"A crisis in American generalship"
[Phillip Carter,
Friday April 27, 2007 at 9:04am ]
Today's Washington Post reports on a new article in the Armed Forces Journal by Army Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, the deputy commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which sharply criticizes the American military's leadership for its performance during the Iraq war. Yingling writes that courage is the most important characteristic for a general. It is a given that military planning will not see everything, and that military operations will require change. The essence of generalship is the ability to see the battlefield, recognize the need for change, and then implement it. Yingling sees all this lacking in the current crop of U.S. generals:America's generals have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq. First, throughout the 1990s our generals failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly. Second, America's generals failed to estimate correctly both the means and the ways necessary to achieve the aims of policy prior to beginning the war in Iraq. Finally, America's generals did not provide Congress and the public with an accurate assessment of the conflict in Iraq.This is an incisive and brilliant article — it is precisely the kind of ruthless self-examination which is so necessary for an army at war. Unfortunately, Lt. Col. Yingling is one of the few officers with the moral courage to make this point so far. Although I've heard this argument made (in somewhat less sophisticated fashion) by a number of military friends and colleagues, I have not seen it made publicly and on-the-record by many. That speaks to a moral decline within the American military, and perhaps to the triumph of careerism over integrity. Perhaps I'm exaggerating here, but given the scope of these failures, I'm disappointed to see so few officers speaking out like this.
Despite paying lip service to "transformation" throughout the 1990s, America's armed forces failed to change in significant ways after the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In "The Sling and the Stone," T.X. Hammes argues that the Defense Department's transformation strategy focuses almost exclusively on high-technology conventional wars. The doctrine, organizations, equipment and training of the U.S. military confirm this observation. The armed forces fought the global war on terrorism for the first five years with a counterinsurgency doctrine last revised in the Reagan administration. Despite engaging in numerous stability operations throughout the 1990s, the armed forces did little to bolster their capabilities for civic reconstruction and security force development. Procurement priorities during the 1990s followed the Cold War model, with significant funding devoted to new fighter aircraft and artillery systems. The most commonly used tactical scenarios in both schools and training centers replicated high-intensity interstate conflict. At the dawn of the 21st century, the U.S. is fighting brutal, adaptive insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, while our armed forces have spent the preceding decade having done little to prepare for such conflicts.
Having spent a decade preparing to fight the wrong war, America's generals then miscalculated both the means and ways necessary to succeed in Iraq. The most fundamental military miscalculation in Iraq has been the failure to commit sufficient forces to provide security to Iraq's population. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) estimated in its 1998 war plan that 380,000 troops would be necessary for an invasion of Iraq. Using operations in Bosnia and Kosovo as a model for predicting troop requirements, one Army study estimated a need for 470,000 troops. Alone among America's generals, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki publicly stated that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Prior to the war, President Bush promised to give field commanders everything necessary for victory. Privately, many senior general officers both active and retired expressed serious misgivings about the insufficiency of forces for Iraq. These leaders would later express their concerns in tell-all books such as "Fiasco" and "Cobra II." However, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq with less than half the strength required to win, these leaders did not make their objections public.
Given the lack of troop strength, not even the most brilliant general could have devised the ways necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. However, inept planning for postwar Iraq took the crisis caused by a lack of troops and quickly transformed it into a debacle. In 1997, the U.S. Central Command exercise "Desert Crossing" demonstrated that many postwar stabilization tasks would fall to the military. The other branches of the U.S. government lacked sufficient capability to do such work on the scale required in Iraq. Despite these results, CENTCOM accepted the assumption that the State Department would administer postwar Iraq. The military never explained to the president the magnitude of the challenges inherent in stabilizing postwar Iraq.
After failing to visualize the conditions of combat in Iraq, America's generals failed to adapt to the demands of counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency theory prescribes providing continuous security to the population. However, for most of the war American forces in Iraq have been concentrated on large forward-operating bases, isolated from the Iraqi people and focused on capturing or killing insurgents. Counterinsurgency theory requires strengthening the capability of host-nation institutions to provide security and other essential services to the population. America's generals treated efforts to create transition teams to develop local security forces and provincial reconstruction teams to improve essential services as afterthoughts, never providing the quantity or quality of personnel necessary for success.
After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America's general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public. The Iraq Study Group concluded that "there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq." The ISG noted that "on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals." Population security is the most important measure of effectiveness in counterinsurgency. For more than three years, America's generals continued to insist that the U.S. was making progress in Iraq. However, for Iraqi civilians, each year from 2003 onward was more deadly than the one preceding it. For reasons that are not yet clear, America's general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq's government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq. Moreover, America's generals have not explained clearly the larger strategic risks of committing so large a portion of the nation's deployable land power to a single theater of operations.
The intellectual and moral failures common to America's general officer corps in Vietnam and Iraq constitute a crisis in American generalship. Any explanation that fixes culpability on individuals is insufficient. No one leader, civilian or military, caused failure in Vietnam or Iraq. Different military and civilian leaders in the two conflicts produced similar results. In both conflicts, the general officer corps designed to advise policymakers, prepare forces and conduct operations failed to perform its intended functions. To understand how the U.S. could face defeat at the hands of a weaker insurgent enemy for the second time in a generation, we must look at the structural influences that produce our general officer corps.
The U.S. Army trains tactical leaders very well. You will not find better tactical leadership schools than what the Army runs in places like Fort Benning and Fort Leonard Wood. Its apprenticeship and mentorship system (aka the company-grade ranks) is second-to-none. However, something has broken at the upper echelons of the military. Instead of producing generals today, the Army is producing bureaucrats and managers. America's private sector is producing visionary leaders like Larry Page, Sergey Brin,
Yingling's article begins with a quote from Frederick the Great, drawing a historical analogy between the U.S. Army after Iraq and the Prussian Army after Jena. It is an apt choice. The U.S. Army will eventually leave Iraq, on terms yet to be decided. At that point, the Army can construct a narrative for its performance which accentuates the positive and assigns blame for the negative to the media, Congress, the American people the Iraqis, etc. Or, it can turn its focus inward, engaging in ruthless and brutal self-examination to distill the critical lessons from Iraq and learn from them.
It is not yet clear which path the Army will take.
Related Posts (on one page):
- The Good Fight
- "A crisis in American generalship"
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> characteristic for a general. It is a given that military
> planning will not see everything, and that military
> operations will require change. The essence of generalship
> is the ability to see the battlefield, recognize the need
> for change, and then implement it. Yingling sees all this
> lacking in the current crop of U.S. generals:
Of the 500 (+/-) or so corporate managers and executives I have dealt with so far in my life, exactly 3 have had that characteristic/ability. The rest have all only seen what they wanted to see, or been so focused on creating their preferred reality that they ignored the current reality approaching with open jaws. Or they just kept their blinders on and heads down so they could put away more paychecks before the next layoff (or with luck retirement).
Now, admittedly senior executives often must have vision and the ability to lead to get the vision accomplished. The problem is that too many people confuse their vision with a divine revelation and also lose the ability to criticize their own action and determine when their vision is unachievable and a change of tactics and/or strategy is needed.
The problem being that we aren't supposed to have these problems in the Commander-in-Chief's office.
Cranky
(1) Preparing for the wrong war:
There is a career management method that uses strategic incompetence to avoid unwanted and unrewarding tasks. The army of the ninties clearly wanted to avoid significant future COIN and nation building assignments. What better way to avoid being given those sorts of tasks, than to not have developed the capability in the first place. Unfortunately as we have seen realworld events forced our hand.
(2) Not preparing for the necessary scale of the occupation:
Given that we had a CiC and SecDef who were single-mindedly focused on selling the invasion, and vindicatively punishing anyone whose actions were percieved as hurting that effort, it was almost inevitable that we jumped into this thing seriously underprepared.
(3) Publicly downplaying of difficulties:
This is similar to item (2), in that the political powers were strongly opposed to any bad news being released. Given that, and the attention paid to the PsyOps and propaganda aspects of the conflict, it was natural for the generals to go along with this.
I can address avoiding (2) and (3) in the future. In the absense of very high moral integrity of top generals, we should try to make institutional changes that make speaking truth to power less risky. In the area of managing the economy we have central bankers (Fed Reserve). Here we maintain a high degree of insulation of this board from congress and the president. It has long been recognized that the interests of the political class are too short-termed in outlook. Nearly all developed nations have a highly independent central bank. You might note the decline in prevalence and severity of world economic recessions in recent decades.
Clearly we need some high level institution, which can make the critical analysis, and publicize the results -even (or especially) in cases where the political leadership is uncomfortable with them. We used to rely on a free press to do this. In recent years corporate ownership of such media -and control of advertising revenue has seriously -perhaps fatally wounded this independence.
level of institutional self-criticism is long overdue.
On his prescriptions for fixing the problem, I don't really
agree with his checklist items of postgraduate study in
the humanities, and fluency in a foreign language. There
are plenty of smart creative effective people who don't have
those. But his idea of incorporating evaluations from
peers and subordinates sounds good. It certainly seems
like a good subject for investigation and hearings
by the Armed Services Committees.
It will be extremely interesting to see how Yingling's
career develops after this generic criticism of his superiors.
Do they have the guts to keep promoting a guy like this,
or will he get sidetracked ?
Excuse the intrusion, but as a longtime lurker, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to add to the conversation: Lordy, this guy is good. The quote above strikes me as the most succinct, on-point analysis of the failure of military leadership in Iraq I've seen.
As has been noted, the muteness of the general staff to the pure wrongheadedness of the war in Iraq is a direct result of the firm hand of the SecDef and White House to ensure everyone shut up and got with the program. Lt. Col. Yingling's article suggests folks in the line and staff levels are fed up. Or am I being overly optimistic?
"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."
I would say that many of these "intellectual" short comings also apply to the Army's "reinvention" of its relationship with the American public since 2002.
1) I'm very concerned about a deliberate effort on the part of current US Army Generals to creat a seperate and distinct "military caste." This is a dangerous and disturbing trend. The overuse of the word "warrior" to replace "soldier" is the most obvious and egregious example. PLDC is now "Warrior Leader Cource." Citizen-Soldier is now "Warrior-Citizen" (I could devote countless paragraphs to this change), Walter Reed now provides "Warrior Care." The portayal of every soldiers as a "hero" also feeds this notion of a noble, warrior caste rather than military service as a civic responsibility. Our General officer corps has relentlessly pushed this image change and it will prove disasterous.
2) Our General Officers - most especially GENS Schoomaker and Cody - are pushing a visual image of the US Army on the homefront that is tied to Iraq. This is a short-sighted mistake that must be challenged for the good of the service and the health of already strained civil-military relations. We now REQUIRE senior officers to give Pentagon briefings in ACUs, force recruiters to visit college campuses in desert combat boots and basically inject controversy into career fairs, mandate that nurses and physicians at Walter Reed dress like they are in Ramadi and generally make the US soldier appear like they are in Iraq, even when they are at academic conferences, reenlisting, becoming US citizens, being awarded Silver Stars, attending Christmas services (yes, a soldier from my home parish wore ACUs to Christmas mass) or giving speeches to skeptical university audiences. This is a road to ruin and estrangement with civil society. The US Army has been around since 1775 and so closely tying our ENTIRE image with an unpopular war will lead to disaster for all involved: the citizenry that equates its Army with the Iraq fiasco and an Army that so internalizes Iraq as its sole raison d'etre that its soldiers will be crushed beyond measure by an eventual withdrawal. I'm not worried about the LTCs and SFCs, but I am very concerned with a new generation of soldiers who don't know better and think that it's expected for soldiers to wear ACUs to Christmas services in New Jersey and that Class A's are a uniform only used for burying our dead! Did you know that BCT and Infantry OSUT soldiers at Ft. Benning no longer wear dress greens for graduation. Every day in the Army is now viewed as "another day in Iraq". Dangerous and a complete use of the Army's appearance as a means of sustaining stateside political support for Iraq. Thank God the Navy and and Marines have not got down this road. I actually encountered an active duty Army CPT who came to us 9 months ago via Blue to Green that doesn't own a set of Class A's. He was told not to bother because "you'll never wear them." What a shame!
The most egregious example I've seen of this lately ocurred this week at West Point where GEN Peter Pace came to address the Corps of Cadets (in Class Bs) and the entire Corps and the Commandant were dressed in ACUs!!! When we are now having USMA cadets - the "long gray line" - embrace this faux warrior culture, we are in serious trouble. Photos like this, where cadet life is "a little slice of Iraq", alienate the American public and do not encourage increasingly skeptical parents to a) consider USMA as a college option; or b) present an image of USMA as an educational institution to skeptical civilians. This shit has to stop!!
Look for yourself:
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=32954
3. Our current crop of Generals entered service during that nadir of the all-volunteer force (late '70s/very early 80's). A time not all that different from today. A time where anyone could get a commission from ROTC and OCS enlistments for civilians didn't even require a degree. This undersized entering cohort was subpar from their late '60s peers and from a less broadly reflective socio-economic swath of society. It gets worse ... you ain't seen nothing yet. As I've elaborated and footnoted ad nauseam, the current crop of entering officers will be drawn from an even more politically, socially and cultural circumscribed pool of self-selected applicants. At least in 1979 we had Army ROTC in places like Detroit, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Jersey City and Dartmouth.
> scale of the occupation:
What I gathered as an uninformed outsider, both at the time and in retrospect, is that the Marines, the Army, and the State Dept all _tried_ to realistically prepare for the occupation. And were all stomped down by Rumsfeld, Cheney, or both. I guess Greg Lanman's first comment would come into play, but it would be very difficult to do that before the war even started.
Cranky
Who will stand up like this in the next generation?
Sure pisses me off. It's militarism and "warrior caste" jingoism. It makes soldiers and their families seperate from (and feeds a delusional self-image of being "better than") civilians.
Dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.
This issue must be raised ... I wish I knew how.
The next administration has a lot of work to do to rehabilitate the Army's self-mage and align it with the society it serves.
LTC Yingling quotes books written by COL McMasters (who he worked for while a part of 3ACR) and LTC Nagl in his article. Both McMasters and Nagl work for GEN Petraeus these days.
Applying this same bureaucratic principle to the military, it's pretty easy to see why counterinsurgency was never a priority beyond the SOF community. Counterinsurgency does not require several multi-hundred billion dollar acquisition programs. The services seem perpetually in competition for how much of the defense pie they will get. Concentrating on counterinsurgency instead would decrease their piece of the pie.
IRR Soldier. I couldn't agree more about the "warrior" culture. Did you know the Air Force just came out with a new Airman's Creed?
Here it is:
All I can say is, Ick.
Wow. Our framers are rolling in their graves. Pure militarism.
They're just a product of the culture after all, and a culture that would permit criminals like Bush and Cheney to hold their high offices for eight years is a culture which is seriously screwed up. What Cranky said about corporate culture is dead on, and this whole gruesome fiasco from start to finish is just a classic example of Americans being Americans at their greedy dishonest worst.
And I have to disagree with the thesis here too: no amount of preparation would change the fact that the invasion of Iraq was a crime without any valid military objectives whatever. The US Army is not the SS.
The failure of Iraq is entirely a failure of discipline: the US military has been subverted to criminal purposes. What the generals really have to be held accountable for is their direct complicity in the crimes.
Yikes, PC, I think you might have gone a bit far with that one. Fiorina was worse to H-P than this war's been to the Army.
By the way, the new issue of Foreign Affairs includes Michael Desch's "Bush and the Generals." The article is available online.
It's been a while since I've been immersed in B-School literature -- who are the private sector CEOs you'd commend to the list?
I wonder if this isn't part of the failure. Since when are generals supposed to put "taking care of their soldiers" ahead of accomplishing the mission? Isn't this where "duty and honor" start to mean something instead of being just slogans?
Yingling makes a brilliant summation of what is wrong. But how do you make it right? Does the will exist even if there was a way?
Who's a successful CEO? Well, for starters, her replacement, Mark Hurd!
But I'd also recommend Fred Smith, CEO of FedEx. If you want an example of someone who gets the vision thing, than look no further than the man responsible dramatically overhauling the business of international logistics.
Of George Marshall, he says, he "may be the greatest figure of the 20th Century."
I AM A WARRIOR.
I HAVE ANSWERED MY NATION’S CALL.
I AM AN AMERICAN AIRMAN.
MY MISSION IS TO FLY, FIGHT, AND WIN.
I AM FAITHFUL TO A PROUD HERITAGE,
A TRADITION OF HONOR,
AND A LEGACY OF VALOR.
I AM AN AMERICAN AIRMAN,
GUARDIAN OF FREEDOM AND JUSTICE,
MY NATION’S SWORD AND SHIELD,
ITS SENTRY AND AVENGER.
I DEFEND MY COUNTRY WITH MY LIFE.
I AM AN AMERICAN AIRMAN:
WINGMAN, LEADER, WARRIOR.
I WILL NEVER LEAVE AN AIRMAN BEHIND,
I WILL NEVER FALTER,
AND I WILL NOT FAIL.
You have got to be kidding me. I'm not one to take a swipe at a borther service, but since when have the line airmen in the Air Force been known as "warriors?" For goodness sakes, do they do any ground combat training? Or has the Air Force changed training to the fact that ALL enlisted personnel are trained to fly combat aircraft?
But IRR is right: all this "warrior" stuff is getting out of control. I hate to say it, but you know who started this? US...the Marines. Ever since we added MCMAP to the training requirements, added the "Crucible" to boot camp, all espousing the "Marine warrior" creed, it just took off from there. The Corps has been way out front in doing this...from our recruiting commercials to boot camp ("Warrior breakfast", anyone?) to our publications.
And the Army decided "hey, we can't let the Marine Corps get all the warrior action! Let's add a "Crucible"-like thing to Army training, let's add the Marine Corps "every Marine a rifleman" doctrine to our training, and let's try to copy the Marines' warrior commercials." I mean, it's getting ridiculous.
And the Navy is trying to jump in on the action, too. Ever notice how Navy commercials are mostly concentrated on "land combat" operations, like SEALS and so forth? And now the Air Force has their new motto?
It's getting whacky.
And why the hell does the Army and Air Force allow their soldiers to wear their ACUs everywhere?!? Sorry, fellow soldiers and airmen, but that is NOT an appropriate uniform to wear outside the gate to courthouses, churches, malls, what have you.
People don't change the inside, the inside changes them. Anyone in a situation to make the conscious decision to "stay inside for the good" has already failed. At that point the system has overtaken any good effort the individual could have potentially made at one point in the past. Now, faced with a "lesser of two evils" scenario s/he must extricate themselves from the sphere of power and insiderism and bring attention to the situation from the outside. The longer they claim to fight the system from the inside so as to lessen the damage, the more devastation accumulates. It's like a good swimmer against a better current.
I'd say we pretty much all agree that the officer selection process breaks down somewhere above O-5. I've known a HELL of a lot of outstanding battalion commanders. Brigade commanders (O-6/O-7)? Not so much. Division commanders (O-8)? Hardly any. And above that I can't think of a single individual I'd put my life on the line for. The system seems to resemble beef production, in that respect. If your goal is to produce a lot of idential, obedient, sleek steers you are unlikely to get a rampaging stud bull out of it.
I'm not sure if there's a way to remedy this. Ideally (and I use the term sarcastically, so don't jump down my throat, OK?!) we'd suffer a (series of) catastrophic battlefield defeat(s) so we could brutally sort out the chaff. I'm afraid that, lacking a peer foe there's no real way to seperate the warriors for the working day from the perfumed princes of the Pentagon.
The Army system - the tiny, introspective, warrior-monk pre-WW2 Army - that produced the Eisenhowers, Bradleys, Stillwells and (particularly) George Marshall...well, that world is gone forever. Might as well wish for the return of the political society that produced the Federalist Papers.
Great points. That said, I think the self-discribed "warrriors" are the problem with the Army right now (e.g. Schoomaker, Cody, Abizaid, Champoux, Maffey, Jackman, Odierno, Barbero ... the list is endless). Seriously, I never thought I would longingly wish for the return of a Dennis Reimer or Eric Shinseki. I do now.
What I wouldn't give for a few 4-star "perfumed princes" with good enough sense to wear a dress uniform at a press conference, when awarding a Silver Star at WRAMC, speaking at Harvard University or when assembling the USMA Corps of Cadets for an audience with the CJCS!!
1. Yingling makes a bald statement early on: "Armies do not fight wars; nations fight wars. War is not a military activity conducted by soldiers, but rather a social activity that involves entire nations."
I would argue that this is an attitude that elides both the "professional wars" of the 17th and 18th Centuries as well as a vast proportion of the wars fought in the 19th and 20th Centuries by European Armies outside Europe.
2. One of the most significant problems with the Iraq war is the very failure of the Bushies to either mobilize the nation for a public war, or figure out how to wage a genuine colonial war that didn't get the public involved and (given the nasty and often inconclusive nature colonial wars) frustrated, angry and disinterested all at the same time. Yingling does not take this any further, which I think is a mistake.
The political nature of the Iraq War, the piss-weak public case for the war and the resulting lack of moral authority makes his generals more vulnerable to their poor judgement. If the war had been truly existential and capable of being sold as such the troop numbers might have been made available (tho given the Bush imperative to reduce the public footprint of the war the 380-470K number was NEVER going to happen, regardless of which general said or did whatever...). Yingling idicts the generals without giving consideration to the reality that our political leadership wasn't EVER going to give any general authority who demanded the means to achieve the COIN ends. It has to be nearly impossible when you're told "go and fight this war" without being told that you were being told to remake a society, too. While I would insist that the generals should have known this and should have protested, the reality is that Bush and Dick were gonna have a war. Any general (like Shinseki) who got in the way was going to go. I wonder if this turns the "the generals failed in Iraq" into a more generalized "The American political-military system failed in IRaq"?
3. Not sure that foreign language capacity and advanced degrees made guys like Marshall et al what they were. Not sure that it would hurt, but how would it help?
4. Congressional and other assorted political "generals" were one of the nightmares of the Civil War. Is this likely to return with increased Congressional involvement? Because this would be, um, bad...
5. 360-degree evals? Oh, hell, yeah. NCOERs should have 'em, too.
I'm not sure why this is brain surgery. I mean, you don't see executives slopping around the office in tevas and t-shirts, right? Attorneys don't show up in court in the same clothes they mow the lawn, police officers don't wear their street uniforms to ceremonies...
Our Class A and B uniforms are how we "dress up" for public occasions. I see no reason for a recruiter, career counselor, or any soldier assigned to a unit while in garrison to wear fatigues unless assigned to a "fatigue", that is, doing physical labor. If you work in an office, dress like it.
To do otherwise is both sloppy and unprofessional. You'd think that by the time you made O-7 you'd have figured this out, but I always got the feeling that a lot of general officers don't read at their grade level...
"First, throughout the 1990s our generals failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly. Second, America's generals failed to estimate correctly both the means and the ways necessary to achieve the aims of policy prior to beginning the war in Iraq. Finally, America's generals did not provide Congress and the public with an accurate assessment of the conflict in Iraq."
You can't blame any of that on civilian leadership. In fact, it is really irrelevant whether the loss in Iraq resulted from these failures.
No, pretty much the status quo. Clearly, we had general officers throwing themselves on their swords all throughout Vietnam.
I know this may make me a heretic, but I have to disagree on recruiters wearing BDUs (ACUs, whatever). As a recruiting company commander, the question I got most often when I wore my B's was "Are you in the Air Force?" In BDUs there is no doubt what service you're in, and they just look cooler. B's are damn flatering unless you have a perfect body, while BDUs look pretty damn good when they are pressed. I always thought the uniform you wear should help you accomplish whatever mission you have been assigned, so I had my troopers in BDUs whenever I could. I found BDUs helped me and my soldiers recruit, while B's or A's did not. Now let the flailing of me begin, since I know what a hot button issue this is!
You raise some good points. Re: recruiting, there has to be a "happy medium" based on good judgment, common sense and METT-T analyisis. The pendulum on uniforms in USAREC has swung from one bad extreme to an even worse one.
I was an "on the numbers" AMEDD Recruiter in NYC and recall a virtual ban on any wearing of BDUs - ever. This made no sense and there were numerous APPROPRIATE instances I would "break the rules" (e.g. meeting with a prior service applicant on weekends, conducting informal/routine paperwork with an applicant committed to processing, non-recruiting visits to West Point/Ft. Meade. etc). I would never be caught dead in BDUs visiting NYU, speaking to residents at Columbia-Presbyterian, attending a career fair or speaking with a school official - ever. This is the "common sense" uniform policy the ARNG always had and it always made sense to me ... there's a time for everything.
The problem today is that the "no-BDU" role has been replaced with an even more idiotic "no Class A/B" rule. I mean, should the USAREC recruiter of the year awards be presented in ACUs? Should the 80,00th recruit be enlisted in Times Square by the Secretary of the Army (in a suit) surrounded by sloppy ACU-wearing recruiters? Should recruiters attend university college fairs and national conventions in ACUs (a sight that took place at Georgetown 3 weeks ago)? No way!
These are bad extremes. Unlike BDUs, there is no way to "dress up" ACUs - they look sloppy - period and unlike BDUs, really accentuate a few extra pounds. Furthermore, this "single pattern" uniform now makes recruiters, staff officers, ROTC PMSs and surgeons at national conferences look "like that guy kicking in doors in Ramadi on TV." Given the declining support for the war in Iraq, I rate the decision to make the sole public image of the US Army = Iraq a colossal mistake.
You sound like a good leader that, like myself, realized there is a "time and a place for everything." By making ACUs, and only ACUs, as the sole uniform of USAREC alienates much of the public, makes the Army look like a bunch of uncouth rubes at coat and tie events and invites needless controversy and antagonism. What's more it diminishes the accomplishments of our force by depriving our recruiters that EARNED CIBs, Purple Hearts, Silver Stars and the like from wearing them on appropriate occasions. At least in Class Bs, you could readily see the difference between the stud, detailed 11B30 and his lackluster 79R40 1SG with 5 ribbons and a drivers badge!
This "image" thing is costing the Army some allies that are indifferent or mildly predisposed towards our success. The earful I heard from three septuagenarian retired O-6s over lunch at the Army/Navy Country Club a few weeks ago re: a 2 star a table away eating lunch in ACUs gave me good insight of just how far "off the reservation" today's leaders are.
Hippasus: I'd counter with the opinion that I recall wearing my Class B khakis with my bloused boots and red beret and feeling like the God of War.
Look at the pics of the officers from WW2 in the "pinks and greens". Blues are sharper than hell.
So the problem, dear sir, is not with our stars but with our togs. We just plain have a piss-poor looking Class B uniform - which is IMO an outgrowth of the fact that we have a Class A uniform that is a poor copy of the German uniforms of WW2 and made of nasty, cheap-looking polyester.
My point is that we have this problem because so many of us run away from our dress-up clothes like toddlers trying to wriggle out of our Sunday pants and button-up shirt. Rather than schlep around in our work clothes because we complain that our glamor togs look bad, why not fix the problem.
Or - to try and drag the subject kicking and screaming back on topic - like the generals discussed above, rather than adapting our tools (our uniforms) to the task, we're trying to redefine the task to suit the tools (our ACUs) we want to use.
The problem is that in the process we have to go through a bunch of unseemly contortions. As much as it hurts, why not stand up and face the difficult task of correcting the original problem? Yes, it may be difficult, it may be uncomfortable, but in the end we will have, not a quick fix that works for today but gets us into trouble down the road, but an enduring solution that will move us towards the future in better shape to deal with it?
So - away with you, ugly Class A's! Let's come up with a truly attractive dress and undress uniform - one that will stay with us much as the Corps' OD wool and dress blues have for over 80 years!
If you don't like your class a/b's, you can always "cross into the blue" and join the AF. We have new uniforms every few years. Eventually you might get one you actually like.
Although I am a real live retired regular army officer—yeah, the long course—my experience with uniforms is limited. As an enlistee in the mid-60s, I got an initial issue of greens, khakis and fatigues. Mostly wore the fatigues in the first enlistment, which included Vietnam Second enlistment, the same, augmented by jungle fatigues back in Vietnam. Then came officer-hood, with, as I recall $300, for uniforms. I made money. On the advice of old-timers in my branch, I went to the QM sales store, bought an enlisted green uniform (stripe shadows were too evident on the old ones, decidedly declasse) and had the black piping sown on. Then I scored a real officer uniform in a thrift store for $7. Total cost for the two was about $40. The old khakis were still good and I was able to wear them in a school. Fatigues were shot, but I didn't need them then. Later, during a one-year tactical tour, I bought two pair of wash-and-wear fatigues for $30, washed them every other day and made it through the year.
Total time in uniform, about six years, I guess, given combat, schools, etc. As a sergeant, I got $300 for civilian clothing. That was barely enough, even in the 60s. As an officer, I got squat. And good suits cost a lot. Fortunately, for much of the time, I wore casual clothing.
I never had blues, whites or any of the other stuff. I did have to wear blues twice that I recall, but I was able to borrow from other guys of the same branch and about the same size. I did have to buy shoulder boards and I had a tux made during a trip to the Far East. While I was on active duty, BDUs, those ugly green shirts and the sweaters came in. Never bought any.
Can anybody guess my branch? But, still. To me, the Army green uniform was always just plain butt-ugly. The blues were really sharp. My wife still has a picture prominently displayed of the two of us at a New Year's reception, her in her finery and me in borrowed blues, ribbons, badges and all. I looked sharp! Only problem was, I was wearing a bow tie at a daytime affair. I learned this when my commander (an 06), said, not unkindly (he was a fine man), "we wear a four-in-hand during the day." Oh. Right.
Jungle fatigues were great, as were the jungle boots. But they wouldn't let us keep 'em after Vietnam. Once we hit the U.S., we were required to be in Class A uniform. I was taken aback during the Gulf War to see troops in airports in what I call fatigues. Not sure I liked it all that much, although I suspect the troops would disagree.
Today, of course, the Army has gone from the ridiculous to the sublime. It's very hard for me to see the depths to which my Army has sunk in its zeal to remind the American people that they are "warriors." I frankly think that soldiers running around civilian America in battle dress look ludicrous and, worse, militaristic, in what was never, ever intended to be a militaristic society. When I see soldiers in battle dress, I am reminded of the third-world banana republics I've seen where the military roams freely wherever it likes, always in fatigues. The only thing missing from our soldiers is the weapons, without which battle dress is incomplete. They should work on that. It's clear the Army leadership favors a garrison state, so why not the weapons as well?
I disagree with the recruiter. Recruiters should be the sharpest looking soldiers with whom a potential enlistee has contact. Sharp to me means ribbons, badges, appurtenances, combat patches, hershey bars, the whole thing. They used to call soldiers "Ambassadors in uniform." When soldiers interact with the Americans they serve, they should present themselves as proud, confident members of a premier fighting force, not as refugees from the motor pool.
And the generals. This uniform PR fiasco represents yet another wet dream on the part of an Army general officer corps that's known for wet dreams. Churchill's statement regarding the "Hun" comes to mind: either at your throat or at your heels. This sums up too many generals. Lions with their subordinates and lambs with their superiors. This gutsy active duty lieutenant colonel has put the lie to the comforting image we have of those guys strutting around with the stars. Turns out many of 'em aren't too good for the Army or for the nation, are they? They're dead wood. And they deserve no respect, certainly not from people like me, but more importantly, from their troops and the American people. They don't deserve to wear the uniform. That's what this article says.
ISTM the "Revolution in Military Affairs" may not turn out to be exactly as intended by those in charge. If we can't trust our military leadership to be faithful to its oath to the people, it is time for a revolution.
I only have one thing to add to the uniform debate - Gen. Petraeus was in DC this past week and every picture I've seen of him he was in his Class A's.
I'm sure many of you have heard of Col. (ret) Patrick Lang. His criticism of the war and Administration has been pretty scathing. On Gen. Petraeus, though, he says:
Re:ACUs, as one who has never worn the uniform himself I had looked at this site's ongoing debate as an example of old soldiers' caring about things nobody else does-- until I was in a sushi restaurant for lunch and found myself in line behind a soldier wearing his ACU. Oh my goodness, those are hideous. They look tacky-- like something I'd expect to find in a dollar-store Halloween costume. And is the American flag insignia really attached by Velcro? It sure looked like it. WTF? Is this so he can enlist in the Swedish army and display his new loyalties without ever having to remove his uniform blouse?
The velcro is there for a practical purpose and it's not for changing loyalties. I can't speak specifically for the ACU, but in general patches get moved around fairly frequently. For example, there are regular red-white-and-blue flags and subdued-colored flags that don't stand out against the camouflage. It's easier and cheaper for soldiers to use velcro than it is to visit the tailor every week to have patches sewn and resewn.
On the subject of Congress and General Officers, there are issues there as well. How likely is it an officer will be promoted if he/she doesn't tow the service line for big procurement projects? If an officer comes before Congress and says we should cancel FCS or some other huge acquisition project and instead put that money into counterinsurgency training, it's not too likely he'll get the approval of Congress and be promoted. Why? Because such an officer directly threatens the billions of dollars such projects feed to Congress' States and districts. It's one reason why you're unlikely to find any senior Air Force officer who opposes the F-22 for example.
And this exact problem is what Rumsfeld began to address very early in the Bush administration. I really liked Rummy initially because he fought the entrenched bureaucracy at the Pentagon and got rid of stupid projects like the Comanche and Crusader. How many senior Army officers opposed those projects? I don't know for sure, but I bet it was very few.
mike
The playing around with Myers-Briggs and diversity seminars in business has made this a cliche. Every large company realizes that it will have people with diverse approaches to problems. And it appears that the most successful companies are the ones that approach that, not as a problem to be managed, but as a strength to by encouraged. The reality is that a process that brings toether people with diverse backgrounds, traning, experience and approaches to problems generally develops better solutions.
That said, is it true for the military? Or does the military do better selecting like-minded people and creating a training and promotion process that weeds out diversity? The result being a hard core of leaders and soldiers who think and react alike in critical ways. Its one thing to want innovative leaders, but you have to start by welcoming innovative foot soldiers. Does that really work?
"Old Whig attitudes concerning the threats posed to civilian rule by standing armies persisted, and were compounded by republican prejudices against the elitist values inherent in the hierarchical structures of military institutions. In fact, in the eyes of many citizens, any army at all seemed out of place in a society so highly individualistic as their own."
My how things have changed. The PC among us should be thrilled that we have adopted the Native American warrior-centric culture.
In re: general officers. I think the problem is that we have gotten the worst of both worlds. After WW2 we adopted much of the German General Staff system (including the schools-education process) similar to the British "staff college" program. The problem was that at about the same time we adopted the corporate "management" philosophy.
I recall that corporations at the time were at the height of the "Salaryman" craze, where everyone was supposed to look, act and think alike - the idea being that the collective decisions of a hundred mediocrities all thinking alike would produce results similar to those of a single genius and 99 drones. Combine this with the staff college system and we were supposed to produce a whole bunch of little officers all capable of reproducing the "staff solution" to tactical and grand tactical problems.
The problem being, of course, that above the level of grand tactics - the operational art and true geopolitical strategy - truly innovative solutions require the input of genuine brilliance. Art, if you will, not science. And art is a gift, not a science. It can be nurtured, shaped and honed, but it can't be taught. It bloweth where it listeth or it doesn't blow at all.
So now we have a system designed to prune the wildly growing branches, produce a nice, well-shaped little bush of an officer. But the real brilliance is war is almost certain to defy the "school solution". So the real innovators - the wild branch - can only flourish in the jungle of wartime, where sheer survivial means clinging to any branch that will keep you above the flood.
Our Army today, though, is so massive, so vastly and monumentally institutional, that there is no "wartime" in the higher reaches of the ediface - at least not when the "war" is a piddly little colonial war. So nothing's going to change in general officer training or selection just because we have to go slay some dirty little wogs off in the heathen parts of the world...
Sad, but there it is.
In the present case, the generals were rolled by ruthless, determined civilian leadership who had decided on invading Iraq at the first opportunity. Some at least warned of insufficient troops. We saw what happened to Shinseki, and there may be many others who were punished for their views. It's like the US Attorney scandal, where we don't know how many were quietly fired and how many sitting ones went along corruptly. There was plenty of planning for the occupation. A multi-volume plan was prepared at State, with some military input, IIRC. It wasn't as thorough as the plan Marshall commissioned for Germany, but had much less preparation time. It was thrown out on Feith's order.
I believe he's wrong on Nam, too. Half the names on the Wall were put there under Nixon and were the work of politicians. After 1968, nobody thought we were trying to win there, just buying time for a less embarrassing settlement. There were many problems with the fit of the general officer culture and the requirements of that war, but the most sophisticated, best prepared COIN effort might not have made much difference. If the military bears any responsibility, it was in the period of the early 60's, when they failed to warn of the dangers. Some of this was careerist reasons -- the all important command experience on the record.
People have been lamenting since the 1950's that the officer corps has become bland and corporatized. Yingling is right about the general issue, but putting it in terms of "courage" is somewhat emotional. People respond to incentives, and the whole reward structure in the military encourages conformity. There aren't a lot of brilliant new ideas available, and it only takes a few people to come up with them. Consider Marshall. The first words that come to mind are "duty" and "focus", not originality. It's an interesting question whether he would have resigned in 2002 if he was in charge. Reluctantly, I think not. It's very unlikely Eisenhower would have. Powell is of the same cautious, steady frame of mind as Ike, and we noted his performance.
I think a primary cause of this inflexible general officer system is with the huge headquarters that have developed.
Following WW2, we decided to have a "diamond-shaped" officer corp, with a big bulge in the O3-O6 levels, and relative small top. We have many field-grade officers so that, in a general war, these field grade officers can be the cadre for the many battalions and brigades we will mobilize for war.
However, in a peacetime military, with an inherently small field army, we just didn't have the space to put all of these mid-grade officers. Thus we parked them at the various echelon headquarters. This led to HQ inflation at all echelons above battalion, along with a calcifying bureaucracy as a natural result.
In this environment, where most field grades spend their time away from the line units, promotion criteria began to change as well. With so few BN CO slots, most O5s work as HQ staff, where OERs depend on pleasing the staff supervisors instead of command performance. Being at HQ also means that these O5s have more time to network than their BN CO brethren, negating the promotion advantages of BN command to some degrees.
Goldwater-Nichols, while generally good, accelerated this trend. To make general, an officer has to have a joint assignment. But of course, almost ALL joint assignments are as staff officers. This emphasis on staff assignments only accelerated the trends above. Having careerist/captured generals is perhaps an inevitable result.
That is like blaming the enemy for your defeat. The fact is that they needed to stand up to that "ruthless, determined civilian leadership" and they didn't.
Powell was not General Powell, he was Secretary of State Powell. If he had still been head of the Joint Chiefs, would they have been so easily rolled? I suspect not, but we will never know.
After 1968, nobody thought we were trying to win there, just buying time for a less embarrassing settlement.
Is that any different than Iraq circa 2005?
And the question is whether a system that did not encourage conformity would be more effective.
So the real innovators - the wild branch - can only flourish in the jungle of wartime, where sheer survivial means clinging to any branch that will keep you above the flood.
Which is a polite way of saying that innovation will be tolerated only after every other alternative has failed and defeat is unacceptable.
Our Army today, though, is so massive, so vastly and monumentally institutional, that there is no "wartime" in the higher reaches of the ediface
Which is to say we need a much smaller military, with a correspondingly vastly reduced mission, if we want an environment open to innovation.
But it seems to me there is another step in this process. A recognition that our political process overwhelmingly rewards conventional thinking. Given that the military is the ultimate government institution, is it any wonder that it would likewise be suspicious of anyone who strays outside the box.
www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/parameters/07spring/robinson.pdf
For more detailed critiques of the 'warrior' stuff, see also: http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk09162006.html and www.journal.forces.gc.ca/engraph/Vol2/no2/pdf/31-38_e.pdf
There are some real problems associated with this language and the 'warrior ethos'. All the stuff about never quitting, close combat, destroying the enemy, a) doesn't apply to a lot of servicemen, b) can be stupd - there are occasions when admitting defeat is the sensible thing to do (if, for instance, the Brits captured by the Iranians had decided to fight, they'd all have been dead in about two seconds), and c) isn't very appropriate for operations other than war.
Paul
1. How many Generals were "quietly" fired by Rumsfeld and his Army Chief of Staff Stooge, Peter Schoomaker? DOZENS!
At least 35 2 and 3 star generals (that we know of) were purged by Schoomaker shortly after taking the Army reigns from Shinseki. Many of these Generals were oustanding officers that questioned, within their official capacities, where we were going and why we were going there institutionally. The most infamous of these "purges" was that of GEN Kevin Byrnes, the TRADOC Commander, a position widely considered as "the #3 General in the Army." Byrnes was doing some downright innovative things and questioning some of Schoomaker's "innovations". What happened? Byrnes was given an Article 15 (like a private) for "adultery" because he had a relationship with a non-Army affiliated adult woman a few weeks before his divorce was final. Thus he was humiliated and silenced. There are many other examples. LTG Dennis Cavin of Army Accessions Command is another.
Schoomaker and Rumsfeld essentially culled about "5 years worth" of senior Army leaders and as a result reached down into a younger, and shockingly less educated group of sycophants and acolytes. The result? We are now seeing 2 star generals that will undoubtedly rise to 3 or 4 stars without masters degrees - of any kind!! This hasn't been seen in over 25 years. Guys like Bernard Champoux and Thomas Maffey couldn't even be bothered to earn the "gimme" MMAS at CGSC! Any accusations of intellectual laziness/weakness by Yingling will be manifestly worse over the next few years. The # of current Colonels with civilain acquired Masters degrees is even lower than among the current generals and about 1/4 the amount of 1992.
2. A smaller Army is not the answer! As I've said over and over, what's causing this mess and making it worse is that we have too small an Army and too narrow a pool of schools/zip codes where officers are drawn from. Shrink the Army, the pool narrows and you are faced with problems like the Navy, where an inordinate amount of Ensigns (the highest % since 1940) are Academy graduates. 4 years of "go along to get along" behavior norming during a time of supposed academic and cultural inquiry (ages 17-22) are not the foundations to build 360 degree introspection or health skepticism into new LTs.
As I mentioned above, the Army cut its ROTC presence in half after Desert Storm. Both LTC Yingling and my alma mater's are now wthout ROTC. As are Manhattan, Brooklyn, Detroit, Memphis, Las Vegas, Sacramento and Jersey City. The cohort from which tomorrow's generation of generals will be drawn is even more culturally, academically and ideologically narrow.
Mix this up with a 99% selection to Major, an 89% selection to LT. Col and you're in for a real disaster.
Who needs education? Who needs brilliance? Just strut around in ACUs on National TV like a banana republic! That's the level of thinking among guys like Champoux and Maffey - trainwrecks in the making!
Great points. I was listening to GEN Cody, the Army Vice Chief of Staff's, press conference following the opening of the "Wounded Warrior Brigade" at Walter Reed on C-SPAN radio. It was surreal and Orwellian. These guy essentially replaced the words soldier, patient and servicemembers with "warrior, "wounded warrior" and "heros". This is the level of thinking. It's alarming and it's worsening. What's more, this unit was established in a Medical Facility with the assembled personnel outfitted as if it were Iraq.
We are in deep trouble and while I may appear shrill, the nation has to get a handle on this.
I just found out today that the ROTC program at UNC-Charlotte will be commissioning its graduates in ACUs this year!! Can you imagine? These kids a taking an oath to our Constitution after 4 years of hard work and the Army no longer deems this an event worthy of nicer dress than the motorpool or LSA Anaconda.
Have our leaders lost their minds? Tying the Army's public face to Iraq is a huge mistake.
I certainly agree it would have been desirable. But the institutions and personnel weren't set up to favor that kind of action. It wasn't so much that they were fighting the last war as that they thought they were up against the Clinton administration.
Powell would still have retired with the rank of Secretary of State. He would have lost his reputation as a team player and wouldn't have been invited to sit on some boards. As head of the Joint Chiefs, he could have been very effective in calls to Congress, backstairs meetings with the Brits, etc. But it probably wouldn't have been successful in the context of late 2002, and so he wouldn't have taken the risk. Like Eisenhower, he doesn't do high risk.
As Yingling and others here have noted, it might better prepare us for the kinds of unconventional military actions we may face in the future. I don't think it would have mattered in the present case. The reasons for not invading are traditionally associated with conservatism. Baker is neither liberal nor creative, but we didn't go into Iraq in 1991 because sober assessment of the realities suggested that the outcome could be the breakup of the country. And the force structure was wrong for an occupation. And we could grind down the Army and be unprepared for emergencies elsewhere. All plodding, conformist thinking, all confirmed by events.
I remember once when we were briefing Stormin Norman for a major exercise in 88. One of his staff O-6's (not an aviator) offered a solution to a VIP helicopter transportation issue that was not only counter to regs, but unwise, even if authorized. Schwartzkopf thanked the briefer and compliments him for the solution before I could speak up. As the Echelon Above Corps Avn Bde Cdr I knew better and said, "Sir, if I might interrupt here, the COL's solution is counter to regs and even if it were allowable, not the best solution. Might I offer a legal and much more productive approach." Silence fell over the room as if I had farted in church. I was well to the rear, so Schwartzkopf rose and turned in my direction. This elicited gasps from those present. Schwartzkopf said, "Good to hear that my Avn Cdr not only wants to keep me out of trouble, but can offer a better solution immediately. Thanks. Let's have it." He was being sincere.
A collective sigh of relief followed Schwartzkopf's remark. I gave him the solution, he liked it, and we continued. Now, this was a room full of flag officers, COLs and a smattering of field grades. Even the 3rd Army Cdr, a 3 star, was amongst those who were aghast that I interrupted, especially after Schwartzkopf had accepted and complimented the first solution offered. Hell, I had corrected a peer, and they were spooked!
The finest commander I ever served under was the installation commander where I was the installation aviation officer and airfield commander. His marching orders to his subordinates included the charge, "Don't let me approve anything stupid, anything dangerous or anything that might send any one of us to jail, no matter how committed I may seem to it. Please, speak your professional minds." Several of the staff did, and earned his respect. Others, simply chose to accept anything they though he would like, and in a short time, he sought little or no input from them, but allowed them to be functionaries when his attempts to mentor them to speak up failed.
The problem under discussion is nothing new. A fellow known as "Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite" wrote some interesting stuff about hierarchical organizations back in the 5th or 6th century. In short, his premise was that officials rose in the organization based on merit and superior knowledge. The one at the top, therefore knew more than his subordinates, and the immediate subordinates, in turn, knew more than their subordinates. Thus, it would be unthinkable for a subordinate to challenge the decision of a superior.
Among the problems with "Pseudo-Dionesian Thinking", is that over time:
Now, apply the above to the past 6+ years. Mr Rumsnamara and his key civilian aides were dictatorial leaders who seemed to love to intimidate. They did not rise to be the top leaders of the military based on even a pretense of merit, but through political appointment. BUT, they were placed into the top leadership of a hierarchical organization that at least thinks it is a meritocracy, and had developed many of the characteristics that Pseudo-Dionysius says are the true aspects of a hierarchical organization. Shinseki spoke out and was marginalized. Schoomaker agrees to be a lap dog and is rewarded.
Look at how Rummy handled anyone who questioned his decisions in public. The specialist who asked about Humvee armor was "educated" to the high level principal of "going to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want". Obviously, once this uninformed subordinate was made privy to this gem of wisdom, he would have no further questions. The problem was the specialist's lack of wisdom, not his lack of armor. On many other occasions, Rummy demeaned the "wisdom" of his questioner with laughter and cute quips. He was SecDef. In the Pseudo-Dionysius model, no one could possibly know something Rummy didn't already know, nor know it better.
This corrosive effect is bad enough when it is confined to the uniformed military. While there are some elements of meritocracy in military promotions, the White House is occupied by someone who passes through no merit selection process, and his key appointees, especially in this administration, suffer the same lack of preparation. But for six + years, this principle has been applied from GWB on down. The damage is compounded by a tradition of serving officers obeying the lawful orders of those appointed over them, regardless of their quality. We spoke our minds to our commanders in private, but when our advice was dismissed, we were bound to execute faithfully - as if we agreed from the start. To do otherwise can become mutiny.
Add to this the imbued obsession with promotion in the military. I can only speak for the Army, but failure to be selected for promotion to the grades of O-2 to O-5 carries a serious stigma. On my watch, the official policy was that those non-selected to these grades were informed, personally, by an appropriately senior officer BEFORE the public release of the promotion list so they could be prepared for the burden when their peers saw their names missing from the list. Suffering two consecutive non-selections to a given grade, and you were involuntarily released from the Army within 90 days, unless you had more than 18 and less than 20 years service toward retirement. If in this category, you served until your retirement date.
O-6 and higher selections for promotion were handled by the first general officer in your chain, and in person, immediately upon the release of the list. Only selectees were notified at this level, as a non-selection did not result in involuntary release.
Now, let's talk about Brigadier Generals. Believe it or not, amongst unrestricted line officers, a higher percentage of BGs are selected for a second star than Lt Cols are promoted to COL, and COLs are promoted to BG. Thus, for example, for an Infantry officer to retire with just one star means that he was in the bottom of the pack.
In light of the above culture of promotion policies and perceptions, is it no wonder than conformity can sometimes become the rule? And, with someone like Rummy personally trying to control all flag officer promotions, the damage is exacerbated 100 fold.
Speaking of forced conformity, there was a great psych experiment some 25 or so years ago. A panel of five "subjects" was presented with lines and shapes projected on a screen. As a test of their visual acuity, they were to compare two similar graphics and state if they were the same size or identify the larger. The panel was not told the correct answer after they had responded. Four of the five panelists were part of the experimenting team, and the fifth was the subject. The subject did not know that the others were shills. At first, the shills would correctly respond to the images shown, showing unanimity with the subject. Then, the items got harder to differentiate and after a couple of images, all the shills began to disagree with the subject. Next, the differences started becoming more obvious, but all the shills still persisted in disagreeing with the call of the subject. At first, a subject would show disbelief and stick to his guns, but after a while, when he saw that the shills were unanimously in disagreement with him, the various subjects began to develop coping mechanisms. There would be arguments. Some subjects would simply give the same answer as the shills, just to avoid conflict or the condescending comments the shills would make. It was not uncommon, if the subject was asked his call first, for him to say he needed more time and to let another answer first. A number of people were put through this experiment, and the vast majority ultimately caved in to the majority.
If a need to conform in a situation where nothing tangible is at risk, such as in this experiment, imagine the pressure to conform in a culture where promotion is so central to the identity of its members.
I am not saying the military is doomed to breeding mediocrity. It is very susceptible to it, however, and the GWB administration, by it's much greater regard for loyalty than competence has surely damaged the military profoundly. Further, the military population was additionally stressed to conform before GWB as a result of the post Cold War drawdown, when competition to avoid involuntary release was fierce.
Charly is dedicated to exposing this administration as criminals. To me, it is more important to recognize that they are a pathogen. And this pathogen seeks out and elevates it's fellow travelers to positions of responsibility while driving off healthy organisms. If left unchecked, our beloved military will suffer like a human body invaded by a cancer. The carcinogenic cells crowd out the normal, healthy cells, until the organism is dead. That worries me more than crimes committed.
Can this damage be undone? Well, in my mind, it will be a task of enormous magnitude. The military needs change, but there is always the danger of careerists making change for change's sake rather than because it is needed and is appropriate. It is often good to be able to "think outside the box", but quite often, the best answer may very well be right there inside the very box that your leader has damned. We need leaders that can think both inside and outside the box and have the moral courage to do what's truly right. It's time to stop mistaking obstinacy and arrogance which rewards mindless conformity for moral courage.
Al
On the topical text: Very very good. I wonder how he will fare career-wise.
IRRsoldier: Purging of generals. That IS really a bananarepublic worthy.
Great discussion all around.
Paul, I thought you article was quite good. Here is a quote for you...
"Martial law is simply military authority exercised in accordance with the laws and usages of war. Military oppression is not martial law; it is the abuse of the power which that law confers. As martial law is executed by military force, it is incumbent upon those who administer it to be strictly guided by the principles of justice, honor, and humanity -- virtues adorning a soldier even more than other men, for the very reason that he possesses the power of his arms against the unarmed."
US General Orders No. 100, art. 4 (1863, "The Lieber Code").
Beginning in 2005, AF Chief of Staff Gen. "Buzz" Moseley has instituted tougher, more combat training in Air Force basic to make every airman a warrior first. Two weeks is being added to AF basic training for a total of 8.5 weeks to provide more weapons familiarization and a week-long FTX.
At that time, according to DOD, about one-third of Air Force personnel have been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan since 2001. In 2005, the AF began training personnel for duty as convoy guards in Iraq.
I reported this two years ago on the Air Force's training program aimed at turning truck drivers and heavy equipment operators into infantry. Everyone of these folks was headed for Iraq.
"During an intensive six-week training cycle, the airmen-turned-grunts learn to use weapons and tactics they've never encountered. Men and women who haven't fired an M-16 since basic training become intimately familiar with such combat tools as the M-4 carbine, Squad Automatic Weapon and .50-caliber machine gun.
It wasn't exactly what they signed up for.