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By streiff Posted in Military Roundtable — Comments (8) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

An article in Armed Forces Journal entitled “A Failure of Generalship” by LTC Paul Yingling has garnered a lot of attention. His thesis:

These debacles [editor’s note: Vietnam and Iraq] are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America's general officer corps. America's generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America's generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress.

I lived through a period when Crisis in Command by Gabriel and Savage was required reading, a fraud writing as Cincinnatus produced another must-read called “Self-Destruction, the Disintegration and Decay of the United States Army During the Vietnam Era.” Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

I am by nature skeptical when anyone in an institution lays off blame on superiors or subordinates. Being Catholic I’m heavily influenced by the whole “log in your own eye” thing. So I took a look to see what the excitement was about.

Read on.

Biographical information on LTC Yingling is sketchy. I can’t determine when or how he was commissioned. He has a masters degree from University of Chicago (so I’m guessing that he is a US Military Academy grad and we’ll find a tour teaching at USMA on his resume). He has one combat tour in DESERT STORM, a tour in Bosnia, and two tours in Iraq. He is currently deputy commander of 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment.

But let’s look at the arguments.

The Responsibilities of Generalship

[…]To prevail, generals must provide policymakers and the public with a correct estimation of strategic probabilities. The general is responsible for estimating the likelihood of success in applying force to achieve the aims of policy. The general describes both the means necessary for the successful prosecution of war and the ways in which the nation will employ those means. If the policymaker desires ends for which the means he provides are insufficient, the general is responsible for advising the statesman of this incongruence. The statesman must then scale back the ends of policy or mobilize popular passions to provide greater means. If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results.

Actually he eliminates a third possibility. A general may be told to undertake a task with existing resources. As Duke’s Peter Feaver says in An Agency Theory Explanation of American Civil-Military Relations during the Cold War:

Civilian principals have the right to ask military agents to do something that ultimately proves costly, foolhardy, and even disastrous. Military agents have an obligation to advise honestly about the consequences of proposed courses of action but in the final analysis they must obey even dumb orders. This is a crucial premise and it flows directly from the principles of democratic theory under which the elected representatives of the people have the right and duty to rule.

Case in point: Afghanistan. In September/October 2003 the Joint Chiefs recommended a force package that was far more robust than the few thousand US troops actually used. They gave their estimate. They were not given more resources. They did the job. In short, the war planners were wrong. I’ve been waiting for the retired generals on the lecture circuit complaining about going into Afghanistan with fewer troops than they wanted. Let me know when you hear of one.

Grenada was also carried out with fewer troops than planners thought necessary.

So the solution is not binary. Generals are often wrong about the resources required for an operation or, true to the bureaucratic nature of the Defense Department and the military services, they use resource requests to avoid carrying out tasks they just don’t want to do. Clinton found this out when trying to get the Pentagon to develop a military strategy for striking at bin Laden in Afghanistan. From the 9/11 Commission Report:

At some point during this period, President Clinton expressed his frustration with the lack of military options to take out Bin Ladin and the al Qaeda leadership, remarking to General Hugh Shelton,“You know, it would scare the shit out of al-Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp.

From this we go on to the predictable “preparing for the last war” argument.

To prepare forces for war, the general must visualize the conditions of future combat. To raise military forces properly, the general must visualize the quality and quantity of forces needed in the next war. […]

The most tragic error a general can make is to assume without much reflection that wars of the future will look much like wars of the past.

In truth, generals must prepare the military to win those wars which present the greatest threat to their nation not those wars which are most likely but present no existential risk. That is why during the Cold War we trained to duke it out with the Soviets in the Fulda Gap and the North German Plain and ignored low intensity conflict or whatever they are calling it this week. We could lose a brushfire war and suffer a loss of prestige and influence. If we lost the fight in Fulda we lost Europe and very possibly our sovereignty.

Generals are more often guilty of ignoring past wars in favor of some future war than they are to wrongly prepare for past wars. Take World War I, for example.

The trench warfare on the Western Front was entirely predictable with the information available in 1914. Robert E. Lee pioneered (watch for the pun there) the idea of infantry units digging trenches to fight from in 1862. From there the use of repeating rifles, trenches, barbed wire, and machine guns runs in a strictly linear mode from the American Civil War through the Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Russo-Japanese War to August 1914. The generals should be faulted for failing to learn from past wars.

The same applies to World War II and the Maginot Line. By 1918 aerial bombardment, use of aircraft to adjust artillery fire, the use of infiltration tactics, and tanks had all been used in combat. The French did not train and prepare for the last war. They trained and prepared as if the last war had never happened.

I don’t care to mud wrestle over what Shinseki said or what Tom Ricks wrote in “Fiasco.” I will say only this, if the failures of generalship in Iraq are as limited and specific as Yingling claims we should pin the Medal of Honor on every general who has served there. When you look at the speed of operations, the number of casualties, and any other empirical measure the military preparation for Iraq was correct.

Even the key items here are specious. It was not like the military was responsible for the planning of the occupation and it isn’t like the war was not going to take place because a few generals thought they needed more troops. In the wake of Afghanistan and credibility military planners had in war planning was shot and they were left with a fait accompli. They could participate or not but the war was going forward.

The Generals We Need

The most insightful examination of failed generalship comes from J.F.C. Fuller's "Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure." Fuller was a British major general who saw action in the first attempts at armored warfare in World War I. He found three common characteristics in great generals — courage, creative intelligence and physical fitness.

The need for intelligent, creative and courageous general officers is self-evident. An understanding of the larger aspects of war is essential to great generalship. However, a survey of Army three- and four-star generals shows that only 25 percent hold advanced degrees from civilian institutions in the social sciences or humanities.

Bzzzzzt. Let’s stop right there and ask why an advanced degree from a civilian institution in the social science or humanities is important. I would submit that it isn’t and I’d further defy anyone to demonstrate there is any linkage between this type of degree and competence as a general Back to the narrative.

Counterinsurgency theory holds that proficiency in foreign languages is essential to success, yet only one in four of the Army's senior generals speaks another language.

Can we say preparing for the last war?

But to the point which language and what level of proficiency?

Let’s take a quick trip back in time. The typical general officer is about 50 years old. This means he or she was commissioned around 1978 or later. At that time what language would have been at a premium? If you guessed Arabic, Tagalog, Dari, or Pashto you’d probably be medicated and institutionalized. Russian. German. Chinese. Korean. But really Russian and German. We spent a boat load of money training officers in these languages. In ROTC you were encouraged to take German as you would statistically expect to spend a quarter of your career in Germany.

I think we can agree that speaking a second language is a nice skill to have but unless the language is related to a theater of operations I don’t see why it is necessary that a general be able to speak just any language for the bragging rights. I don’t know how you go about picking which languages a general will need to know. I don’t know what level of proficiency we want him to achieve or at what point in his career he takes a time out to learn this language.

While the physical courage of America's generals is not in doubt, there is less certainty regarding their moral courage. In almost surreal language, professional military men blame their recent lack of candor on the intimidating management style of their civilian masters. Now that the public is immediately concerned with the crisis in Iraq, some of our generals are finding their voices. They may have waited too long.

Maybe true, maybe not. I’d hesitate to call the senior military leadership spineless wimps because I don’t believe that is the case. I wrote on this subject two years ago and I don’t believe it to be any more the case today than it was then.

From a constitutional viewpoint, I don’t see how we are strengthened as a nation by turning our general officer corps into political tools on the model John Batiste and Paul Eaton. It doesn’t, in my view, serve either the Republic or the service.

Neither the executive branch nor the services themselves are likely to remedy the shortcomings in America's general officer corps. Indeed, the tendency of the executive branch to seek out mild-mannered team players to serve as senior generals is part of the problem. The services themselves are equally to blame. The system that produces our generals does little to reward creativity and moral courage. Officers rise to flag rank by following remarkably similar career patterns. Senior generals, both active and retired, are the most important figures in determining an officer's potential for flag rank. The views of subordinates and peers play no role in an officer's advancement; to move up he must only please his superiors. In a system in which senior officers select for promotion those like themselves, there are powerful incentives for conformity. It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties.

Once we get past the silly ad hominems, Yingling is correct on the selection process but he fails to make a case for why the system is bad.

Yes, they do have similar career patterns because there are similar things they must do. They must command, and command exceptionally well, at every level of command. They must have an advanced degree. They must have served on a joint staff. They must have attended two different service colleges. They must have served on a high level staff.

Yes, retired generals do have an important, albeit unofficial, say in the promotions to flag rank. They sort of serve as the services’s boards of directors. Again, I don’t see how this is bad.

No, peers and subordinates do not get an official vote on your promotion. When one considers the traditional maxim of an officer acting “without fear or favor” it is hard to see how peer and subordinate ratings help this out.

Outside of Congress conducting its own promotion boards I don’t see how any of his recommendations are either feasible or even make sense. Promotion boards are convened under the authority of the services, not of Congress, and those selected are presidential nominees. It would be virtually unprecedented for the Congress to insinuate itself into the selection of officers rather than using their right of advise and consent to object to certain officers recommended for promotion.

His suggestion that Congress make more use of its authority to confirm the retirement rank of general officers is simply misplaced and would serve to work grave mischief and politicize the role of general officers. Each general would be forced to serve two masters because as surely as the Congress could refuse to confirm retirement in the highest grade held, the Secretary of Defense is under no obligation to forward that recommendation to Congress in the first place.

None of this is to say self-examination is bad or the status quo is just peachy. I would submit, however, that all the services do an incredible job of identifying and nurturing talented officers. There are problems, to be sure, with the system that selects those to be generals but the problem starts at the level of LTC Yingling. In the Army, the first gate you must pass on your way to being competitive for flag rank is command of a battalion/squadron. Yingling has been selected for battalion command by the same system he is decrying.

I am underwhelmed.