Reforming the Officer Corps – a Polemic

In the May issue of Armed Forces Journal Lt. Col. Paul Yingling argues that the United States has suffered failures in two major counter insurgency wars in the last forty years. A large share of the blame lies not with specific individuals but with America’s General Officer Corps as an institution. He makes a compelling case. Different times and different players produced similar results. As a graduate of the United States Military Academy, a Vietnam veteran, and the father of a career Marine I find Lt. Col. Yingling’s ideas quite evocative and I hope they are widely debated. I also think he is largely wrong, on several counts. Lt. Col. Vingling makes three points. “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’ll take them in order. There is no such thing as a “correct estimate of strategic probabilities.” There are only opinions. The United States invests billions every year attempting to predict the future. As any arm chair general like me can attest, the results have been so-so at times, dismal at others. We have a lot of very smart people involved in the effort but show me someone who predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union or the absence of WMD in Iraq and I will show you a very rare analyst. There is no reason to think reforming the military will change that. The generals have a role to play to be sure but if our solution is to pick a coterie of clairvoyant geniuses for star rank we really ought to lie down until the giddiness passes. I hope we learn from our mistakes in the intelligence services, the diplomatic services, and the officer corps. To suggest we learned nothing from Vietnam is silly. As has every war, Vietnam prompted a number of important changes, one of the most significant being the all volunteer professional army, a radically new concept that I would maintain has served us well. It comes with its own set of issues but that is a subject for another day. Some of the lessons from Vietnam are applicable in Iraq, some not, but Iraq is a very different conflict. New mistakes have been made, some have been repeated and there are lessons to be learned and relearned. The Yingling criticism is that the generals don’t have to get it right every time but they have to be close enough to adapt as they go, well before the cause is lost. He rightly claims that they have an obligation to prepare for every conceivably contingency. Fair enough, I would just reply that he is placing a tall order. There is a limit to anyone’s prescience, and any institution’s. Also in our society there are very strict limits to the military’s influence over civilian decisions. Inform them of the risks? Of course, in so far as they are known, but one man’s risk is another man’s opportunity. When the Commander in Chief makes a decision it is the responsibility of the military to carry it out. I’m not sure just how far we want to go in tinkering with that concept. Yingling is on more solid ground when he argues that in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse we held on too long to investments in high tech weaponry and paid too little attention to counter insurgency operations. But there too I would caution that, though asymmetrical warfare may be the more likely focus of our attention in the near term, conventional military opponents can pose a greater threat should a conflict arise. To be poorly prepared to cope with a failed government in Somalia is a problem. To be surprised by a North Korean invasion of the south could be far more serious. Lt. Col. Yingling contends that wars in Vietnam and Iraq were both failures because of faulty military advice. I would hold that in a large sense Vietnam was not a failure, and neither is Iraq, not yet. I will also assert that the insurgency in Vietnam was not a determining factor in our ultimate withdrawal, the lack of a clear cut victory over North Vietnam was not a result of bad military advice, and the insurgency in Iraq is unlike any other we have ever faced. I am enough of a history student to remember the public justification for engagement in Vietnam, the since widely disparaged Domino Theory, the idea that if Vietnam fell the rest of Southeast Asia would follow. That it did not was taken by many to discredit the theory. I’m not so sure. Vietnam was not an isolated war any more than Iraq is. It was one campaign in the longest conflict the United States has ever experienced, the Cold War. Iraq is one campaign in a wider conflict too, the Long War (I’m going to quit calling it the War on Terror.) Our strategy in the Cold War was summed up in a single word, containment. We were ultimately victorious and containment was one reason why but it came with a price. There were no clear cut victories to be had. The lack of them left a bad taste in the public’s mouth, not to mention the military’s. A lot of people felt like we had been whipped in both Korea and Vietnam. A lot of people still do. Harry Truman made a critical decision in Korea when he fired Douglas MacArthur, he of the immortal words “there is no substitute for victory.” Truman decided to settle for a draw and launched an era of American warfare to be waged with limited objectives. Truman had no desire to march into Beijing at the head of a conquering army or to pay the price such an outcome would require. He was wary of becoming bogged down in a land war in Asia and, having dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, had no intention of risking a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. It can be argued that the MacArthur firing had the long term consequence of a crippled General Officer Corps as Yingling describes it, but there is no question America’s goals in Korea were President Truman’s to set. MacArthur’s insubordination had to be dealt with firmly. Lyndon Johnson made a similar calculation in Vietnam. He was fresh enough from the Cuban Missile Crisis to be even more wary of nuclear confrontation than Truman was. He also vividly remembered the catastrophe of China’s unexpected intervention in Korea. Neither he nor Richard Nixon ever seriously considered an invasion of North Vietnam, a step any General would surely have advised if victory over the North were the objective. It was not. Containment was. Johnson’s sole concern was to prevent a communist takeover in the South and its subsequent spread in the region. The military problem became one of securing South Vietnam from invasion. Putting down an insurgency was secondary. Viet Cong guerillas were never more than a deadly nuisance for the Americans. North Vietnamese regulars were another story. Unlike Korea, South Vietnam had long porous borders with both Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnam exploited them with the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail, an invasion route off limits to American forces under Johnson except for ineffective aerial bombing. American generals were restricted to the only strategy available, a war of attrition; a strategy that ultimately proved futile against an enemy willing to pay any price. Americans won almost every battle, including a spectacular military success in the 1968 Tet Offensive when they virtually destroyed the North Vietnamese Army in the south. But an increasingly impatient Western press finally realized what should have been obvious from the beginning. A war of attrition goes to the side with the willingness to tolerate unlimited losses so long as it can sustain them. Not even a battle the magnitude of the Tet Offensive could be decisive while Ho Chi Minh had a sanctuary to lick his wounds and prepare to fight again. Johnson had lost. Nixon reversed the off limits policy on the Ho Chi Minh trail, invaded Cambodia, and took the gloves off the bombers in the north. But his goals were even more limited than Johnson’s. He just wanted out and he wanted to take his POWs with him. I don’t think any military advice could have significantly affected the strategic decisions of either Johnson or Nixon, or changed the outcome. Was Vietnam a failure? Well, the spread of communism slowed and America did win the Cold War. None of this is to excuse American military mistakes in Vietnam and there were many. One of them was to send units into combat, then keep them there indefinitely while rotating personnel in and out. In Iraq we rotate whole units, allowing them to refresh and train together before redeployment, a lesson learned. Another was command term limits. In Vietnam nobody could hold a command at battalion or company level for longer than six months. We had only one war and every officer needed the command chit for promotion purposes, a policy that got a lot of people killed. We don’t rotate small unit commanders like that any more. I would like to think we don’t do it at the higher echelons either but in current conflicts there has been a steady parade of changes at theater and country levels for no other apparent reason. We have a new Chairman of the Joint Chief’s of Staff every four years regardless of how good a job the retiring chief has done. The same is true at every major command. I can’t think of another institution where that is the practice. Maybe we ought to look at that. There were a lot of those kinds of lessons, many of them as applicable to conventional war as to counter insurgency operations and after Vietnam we turned our attention back to the Soviet Union, culminating in the Reagan build up and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s hard to argue with success like that. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991 he soon faced what was arguably the most powerful conventional force the world had ever seen, staring at him across a line in the sand. It was the perfect euphemism for the senior Mr. Bush’s limited goals. He had no designs on Iraq proper. He just wanted to restore a status quo ante and for that all he needed was to evict Saddam from Kuwait. He had just the right force in place to do it. It’s hard to fault that too. We were not prepared for September 11th so in Donald Rumseld’s much maligned phrase, we went to war with the army we had, not the one we wish we had. The generals can be faulted for that but so can everybody else. In my recollection the only prominent official to warn of the danger from Muslim extremists, in or out of the military or from either Democratic or Republican administrations, was former Secretary of State George Shultz. For his effort he was widely panned in the press as an alarmist. Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq achieved phenomenal initial success reminiscent of the WWII German Blitzkrieg. Taliban and Baathist regimes quickly collapsed. The strategy was to use the least required force and minimize the American footprint (and casualties) on the ground. The strategy was hotly debated in both military and civilian circles but among senior active duty officers it was publicly criticized only by Army Chief of Staff General Erik Shinseki. There were good reasons for the strategy. The force used was certainly up to the task of ousting the rogue regimes. Had we waited for a broader mobilization the window of widespread public support for the two invasions might well have closed. The junior Mr. Bush reasoned, and many of his military advisors agreed, the time for action in Iraq was the spring of 2003 or never. Then the president made a mistake. He prematurely proclaimed the end of major combat operations in Iraq. The military had met the goals he set for them but in this case his goals were too limited. He did not foresee the utter collapse of civil authority. He did not expect the vehemence or the tenacity of the anarchy that followed. He expected the populace to welcome the banishment of a hated dictator and move quickly to get on with their lives, allowing Americans to leave as they had left after the 1st Gulf War a dozen years earlier. Four years on, a force of well over 100,000 US troops remains unable to provide adequate security for much of Iraq’s population. Internal Iraqi security forces still aren’t up to it either. A large share of the responsibility can and should be laid squarely at the door of senior military commanders. Mr. Bush was warned, though he rightly retorts that he was warned about a lot of things. No less a figure than Winston Churchill as long ago as 1925 proclaimed Iraq to be ungovernable. General Shinseki had gone before Congress three months prior to the invasion with his assessment that a force of several hundred thousand would be required to secure post war Iraq. He was roundly criticized by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and retired soon after. I’m not prepared to say who was right. As I said at the beginning of this essay there are no right estimates. There are only opinions. It seems clear to me however there is one major lesson we failed to learn in Vietnam, a mistake we have repeated in Iraq. We do not know how to strengthen governing institutions in a nation facing existential conflict. It is reasonable to ask our troops to shoulder internal security responsibilities in such countries only if there are effective processes in place for an expeditious turnover of those responsibilities. They were not in place in Vietnam. If they are in Iraq they have not been expeditious. Four years should have been time enough. That it was not enough in Vietnam should have been an alarm. That it has not been enough in Iraq represents a failure in leadership at the institutional level. Lt. Col. Yingling is right about that much. The question is what to do about it, which brings me to the Colonel’s third and final point. He wants congressional intervention on the grounds that today’s generals select their own replacements and will always select conformists who will be much like themselves. I have several concerns with that. For one thing congressional committees are not renowned for the leadership any reform will require. The institutional officer corps has shown such leadership in the past, often remarkably so, and can be expected to show it in the future. West Point was founded by officers who recognized a critical shortage of engineering skills in the Revolutionary War. Whatever General MacArthur’s faults he was partly responsible for introducing major reforms in the army after WWI, largely by revising the curriculum at West Point while superintendent there. Those reforms paid substantial dividends in the war to come. Today’s generals are a far different sort from those of Blackjack Pershing’s day. In my mind that points to the most productive likely place for reforms needed now: the military schools. In the United States the profession of arms devotes more time and energy to post graduate education than any other professional class I know about save possibly physicians. Every Marine Lieutenant attends a year long basic course. Every Army Captain attends a Career Course specific to his branch if he wants to be promoted. Majors attend Command and Staff College, Lt. Colonels on track for bird go to a War College, often one run by another service, and so it goes on up through an array of defense institutes and universities for more senior officers. Many of these same officers spend two or more years of paid duty at civilian universities earning conventional graduate degrees. Most of my instructors at West Point were young alumni who had done just that. It is not unusual for an officer to spend twenty percent or more of his career as a full time student. There are lots of opportunities for serious thought, for developing new doctrine, and for imparting that thought to up-and-comers. A large part of the selection process for promotion has to do with how well they do in those schools, hardly the cloning operation Lt. Col Yingling complains about. I have other concerns too. I don’t think we want a class of hard to control mavericks in senior positions. General MacArthur rose to a level of prestige that made his firing not only a major historical event, but a very difficult decision for his president to make. There became a serious question just who was going to decide what America’s objectives were to be in a major armed conflict. We do want men of character who will make their voices heard, especially when the news is bad. But there comes a time when the debate is over, an officer is given a lawful order, and it is his duty to carry it out. MacArthur forgot that. The repercussions are his, not Truman’s. I would not like to see that happen again. One more thing; more than in any other conflict I can remember the war in Iraq has highlighted a serious command weakness that transcends the military, a weakness that the military cannot unilaterally resolve. The intelligence community, the Foreign Service, and the military all have crucial roles to play in Iraq. We have never before attempted a nation building exercise of this magnitude. Even in post war Germany and Japan there were functioning civil authorities in place. As I have argued here the military has built in mechanisms for learning the lessons of past mistakes. It is not clear to me that either the Foreign Service or the intelligence communities do. Nor is there a clear methodology for coordinating or even delineating their respective roles in the required construction of various state agencies. One reason it is so difficult to produce a competent and reliable security force is the lack of strong government institutions on the American model for them to be responsible to. These are big issues and they require big men to address them. We don’t produce such men very often, maybe not even once in a generation. Soldier and statesman General George Marshall comes to mind. If the answer is an institutional one I don’t think it will be confined to the general officer corps. That’s why I hope Lt. Col. Yingling’s ideas get a broad forum. We really need to talk about this. The point of it all is that there is and remains room for reasonable men and women to disagree on the best course of action in any major conflict. Risk assessments will almost always be imprecise. There will always be mistakes. One question at hand is whether reforming the selection process for flag rank can be expected to reduce the likelihood and severity of those mistakes, and to speed the process of recognizing and adapting to them. I think it can, but I would approach it with caution and I don’t consider an invitation to congressional intervention a cautious approach. Congressional hearings might serve a purpose. Nothing gets a general’s attention like a congressman asking questions. The larger issue remains. We have separated intelligence gathering and state building from military oversight. How are we going to make that work where they need to come together in places like Iraq?