As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.
--"A Failure in Generalship," Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, Armed Forces Journal, May, 2007

"What I want to know is, where the hell were the generals?"
--question asked by my husband, former 1st Lt., U.S. Army, 101st Airborne Division, platoon leader, Vietnam...to his younger brother over dinner recently, upon Richard's retirement from 30 years with the U.S. Army Special Forces, at the rank of Brigadier General.


My husband's question to his brother was angry and demanding, but he was not angry at Richard, because he knew the military structure well enough to know that a one-star general is so far down the food chain that he, himself, would have had little to do with any decisions going on at the Pentagon and White House in the days leading up to the Iraq war.

Hell, in the red-hot days leading up to the big triumphant invasion, my brother-in-law could have set himself on fire and attracted little notice in that macho, macho world.

It reminds me of a bit by Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live at the time, when in her "news" segment, she joked that the reason Donald Rumsfeld, whom Bush liked to call a "matinee idol" stood behind a podium all the time during his ubiquitous press conferences was to hide his hard-on.

My husband is not a hot-headed man, but after sending his own son twice into combat in the Anbar province with the Marine Corps, his sister's son three times, also with the Marines, and Richard's own son with the Army, his voice rose with his questions and, it must be stated, accusations.

"All they gave a damn about was their miserable careers," he said.  "They sat there and let Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks and the others run roughshod over them because they knew damn well that if they spoke up, their careers were over.  And now how many have died because of that?"

My brother-in-law had little choice but to agree, because he knew it was true.  The whole world watched as one brave general, Eric Shinseki--at the time the Army's Chief of Staff--testified before Congress that it would take several hundred thousand troops to secure Iraq...only to be shuttled out quickly and replaced by more of a "team player" by a secretary of defense bound and determined to use war as a great laboratory to prove his grand experiment of a new streamlined military that could win a war in weeks and get out within a few short months before moving on to the next quick conquest.

A year or so ago, when seven retired generals released scathing indictments on Rumsfeld and the Bush administration's handling of the war, I was glad to hear it, but also bitter and angry that they had waited so damn long to speak out.  Most had been active-duty at the time, and I had to wonder if they'd expressed their doubts openly to anyone then.  I had heard rumors that in the lead-up to war, many in the Pentagon were opposed.

Like the secretary of state at the time, retired general Colin Powell, those who have known combat are the least likely to want to engage in it again unless absolutely necessary.

And yet, to war we went, led by gung-ho civilians who had never been.

The earth-shaking protest by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling in the esteemed Armed Forces Journal is groundbreaking in that it marks the first time an active-duty officer who is himself a veteran of Iraq has actually spoken out in clear, no-nonsense terms, to express what so many people--both in the military and out--have been thinking: 

Where the hell were the generals?

The piece is lengthy, but so well-written as to compel reading in one sitting, and although he breaks it into three things generals must do if war is requested by policy-makers, I think the main, most persuasive point he makes can be summed up in his own two words:

MORAL COURAGE.

"A military professional must possess both the physical courage to face the hazards of battle and the moral courage to withstand the barbs of public scorn.  On and off the battlefield, courage is the first characteristic of generalship," he says. 

"Failing to visualize future battlefields represents a lapse in professional competence, but seeing those fields clearly and saying nothing is an even more serious lapse in professional character."


Before going into a breakdown of both the Vietnam war and the Iraq war, he presents his major thrust, which is not new to military historians and strategy-buffs, and that is that wars of the future cannot be fought based on wars of the past. 

Though there were clear indications, from the beginning, that both the Vietnam war and the Iraq war would be primarily guerilla wars fought with insurgents, each was conducted like conventional wars, and the military budget was squandered, in large part, on high-tech systems and airplanes and such more suited to the Cold War than to putting decent body armor on a grunt in the field.

He says generals have three responsibilities: 

First, prepare and train our armed forces for the kinds of battles they might have to fight in future conflicts, so that if called upon by civilian leadership, they will be ready. 

Second, lay out in no uncertain terms to that civilian leadership exactly what that fight might entail in costs of blood and treasure, because they lack the training and expertise to know for themselves and have to trust their military advisors--which means, if you have to tell them something you know they do not want to hear, it is your responsibility to do so. 

And finally, be honest when explaining those same things to Congress and to the American people, who deserve to know the depth of the sacrifices being asked of them, and whether or not those sacrifices are proportional to the peace that will be gained. 

Because peace, in the final analysis, he says, should be the objective of all war--not material gain.

Yingling accuses the general corps not just of breaking all those rules, but furthermore, of deliberately underestimating how bad things were once we got there:

"After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America's general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public," he writes.

"The Iraq Study Group concluded that 'there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq.' The ISG noted that 'on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is sytematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.' "

He goes on:  "Population security is the most important measure of effectiveness in counterinsurgency. For more than three years, America's generals continued to insist that the U.S. was making progress in Iraq. However, for Iraqi civilians, each year from 2003 onward was more deadly than the one preceding it. For reasons that are not yet clear, America's general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq's government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq. Moreover, America's generals have not explained clearly the larger strategic risks of committing so large a portion of the nation's deployable land power to a single theater of operations."

To fix this problem, which Yingling believes is systematic and not just particular to a few bad seeds, he puts before Congress the responsibility to demand accountability of its generals.

"They must ask hard questions," he insists--such as, if it really will take hundreds of thousands of troops up to ten years to secure Iraq, then is an all-volunteer force sufficient to the task? And if not, then should we be getting into this in the first place?

He is also sick and tired of seeing generals rewarded for terrible performance. (Remember Tommy Franks receiving the Medal of Freedom from Bush?)

"A general who presides over a massive human rights scandal or a substantial deterioration in security ought to be retired at a lower rank than one who serves with distinction. A general who fails to provide Congress with an accurate and candid assessment of strategic probabilities ought to suffer the same penalty. As matters stand now, a private who loses his rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war."

Lt. Col. Yingling believes that when a high-ranking officer is up for promotion, he should be assessed for that promotion by more than just his superiors, as it stands now, which rewards a sort of bland conformity. They should also be assessed by their junior officers and the NCOs who are tasked with carrying out their orders--especially on the battlefield.

And Congress, he says, should also reward moral courage when they see it. A General Shinseki should be singled out for promotions, plum assignments, and rewards, rather than kicked out for honesty.

And a Tommy Franks, in my opinion, should be busted to private.

Lt. Col. Yingling also blames, "the executive branch, the services and lobbyists (who have) presented information that is sometimes incomplete, inaccurate, and self-serving" for many of the problems in Iraq right now, which is where, again, he tasks Congressional oversight to catch.

Oversight, I might add, that we did not have until the Democrats took over Congress.

He holds accountable not just those who did not ask the hard questions, but those who "marched into Iraq without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like the wars of the past" as well as, "Those few who saw clearly our vulnerability to insurgent tactics (and) said little and did little to prepare for those dangers."

As far as the situation now stands in Iraq, Lt. Col. Yingling made one statement that stood out to me above the rest, and it is perhaps his most sobering assessment:

"If our operations produce more enemies than they defeat, no amount of force is sufficient to prevail."

(cross-posted at:  http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/deanie_mills)