[The Reaper]

Nearly three years into the fight for Iraq, during the fall of 2005, Abizaid’s advice to Congress to “stay the course” began to fall flat. His mantra that, “Since Desert Storm in 1991, U.S. forces have not lost any combat engagement in the region at the platoon-level or above,”[45] was not convincing. It is a fact that American soldiers and marines inflicted many more casualties on the Arab insurgents, but it is the insurgents who control events by virtue of the fact that they initiated most of the contacts, and their attacks have not diminished; they have expanded.

Like Lyndon Johnson’s generals during the Vietnam era, Bush’s generals are politically skilled, energetic officers whose briefings can be impressive, but their leadership in war arouses no faith. In modern conflict, trends outweigh episodes or individual battles in their importance, and the trends are bad.[46] By the time Gen. George Casey arrived in Baghdad in November 2004 the Army generals’ fight was not simply with a resilient opponent in Central Iraq. Casey and his generals were also fighting to prop up not only a failed strategy but also a blinkered civilian leadership in Washington. It remains a sad commentary on the generals that they have shown so little spine in the face of a disastrous occupation and an incompetently run war.

Imposing Accountability

Long periods of peace during the Cold War cultivated a bureaucratic mindset inside the Department of Defense, a mentality that is at odds with winning wars that require creative thinking and aggressive action. The resulting tendency is to promote those officers to high rank with whom the four-star generals at the top are comfortable, officers much like the four-stars themselves. These rising officers exhibit good bureaucratic skills with an over-riding instinct for personal self-promotion and they reap the rewards for “going along.”[47] Such officers are only as good as the tactical doctrine they know, because they have learned not to ask what else might work. They are obviously not good enough.

Americans should reflect on the fact that U.S. military performance for over half a century has not been the mythic success that the generals encourage the public to believe. America’s war on the Korean Peninsula ended in a stalemate. America lost in Vietnam. Grenada was an operational embarrassment in a fight with almost no enemy at all. Panama can be called a success despite its flaws, but it could not have been a failure given the weakness of the Panamanian Defense Force. Military incompetence enabled terrorists to drive U.S. troops out of both Lebanon and Somalia. The severely deteriorated situations in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo are scarcely tributes to the generals’ skills in peace support operations. The 1991 Gulf War was a grossly exaggerated victory, characterized by very little direct fire ground combat, against a weak and demoralized enemy. America’s intervention in Afghanistan and its 2003 invasion of Iraq were both carried out against far weaker enemies to the point where there was almost no serious opposition by conventional forces.

What is needed is a selection system for promotion to flag ranks that tests competence in training and deployments and that holds officers accountable for their performance in military educational institutions and certainly on the battlefield.

Leo Strauss, a leading American political philosopher and early advocate for neoconservative thinking confronted similar challenges at the University of Chicago from professors who contended that “all points of view are equal… and that anyone who argues for the superiority of a distinctive moral insight, way of life, or human type is somehow elitist or antidemocratic- and hence immoral."[48] The university professors who opposed Strauss, like the generals, were comfortable with the ambiguity of cronyism and the opportunity to advance individuals on the basis of loyalty alone, not performance. In the profession of arms, a profession that involves life and death decisions, competence, not cronyism, must be king.

In retrospect, appointing General Mattis to assume command of the ground force after the fall of Baghdad would have helped immeasurably. He was not only aggressive in combat, he had also taken the trouble to study the British and French experience with counter-insurgency and stability operations. Immediately advancing Mattis to three stars, something Marshall and Patton would surely have done, would have sent a powerful signal that professional competence and character under fire trump all other considerations in wartime. Unfortunately, the civilians in charge bowed to service parochialism and appointed an Army general, because Army troops constituted the majority of the ground force and because the civilians were unfamiliar with how ground forces should fight and how generals should command them.

Today, Winston Churchill is remembered for readiness in wartime to reverse course, to replace ineffective military commanders, to change tactics, and adopt new, more promising strategies. He believed that results, not sentiment, counted most in war.

Frustrated with the miserable performance of British generals in the opening battles of World War II, Churchill told Sir John Dill, chief of the Imperial General Staff, “We cannot afford to confine Army appointments to persons who have excited no hostile comment in their careers… This is a time to try men of force and vision and not to be exclusively confined to those who are judged thoroughly safe by conventional standards.”[49]

Today, there is no one holding elected or appointed office on the American political scene like Churchill and no political “constituency” for excellence in generalship. There needs to be – and it should not be a party matter - because the consequences of mediocre generalship are serious.

-- Douglas Macgregor is a former Army Colonel and a decorated Gulf War combat veteran.He is the author of Transformation Under Fire (published by Praeger, 2003), Breaking the Phalanx: A New Design for Landpower in the 21st Century, (published by Praeger, 1997), and The Soviet-East German Military Alliance, (published by Cambridge University Press, 1989). His newest work, Character under Fire: The Battle of 73 Easting will be appear later this year. Col. Macgregor writes this article for the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, DC.

ENDNOTES

[1] George Packer, The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq, (New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005), page 446.
[2] Greg Jaffe and Yochi J. Dreazen, “As Bush Pledges To Stay In Iraq, Military Talks Up Smaller Force: Some Top Brass Say Troops May Be Fueling Insurgency; Two Political Tests Ahead,” Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2005, page 1.
[3]Ellen Knickermeyer, “Baghdad Neighborhood’s Hopes Dimmed by the Trials of War,” Washingtonpost.com, 27 September, 2005. The new ABC-Time Oxford Research International poll conducted in Iraq during December 2005 states: “There's other evidence of the United States' increasing unpopularity: Two-thirds now oppose the presence of U.S. and Coalition forces in Iraq, 14 points higher than in February 2004. Nearly six in 10 disapprove of how the United States has operated in Iraq since the war, and most of them disapprove strongly. And nearly half of Iraqis would like to see U.S. forces leave soon.” See Anthony Cordesman’s“The True Meaning of the Iraqi Election: A “Trigger,” Not a “Turning Point,” Report for Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC, 14 December, 2005, page 5.
[4] Seymour M. Hersh, “Up in the Air. Where is the Iraq war headed next?” New Yorker, Issue of 2005-12-05. Hersh claims that the generals are, “… deeply frustrated, but they say nothing in public, because they don’t want to jeopardize their careers. The Administration has “so terrified the generals that they know they won’t go public.””
[5]Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War, London, UK: Methuen, 1981), pages 15-19. The French Army from 1830 to 1870 was an army with a reputation for excellence against enemies far weaker than itself. But victory over Arabs, Berbers, Russians and Mexicans enemies whose administration, training and small unit leadership was demonstrably worse than the French Army’s provided all the justification that was needed to halt reform and let the generals preserve a system that for all its faults still worked well enough. When war came with Prussia, however, the same generals exalted in the French press for their brilliant leadership in previous campaigns shocked the French nation by surrendering their forces to the competent and effective Prussians in the space of only a few months. The French generals were quite capable of defeating weak enemies, but they were incapable of defeating a competent adversary.