The 20/20 hindsight gift

[Administrator]

As a career Army officer, I found many elements of Lt. Col. Paul Yingling's assessment of our general officers' leadership to ring true, but his use of history and facts are selective, his expectations of Congress as a solution are naïve and his stance a bit self-righteous. This rebuttal does not excuse those few generals who are culpable in failing to stand up to a secretary of defense and the U.S. administrator in Iraq, but Yingling's scathing assessment doesn't apply to the great majority of our generals.

http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2007/07/2779405

[robert Shule]

It only takes a few bad apples to make the whole bushel look bad. In the subject case here of our present U.S. military, the bad apples are right at the very top; that is the core of the problem. It starts with the Commander-in-Chief, Mr. George Bush. The rot then proliferates on down to those immediates about him. If our Armed forces wish to solve its problems, it is he, the bad apple at the very top that must go first. In his conduct as the Commander-in-Chief, Mr. Bush has clearly violated geneva conventions amongst other things. His actions are understood by many as crimes of war, and thus stands accused of violating military codes of conduct. That being, and since no individual in the military stands above the law not even the Commander-in-Cheif, court martialing Mr. Bush should not be out of the question. Now, I ask; does anybody in the service have the balls to start such court martial proceedings?

[Major Riptide]

LTC Mauk makes some interesting points in his rebuttal of LTC Yingling's criticism of our General Officer leadership. He makes some valid points, but on the whole I find that his commentary sounds an awful lot like our post-Vietnam attempt to blame the politicians for our internal shortcomings in counter-insurgency training and operations.

Don't get me wrong - there is plenty of blame to go around, and a good portion of that blame deserves to be put on the politicians. However, the notion that we would have wrapped this thing in Iraq up neatly were it not for them is questionable at best.

I agree with Mauk that not all our Generals suffer from a lack of character, ability, or conviction, however, I don't think that Yingling ever made that claim. I don’t think Yingling intended to describe all our General Officers, but he made it clear there are a significant portion of General Officers who are lacking, many of whom were in key positions to influence the course of the Iraq War. Still, it's noteworthy that of all the Officers that enter the Army, very few are selected to be General Officers. We have a lot of talent to choose from - I'm not sure why we ought to settle for any General Officer who lacks moral conviction.

Mauk also asserts that our Generals grew up in the same culture that suppresses objection and independent thinking that Mauk and Yingling grew up in and therefore should be capable of exercising free will (like Mauk and Yingling). I would assert that Yingling was not speaking to the capabilities of General Officers to exercise free will, but rather their willingness to do so. We are all products of the Army’s conformist culture. The more one is willing to conform, the more successful one will be. Hence, we can infer that the higher an Officer progresses in the Army, the more likely he/she is to conform to cultural expectations. Put another way, a General is likely to be more of a conformist than a Lieutenant Colonel.

This dynamic is critically important to understand within the context of the Iraq War. One of the “sacred cow” cultural expectations we have in the Army is the "can do" attitude. Officers (at all levels) who provide realistic assessments of what can be done are derided as naysayers and obstacles to mission accomplishment. Those who simply give an enthusiastic "thumbs up" and move out to execute the mission, regardless of whether that mission has a real chance for success, are more likely to be looked favorably upon by their superiors. As the old business saying goes “What gets rewarded, gets done.”

These cultural realities very likely led to many Generals not to speak out against the Iraq war, many of whom most likely knew better. As Mauk points out, our Generals are the best educated students of warfare in the world, and it’s difficult to imagine they did not perceive the inherent risks in the plan for the Iraq War. However their education, training, and ability as warfighters is not in question - it’s their guts and their willingness to speak up and give the civilian leadership honest, frank advice – maybe even lay down their stars if the decisions of those civilian leaders were negligent to the extent they were likely to shed our Soldier’s blood needlessly.

Mauk disputes Yingling's claim that our generals failed to train the force for irregular warfare, but Yingling was right on in this regard. Mauk justifies his argument by saying the military had a sound strategy going into Iraq, that was then disrupted by the politicians. Mauk is confusing the argument here. The soundness of the Iraq strategy and the readiness of our troops to fight an irregular war are two separate questions. Did our Generals train the force properly for irregular warfare? Are our current woes in Iraq the result of poor strategy or the undercutting of sound strategy by the politicians?

First, the question of training. Mauk claims that the military trains for both regular and irregular warfare, but that is patently false. While certain Special Operations units train for irregular warfare, the conventional force did not start training irregular warfare until we were well into Iraq. I personally went to the National Training Center and trained against a conventional opposing force in a classic cold war tank battle scenario – this was more than six months after 9/11. Even in the midst of an ongoing irregular fight in Afghanistan, we still had not incorporated even small bits of irregular training into our major training events. To claim that we were doing any type of meaningful irregular warfare training in the conventional Army prior to 9/11 and even prior to Iraq is a far, far stretch on the part of Mauk.

While it seems obvious we should have been training irregular warfare, it’s important to understand why we weren’t.

After the loss in Vietnam, the Army stuck it’s collective head in the sand. Rather than admitting that we failed dreadfully at counter-insurgency OPS, we instead chose to blame the politicians and lack of national will on our loss while ignoring our own shortcomings. We decided to train almost exclusively for big tank battles in the Fulda Gap because that is what we were comfortable with. Even with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of our major conventional threat, we continued training for these conventional scenarios. Sure, we paid some lip service to irregular warfare, but it was just that and nothing more.

Unfortunately, our victory in the Gulf in 1991 led us to believe that we were doing all the right things, but really, we were not. We were not training to meet emerging non-state threats and to fight the “three block war”. We fell into the age-old trap– like the Allies after WWI, we trained to fight the last war while our enemies trained to fight the next one. Our enemies learned the right lessons from the Gulf War, the most important of which was to avoid confrontation with the US with symmetric or regular forces. The stage was set for the next generation of warfare to emerge in earnest.

Ironically, Mauk accuses Yingling of taking after the post-Vietnam critics, when he himself is the one falling into that trap, choosing to ignore our training and strategic shortcomings and shifting all blame to the politicians. Mauk claims that our slowness in transitioning to the unconventional fight was a result of “having to shift operational gears.” This is nothing more than an excuse. Irregular fighting means fighting the three block war. This just isn’t the ability to “shift operational gears” quicker, it’s the ability to operate along several lines of operation simultaneously. Had we been training this fight, the transition would have been seamless. The fact is we were not trained for this fight.

Second, the question of strategy. There can be no question that certain decisions by Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfield, and others led to the post-invasion chaos and ensuing insurgency. The disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the de-Baathification policies come to mind. Our strategy for Iraq was to decapitate the leadership leaving existing institutions in place to keep the government functioning. Was this a sound strategy, or was it full of risks that our Generals should have voiced opposition to?

One key fundamental of any successful operation is to never have your plan hinge on something you don’t control. Even if we had executed our proposed strategy, there is a good chance that the Iraqi institutions of government would have fallen apart to some degree. Indeed, many people involved in the Coalition Provisional Authority claim that the Iraqi Army was a non-entity by the time Baghdad fell. Even if we had executed our strategy without political interference, we would likely have had to fall back, so some degree, on Coalition Forces to secure the country and get the government back in business. By any measure, we went in to Iraq with far too few troops to even make an attempt at this task. In short, our strategy hinged on an unknown that we could not control, and we left ourselves no backup because we didn’t have the troops.

The combination of strategy and politics failed collectively, much as it did in Vietnam.

While politicians clearly share some of the blame for the shortcomings in Iraq, the fact remains that our strategy was questionable, even without interference from the politicians. Our troops were not trained for irregular or counter-insurgency operations because as an Army we have still not learned the most critical lessons of Vietnam. While our Generals don’t deserve all of the blame, some of them certainly deserve some of the blame. There have been enough shortcomings in our General Officer corps that we must be forced to examine our culture and re-evaluate how we grow and select our senior leaders.


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[SamSellers]

After reading LTC Paul Yingling's article "A Failuer in Generalship," I knew there'd be a host of upwardly mobile O-5s and O-6s scrambling to be the first to write a rebuttal. COL Aumuller didn't disappoint. Can't you just imagine him racing to his computer to rough out a quick response and then tugging on his superiors' sleaves to ask for their input or reaction.

Reading COL Aumuller's essay gives one the strong sense that this is a man hell-bent on pinning a star to his uniform. Knowing that he HAD to have a BLUF statement for his general officer reviewers, I can imagine (based on my reading of his essay) that it was in bullet form and included:
LTC Paul Yingling is a whiner (who ought never be promoted or given another command)
The U.S. officer corp is the best educated, best trained, best fit bunch of folks in the universe (and we rarely even have bad hair days)
Conventional versus unconventional assymetric warfare is a bogey man that bears little need for serious thought or reflection (so there's no need to specifically address LTC Yingling's essay; we'll just call him a whiner)

Sadly, COL Aumuller probably will be promoted and LTC Yingling will not. The system will continue to promote and put into leadership positions those officers who are expert at fighting World War II...or are fully educated on the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act as COL Aumuller is...