“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."
"One of the Most Important Military Men in the World."
President George W Bush has nominated the top military commander in the Pacific, Admiral William Fallon, as the new head of US Central Command. If confirmed, he will replace Gen John Abizaid in a move which will put a navy man in charge of overseeing the Middle East and two land wars - Iraq and Afghanistan.
ADMIRAL WILLIAM J. FALLON, USN Commander, U.S. Pacific Command Admiral Fallon’s Bio at US Pacific Command
Admiral Fallon began his Naval Aviation service flying in the RA-5C Vigilante with a combat deployment to Vietnam, transitioning to the A-6 Intruder in 1974. He served in flying assignments with Attack Squadrons and Carrier Air Wings for twenty-four years, deploying to the Mediterranean Sea, Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans embarked in USS Saratoga, USS Ranger, USS Nimitz, USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and USS Theodore Roosevelt. He has logged more than 1,300 carrier arrested landings and 4,800 flight hours in tactical jet aircraft.
Admiral Fallon commanded Attack Squadron SIXTY FIVE embarked in USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, Medium Attack Wing ONE at NAS Oceana, Virginia, and Carrier Air Wing EIGHT in USS Theodore Roosevelt during a combat deployment to the Arabian Gulf for Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Assigned as Commander, Carrier Group EIGHT in 1995, he deployed to the Mediterranean as Commander, Theodore Roosevelt Battle Group and commanded Battle Force SIXTH Fleet (CTF 60) during NATO’s combat Operation Deliberate Force in Bosnia. Admiral Fallon served as Commander, SECOND Fleet and Commander, Striking Fleet Atlantic from November 1997 to September 2000.
So, who is Admiral Fallon and what makes him the man?
As Robert Kaplan noted in his Atlantic Monthly piece of June 2005, PACOM has become the real center of gravity of US military power, which is a type and degree of power that generates and carries on its own diplomacy. Admiral Fallon, though his name is unknown to most Americans, is one of the most important military men in the world.
Doug has mentioned in passing some thoughts about the Admiral that are echoed by commenters at the Confederate Yankee:
Sinking The Admiral In addition, Admiral Fallon has restricted U.S efforts to conduct intelligence -gathering operations against China, leading us to be even more in the dark ...
One very interesting thing in the Confederate Yankee post is this observation:
The Song-class submarine may have targeted Admiral Fallon's carrier group, but by leaking the story to Bill Gertz when they did, it is clearly the intention of the Department of Defense to sink Fallon and a program that they consider to be a risk to national security.
National Public Radio featured Fallon on a story about North Korea.
U.S. Admiral Eyes Stronger Ties to Chinese Military by John Hendren Morning Edition, November 1, 2006 • Adm. William Fallon, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, hopes the North Korea crisis will draw the American and Chinese militaries into closer cooperation. Fallon's interest in better relations with the Chinese comes as North Korea has agreed to return to negotiations over its nuclear weapons program.
Bill Gertz at the Washington Times has reported nothing about Fallon since the announcement but this is an interesting bit of news that shows that more than one group has a reason to torpedo the Admiral's nomination.
CIA on China threat CIA Director Michael V. Hayden spoke to CIA employees yesterday for a town -hall-style meeting where he revealed the agency's new "Strategic Intent" report and outlined some of the reforms taken. They include setting up a new operations center with representatives from the collection, analysis and technical services branches.
The report lists the long war on terrorism, arms proliferation and the rise of China and India as part of the current "unstable and dangerous " strategic environment.
So far, it looks as though Admiral Fallon’s claim to fame and infamy is developing Sino-US military relations; a position which brings him into conflict with China Hawks at the DoD, the Pentagon and the CIA. Perhaps the President has chosen Fallon to reassure the Chinese regarding US intentions toward Iran. Maybe Fallon's aviation experience will serve the military goals of Navy close air support of Army units. More and more we are seeing Air Force and Navy personnel retrained and reassigned to ground combat units. Maybe the US military is evolving even more than we realize. Maybe one day we'll be down to nothing but two services, Navy and Marines.
Fallon resigns as chief of U.S. forces in Middle East
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Adm. William Fallon has resigned as chief of U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia after more than a year in the post, citing what he called an inaccurate perception that he is at odds with the Bush administration over Iran.
Adm. William Fallon had been serving as chief of U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia since 2007.
Fallon, the head of U.S. Central Command, was the subject of a recent Esquire magazine profile that portrayed him as resisting pressure for military action against Iran, which the Bush administration accuses of trying to develop nuclear weapons.
In a written statement, he said the article's "disrespect for the president" and "resulting embarrassment" have become a distraction.
"Although I don't believe there have ever been any differences about the objectives of our policy in the Central Command area of responsibility, the simple perception that there is makes it difficult for me to effectively serve America's interests there," Fallon said.
In Washington, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters at the Pentagon that he accepted Fallon's resignation "with reluctance and regret."
But, he added, "I think it's the right decision."
"Admiral Fallon reached this difficult decision entirely on his own. I believe it was the right thing to do, even though I do not believe there are in fact significant differences between his views and administration policy," Gates said.
In a written statement, President Bush praised Fallon for helping "ensure that America's military forces are ready to meet the threats of an often troubled region of the world.
"He deserves considerable credit for progress that has been made there, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Fallon, a 41-year veteran of the Navy, took over as chief of Central Command in early 2007. Gates said he will be replaced by Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, his deputy, who commanded an Army division in Iraq in the early days of the war and led efforts to train the Iraqi military.
The perception that Fallon has opposed a drive toward military action against Iran from within the Bush administration dates to his confirmation hearings in January 2007, when he told the Senate that the United States needed to exhaust all diplomatic options in its disputes with the Islamic republic.
But he also has said that the United States would be able to take steps if Tehran were to attempt to block the Strait of Hormuz, the outlet of the Persian Gulf and a choke point for much of the world's oil.
And he recently told CNN that the United States is looking for a peaceful settlement to disputes "in every case."
"We're trying to encourage dialogue and find resolution," he said. "In fact, that's our message to the Iranians out here, given that everybody is nervous and anxious about their activities, is to come forth and explain what they are doing with all the people in the region."
On Tuesday, Gates said, "We have tried between us to put this misperception behind us over a period of months and, frankly, just have not been successful in doing so."
But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Fallon's resignation showed that independent views "are not welcomed in this administration."
"It is also a sign that the administration is blind to the growing costs and consequences of the Iraq war, which has so damaged America's security interests in the Middle East and beyond," said Reid, D-Nevada. "Democrats will continue to examine these matters very closely in the coming weeks and months."
Meanwhile, Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain offered words of praise for Fallon.
"Under Adm. Fallon's leadership at Central Command, the situation in Iraq has improved dramatically," McCain said in a statement. "All Americans should be grateful for Adm. Fallon's service and respect his decision to retire."
Gates' spokesman, Geoff Morrell, said Monday that the secretary and the admiral still had "a good working relationship" and that the Esquire article -- "The Man Between War and Peace" -- had not changed that.
He said Gates had read the article and had no comment on it.
Over at theAtlantic.com, Robert Kaplan says that the recommendations of the much disparaged Iraq study group are being implemented by the Bush Administration. He writes that the report:
...warned against a precipitous troop withdrawal from Iraq, and was open-minded regarding a temporary surge of modest scale in Greater Baghdad. President George W. Bush is doing that. The report called for a reinvigoration of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, as part of a regional diplomatic blitz. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have been doing that. The report called for a reconstruction czar for Iraq, as part of a process of infusing the country with more economic aid. President Bush indicated he will do that. The report sought to give the President a swift kick in the rear end—toward a more dynamic policy on Iraq. The Baker-Hamilton report, together with the November election results, have accomplished that...
He goes on to say that the appointment of Admiral Fallon as head of Central Command was meant to send a "we mean business" message to Iran. This little quote got my attention.
Army Lt. Gen. David Petreaus told me months ago that because the Army promotes people for commanding American and not foreign troops, sometimes the least talented people get assigned to train Iraqi forces: therefore, the policy needed to be reversed.
Why am I not surprised and shocked? It's the old theory about "crap rolling downhill." Human nature is universal, even in the military. Undesirable tasks are passed down the chain to subordinates often with less than desirable results.
How many years ago was it that Secretary Rumsfeld was reporting the numbers of trained Iraqi forces "under arms and ready to stand up." Apparently, Gomer Pyle and Forrest Gump were doing the training because two years later we still haven't seem a significant improvement. Now that the first of the 20K surge troops have arrived in-country, the insurgents have stepped up the carnage and the question is: Can they be stopped or tamped down long enough for us to wean the Iraqi government. We'll know within a few months. The question that may not be answered so quickly though is "What the hell is Iran doing?" Well, we know what they're doing; working feverishly night and day to develop a nuclear deterrent so that they can work their will in the Islamic world or worse, bring on the end times. Kaplan writes:
Fallon could eventually be proven right on China. Whatever the case, it may not necessarily say anything meaningful about his stomach for a confrontation with Iran. Like a lot of people, he may put China in a completely different category from Iran. One thing is clear: he will be extremely cautious over the need for military action against Teheran. So the question becomes, can Gates and the man he has chosen to lead his war fighting command in the Greater Middle East frighten the Iranians sufficiently to make negotiations meaningful? For the history of naval pressure shows that it must communicate the willingness to fight if it is to have the desired impact on an adversary. I worry that we do not sufficiently grasp the fact that the Iranians may not be reading from the same set of instructions as us, on the real-life political-diplomatic board game we are about to embark on. What if the Iranians watch our beefed-up naval and air presence, combined with increasing economic pressure on them, and say, so what? That's where the partial and tenuous overlap between what the Baker-Hamilton report advised we should do, and what neoconservatives say we might do under better circumstances, evaporates. That's where it may come down to a confrontation between Vice President Dick Cheney and the Gates-Fallon team at the Pentagon, which is essentially the Baker-Hamilton team.
Only then will we know if Bush has truly repudiated the Iraq Study Group. For the moment, he has co-opted enough of its recommendations for those in Congress who praised the report, and now denounce the President's surge, to be labeled hypocrites. As I said, a report like that of the Iraq Study Group is never intended to be liked; or openly implemented. It is meant to subtly influence policy. That it has surely done, so far.
Niall Ferguson, also writing at the Atlantic, A War to Start All Wars, says that the middle east looks like Europe, circa WWI and he concludes with this:
What will the United States do if Iraq’s neighbors fail to contain the ethnic conflict that is now consuming Iraq? The simple answer would be to leave the people to kill and displace one another until ethnic homogeneity has been established in the various states. That has effectively been American policy in central Africa. The trouble, of course, is that Iraq matters more than Rwanda, economically and strategically. Does anyone seriously believe that a regional conflagration would leave Israel and Saudi Arabia—America’s most important allies in the Middle East—unscathed?
Ask a different question. Did anyone seriously believe that a war in Central and Eastern Europe in 1939 would leave Britain and France unaffected? The really sobering lesson of the twentieth century is that some civil wars can grow into more than just regional wars. If the stakes are high enough, they have the potential to become world wars too.
Ferguson rightly raises the issue of what happens after the US leaves Iraq. With the Democrats lost in the myopic politics of today and now joined by the first wave of Republican defectors, no thought seems to be given to the consequences of leaving the Iraqi government to fend for itself against the Baathists, al-Qaeda, the sectarian militias, and Iran. Maybe it's unfair to say "no thought is given to the future consequences of the redeployment plan. " This morning, I heard one Bush critic on public radio say that it doesn't matter when we withdraw, a sectarian bloodbath is inevitable, therefore, we need to begin withdrawal now. That represents shallow, callous thinking to me; dangerous thinking, because it only looks at the short term without regard for the future. The argument is also made that continued US presence in Iraq is causing the violence. Does anyone honestly believe the violence will end when the US leaves? Look at the Iranian proxy in Lebanon today. How many times must it be repeated? "The biggest threat to middle-east and world stability is radical Islam."
General Petraeous, testifying before Congress this morning admitted the situation is grim. He also said that he wouldn't have accepted the job if he thought Bush's plan had no chance of success. Petraeous is willing to "give it a go" and the country should be also. Bush's plan may fail , but the fact is, "staying the course" has been defeated and there is a higher probability for an unfavorable outcome with the Democrat's "Redeployment" plan. This could be our last opportunity to stabilize the country and secure our investment (such as it is). It would be a shame to give up now but letting the situation descend into regional chaos or world war would be criminal. General Petraeous also told Congress, "The situation in Iraq is dire. The stakes are high. There are no easy choices. The way ahead will be very hard. ... But hard is not hopeless."
Based on comments by Condi Rice, the reported discussions between Chancellor Merkel of Germany with President Bush and a joint statement this afternoon from the German and French leaders calling for Russia and China to help increase pressure on Iran over its disputed nuclear program, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy saying that Teheran must get "no nuclear weapon," it is clear a deal is in the works.
Sarkozy recently has led European calls for tougher sanctions against Iran over its defiance of UN Security Council demands to halt uranium enrichment, which could be used both to generate nuclear power and create the fissile core of warheads. Sarkozy said as much in the address to Congress and in reported discussions during his Washington visit.
France has suggested new European Union economic sanctions against Iran. Chancellor Angela Merkel has made clear that Germany wants to concentrate on negotiating sanctions at the UN.
Merkel said after the two countries' Cabinets held a twice-yearly meeting that there was "a very great level of agreement" on Iran.
The US military is very reluctant to get involved with a difficult war with Iran while it is engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. With rising oil prices, a falling dollar, a heating up of the US election process, it is evident that every effort short of war will be used to make a deal.
The continued belligerence of Vladimir Putin has probably added to the developing European view that a stronger relationship with the United States, based on diplomacy and negotiation, without taking a military option off the table, has the best chance at success.
US strike on Iran ‘not being prepared’
By Demetri Sevastopulo, Daniel Dombey and Andrew Ward in Washington Published: November 12 2007 00:01 | Last updated: November 12 2007 00:01 Financial Times
The Pentagon is not preparing a pre-emptive attack on Iran in spite of an increase in bellicose rhetoric from Washington, according to senior officers.
Admiral William Fallon, head of Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, told the Financial Times that while dealing with Iran was a “challenge”, a strike was not “in the offing”.
“None of this is helped by the continuing stories that just keep going around and around and around that any day now there will be another war which is just not where we want to go,” he said.
“Getting Iranian behaviour to change and finding ways to get them to come to their senses and do that is the real objective. Attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice in my book.”
Adm Fallon did not rule out the possibility of a strike at some point. But his comments served as a shot across the bows of hawks who are arguing for imminent action. They also echoed the views of the senior brass that military action is currently unnecessary, and should only be considered as an absolute last resort.
In recent months, President George W. Bush and his top officials have made a string of tough statements that have fuelled speculation that the US was preparing to strike Iran over its nuclear programme. Adm Fallon declined to comment specifically on whether the US rhetoric was feeding the speculation, but said that “generally, the bellicose comments are not particularly helpful”.
“That said we have to make sure that there is no mistake here on the part of the Iranians about our resolve in tending to business in the region,” said Adm Fallon. “There has got to be some combination of strength and willingness to engage. How to come up with the right combination of that is the real trick.”
Several senior active and retired miltary officers told the FT that the Pentagon believes striking Iran at this point would be a strategic mistake, as even a limited air strike could spark a broader conflict.
“The US might think in terms of a limited strike but military officers like to point out that the enemy has a vote,” said Jo-Anne Hart, an Iran expert at Brown University who consults for the military. Retired General Anthony Zinni, a former Centcom commander, said the US military was “stretched too thin” to fight a protracted war with Iran.
Retired Gen John Abizaid, who preceeded Adm Fallon, recently said the US should avoid a war with Iran, which would be “devastating for everybody”. He added that the US should do everything to prevent Iran getting a nuclear weapon, but said Washington could live with that outcome if it happened.
In another sign that the Pentagon is trying to reduce tensions with Iran, the US military this week released nine Iranians it had been holding in Iraq. The move came after Robert Gates, defence secretary, confirmed that Tehran had told the Iraqi government it would be willing to stop sending weapons to militias in Iraq.
Speaking to the FT before the release, Adm Fallon said there had “certainly been a downturn” in roadside bomb attacks on US forces, but that the “jury is still out” on whether Iran had reduced its support for militias in Iraq.
“We need to see them do something along the lines of ‘we are serious about having a dialogue’ and then maybe we can do something,” he added.
The Iraq 'surge' general will have to deal with the growing Islamic militant threat in a poorer and nuclear Pakistan. Yet that is only a part of his responsibility for Middle East and central Asia. The political situation in Pakistan worsens daily.
Pakistan is also stone cold broke. Pakistan needs about $15-billion to stay afloat.
Petraeus is uniquely qualified to fulfill his new role, but he will need a lot of help.
__________________________
Petraeus takes charge of US Central Command
Mark Tran and agencies guardian.co.uk, Friday October 31 2008 11.13 GMT
David Petraeus, the general who directed the Iraq "surge", today takes charge of US Central Command, where he will head American military operations in the Middle East and central Asia.
Petraeus has signalled his priority will be Pakistan, the first country he will visit after today's swearing-in ceremony in Tampa Bay, Florida.
Nuclear-armed Pakistan faces a growing Islamist threat, has had to ask for financial help from the International Monetary Fund, and faces impatient calls from the US to crack down on Taliban and al-Qaida militants operating from Pakistan into Afghanistan.
Petraeus, an expert on counter-insurgency, comes into his new job credited with pulling Iraq back from the brink of disintegration. During the surge, sectarian violence fell off dramatically and the US military speaks glowingly of a newly confident Iraqi army.
The general has been cautious about Iraq's prospects, insisting that the job is far from finished. He has said the war in Afghanistan is likely to prove even longer and harder.
Pakistan is shaping up to be just as difficult. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, has warned that any future terror attack on the US would come from Pakistan's western tribal regions, where the central government has little or no control. For US strategists, Pakistan may be considered a bigger immediate threat than either Iraq or Afghanistan.
"Dealing with Pakistan, where America's mortal foe al-Qaida is nestled alongside the Taliban, is clearly the most pressing problem we face," Bing West, a retired marine and former assistant secretary of defence, wrote in National Interest, the journal of international affairs and diplomacy.
Petraeus has acknowledged Pakistan will probably be altogether different from Iraq, where his counter-insurgency tactics succeeded. "Pakistan is going to do this on their own," he told rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation this month. "They have a very keen sense of sovereignty."
In an interview in Washington this week, a senior Pakistani official said his government was drawing up a more comprehensive strategy for fighting the insurgency, now regarded as the gravest threat to the government.
It would be carried out in cooperation with the US, but not on a US timetable, the official said. "We are going to run this."
There is tension between the US and Pakistan over the insurgency in tribal areas. The Bush administration has stepped up sending drone aircraft to attack targets in remote border areas inside Pakistan. Resulting civilian casualties have caused uproar among Pakistanis.
Petraeus's arrival at Central Command was not the original plan. The US secretary of defence, Robert Gates, wanted to move Petraeus from Iraq to the less demanding job of commanding US and Nato forces in Europe.
But Admiral William Fallon unexpectedly announced his retirement in February after a year at Central Command and Petraeus was named as his replacement.
Here is what they had to say today at a DOD press conference.
Presenter: Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Chariman Joint Chiefs Of Staff General Peter Pace April 05, 2007
Defense DoD Special Briefing With Secretary Of Defense Robert M. Gates And General Peter Pace From the Pentagon Briefing Room, Arlington, VA
Q Mr. Secretary and General Pace, by your own accounts, you only have two of the five surge brigades into place, about 40 percent of the surge force. Why has it been so slow in getting brigades into place, and how can you judge, eight weeks into a surge -- how can you judge this summer whether the surge is working, when the surge is really more of a trickle than a surge?
SEC. GATES: Well, let me take a crack at it and then invite General Pace to comment. First of all, the plan from the very beginning has been to move approximately a brigade a month into Baghdad as part of the Baghdad Security Plan. We looked at one point of whether we could accelerate that process, and, frankly, to ensure that -- one of the principal reasons that it was not possible to accelerate it was that we want to make sure that every single one of those brigades is adequately trained before they actually enter Iraq. So the training piece of it was important as well as the fact that no matter how fast we get the troops there, most of the equipment still goes by sea, and it's 30 days, no matter how much of a hurry you're in. And so it's been really a combination of logistics and training that has paced this, as we've seen.
GEN. PACE: This is very much on track. The Marines are now -- are all in Al Anbar. The five Army brigades that are plussing up -- the third one, as you know, is moving into Baghdad as we sit here. It'll be fully operational within the next week to 10 days. The fourth brigade goes into Kuwait as scheduled, around the 15th of this month; the fifth brigade goes into Kuwait around the 15th of May. So this has been on plan to be fully up in all categories in early June to be able to continue this.
SEC. GATES: I think it's been -- to answer the other part of your question -- I think it's been General Petraeus's view all along that during -- sometime at some point during the summer -- mid to late summer, perhaps -- he has thought that he would in a position to evaluate whether the plan was working so far. As we've indicated, you know, the early signs are positive. I must say that General Petraeus and others were accurate in projecting that once the security plan began to take hold, that you would see a rise in large-scale bombings and other efforts to try and show that it wasn't working, and to try and cause more violence; so more vehicle-borne IEDs and things like that. And we are seeing that. But I think already there are -- everybody is being very careful. I think that there is a great reluctance to engage in "happy talk" about this. It's a tough environment. General Petraeus I think has been very realistic in his assessments in terms of what's working and what he's happy with and what concerns him. And I think we'll just have to wait several more months before we're in a position to make any real evaluation.
Q Mr. Secretary, we've heard, though, from some of the commanders in Iraq that this increased level of troops that are associated with this surge may be needed well into 2008. And I'm wondering, what would that extended increase in the number of troops in Iraq do to the overall readiness? After all -- and for you, too, General Pace -- you know, we're soon going to have at least three brigades returning to Iraq who have had less than a year dwell time. We've heard that some of the training opportunities for the troops redeploying to Iraq have been curtailed somewhat. A couple of brigades were not able to go to Fort Irwin, for example.
So what is this prolonged deployment in Iraq doing to the overall readiness of the force, and what is the state of the readiness of the force today?
SEC. GATES: Let me make one comment and then ask General Pace to answer your question.
I have said all along that I believe the decisions on duration and everything else will depend on the situation on the ground. So the truth is, I think people don't know right now how long this will last. I believe that the thinking of those involved in the process was that it would be a period of months, not a period of years or a year and a half or something like that. So the honest answer is that nobody knows for sure. It will depend on the circumstances on the ground.
But in terms of readiness -- General?
GEN. PACE: First of all, fundamentally, Mic, we are not going to send any troop into Iraq who is not manned, trained and equipped to do the job. And that's why, as the secretary pointed out, that we have them going one month at a time, so we can make sure that they are properly trained. And it is true that some units are not going to be leaving their home station, go to California, train out in California and come back. But they will get the training at their home base. And we will certify -- the commanders must certify to their chain of command before the units deploy that their soldiers and their Marines are properly trained.
What happens over time -- to answer your question about long-term readiness -- is that we will ensure, we will have the capacity to ensure that those who are going into Iraq, those who are going into Afghanistan are properly trained for those missions. But when you only have one year between -- or less -- between deployments instead of the two that you would like to have, you then do not train to what we call full spectrum. So that if an unexpected event were to happen somewhere in the world where you needed your full combined arms team, that you had been training to that on a routine basis.
So you end up with your troops who are well-trained for the mission they're going to, but you do forfeit some of the kind of training you would like to do just to have a little bit more readiness in case something happens that you're not expecting.
But there's more than one audience here, so let me make sure I got -- I make sure our potential enemies also know that the United States armed forces have enormous power and capacity, and at any given time we have about 200,000 to 250,000 of our troops overseas out of some 2.4 million. We have enormous residual capacity. We have the vast power of our Army -- correction -- of our Navy and our Air Force still available to take on any potential foes. And it would take longer then for the reserve forces to be remobilized and to get to the fight, but there is zero doubt about the outcome. It would simply take us longer than we would like, or than it would if we were not doing anything else, to defeat any potential enemy.
Q Which would potentially increase the number of casualties of the West.
GEN. PACE: You potentially increase the number of casualties on both sides and the amount of damage done on both sides, because you have some of your precision intelligence systems and some of your precision delivery systems already committed, and therefore, you may end up using more dumb bombs, for example, to get the job done. So you would end up using more brute force than you normally would if you could just start with nothing else going on and pick the exact units and exact weapons that you would use.
...
Q General, you talked about the Army brigades heading into Baghdad. Could you focus on Anbar province and the Marines? The 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit has left or is leaving Anbar. Which unit will replace that? Do you know at this point?
GEN. PACE: Admiral Fallon will make a decision. He has the troops available to him right now. He has another Marine unit available to him right now. He'll decide with the commands on the ground when and if to send that additional unit ashore. In addition, there have been the plus-up of additional Marine battalions, two additional Marine battalions. So the entire force is available to the commands on the ground. It will be up to them to employ them ashore as they see fit.
Q But do you expect to have that level -- it's the same level of Marines there, correct?
GEN. PACE: We'll have the same level of Marines in theater. Right now the Marine Expeditionary Unit Number 15 is back aboard ship, and another Marine expeditionary unit is available in theater. The commanders have not yet made the decision to put that unit on the ground. They can if they want to. They have not yet made that decision.
Sir?
Q But the bottom line is, you're 1,200 short in Anbar as a result, aren't you?
GEN. PACE: No. The bottom line is, there are about -- there are 1,200 fewer Marines there today than there were two weeks ago. Those Marine are available to the commanders if they want to put them ashore. They have not yet made that decision.
I was wondering about the errant flight of the nuclear armed B52. Something does not seem right about it. Searching around I found this. Crazy isn't it? I hope.
Conclusion: Exposing those Responsible for the B-52 Incident the canadian
Consequently, there is considerable circumstantial evidence to argue that the nuclear armed B-52 was part of an apparent covert operation, outside the regular chain of constitutional military command. The alleged authority responsible for this was Vice President Cheney. He very likely used the Secret Service to take charge of a contrived National Special Security Event involving a nuclear armed B-52 that would be flown from Minot AFB. The B-52 was directed to Barksdale Air Force base where it would have conducted a covert mission to the Middle East involving the detonation of one or more nuclear weapons most likely in or in the vicinity of Iran. This could either have occurred during a conventional military strike against Iran, or a False Flag operation in the Persian Gulf region.
Apparently, the leaking and discovery of the nuclear armed B-52 at Barksdale was not part of the script. According to a confidential source of Larry Johnson, a former counter-terrorism official from the State Department and CIA, the discovery of the nuclear armed B-52 was leaked. Johnson concludes: "Did someone at Barksdale try to indirectly warn the American people that the Bush Administration is staging nukes for Iran? I don't know, but it is a question worth asking." LINK.
While the general public is likely to be given a watered down declassified report by the Air Force over the B-52 incident on September 14, the real investigation will reveal that it was part of a covert operation that intended to bypass the regular chain of command in using nuclear weapons in the Middle East. This will likely result in a furious backlash by key figures in the regular military chain of Command such as Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, and the Commander of Central Command, Admiral William Fallon, who have direct responsibility for the conduct of military operations in the Middle East. The US. Air Force, the Secretary of Defense and Commander of Central Command, is now aware of what was likely going to be the true use of the B-52 and the responsibility of the Office of the Vice President.
It is very likely that the exposure of the B-52 incident will lead to an indefinite hold on plans to attack Iran given uncertainty whether other nuclear weapons have been covertly positioned for use in the Middle East. Significantly, public officials briefed about the true circumstances of the B-52 incident will almost certainly place enormous pressure on Vice President Cheney to immediately resign if it is found that he played the role identified above. It is therefore anticipated that in a very short time, the public will learn that Cheney has resigned for health resigns.
The forthcoming September 14 U.S. Air Force report will likely describe the B-52 incident as an "error" and an "isolated incident" as foreshadowed in the September 6 Press Statement. This will create some difficulty in exposing the actual role played by Cheney and any other government figures that supported him. There will be a need for continued public awareness of the true events behind the B-52 incident in order to expose the actual role of Mr. Cheney. Only in that way can Cheney be held accountable for his actions, and other government figures that supported his neo-conservative agenda be exposed. Regardless of whether Cheney's role as the prime architect of the B-52 incident is exposed to the public, the official backlash against his covert operation should force his resignation. In either case, a very dangerous public official would be removed from a powerful position of influence. More importantly, the world has been spared a devastating nuclear war by courageous American airmen who revealed the true contents of an otherwise routine B-52 landing at Barksdale, AFB headed for a covert nuclear mission to the Middle East.
This is a picture of A Chinese Song Class diesel powered submarine. You think of diesel powered subs as being low tech, but below the outtake on the Bill Kurtz story is a description of this class of Chinese submarine. It is obviously up to its mission and a combination of European supplied components and "borrowed" design technology.
Yesterday it was reported that the Iranians were routinely tracking US carriers with drones. Naval history is replete with example after example of unsinkable and invulnerable ships and fleets being reduced to being both sinkable and vulnerable. Virginia is going to be represented by a Senator James Webb, Jr, a Marine Corps veteran, former member of Ronald Reagan's cabinet, A 1968 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, a Marine Corps infantry officer until 1972, and a Vietnam War combat veteran. During his four years with the Reagan administration, Webb served as the first Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs, then as Secretary of the Navy. It would be very interesting to know what the Senator has to say about these two stories. I will send him a copy of this post and ask him.
A Chinese submarine stalked a U.S. aircraft carrier battle group in the Pacific last month and surfaced within firing range of its torpedoes and missiles before being detected, The Washington Times has learned. The surprise encounter highlights China's continuing efforts to prepare for a future conflict with the U.S., despite Pentagon efforts to try to boost relations with Beijing's communist-ruled military. The submarine encounter with the USS Kitty Hawk and its accompanying warships also is an embarrassment to the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Adm. William J. Fallon, who is engaged in an ambitious military exchange program with China aimed at improving relations between the two nations' militaries. Disclosure of the incident comes as Adm. Gary Roughead, commander of the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet, is making his first visit to China. The four-star admiral was scheduled to meet senior Chinese military leaders during the weeklong visit, which began over the weekend. According to the defense officials, the Chinese Song-class diesel-powered attack submarine shadowed the Kitty Hawk undetected and surfaced within five miles of the carrier Oct. 26.
The first of this new class of SSG (Type 039, 2,250t dived) was launched in May 1994 but not commissioned until 1998. Although it still retains the stepped conning tower similar to the old Ming/Romeo class, the overall design represents a major step forward compared with the obsolete Ming class. The improvement includes a hydrodynamically sleek profile, new cylindrical bow mounted sonars (H/SQG-04?) and GermanMTU 12V 493 diesel engine. With a large asymmetrical seven-blade skewed propeller, the Song class is much quieter than its predecessor. This class is also the first Chinese submarine capable of launching YJ-82 AShMs as well as new wire-guided torpedos (Yu-4G & Yu-6/Mk-48?) from its 533mm torpedo tubes. However, the construction of Type 039 ended after only a single hull (320) was built due to some design flaws. As the result, all boats following 320 are the improved Type 039G, the first of which (321) entered the PLAN service at the end of 2001. The 2nd 039G (322) was believed to be undergoing sea trial in late 2002. Since then at least three new hulls were launched at Wuhan Shipyard and two more at Jiangnan Shipyard, a clear indication that Type 039G has finally evolved into a mature design and entered series production. This version has the stepped conning tower removed making it similar to French Agosta-90B in external appearance. A new coat of anechoic tile is believed to have been applied to further reduce the noise. In additon it might be fitted in the future with an AIP system believed to have been tested onboard a Ming class SS. So far 6 more 039As (314-316, 318, 323-324) have been identified.
RICHARD H. KOHN is Professor of History and Adjunct Professor of Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been Chief of Air Force History for the U.S. Air Force and Omar N. Bradley Professor of Strategic Leadership at Dickinson College and the Army War College.
When news reports suggested that if the Obama administration did not follow General Stanley McChrystal's recommendations for the war in Afghanistan, the general might quit, McChrystal immediately slapped them down. But soon after, others appeared to be urging him to do just that. The respected former vice chief of the U.S. Army, retired General Jack Keane, stated on a Sunday talk show that were he in McChrystal's shoes, he would probably resign. And in an op-ed, John S.D. Eisenhower, the son of President Dwight Eisenhower and a professional soldier and military historian, went so far as to claim that officers "have an obligation to resign if they are unable to carry out the commander in chief's policies."
Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, resigning (asking for retirement or reassignment) over advice not taken, policy disagreements, or moral or ethical qualms undermines the relationship between military officials and their civilian superiors and destroys the professionalism of the U.S. armed forces.
As General Richard Myers and I argued two years ago in Foreign Affairs ("Salute and Disobey?" September/October 2007), an officer who threatens to -- or does -- resign over a policy decision commits a political act. He or she is publicly disputing the judgment of civilian leaders and violating the principle of civilian control over the military, a fundamental tenet of American government and a basic precept of military professionalism. Because of the military's prestige and reputation for disinterested patriotism, such public dissent weakens civilian leadership in the public eye. Those opposing the decision could become emboldened, and the policy decision likely submerged, in partisan bickering. Indeed, that is why administrations have frequently negotiated with military leaders to gain their support prior to announcing important defense decisions, and why recent administrations have sometimes asked potential appointees about their political party or the circumstances under which they might resign.
Furthermore, military leaders who claim that they are resigning for moral or professional reasons are imposing their own conceptions of morality and professional behavior on the country. While there may be general group norms, these kinds of judgments always vary by individual. Even supposed norms provoke considerable disagreement within the military. Resigning because of moral doubts also violates the military's subordination to civilian authority and contravenes an officer's oath to support and defend the U.S. Constitution.
Likewise, it is not the role or function of the military to make policy. That job is properly the responsibility of elected officials and those they appoint for that purpose. The role of senior military officers is to advise and then execute civilian leaders' orders, even when they seem to infringe on professional military matters. Officers cannot possibly know all of the larger national and international considerations that go into a policy or decision, in peace or in war. "There are too many influences involved," George C. Marshall, former chief of staff of the U.S. Army, secretary of state, and secretary of defense, once put it, "and it is quite a question of how much of this would be familiar to military participants."
There is no tradition of resignation at the most senior level of the U.S. armed forces. Just one instance, such as McChrystal resigning, could set a very dangerous precedent. Presidents, senior defense officials, and senators would inevitably begin to vet military nominations more routinely on the basis of whether the officer might quit. Candidates for the Joint Chiefs and for the most significant command positions would find themselves subjected to all sorts of litmus tests (regarding their politics, their ethical and moral views, and other personal matters) that are likely to be irrelevant to their suitability for the role. In effect, senior military posts and wartime command positions -- perhaps especially wartime command positions -- would become political appointments. One can imagine a president or secretary of defense wondering even then whether it is safe to be honest with a military leader who might spill all once safely in retirement. In fact, the last 60 years is riddled with examples of just such distrust and poor communication between the military and civilian superiors that produced bad policy. The Vietnam War stands out as the chief example, but strategic disagreements in the 1950s, arguments over budgets in the 1970s, and interventions in the 1990s -- such as that in Somalia -- were typical.
Beyond undermining civil-military relations, resignations can also compromise the military internally. Any officer who chooses to quit abandons his or her troops and the country, giving heart to enemies and shaking the morale of the armed forces. If a senior officer -- one of the Joint Chiefs or a theater commander -- quits, it could, depending on the circumstances, produce a political storm, however short-lived. If several did, it would amount to a military revolt. In the wake of such an event, it could be extremely difficult for successors to gain the confidence of their troops, especially if the move had struck a chord with the soldiers.
These considerations apply mainly to the Joint Chiefs and most senior commanders. Officers who have fulfilled their service commitment at lower levels have the right to retire when they wish, for any reason. But if servicemen and servicewomen at any level of the military begin to condition their continued service on personal moral standards or whether they agree with their civilian superiors, the U.S. military would become thoroughly politicized from the inside, and might come apart in wartime.
One can imagine an extraordinarily rare instance in which an officer, genuinely believing that he or she has become ineffective, is no longer the best person to serve in a particular role. While the final judgment belongs to the civilians, the officer might request retirement or reassignment and leave quietly -- as did Ronald Fogleman, former U.S. Air Force chief of staff, in 1997 and Admiral William Fallon, former head of Central Command, in 2008 -- so as not to disrupt civil-military relations, intrude into policymaking, politicize the issue, or set a precedent that would weaken military professionalism. However, an officer's duty to "salute and obey," and the privilege that comes with his or her rank to "the special trust and confidence" of the nation's civilian leaders, must not, even in rare and unusual circumstances, be rendered meaningless by resignation. That would eventually destroy the U.S. military, both from within and without, and undermine the national security of the United States.
:Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability, according to government officials familiar with the document.
That caught my attention because it was an obvious intentional leak designed to focus public opinion on the so-called "existential threat" of a nuclear Iran to Israel. The fanciful threat is ended, of course, by a pre-emptive US attack against Iran. Such an attack is the desired outcome of certain Israeli politicians and their minions in the US Congress (of which there are many). Such a reckless and needless attack against Iran would be the ruin of the US and could not come at a worse time given our existing wars and terrible financial troubles.
Many in Israel and the US are trying to make Iran a US problem. Iran is in many ways a problem for the US but Iran is not a threat to the US. If Israel believes that Iran is an existential threat, that is their problem. Israel is a nuclear power, armed to the teeth with an arsenal that could destroy Iran and every potential ally of Iran. Israeli paranoia should not lead to US folly. There is no US interest served by slavishly following Israel into a such a needless calamity.
If you do not think that this is going on, you are not paying attention. Benjamin Netanyahu is a dangerous demagogue and no friend to the US. Israeli problems are not solved by the US being dragged into another Middle Eastern war.
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False bells on Iran's nuclear program
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Confusion over an assessment of Iran's nuclear program by the Rand Corporation in the past week perfectly illustrates the quagmire that anyone has to contend with when sifting through bias on media reports.
When the Republican-leaning New York Post says history may well mark United States President Barack Obama "as the leader who let Iran get the bomb - and so doomed the Middle East to a new Dark Age", it based its assertion on a report it attributed to Rand Corporation analyst Gregory Jones.
"Using the latest data from the International Atomic Energy Agency, he recently concluded that, if Iran's centrifuges continue to produce enriched uranium at current capacity, the regime will have 90% of the 20 kilograms it needs to produce a nuclear weapon within two months - certainly by summer's end," the Post said in an opinion piece. [1]
The Post report was at least an accurate reflection of Jones'
calculations in a report dated June 2, but inaccurately reported that it was published by the Rand Corporation, when it was in fact from the Non-proliferation Policy Education Center. [2] Jones has written for Rand, but his last report for the non-profit policy and research think-tank was published in 2009.
Yet the New York Post was not alone. A deluge of commentaries took it at face value that Rand was alleging with iron-clad certainty that Iran was "two months away from making nuclear bombs". Media sources who attributed the report to Rand included Israel's Ynetnews, the Daily Mail in the United Kingdom, the Weekly Standard and American Thinker, the latter under the headline, "RAND Corp: Iran 8 weeks from the Bomb". [3]
The Rand Corporation's own report, Iran's Nuclear Future: Critical US Policy Choices, financed by the US Air Force and published on June 7, contained no such timetable and is about policy alternatives for the United States and urges greater engagement. [4]
The study's lead author Lynn E Davis, a senior political scientist at Rand, summed up the report in a statement saying, "The challenge for the United States is to influence how the Iranian leadership pursues [national security] interests, for they could provide reasons for acquiring nuclear weapons."
For all it is worth, the Rand report failed to mention that the US intelligence community has yet to revise its December 2009 finding that Iran as of early 2003 has stopped its nuclear weapon program. Nor does it mention that the IAEA despite its expressed concerns about the "possible military dimension" of Iran's nuclear activities has repeatedly stated that after extensive inspections it has found "no evidence of diversion of declared nuclear material".
Close scrutiny of the study shows repeated references to "considerable uncertainties" regarding Iran's nuclear program and, on page 14, it states categorically that "Iran is likely in the near to medium term to strive to stay within the bounds of international norms and laws established by the NPT [nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty], while continuing with uranium enrichment and warhead experimentation."
This is hardly an affirmation of an Iranian march toward nuclear weapons, unless the scope of outside inspections of Iran's nuclear activities by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is considered irrelevant. The IAEA's surveillance cameras at Tehran's enrichment facility in Natanz can easily detect any diversion of nuclear material.
A report by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh titled "Iran And The Bomb - How Real is the Nuclear Threat?" and published in the June 6 issue of The New Yorker magazine quotes former IAEA director general Mohammad ElBaradei as saying he didn't see "a shred of evidence" in 12 years in charge to suggest Iran is building nuclear-weapons facilities and using enriched materials.
"I don’t believe Iran is a clear and present danger. All I see is the hype about the threat posed by Iran," ElBaradei, a likely candidate for future Egyptian president, told Hersh in the interview. An abstract of Hersh's piece says:
There’s a large body of evidence, however, including some of America’s most highly classified intelligence assessments, suggesting that the U.S. could be in danger of repeating a mistake similar to the one made with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq eight years ago - allowing anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical regime to distort our estimates of the state’s military capacities and intentions. The two most recent National Intelligence Estimates (N.I.E.s) on Iranian nuclear progress have stated that there is no conclusive evidence that Iran has made any effort to build the bomb since 2003.
Yet Iran is heavily invested in nuclear technology. In the past four years, it has tripled the number of centrifuges in operation at its main enrichment facility at Natanz, which is buried deep underground.
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors have expressed frustration with Iran’s level of cooperation, but have been unable to find any evidence suggesting that enriched uranium has been diverted to an illicit weapons program. [5]
Such frustration was in evidence on Monday when Yukiya Amano, ElBaradei's successor at the global nuclear watchdog, told the IAEA board the agency had acquired new "information related to possible past or current undisclosed nuclear related activities that seem to point to the existence of possible military dimensions to Iran's nuclear program".
The disclosure of new information came as Iran announced it would enrich nuclear fuel at an underground facility whose function had been secret until 2009, boosting its production of enriched uranium in spite of UN sanctions over its refusal to halt the enrichment program, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
It is ironic, albeit understandable from the prism of the US Air Force, which is in competition with other branches of the US military and has a vested interest in promoting itself by getting ahead in the "war-games", that the Rand report on Iran's nuclear program pays scant attention to the actual program and, instead, focuses on various potential scenarios and the policy implications for the US, Israel, and Iran's neighbors in Persian Gulf.
Although maintaining that "different future Iranian nuclear postures are possible", it nonetheless takes for granted Iran's evolution of a nuclear weapons program that allegedly could be either "virtual", ie fully developed short of building the actual bombs", or "ambiguous" or "declared". The reason for the multiple authors' collective certainty that Iran is acquiring a nuclear weapon capability is that "Iran's national security interest could be served by nuclear weapons".
Not so, and in fact the Rand study itself provides several clues that contradict its abstract generalization on Iran's national security interests, such as the implication of Iran's Arab neighbors being spurred to emulate Iran and build their own bombs and thus hurl the oil region into a costly nuclear arms race, to US playing nuclear shield for the supposedly vulnerable Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states indefinitely, etc. As the authors concede, "expanded US conventional activities could be counterproductive" and "heighten Iranian threat perception."
In addition to a distorted understanding of Iran's national security interests and priorities, the report also has a distorted view of how Iran's neighbors view the Iranian nuclear threat, claiming that none of the Gulf Cooperation States (GCC) states support "an approach that seeks to reduce the threat posed to Iran".
In fact, the myth of a monolithic GCC bloc with a unified voice on Iran needs debunking, and following the report's own line of argument, the GCC states should logically support a more congenial security environment with reduced risks for Iran that could, in turn, keep Iran's nuclear potential just that; potential rather than actual.
Interestingly, the Rand report's release coincided with a Washington conference on the changing Middle East and future of US-Iran relations on Tuesday, featuring the former head of US Central Command, Admiral James Fallon, who told the audience that there was very little chance of any US and or Israeli strike on Iran and that the US and Iran should pursue the path of comprehensive dialogue and engagement in light of their shared concerns in the region.
Unfortunately, instead of giving coverage to such voices of reason, the US media and others opted to give prominent and erroneous billing of alarming new information about Iran's nuclear program; yet another example of Chomskyan "manufacturing consent".
Looking back on the troubled wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many observers are content to lay blame on the Bush administration. But inept leadership by American generals was also responsible for the failure of those wars. A culture of mediocrity has taken hold within the Army’s leadership rank—if it is not uprooted, the country’s next war is unlikely to unfold any better than the last two.
On June 13, 1944, a few days after the 90th Infantry Division went into action against the Germans in Normandy under the command of Brigadier General Jay MacKelvie, MacKelvie’s superior officer, Major General J. Lawton Collins, went on foot to check on his men. “We could locate no regimental or battalion headquarters,” he recalled with dismay. “No shelling was going on, nor any fighting that we could observe.” This was an ominous sign, as the Battle of Normandy was far from decided, and the Wehrmacht was still trying to push the Americans, British, and Canadians, who had landed a week earlier, back into the sea.
Just a day earlier, the 90th’s assistant division commander, Brigadier General “Hanging Sam” Williams, had also been looking for the leader of his green division. He’d found MacKelvie sheltering from enemy fire, huddled in a drainage ditch along the base of a hedgerow. “Goddamn it, General, you can’t lead this division hiding in that goddamn hole,” Williams shouted. “Go back to the [command post]. Get the hell out of that hole and go to your vehicle. Walk to it, or you’ll have this goddamn division wading in the English Channel.” The message did not take. The division remained bogged down, veering close to passivity.
American troops were fighting to stay alive—no small feat in that summer’s bloody combat. One infantry company in the 90th began a day in July with 142 men and finished it with 32. Its battalion commander walked around babbling “I killed K Company, I killed K Company.” Later that summer, one of the 90th’s battalions, with 265 soldiers, surrendered to a German patrol of 50 men and two tanks. In six weeks of small advances, the division would use up all its infantrymen, requesting replacements of more than 100 percent.
General Collins removed MacKelvie on the very same day that his tour revealed no fighting in progress. Collins instructed the 90th’s new commander, Major General Eugene Landrum, to fire the commanders of two of the division’s three regiments. One of those two, the West Point graduate Colonel P. D. Ginder, was considered by many to be a disaster. One man, a mortar forward observer, remembered that Ginder “almost constantly made the wrong decisions.” He had been in command of his regiment for less than a month when he was replaced.
MacKelvie’s successor, Landrum, was given a few weeks to prove he was an able commander, but by midsummer he too was judged to be wanting. Before he was relieved, Landrum fired the assistant division commander he had inherited, Sam Williams, with whom he had clashed. “I feel that a general officer of a more optimistic and calming attitude would be more beneficial to this division at this time,” Landrum wrote. General Omar Bradley, the senior American general in France at the time, concurred. He topped off the dismissal by demoting Williams to colonel.
Within a few weeks, Bradley relieved Landrum as well, and sent Brigadier General Raymond McLain, whom he had brought from Italy to England to have on tap as a replacement when someone was fired, to take over the 90th Infantry Division. “We’re going to make that division go, if we’ve got to can every senior officer in it,” Bradley told him. Two days later, McLain gave him a list of 16 field-grade officers he wanted out of the division.
The swift reliefs of World War II were not precise, and while many made way for more-capable commanders, some were clearly the wrong move. Nonetheless, their cumulative effect was striking. The 90th Division, for instance, improved radically—transforming from a problem division that First Army staff wanted to break up, into “one of the most outstanding [divisions] in the European Theater,” as Bradley later wrote. Retired Army Colonel Henry Gole, in his analysis of the 90th Division, directly credits the policy of fast relief:
Because incompetent commanders were fired and replaced by quality men at division and regiment, and because the junior officers of 1944 [who were] good at war … rose to command battalions in a Darwinian process, the division became an effective fighting force.
Generalship in combat is extraordinarily difficult, and many seasoned officers fail at it. During World War II, senior American commanders typically were given a few months to succeed, or they’d be replaced. Sixteen out of the 155 officers who commanded Army divisions in combat were relieved for cause, along with at least five corps commanders.
Since 9/11, the armed forces have played a central role in our national affairs, waging two long wars—each considerably longer than America’s involvement in World War II. Yet a major change in how our military operates has gone almost unnoticed. Relief of generals has become so rare that, as Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling noted during the Iraq War, a private who loses his rifle is now punished more than a general who loses his part of a war. In the wars of the past decade, hundreds of Army generals were deployed to the field, and the available evidence indicates that not one was relieved by the military brass for combat ineffectiveness. This change is arguably one of the most significant developments in our recent military history—and an important factor in the failure of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Relief of generals has become so rare that a private who loses his rifle is now punished more than a general who loses his part of the war.
To a shocking degree, the Army’s leadership ranks have become populated by mediocre officers, placed in positions where they are likely to fail. Success goes unrewarded, and everything but the most extreme failure goes unpunished, creating a perverse incentive system that drives leaders toward a risk-averse middle where they are more likely to find stalemate than victory. A few high-profile successes, such as those of General David Petraeus in Iraq, may temporarily mask this systemic problem, but they do not solve it.
Ironically, our generals have grown worse as they have been lionized more and more by a society now reflexively deferential to the military. The Bush administration has been roundly (and fairly) criticized for its delusive approach to the war in Iraq and its neglect of the war in Afghanistan. Yet the serious failures of our military leaders in these conflicts have escaped almost all notice. No one is pushing those leaders to step back and examine the shortcomings of their institution. These are dangerous developments. Unaddressed, they could lead to further failures in future wars.
Generals are born, and generals are made. The promotion from colonel to brigadier (or one-star) general is one of the largest psychological leaps an officer can take. It is richly symbolic: the promoted officer removes from his or her uniform the insignia of an Army branch (the crossed rifles of infantry, for example, or the tiny triple-turreted castle of engineers) and puts on a single star. As brigadier generals, the newly promoted officers are informed that they no longer represent a part of the Army, but now are stewards of the entire service. They are expected to coordinate and control multiple branches, such as artillery, cavalry, and engineers—that is, to become generalists.
These people are given powers we accord to few: to save and take lives; to advise presidents on our most fundamental national issues; to shape their own institution by deciding how to select and groom their successors.
During World War II, top officials expected some generals to fail in combat, and were prepared to remove them when they did. The personalities of these generals mattered enormously, and the Army’s chief of staff, George C. Marshall, worked hard to find the right men for the jobs at hand. When some officers did not work out, they were removed quickly—but many were given another chance, in a different job. (Ginder, Landrum, and Williams were all given second chances, for instance—and all, to varying extents, redeemed themselves.) This hard-nosed but flexible system created a strong military, not only because the most competent were allowed to rise quickly, but also because people could learn from mistakes before the results became crippling, and because officers could find the right fit for their particular abilities.
In World War II, the firing of a general was seen as a sign that the system was working as planned. Yet now, in the rare instances when it does occur, relief tends to be seen, especially inside the Army, as a sign that the system has somehow failed. Only one high-profile relief occurred during the American invasion of Iraq, and the officer removed was not a general but a Marine colonel. Relief has become so unusual that even this firing made front-page news.
How did this transformation occur? Why has relief become so rare, and our military leadership rank so sclerotic? The nature of the wars the nation has fought since World War II is one reason. Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq were all small, ambiguous, increasingly unpopular wars, and in each, success was harder to define than it was in World War II. Firing generals seemed to send a signal to the public that the war was going poorly.
But that is only a partial explanation. Changes in our broader society are also to blame. During the 1950s, the military, like much of the nation, became more “corporate”—less tolerant of the maverick and more likely to favor conformist “organization men.” As a large, bureaucratized national-security establishment developed to wage the Cold War, the nation’s generals also began acting less like stewards of a profession, responsible to the public at large, and more like members of a guild, looking out primarily for their own interests.
In Vietnam, the consequences of this shift in Army practices became painfully evident. Almost no generals were fired in that war, and those few who were removed were only the top men, ousted by civilian leaders in Washington—generals did not fire other generals. Not coincidentally, appropriate risk-taking diminished (the art of combat pursuit was almost lost in Vietnam), and a “cover your ass” mentality took hold.
These corrosive tendencies were reinforced by a new policy of officer rotation after six months in command, which encouraged many leaders to simply keep their heads down until they could move on—and likewise encouraged superior officers to wait out the tours of bad officers serving beneath them. Instead of weeding out bad officers, senior leaders tended to closely supervise them, encouraging habits of micromanagement that plague the Army to this day. Mediocrity also led to mendacity: Almost forgotten now is that an Army investigation of the 1968 massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese villagers by troops of the 23rd “Americal” Division concluded that 28 officers, including four colonels and two generals, appeared to have committed offenses in covering up the incident. Even after the extent of the massacre and the subsequent cover-up were revealed, Major General Samuel Koster, who had commanded the Americal and who had been implicated in the cover-up, was allowed to remain in uniform for another 23 months, and was never brought to trial (although he was eventually demoted).
The Army famously rebuilt itself after the Vietnam War ended. It improved training; reequipped itself with a new array of tanks, helicopters, and armored vehicles; and, most significant, learned how to live without a draft, relying instead on a more professional “all volunteer” force. These developments, combined with a successful offensive in the 1991 Gulf War, led to a resurgence of American pride in the military, and a newfound veneration for military leaders.
Yet despite this otherwise magnificent rebuilding effort, the Army did not change its approach to generalship. The generation of leaders trained in the 1980s and ’90s were smart and energetic, but also conformist and relentlessly tactical, conceiving their role narrowly. Relief remained exceedingly rare.
Nor did the relationship between an officer’s battlefield performance and his or her subsequent promotions grow any stronger. As an American civilian official then based in Afghanistan put it in 2007, “The guys who did well didn’t get treated well, and the guys who did badly didn’t get treated badly.” One-year rotations meant officers came and went without seeing the consequences of their actions, enabling almost all to claim that they presided over progress.
Many Americans remember the Iraq War as a string of mistakes by the Bush administration—from overestimating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein to underestimating the difficulty of occupying the country. While that perception is correct, it hardly tells the entire story. In 2007, Philip Zelikow, who had been the State Department’s counselor as the war in Iraq descended into chaos, told me, “I think the situation is worse than people realize, and the problems are primarily with the military.” Discussing American generalship in Iraq over the course of the war, he added: “I don’t think people realized how bad this was … The American people believe the problem is, the civilians didn’t listen to the generals. This is very unhealthy for the Army.” The U.S. Army in Iraq, Zelikow said, reminded him of the French army before World War I: “The military is venerated. It is the inheritor of Napoleon. The general is decorated with gold braid—but there’s no ‘there’ there. There is an aversion to deep thinking.”
The failures of the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan were not the failures of frontline soldiers. American troops deployed to these wars fit and well trained. However, training tends to prepare one for known problems; it is the job of military leaders to prepare for the unknown, the unpredictable, and the unexpected. Many of the generals leading the Army were not mentally prepared for the wars they encountered.
“The troops were good at what they were told to do, from day one,” observed retired Army Colonel Robert Killebrew, a longtime student of strategy and leadership, in a correspondence we had about Iraq. “Had counterinsurgency been invoked on day two, [the soldiers] would have adapted.” For an example, Killebrew pointed to the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul, which in 2003, under General Petraeus, moved quickly to a counterinsurgency strategy and kept Mosul surprisingly quiet for almost a year. The problem everywhere else in Iraq, Killebrew continued, was not the troops but the senior leaders, who were unable to tell their soldiers how to counter an insurgency. “As is often the case in war, the question is not whether the troops can adapt, but whether the leaders can. The troops, as always, paid the price of educating their leaders.” In Iraq, it took more than three years for Army leaders simply to begin listening to units on the subject of what wasn’t working—that is, about as much time as the U.S. military spent fighting World War II.
American generalship in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was too often a tale of ineptitude exacerbated by a wholesale lack of accountability. Both wars began badly, with General Tommy R. Franks failing to understand what he was wading into. In many ways, Franks is the representative general of the post-9/11 era. He concerned himself principally with tactical matters, refusing to think seriously about what would happen after his forces attacked. “I knew the President and Don Rumsfeld would back me up,” he wrote in his memoir, “so I felt free to pass the message along to the bureaucracy beneath them: You pay attention to the day after and I’ll pay attention to the day of.” Franks fundamentally misunderstood generalship, which at its topmost levels must link military action to political results.
Most generals get the opportunity to lose, at worst, one war. Franks, who from mid-2000 to mid-2003 oversaw the U.S. Central Command, the headquarters for operations in the Middle East, bungled two. Warning signs began flashing in late 2001, with his tepid effort to capture Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora, on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, about 90 miles southeast of the Afghan capital, Kabul. Coming just three months after the stunning attacks of 9/11, the Tora Bora fight provided the best early chance for American forces to kill or capture the al‑Qaeda leader. Yet Franks seemed inattentive, almost as if the battle were someone else’s problem. The Centcom commander did not see bin Laden’s capture as crucial to his campaign, or as a goal for which he should risk casualties and a messy fight. He was content to provide air power, which dropped 700,000 pounds of bombs in the area of Tora Bora over a few days in December 2001.
Ironically, our generals have grown worse as they have been lionized more and more by a society now reflexively deferential to the military.
The CIA officer in charge at Tora Bora was certain he had bin Laden cornered, though his team remained outnumbered on the ground. He repeatedly requested a battalion of Army rangers to help press the attack and seal the escape routes into Pakistan. But Franks declined the requests, citing several reasons, among them his desire not to inject more troops, the time it would take to send them, and his sense that the intelligence on bin Laden’s location was less reliable than the CIA believed. The best evidence indicates that bin Laden walked south into Pakistan in mid-December 2001, perhaps wounded in the shoulder.
Four months later, Franks made a similar mistake during Operation Anaconda, declining to provide adequate artillery support to light-infantry units that had pinned down several hundred al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the Shah-i-Kot Valley. Again, the al-Qaeda men escaped into Pakistan. “I thought it was a very successful operation,” the general said afterward. “I thought the planning that was done was very good planning, and I think the result of the operation was also outstanding.” He seemed to believe that it was a net strategic gain to push the Islamic extremists from Afghanistan into neighboring Pakistan, a far more populous country that suffered from a shaky security situation—and possessed a nuclear arsenal estimated to contain scores of warheads.
Not long after the Anaconda battle, Franks spoke at the Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island. A student heard his talk and then posed the most basic but most important sort of question: What is the nature of the war you are fighting in Afghanistan? “That’s a great question for historians,” Franks said. He then went on to discuss how U.S. troops cleared cave complexes. It was a sergeant’s answer, not a general’s. Franks “really was comfortable at the tactical level,” concluded an officer who was in the audience that day.
Privately, Army strategists agreed with that verdict, according to an after-action review of the first part of the Afghan War, completed at the Army War College the following summer. Franks’s headquarters suffered from “many disturbing trends,” including “a short-term focus,” the report stated. “The lack of a war plan or theater campaign plan has hindered operations and led to a tactical focus that ignores long-term objectives.”
If Afghanistan hinted at Franks’s shortcomings, Iraq revealed them fully. Historically, thinking about war and then arriving at actionable conclusions has been the core task of generals. Yet Franks seemed to believe that thinking was something others did for generals. In his memoir, he refers to his military planners, with a whiff of good-old-boy contempt, as “the fifty-pound brains.”
Part of the problem was Franks’s personality. He was a military version of Donald Trump, both dull and arrogant. His memoir, with its evasions and omissions, is not reliable as a historical record, but it reveals the man well. In it, for example, Franks claims that the troubled aftermath of the Iraq invasion “was actually going about as I had expected—not as I had hoped, but as I had expected.” Yet this assertion contradicted the formal planning documents produced by his subordinates before the war. For example, one classified PowerPoint briefing given shortly before the invasion stated, under the heading “What to Expect After Regime Change”:
Most tribesmen, including Sunni loyalists, will realize that their lives will be better once Saddam is gone for good. Reporting indicates a growing sense of fatalism, and accepting their fate, among Sunnis. There may be a small group of die hard supporters that [are] willing to rally in the regime’s heartland near Tikrit—but they won’t last long without support.
Not long before the invasion began, General Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, expressed concern that the U.S. force lacked sufficient troops to occupy Iraq. When I asked Franks in August 2004 about Shinseki’s concerns, he dismissed the question, saying that Shinseki “didn’t provide anything that all of us didn’t already know.” Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who took over the Iraq War from Franks, states in his own memoir that Franks told him in June 2003 that American forces would be out of Iraq later that year.
In his book, published in 2004, Franks dwells on the variety of ways he had devised to start the Iraq War, but he has little to say about how he thought it should end. He insists that he did a lot of hard thinking about post-war Iraq, but a chart he proudly reproduces in the book, outlining his “basic grand strategy,” shows nothing to support that claim—it is all about attacking, nothing more.
Franks and his staff devoted almost all of their energies to the mission of removing a weak regime and almost none to the more difficult task of replacing it. This omission became disastrous, because no one in the Bush administration was focusing on the problem either. In 2004, an official Pentagon review led by two former defense secretaries, James Schlesinger and Harold Brown, unambiguously concluded, “The October 2002 Centcom war plan presupposed that relatively benign stability and security operations would precede a handover to Iraq’s authorities.” The following year, the head of the Rand Corporation sent a memorandum to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stating that after extensive review of internal documents, his researchers had found that “post conflict stabilization and reconstruction were addressed only very generally, largely because of the prevailing view that the task would not be difficult.”
Despite the large strategic costs of his leadership in two separate wars, Franks retired, not long after the fall of Baghdad, to enjoy the American version of a Roman triumph, going on the road to make speeches for large sums and issuing his preening memoir. He passed command of the Iraq War to Ricardo Sanchez, a fellow Texan and the Army’s newest lieutenant general, who understood the conflict perhaps even less than Franks did. “I came away from my first meeting with [Sanchez] saying ‘This guy doesn’t get it,’ ” recalled Richard Armitage, who was the deputy secretary of state at the time.
Sanchez was a tragic figure, a mediocre officer placed in an impossible situation. Iraq was boiling over, the Pentagon and the Bush administration were in denial, and he was operating within a confused command structure.
An inveterate micromanager, Sanchez sank into the details of his job, constantly correcting subordinates but failing to provide overarching guidance. Like many micromanagers, Sanchez also tended to criticize harshly in public. “He would rip generals apart on the tacsat”—the military’s tactical satellite-based communications network—“with everybody in the country listening,” an officer who served on his staff told me in 2005.
Sanchez inherited no real war strategy from Franks or the Bush administration, and he did nothing to remedy that deficit. This lack of any coherent strategy manifested itself in the radically different approaches taken by different Army divisions in the war. Observers moving from one part of Iraq to another were often struck by the extent to which each division was fighting its own war, with its own assessment of the threat, its own solutions, and its own rules of engagement.
In western Iraq’s Anbar province, the 82nd Airborne and the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment got tough fast, violently confronting local opposition. The 4th Infantry Division, based in Tikrit, in north-central Iraq, operated even more harshly, rounding up thousands of “military-age males” and probably turning many of them into insurgents in the process. Baghdad was its own separate situation, exceedingly complex and changing from block to block. Meanwhile, in far-northern Iraq, Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division made a separate peace, ignoring many of the anti-Baathist rules promulgated by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and conducting negotiations with the government of Syria to provide electricity to Mosul.
One reason for such distinctly diverse approaches was that conditions were very different in each of these areas. But another reason was that each division commander received little strategic guidance from Sanchez. Jeffrey White, a veteran analyst of Middle Eastern affairs for the Defense Intelligence Agency, wrote early in 2004, “Some observers feel that the various U.S. divisions in Iraq have thus far waged more or less independent campaigns.”
Sanchez did not seem willing to learn from and adapt to the conflict. Some commanders at the tactical level took effective approaches, but these were ignored or even discouraged by Sanchez. For example, a Florida National Guard battalion stationed in Ramadi in 2003 was more adept at police work than most military units, because its ranks included many members of the Miami-Dade police force. It emphasized local policing, setting up an academy and an Iraqi force, and also helped cooperative sheikhs win contracts for reconstruction projects, as an Army intelligence officer who served in Iraq recalled to me in 2010. But, the officer noted, “the efforts of [the Guard unit] were consistently undermined at the theater level by military leadership that lacked a campaign plan,” as well as by the failings of the Coalition Provisional Authority. When General John Abizaid, who had replaced Franks as the chief of Central Command, visited Ramadi, he was so impressed with operations that he told Sanchez to go there and get the same briefing. Sanchez did so, apparently rather unhappily. “Sanchez came in pissed off that he’d been ordered to get a clue from [colonels and other field-grade officers] in the hinterland, and was in full attack mode,” the officer recalled. “He lit up the staff, told us we didn’t know what we were doing, and went back to Baghdad having learned nothing.”
Sanchez’s biggest failure was that on his watch, some units acted in ways that were not only counterproductive but also illegal. Not knowing how else to put down an insurgency, some divisions indiscriminately detained thousands of Iraqis and shipped them off to Abu Ghraib prison and other detention centers, where the Army lacked sufficient guards and interrogators to hold and sort them. Short-term thinking guided many of these decisions. “In the summer of ’03, we all thought we were going home by Christmas, so there was no consideration for the long-term consequences of locking up the wrong guys,” recalled Lieutenant Colonel Russell Godsil, the senior intelligence officer for the 1st Brigade of the 1st Armored Division. “Commanders just wanted all the ‘possible’ bad guys out of their neighborhoods until they left.” Where those Iraqis wound up was someone else’s problem.
When the world learned in the spring of 2004 that American soldiers had sadistically abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Sanchez treated the scandal as a breakdown of discipline among a few enlisted soldiers, rather than a problem caused by a series of leadership failures, most notably his tolerance of massive roundups. An Army intelligence expert later estimated that more than 85 percent of the detainees had no intelligence value.
During the Tora Bora fight, Franks seemed inattentive, almost as if the battle were someone else’s problem. He did not see bin Laden’s capture as crucial to his campaign.
Even if widespread detentions were the right approach—and to this day, some Army officers maintain that they were—Sanchez failed to ensure that he had a back office capable of processing all those prisoners. Because detainees were not sorted by political orientation, hard-core insurgents and al‑Qaeda terrorists were able to use the prisons as recruiting and training centers. Worst of all, Abu Ghraib was run by a small, undertrained, poorly led Army Reserve unit that amused itself by playing brutal games with prisoners. The revelation of its crimes was the biggest setback of Sanchez’s year of command in Iraq—a black eye for the American military and the United States, and a major boost for the insurgency.
In a 2009 study, a veteran Army intelligence officer, Major Douglas Pryer, reviewed Sanchez’s performance. “Perhaps most unforgivably,” he wrote, “based on his staff’s recommendations, Lt. Gen. Sanchez approved two interrogation policy memoranda that were, at best, poorly considered and poorly written.” The main cause of the Abu Ghraib scandal was not lack of resources or training, he concluded, but lack of ethical leadership. “The fundamental reason why interrogation abuse in Iraq occurred was a failure in leadership. The answer is that simple.”
After the scandal broke, Sanchez contemplated relieving Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commander of the American jailers at Abu Ghraib. But he did not do so, he said, in part because she was due to rotate home in less than two months.
Nor was Sanchez himself relieved, despite his dismal record. In a privately circulated essay on American generalship in Iraq, retired Army Lieutenant General John Cushman, a veteran commander and a leading Army intellectual in the post-Vietnam era, concluded that General Abizaid, Sanchez’s immediate superior at Central Command, should have relieved Sanchez of his post.
The military scholar Andrew Bacevich’s verdict on Sanchez’s performance in Iraq is harsh but fair:
When Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez assumed command of coalition forces in Iraq in 2003, the first stirrings of an insurgency had begun to appear; his job was to snuff out that insurgency and establish a secure environment. When Sanchez gave up command a year later, Iraq was all but coming apart at the seams. Security had deteriorated appreciably. The general failed to accomplish his mission, egregiously so. Yet amidst all of the endless commentary and chatter about Iraq, that failure of command has gone all but unnoted, as if for outsiders to evaluate senior officer performance qualifies as bad form. Had Sanchez been a head coach or a CEO, he would likely have been cashiered.
Given the record of his command in Iraq, it is startling that one of the preoccupations of Sanchez’s memoir is how the Bush administration failed to elevate him to four-star rank. The end of the book dwells not on the mess he helped make of Iraq, nor on the American troops who were stuck there, nor on the American and Iraqi dead, but on how he did not get a promotion he believes he was promised. As he was trying to salvage that promotion with officials at the White House in May 2004, Sanchez turned to an aide and uttered that most tired of Army lines: “Boy, am I glad to be leaving Washington. At least in Iraq I know who my enemies are and what to do about them.”
He was wrong, of course: Sanchez was even more out of his depth in Iraq than he was in Washington. In the spreading war in Mesopotamia, he had only a dim idea of who his foes were, and even less sense of how to deal with them. There is perhaps no clearer sign of how radically America’s military culture has changed since World War II than Sanchez’s entitled whine, which speaks not only to the decoupling of poor performance from consequences in the Army’s leadership ranks, but to the expectation, civil service–style, that promotion should follow from merely putting in one’s time.
Sanchez was succeeded in Iraq in mid-2004 by General George Casey, a deeply conventional man who tried to persuade the Army to operate unconventionally. Casey was an Army insider—a four-star general and the son of the highest-ranking American casualty of the Vietnam War, a division commander who was killed in a July 1970 helicopter crash. He knew the Army needed to start operating differently in Iraq. He developed a formal campaign plan, something Sanchez had never done. More significant, he asked two counterinsurgency experts, Colonel Bill Hix and retired Lieutenant Colonel Kalev Sepp, to review the actions of individual units and make suggestions. Sepp, a Special Forces veteran of El Salvador with a doctorate from Harvard, reviewed the commander of every battalion, regiment, and brigade in Iraq and concluded that 20 percent of them understood how to properly conduct counterinsurgency operations, 60 percent were struggling to do so, and 20 percent were not interested in changing and were fighting conventionally, “oblivious to the inefficacy and counterproductivity of their operations.” In other words, a vast majority of U.S. units were not operating effectively.
His misgivings confirmed, Casey started a Counterinsurgency Academy at the large military base in Taji, just north of Baghdad. There, he gave newcomers a one-week immersion course in the basics of irregular warfare. “Because the Army won’t change itself, I’m going to change the Army here in Iraq,” he told subordinates. Just capturing a known insurgent is not necessarily a tactical gain, the academy taught the students, if it is done in such a way that it creates new enemies. As the course’s textbook put it, “The potential second- and third-order effects … can turn it into a long-term defeat if our actions humiliate the family, needlessly destroy property, or alienate the local population from our goals.”
Even so, both Casey and the Army were slow to adjust. For example, a key tenet of classic counterinsurgency theory is that troops should live in small outposts among the local people, to better understand them and to deter the enemy from controlling them. Yet in 2005 and 2006, Casey was determined to close small outposts and move his troops onto a few very big bases. “By and large,” concluded Francis West, a counterinsurgency expert and Vietnam veteran who studied American military operations in Iraq, “the battalions continued to do what they knew best: conduct sweeps and mounted patrols during the day and targeted raids by night.”
Torn and confused, trying to change course while under assault by a sophisticated group of enemies who adapted constantly, the American military under Casey did not make progress in Iraq. In 2004, it recorded 26,496 insurgent attacks. In 2005, that number increased to 34,131. Casey hopefully announced that 2006 would be “the Year of the Police,” but it turned out to be the year of bitter urban fighting, as Baghdad was consumed by a small-scale civil war. Fighting in Iraq intensified in July, especially in and around the capital. That summer there were an average of 50 insurgent attacks a day just in Anbar province, west of Baghdad. By the end of the summer, the capital had been largely ethnically cleansed, with Sunnis reduced to a few embattled enclaves on its western side. Insurgents were detonating about 1,000 roadside bombs a week. An estimated 2 million Iraqis, most of them Sunni, had fled the country, and an equal number had been classified as internally displaced.
Casey and those around him did not seem to grasp how quickly the situation was deteriorating. Admiral William Fallon, the American military commander for the Pacific, visited Baghdad in midsummer. When he returned home, he called retired Army General Jack Keane, an influential figure behind the scenes in Washington. “Jack, I just came out of Iraq,” Fallon began. “Could you help me to understand what the fuck is going on? … Casey is up to his ears in quicksand, and he doesn’t even know it. This thing is going down around him.” (The following year, Fallon was reassigned to run Central Command, overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in early 2008 he was forced by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to step down after making disparaging comments to a journalist about Bush-administration policy in the Middle East.)
Casey’s lack of awareness began to undercut his support at the top of the Bush administration. On August 17, 2006, during a video briefing to top national-security officials, he said he wanted to stick with his plan to turn Baghdad over to Iraqi security forces by the end of the year. Vice President Dick Cheney, watching from Wyoming, was troubled by that comment. “I respected General Casey, but I couldn’t see a basis for his optimism,” he wrote later.
In the wake of that briefing, the vice president began poking around for a different strategy—and different generals to lead it. Among those he met with was Colonel H. R. McMaster, the author of Dereliction of Duty, a book about the failures of top American generals in Vietnam. The colonel told Cheney that the U.S. government should abandon the view, held by Casey, that the American goal was to turn over control to the Iraqis as soon as possible.
In December, Casey was told to leave Iraq within weeks rather than in the spring of 2007, as he had planned. “I left not really understanding what the hell had happened,” Casey said. He was replaced by General Petraeus, who took a sharply different approach, moving his troops out to live among the people and getting insurgents to stop fighting Americans by putting almost 100,000 Iraqi fighters on the American payroll. Petraeus ultimately extracted the United States from Iraq, but hardly left behind a stable democracy.
Bizarrely, the tactical excellence of enlisted soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan may have enabled and amplified the strategic incompetence of the generals in those wars, allowing long-running problems in the military’s leadership culture to reach their full expression. The Army’s combat effectiveness let its generals dither for much longer than they could have if the Army had been suffering clear tactical setbacks. “One of the reasons we were able to hold on despite a failing strategy, and then turn the situation around, was that our soldiers continued to be led by highly competent, professional junior officers and noncommissioned officers whom they respected,” Sean MacFarland, who as a brigade commander in Ramadi in 2006 was responsible for a major counterinsurgency success, said at a 2010 Army symposium on leadership. “And they gave us senior officers the breathing space that we needed, but probably didn’t deserve, to properly understand the fight we were in.”
MacFarland’s point is rarely made, and worth pausing over, because its implications are far-reaching. Consider a U.S. military at the other extreme—tactically mediocre and manned with unmotivated troops. In such a circumstance, it is hard to imagine the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan being allowed to meander for years without serious strategic review and redirection. Yet meander they did, at the cost of many thousands of lives—both American and Iraqi. Unless something changes at the top, it is not hard to see our future wars devolving into similarly rudderless messes, held together by the rank-and-file troops, who bear the heaviest costs.
A few reliefs might have broken the strategic logjam in Afghanistan and Iraq, but by now, even the vocabulary of accountability has been lost. A fine essay by Colonel George Reed on “toxic leadership” in the military, published in 2004 in Military Review, bravely analyzed the problem but tiptoed around the obvious solution, saying only, “If the behavior does not change, there are many administrative remedies available.” Similarly, a 2005 Rand study of Army generalship found many deficits and made many recommendations—but you will not find terms like firings or relief for cause within it. The report speaks vaguely and briefly of the need for more “performance departures.” And a study done at the Army War College by Colonel Steven Jones at about the same time pointed to persistent problems with rotation and officers’ unaccountability, as well as an assessment system that tended to reward abusive leadership—but, again, it never quite mentioned the need for firing such leaders.
The erosion of the Army’s performance culture—at least in its highest ranks—has not left the service devoid of talented leaders. But the Army continues to do too little to sort the average performers from the outstanding ones. That has long-term consequences for the caliber of military leaders. A recent survey by students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government found that good young officers have left the military in large part because of frustration with military bureaucracy and the sense that the armed forces do not have a performance-oriented system for managing personnel.
If George Marshall, the superlative Army chief of staff during World War II, came back today to run the Army, the first thing he would likely insist upon is accountability. And that would produce more-adaptive leaders, a necessity in the post–Cold War, post-9/11 world.
Almost certainly, Marshall would also restore the sense that the needs of the nation should come before the needs of the individual or even the service. No one should get to be a general because it is his or her turn. Leading soldiers is a privilege. Our military should abide by the belief that the lives of soldiers are more important than the careers of officers—and that winning wars is more important than either. This fundamental truth is all that needs to be expressed to justify a policy of rapid relief. As Marshall understood during World War II, instilling that attitude is healthy for a military that protects a great democracy.
Thomas E. Ricks writes the Best Defense blog for Foreign Policy magazine and is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. This essay is adapted from his new book, The Generals, out this month.
