own people. The success of the Awakening was not a refutation but a confirmation of his approach to counterinsurgency, which depended on winning the support of local notables as much as executing more traditional measures of battlefield success.
This was only one of many “lines of operation” that Petraeus pursued in contrast with the less ambitious and less successful approach of his predecessors. He and General Ray Odierno, then the day-to-day commander in Iraq, pushed U.S. troops off the massive “forward operating bases” on which they had secured and isolated themselves. Troops were directed instead to live in population centers so they could provide security to the Iraqis around the clock, seven days a week. Petraeus also pressured Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (a Shiite) to approach the Sunnis, and to remove the most notorious anti-Sunni ethno-sectarians from his government. Petraeus oversaw the detention and killing of more insurgents than ever before without causing a backlash among the Sunni population, because his troops acted on precisely targeted intelligence. He instituted “counterinsurgency behind the wire” in detention facilities, to make sure that hard-core detainees in coalition custody were not able to cultivate new recruits behind bars. He targeted Iranian intelligence operatives who were supporting insurgent groups (among them the notorious Mahdi Army) fighting coalition forces. He also communicated clearly and without spin to the American public and Congress about the extent of the success he was achieving and the problems that still remained. And on and on. The scale and scope of Petraeus’s activities as commander of Multi-National Force–Iraq were exhaustive and exhausting.
It is true that Petraeus did not solve all of Iraq’s problems, but that was not his charge. By any reckoning, he achieved far more than anyone could have imagined possible in early 2007, when Iraq appeared to be on the brink of all-out civil war. From 2007 to 2008, the surge reduced violence by 90 percent and restarted the Iraqi political process, which had all but ceased to function.
Petraeus’s achievement in turning around a desperate situation in Iraq has few parallels in the annals of counterinsurgency. It will guarantee his place in military history, even though he did not have a comparable degree of success in Afghanistan during his year in command.
Petraeus was sent in July 2010 to Afghanistan to replace Stanley McChrystal, another remarkable general. McChrystal had established an outsize reputation as the commander (from 2003 to 2008) of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), home to SEAL Team Six, Delta Force, and other top-tier special-operations forces. McChrystal displayed a dedication that was legendary even in the hard-charging world of special operations: He set up his global headquarters, not at the congenial Fort Bragg in North Carolina, but at a dusty air base in Balad, north of Baghdad, where he stayed for the bulk of the next five years. He ate only one meal a day, slept on a cot, and exercised relentlessly even in punishing heat and dust. Along the way he remade JSOC into the finest man-hunting organization in the world.
(Cont'd)