The Generals: American Military Command From World War II To Today

Prologue: Capt. William Depuy and the 90th Division in Normandy, summer 1944

• The 90th Division in June 1944 was a killing machine... of its own men
• Completely stalled out, even in the face of light German opposition
  • Requested replacements totalling > 100% in six weeks of combat operations
  • Average term of service of a lieutenant leading a platoon: two weeks
• Because of this, Lt. Gen. J. Lawton Collins relieved Brig. Gen. MacKelvie and replaced him with Maj. Gen. Eugene Landrum
  • Also ordered the relief of two of MacKelvie's subordinates:
  • Col. P. D. Ginder — relieved under armed escort after he continued to give orders after his replacement
• By midsummer Landrum himself was being fired for underperformance
• In addition, before his own relief, Landrum relieved the division's assistant commander, Brig. Gen. Sam Williams (and demoted him to Colonel)
• However for most of these men, being relieved of command was not a permanent judgement of incompetence, and they were given second chances
  • Ginder distinguished himself in the Battle of the Bulge and the Battle of Hurtgen forest, as well as Korea, and eventually retired as a Maj. General
  • Landrum served in Korea under Lt. Gen. Walton Walker and retired as a Maj. General
  • Williams was promoted back to Brig. Gen. in Korea, and eventually became the senior US military advisor in Vietnam, before retiring as a 3-star Lieutenant General
• The swift reliefs, while not always deserved, had their intended effect
• The 90th Division went from being a failure of a unit to being one of the finest of the European theater
• Relieving senior officers of command quickly also allowed junior officers to rise through the ranks more quickly
  • DePuy, the narrator of the story of the 90th Division rose from being a green Lieutenant to battalion command by the age of 25
  • DePuy would go on to use his experience under incompetent command to shape his approach to commanding the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam, and would also use it to set the shape for the post-Vietnam Army that would excel in Kuwait
• Three aspects of the experience of 90th Division stand out:
  • Generalship in combat is hard, and even seasoned officers will fail the test
  • Personalities matter: the 90th floundered under MacKelvie and Landrum, but flourished under its third commander, Brig. Gen. Raymond McLain
  • Generals in World War 2 were given a few months to prove themselves — if they could not prove themselves in that time, they were relieved of command
    • 16 Army division commanders (out of 155) were relieved for cause
    • 5 corps commanders were removed for cause
• This stands in stark contrast to the relative lack of accountability of the US Army in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars
• "a private who lost his rifle was now punished more than a general who lost his part of a war"
• During World War 2, the Army expected that some portion of its generals would fail the test of combat, and was ready to relieve them and find replacements when that happened
• By looking at who is promoted from Colonel to Brigadier General, we can discern the values of the Army, as an institution
  • In World War 2, George Marshall preferred aggressive officers
  • However, his immediate subordinates, Eisenhower and Bradley preferred officers who could operate as part of a team
  • During the '50s, the Army seemed to value conformists
  • During the '90s, even though the Army kept talking about "warfighting", the officers it promoted were tacticians who could win battles, rather than strategists who could win wars
• Although today's generals share many attributes with their predecessors, the Army has shifted in one major respect: relief of command is no longer seen as a natural and necessary phenomenon
• Under Bradley, being relieved of command was not a mark of disgrace or dishonor
• Officers who had been relieved of command could be and were given second chances to prove themselves (as we see with the senior officers of the 90th Division)
• While in World War 2, relief was a sign that the system was working as intended, today it is seen as a sign that the system has failed
• This raises a number of questions, which have not been broadly considered
  • How and why did we lose the practice of relieving generals for failure?
  • Why has accountability declined?
  • What does this have to do with the declining operational competence of America's generals?
    • How did we go from men like Marshall and Eisenhower, who weren't afraid to speak truth to power, to pliable bureaucrats like Richard Meyers and Peter Pace?
      • Are Richard Meyers and Peter Pace "pliable bureaucrats"?
• Although it touches upon the other services, this book focuses on the US Army, and specifically the US Army in Europe
  • The US Army in Europe was the incubator for the generals who commanded the Army in Korea and Vietnam
  • The Army is currently the pre-eminent military branch
  • The Navy has its own "seafaring" traditions, which aren't as applicable to the Army
  • The Marine Corps follows naval tradition
  • The Air Force is too young to have its own long-lasting traditions
• After World War 2, when the Army stopped relieving generals, it attempted to compensate in other ways
  • More oversight a.k.a "micromanagement"
  • If the Army isn't firing its generals, civilians now are — more generals are now being dismissed by civilian oversight
  • The quality of the relationship between military leadership and civilian leadership is one of the few leading indicators that show how well the war is going

Part I: World War II

Chapter 1: George C. Marshall: The Leader

• The American effort in World War 2 began with a set of dismissals across all branches and theaters
• This was because of the policy of George C. Marshall, the man who founded the modern American military
• Marhsall's policies and views on who does and does not make a good general officer still permeate the military today
• Biography of George Marshall
  • Born in 1880, only 15 years after the end of the Civil War
  • Joined the Army when it was recovering from its low ebb of the 1890s
  • Received his commission when the Army expanded rapidly in the wake of the Spanish-American War
  • Singled out early as an able commander — one of his superiors said that he'd rather serve under Marshall than have Marshall serve under him
  • Became Army Chief of Staff on Sept. 1 1939, the very day Germany invaded Poland
  • Known as a rather colorless officer — preferred duty and country over career advancement

Marshall and the Great War

• The formative experience of Marshall (as with many other officers in World War 2) was World War 1
• The US went into World War 1 with a thoroughly unprepared military
• No experience with industrial-scale warfare
• The overall contribution of the United States to the Entente cause in the Great War was mostly moral support
  • While the US declared war in April 1917, it took until November 1917 to get troops into combat
  • The first solely American offensive was not launched until September 1918, just 8 weeks before the Armistice
  • The main effect of the US entry into the war was to give Britain and France a reason to hold on
• While the US effect on the Great War was slight, the Great War had a huge effect on US officers
• Marshall's first memorable encounter in World War 1 was with Robert Pershing, the commander of US forces in France
  • Pershing was dissatisfied with Marshall's commanding officer, Gen. William Sibert
  • Marshall, then a Captain, stood up to Pershing and attempted to convince him that the unit was doing the best it could under the circumstances
  • Although he was unsuccessful in saving his commanding officer's career, Marshall was showing that he was willing to speak truth to power even at the risk of his own career
• Marshall witnessed Pershing's penchant for swiftly relieving underperforming officers
  • Pershing relieved six division commanders and 2 corps commanders in World War 1
  • Used a two-step process
    • Send officers to an out of the way posting in France
    • Then send them home
• In swiftly relieving underperforming Generals, Pershing was acting within a tradition that was well established during the Revolutionary War and the Civil War
• Pershing's dismissals, as well as the high regard his fellow officers held for him, allowed Marshall to rise quickly during the World War 1 military
• Marshall was put in charge of the First Infantry Division ("Big Red 1"), the first combat division the US Army would field in Europe
• What influenced Marshall the most in World War 1 was his commander's attitude
• Even though the British and French militaries were near collapse, and even though the US military was inexperienced and ill-trained, Pershing "radiated cheerfulness, determination and will-to-win"
• Those three characteristics would be what Marshall would look for in junior officers when he was in charge of the US Army
  • Calm under adversity
  • Good humor
  • Determination

Marshall's List

• Marshall had a very clear idea of the qualities that a good general possesses:
  • "Good common sense"
  • "Have studied your profession"
  • "Physically strong"
  • "Cheerful and optimistic"
  • "Display marked energy"
  • "Extreme loyalty"
  • "Determined"
• Marshall disdained the World War 1 "chateau generals" who remained in their headquarters and rarely ventured out among the fighting men
• Emphasized character over intellect
  • Marshall realized that the natural tendency of the US was towards military unpreparedness
  • US was protected by two large oceans to the east and west, and friendly neighbors to the north and south
  • Therefore, at the start of a war, the US military would almost always be underprepared
  • It's more important that a general be cheerful and optimistic in this scenario than more knowledgeable but pessimistic
  • Optimism + common sense + determination + resourcefulness is preferable to a great depth of military knowledge
• Marshall's list is notable for what it leaves out
  • Marshall was ambivalent about aggressive officers
    • Felt that aggression led to officers taking unnecessary risks
  • Also distrusted outliers and eccentrics
  • Wanted levelheaded team players
• Marshall's criteria for promotion had their intended effect: at the end of World War 2, the defeated Germans remarked on the clear difference in quality of American leadership between World War 1 and World War 2

Marshall and President Roosevelt

• One of the reasons Marshall was nominated as Chief of the Army was his willingness to be blunt with the President
• Example: aircraft construction program
  • In 1938, the President was considering funding the construction of 10,000 aircraft
  • By contrast, at the time, the entire US Army air corps consisted of around 160 aircraft
  • Marshall, to the surprise of the President, opposed such a rapid expansion
  • In Marshall's opinion, such a wildly unbalanced development focused too much on the airplanes themselves and not the guns, bombs, trained aircrews and bases needed to operate them
  • Marshall suspected that the airplanes were going to be built for the benefit of Britain and France
• Example 2: military mobilization in 1940
  • Henry Morgenthau (Secretary of the Treasury) advocated a military expansion in 1940, in anticipation of a potential US entry into World War 2
  • Roosevelt was opposed, having just promised the American public that he would do everything he could to keep the US out of the war
  • Marshall stood up to the President, and said that the US Army was in a "desperate situation" and that he would have to start preparations now if the Army was to have any hope of doing its job if it were called upon
  • Roosevelt was impressed with Marshall's grasp of the details of military preparedness and agreed to have Marshall draw up plans for mobilization
• Although Marshall and Roosevelt had a close working relationship, they were not close personally
• Marshall refused to socialize with Roosevelt, to the point of not even laughing at the President's jokes
• In Marshall's opinion, a modicum of professional distance allowed him to retain his objectivity when presenting plans that the President might disapprove of

Marshall Prepares for War

• Marshall's main concern with war preparation was not men or materiel, but leadership
• In 1939, even before he had been formally confirmed as Chief of the Army, Marshall was thinking about how he would remove underperforming general officers
• In 1941, Marshall removed 31 colonels, 141 lieutenant colonels, 31 majors and 16 captains
• The press accused him of "removing the brains of the Army", but Marshall's personal opinion was that he was ridding the army of officers who couldn't stand up to the rigors of modern combat
• After the war, Eisenhower said that Marshall's removal of the deadwood in the senior ranks of the US Army had been a key factor in the Allied victory
• During World War 2, the US Army grew from 1.4 million to 8.3 million
• Marshall, by promoting young officers to high leadership positions, found men who could handle that growth
  • I guess George C. Marshall was the Paul Graham of his era — finding young talent and pushing them into leadership roles, only in the Army rather than private industry
• In addition to being swift to fire, Marshall was swift to promote
• Promoted a man directly from major to brigadier general, skipping the ranks of lieutenant colonel and colonel in the process
  • That is more surprising than the swiftness with which he could fire
  • In today's military skipping a rank is unthinkable, much less skipping two ranks
• While Marshall was swift to relieve officers, he was also willing to give them second chances
• Many of the officers he relieved or demoted regained commands after proving themselves in "backwater" assignments, like running training camps
• Another reason that Marshall fired officers was insufficient teamwork
• Marshall was intolerant of idiosyncratic hotheads, and refusing to cooperate with other generals or other branches of the military over what he perceived to be petty reasons was cause for dismissal
• One of the reasons the US got away with only mobilizing 89 divisions was because its greater level of mechanization meant that those divisions could be shifted around much more rapidly to meet changing battlefield conditions
• Marshall knew that he needed officers who could make full use of that speed
• Marshall's system created a military that had officers who could think as fast as the Army could move

Chapter 2: Dwight Eisenhower: How The Marshall System Worked

• Marshall's most significant decision in World War 2 was made on December 12, 1941, when he decided to make Dwight Eisenhower the supreme allied commander
• Marshall knew that when the US went to war, it would do so overseas
• This means having to deal with allies
• Marshall picked Eisenhower because of his ability to work well in a coalition, and lead it if necessary
• Eisenhower, at least initially, did not want to be picked for command
  • Had sat out much of World War 1 at home, at the War Department
  • Wrote George Patton (who was actually senior to Eisenhower) asking for a regiment to command in the field
• Eisenhower wasn't a perfect fit for Marshall's criteria
  • Lack of combat experience
  • No reputation for being aggressive
• However, Marshall knew that Eisenhower was well-read, conscientious, and innovative
  • Read On War three times
  • Deliberately studied the Low Countries because he knew that would be where the next big war would be fought
  • Worked with Patton to explore how tanks could be used as more than rolling pillboxes for the infantry, even at the cost of risking a court-martial
• Marshall picked Eisenhower not for his strategic brilliance, but for his skill at turning strategy into operations and tactics
• Like Zhukov, Eisenhower was best at the "operational" part of warfare — at the point where broad strategic goals have to turn into specific orders for units
• When Eisenhower arrived in Washington, Marshall set him straight to work on the most important problem of the war:
  • "We have got to do our best in the Pacific, and we have got to win the whole war. Now, how are we going to do it?"
  • In other words
    • When and where does the US begin to fight
    • Should the US abandon the Philippines
  • In a few hours, Eisenhower had a three page memo that would form the outline for the entire US war
    • US would abandon the Philippines
    • US would not reinforce its own West Coast cities
    • Instead the focus would be on setting up Australia as a base for a counteroffensive
      • Hold Australia
      • Keep open the sea lanes to Australia
  • In drafting this strategy, Eisenhower was elaborating on US strategic thinking from the '20s and '30s, which saw the US position in the Philippines as increasingly untenable in the face of another major global conflict
    • Initially the US strategy called for defending Manila at all costs
    • However, as the '30s wore on, there was an increasing sense that the entire Philippine archipelago was indefensible
    • One of the things that we don't understand today is that in the '30s and '40s, the US was not a superpower. While it was certainly one of the stronger "great powers", US military leaders understood that the US could and would be locally overmatched
    • This is an especially salient point today, as the US is having to grapple with some of the same considerations with e.g. Taiwan
• The problem was more of a test of Eisenhower's character, personality and intellect
  • Marshall was testing Eisenhower to see if he would stick to the established plan, even knowing that it would involve abandoning thousands of US soldiers in the Philippines
  • Marshall also wanted to see if Eisenhower was willing to buck Gen. MacArthur, who was the head of Pacific command and who Eisenhower had served as an aide for
• The real genius of Eisenhower was his ability to prioritize
  • Example: March 1942 memo to Marshall
  • Eisenhower lays out three primary priorities for the US:
    • Keep Russia in the war
    • Keep the Middle East open, both to relieve pressure on Russia and to prevent German and Japanese forces from linking up
    • Keep England secure
  • Note that the priorities make no mention of the Pacific
  • Once again, this was not new strategic thinking, but it does once again demonstrate Eisenhower's ability to seperate the absolutely essential from the highly desirable
• One of the things that distinguished Eisenhower (and the American military in general) was its disregard for its generals backgrounds
• Unlike the British, who still took the notion of "an officer and a gentleman" seriously, the American army in World War 2 promoted officers from relatively humble backgrounds

Marshall and Ike Mature

• Of course both Marshall and Eisenhower made mistakes, especially during the opening phases of the war, in 1942
• Marshall advocated an invasion into France in 1943, which would have been disastrously early
• Marshall also opposed Operation Torch, the Allied landing in North Africa, as a distraction
• In retrospect, Operation Torch allowed the Allies to develop and refine the armored combat doctrines that would serve them well later on in Europe, as well as allowing commanders to gain much needed experience in a relatively permissive theater
• However, the largest mistake that Eisenhower and Marshall made was appointing Lloyd Fredendall as the front line American commander instead of Patton
• Fredendall was far too cautious and slow
  • When Eisenhower visited Fredendall, he found his headquarters some 70 miles behind the front, in an underground bunker that Fredendall had used precious engineering resources to construct
  • The troops that Fredendall commanded were not prepared for the speed of the German attack in the Battle of Kasserine Pass, which turned into a humiliating defeat for the Allies
  • The deciding factor in Fredendall's removal was Eisenhower learning that the British were also dissatisfied with his performance
  • Eisenhower realized that in a coalition effort, if any one of the coalition partners lost confidence in a commander, the commander had to go, regardless of what his own military might think of him
• When Eisenhower put Patton in charge, he gave him two standing orders
  • Don't be personally reckless
  • Don't hesitate to weed out underperforming officers
• Eisenhower repeated this advice to other commanders in the Army — if you have any doubts about the suitability of an officer in combat, weed him out
• However, true to the Marshall system, many of the officers dismissed by Eisenhower and Patton received second chances
• Most notable among them was Orlando Ward, who was dismissed by Patton from North Africa
  • By the end of the World War 2, Ward was back in command of a combat unit, this time the 20th Armored Division
  • He was also briefly in command of V Corps
• After the firings of Fredendall and Ward, Marshall released another report in which he outlined what he looked for in a general officer
  • High standard of military skill
  • Comprehensive understanding of modern warfare
  • Physical stamina
  • Moral courage
  • Strength of character
  • Flexibility of mind
• This list is largely aligned with the previous list, with the notable addition of "flexibility of mind"
• Marshall wanted generals who could adapt rapidly to changing circumstances
• If they could not adapt, they would be fired
• As Eisenhower put it, if the results obtained by a commander are unsatisfactory, the solution is not admonishment, supervision or harassment, but rather relief and replacement

Chapter 3: George Patton: The Specialist

• Patton was the exception to the Marshall system
• Unlike Eisenhower, Patton was idiosyncratic, moody, and prone to temper tantrums
• This culminated in 1943, when, during visits to field hospitals, Patton struck two privates who had been hospitalized for psychological reasons, calling them cowards
• Although Patton's lapse in judgement would have been enough to get any other general fired, Eisenhower kept Patton for two reasons
  • First, Patton had helped out and looked out for Eisenhower, when Eisenhower was younger
  • Second, and more importantly, he knew that he needed an aggressive general like Patton
• However, Eisenhower's admiration of Patton only went so far
• Unlike the Germans, who characterized Patton as the best American general, Eisenhower said Patton was the best at "aggressively pursuing a retreating enemy" — far more measured praise
• Fortunately for Patton, this is exactly the situation the US Army found itself in all through 1944 and 1945

Chapter 4: Mark Clark: The Man In The Middle

• Patton was not the only general whose personal closeness to Eisenhower allowed him to remain in place
• Another such general was Mark Clark, commander of US forces in Italy
• At the start of the Italian campaign, Clark panicked even in the face of a relatively tame German counterattack, almost organizing an evacuation until he was overridden by his British superior, Harold Alexander
• The more talented of Clark's subordinates always harbored doubts about his ability to lead in combat
• He didn't seem to have the "battle sense" that more talented generals did
• Did not facilitate communications between his subordinates, a failing that the enemy noted and exploited
• His choice for the general to lead the landing at Anzio, Maj. Gen. John Lucas, was a disastrous one
  • Very pessimistic attitude towards the amphibious operation
  • Didn't push forward and secure the hills surrounding the beachhead on the first day, even though he could have done so
  • Instead he chose to dig in and wait for further supplies and reinforcements
  • This allowed the Germans to secure the hills, containing and trapping the soldiers at Anzio, making the eventual breakout significantly more difficult
• Much of the blame on the disaster at Anzio also falls on Clark himself
• Clark advised Lucas at first to be cautious, and then blamed him for not pushing forward to take the surrounding hills
• Clark seemed to be more interested in shifting blame than accomplishing objectives
• Lucas' peers, even though they faulted him for not pushing forwards to take the hills around Anzio, did not think his dismissal was justified in light of the overall poor leadership from Clark
• Modern scholars think that Lucas' firing was both unjustified and the right thing to do
  • Firing Lucas for following the advice that Clark gave was an unfair thing to do
  • Yet it's also clear that Lucas was the wrong person to handle the landings at Anzio
  • Lucas needed to be fired for the Army to have any chance of getting through months of hard fighting needed to break out from the beachhead at Anzio
• The only general who seemed to like Clark was his foe, Albert Kesselring, who quickly understood that Clark was overcautious and proceeded to take full advantage
• So given all this why wasn't Clark fired
  • Personal relationship with Eisenhower
  • Lack of a viable replacement
• Clark and Patton were both glaring exceptions to the "Marshall system" for choosing generals, in opposite ways

Chapter 5: "Terrible Terry" Allen: Conflict Between Marshall and His Protégés

• Maj. Gen. Terry Allen de la Mesa was another challenge to the Marshall system
• Terry Allen was, in many ways, emblematic of the pre-World War American Army
  • Hard drinking, hard charging cavalry officer
  • Effective combat leader, but not much of a team player
• Allen was very effective at training his men, and was especially fond of night operations, which he used on several occasions to surprise German forces
• Allen proved his worth in the battle to recapture Sicily, taking the First Infantry Division (the "Big Red 1" that Marshall had led previously) into the mountainous heart of the island, capturing the German redoubt at Troina
• Yet, at the moment of his triumph, Allen was relieved of command by Omar Bradley and replaced with Maj. Gen. Clarence Huebner
• Eisenhower and Bradley's explanations for why they fired Allen are inconsistent and confusing
  • Tired
  • Undisciplined troops
  • Too aggressive against the Germans
• The real reason that Allen was fired seems to be simply that he was too individualistic to be the sort of "team player" that Eisenhower, Bradley, and others wanted as generals
• Marshall, on the other hand, was impressed with Allen's combat performance, and gave him the 104th infantry division
• Allen led the 104th from Normandy, across France into Germany
• His peers considered him a "problem child" personally, but noted his division's tenacity and the smoothness of the coordination between infantry and artillery
• Simply put, Allen was fired for being a go-it-alone maverick who didn't fit with Eisenhower and Bradley's leadership style

Chapter 6: Eisenhower Manages Montgomery

• The key test of Eisenhower's leadership was his ability to manage the British commander, Bernard Law Montgomery
• Montgomery did not agree with the American style of giving subordinates objectives, but leaving the means by which those objectives were achieved to their discretion ("commander's intent")
• In turn, American commanders saw Montgomery as a master of set-piece battles with extensive preparation, but completely inept at improvisization and pursuit
  • Montgomery, in many ways, is exactly the opposite of Patton
• Complicating the relationship between Eisenhower and Montgomery was the overall politics between the United States and Great Britain
  • The US didn't well and truly join the war until 1942
  • Was not present for all the British defeats and reversals in 1940-41
  • In 1944, at the Normandy landings, the US was entering France, but the British were returning to France
  • However, by the end of 1944, it was clear that the US was quickly becoming the dominant western Allied power, and the British were being pushed from center stage
• Moreover, Eisenhower didn't think that Montgomery was the right man for the job
• Eisenhower would have preferred that the British had appointed Gen. Harold Alexander, whom he thought was a better strategic thinker than Montgomery
• Likewise, Montgomery thought that Eisenhower was an inexperienced lightweight who didn't really know how to run a war
• Montgomery would repeatedly forget that Eisenhower was technically his boss
• However, despite all this, Eisenhower was determined to accomodate Montgomery to the greatest extent possible, because both Marshall and Roosevelt had made it absolutely clear that preserving the coalition with the British was of paramount importance
• The lengths to which Eisenhower went to accomplish this led some soliders Patton's army to dub him, "The best general the British have"
• Montgomery was convinced that the best way to invade Germany itself was to concentrate force along a single relatively narrow front
• Eisenhower had his doubts but was willing to let Montgomery try his approach with Operation Market Garden
• Market Garden was a disaster, and highlighted Montgomery's shortcomings
  • Inability to conduct an attack without significant preparation
  • Inability to rapidly adapt to changing battlefield circumstances
• For his part, Montgomery didn't seem to appreciate that the Americans and the British militaries, while superficially similar, were growing apart in terms of tactics and doctrine
  • The American military had become far more mobile than the British one
    • Better American electronics manufacturing ensured that almost every American platoon had radios, while even in 1944 radios were at the company or batallion level in Britain
    • American logistics ensured that even rapid movements could be supported by adequate supplies of fuel, food and equipment
      • When Montgomery tells one of his American subordinates that a corps can't be supplied over a single road, the subordinate responds, "Well, maybe you British can't, but we can"
  • The American military was much faster at learning than the British
    • Both British and German commanders noted that their American counterparts made a lot of mistakes, but never the same one twice
    • The US military, having been at war for a significantly shorter period of time, with significantly greater manpower and industrial production, was willing and able to take more risks in order to learn faster
• Montgomery's greatest strength was on the defense, and it was during the Battle of the Bulge that Montgomery would have his finest moment, coordinating the defense against the Ardennes salient
• However, even there, Montgomery would offend his allies by implying that the British were primarily responsible for throwing the Germans back, at a press conference after the battle was over
• For all the friction between Eisenhower and Montgomery, however, their relationship was a productive one, which can be studied as a model of how very disparate management styles can accomodate each other

Chapter 7: Douglas MacArthur: The General As Presidential Aspirant

• The greatest anomaly of World War 2 was not Patton, or Clark, but rather MacArthur
• MacArthur was truly the last of the old pre-War Army
• Managed as much by Roosevelt himself as by Marshall
• MacArthur bio
  • Son of a Civil War general
  • Chief of staff of the 42nd Division in World War 1
  • Served as Army Chief of Staff from 1930 - 1935
  • By 1940 he was commander of US forces in the Southwest Pacific theater
• MacArthur's leadership style was exactly the opposite of Marshall's
  • Marshall kept himself to the background, and made sure his subordinates got the credit
  • MacArthur's leadership style was brash and personal, and he tended to take credit himself even for ideas that his subordinates came up with
• One of the reasons Eisenhower had command of the D-Day landings, rather than Marshall, was because FDR felt that he needed Marshall in Washington to help rein in MacArthur
• Marshall repeatedly writes to MacArthur to get him to follow the US strategy (focus on winning in Europe first, then focus on the Pacific) and cooperate with the Navy
• So if MacArthur was such a problem, why wasn't he fired?
• President Roosevelt felt that MacArthur was less of a danger in uniform than out of it
  • The isolationist forces that opposed US entry into the war still existed, even though they had been stunned by the momentary consensus that emerged in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor
  • MacArthur, isolationist and conservative, would have made a perfect figure for those forces to rally around
  • This is why Roosevelt and Marshall kept MacArthur in the Pacific, where he was both too far away to be a danger, yet still in a position prestigious enough that it wouldn't be perceived as a snub
  • This is also why MacArthur was awarded the Medal of Honor after being ordered to retreat from the Philippines, despite having done nothing to earn it
• It's notable that we know the names of Eisenhower's subordinates (e.g. Patton, Bradley, etc), but we don't know the names of MacArthur's subordinates, even though one of them, Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, would be highest ranking US POW of the war after the surrender of the Philippines

MacArthur The Presidential Candidate

• While generals like Patton and Clark were not completely in line with Marshall's leadership style, they still operated within his system
• MacArthur, on the other hand, drew no clear cut line between the military and the political
• Fortunately, however, MacArthur was badly out of touch with American politics, having been out of the country from World War 2 to the moment he was fired as commander of US forces in Korea
• MacArthur had started exploring the possibility of a Presidential bid as early as 1943
  • He'd sent a subordinate back to the United States to sound out Republican congressmen to see what his chances were of securing the Republican nomination
  • Exchanged letters with Rep. Albert Miller, who was trying to get him to run
• MacArthur's continued dabbling in politics would lead to his relief in the Korean War, and would have a lasting impact on civil-military relationships
• MacArthur's antics in Korea contributed to Johnson's later mistrust of his generals in the Vietnam War
• MacArthur's legacy in the Army would mostly be a negative one — the Army's continued distrust of brash, outsize figures is a result of MacArthur (and, to a lesser extent, Patton)

Chapter 8: William Simpson: The Marshall System and the New Model American General

• The general who best fit Marshall's criteria was William Simpson
• Simpson was smart, adaptive and aggressive
• But unlike Patton, Simpson was not brash and didn't make the news for the wrong reasons
• Subordinates enjoyed working for him
• The bland efficiency of Simpson's command is the reason that he's largely forgotten to history — there simply isn't really any drama for historians to write about
• Simpson personified the ideal of generalship that the Army would embrace in the post-war years
• Eisenhower praised Simpson, saying, "If he ever made a mistake, it never came to my attention"
• Bradley called him "uncommonly normal"

The Effectiveness of the Marshall System

• After the war, many were critical of the wave of reliefs carried out in 1944-45 in the US Army
• Felt that Eisenhower was "running out of candidates"
• Thought it was unfair that leaders of inexperienced units were relieved without really being given a chance to get better
• Martin Blemson, the Army's official historian, argued that most reliefs in World War 2 were unwarranted
  • Argues that the Army handled relief in a "more professional" manner in Korea and Vietnam
  • However, it remains that Korea and Vietnam were a stalemate and a loss, respectively, while World War 2 was a decisive victory
  • C'mon Ricks, that's basic post-hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning
• What the critics of Marshall and Eisenhower don't understand is the opportunity cost of leaving failing officers in place
  • Relieving incompetent commanders improved morale farther down the line
  • For a good example of this: see Band of Brothers where the morale of Easy Company improved dramatically once Capt. Sobel was relieved
  • In many cases where the relief was unjustified, the combat effectiveness of the unit was uncompromised — after Terry Allen was relieved, the First Infantry Division continued to be a highly effective unit
  • The removals allowed a new generation of officers to gain experience faster than it would have otherwise
    • And of course, it could have been much worse: Stalin had his non-performing officers shot
• A better critique of the Marshall system was that it was unnecessarily harsh towards nonconformists
  • It's important to note that Marshall, Eisenhower, Bradley and most of the senior generals of the US Army in World War 2 came out of the infantry
  • This caused frustration with cavalry officers, especially, who argued that the army moved unnecessarily slowly
  • This was also noticed by the Germans, who noted that the US and British armies were moving slowly despite massive materiél advantages
• The manner in which the war was ended was emblematic of the leadership style that Marshall and Eisenhower embodied
  • After accepting the German surrender, Eisenhower simply stated: "The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241 local time on May 7, 1945."
  • So simple as to be eloquent

The Politics of the Marshall System

• Relieving commanders was not just about combat effectiveness, it also sent a political message
• Being willing to remove officers signalled to the American public and Congress that Marshall cared just as much about enlisted men as he did about the officer corps
• FDR and Marshall wanted a "New Deal Army", which cared as much about its lower ranks as it did about its colonels and generals
• Not only justified the relief of officers, but also was the reasoning behind choosing men from the enlisted ranks to replace them, rather than looking outside the Army
• This concern for democratic legitimacy permeated Marshall's decision-making around all aspects of the Army
  • Insisted that draft policy be made in a way that was both fair and understandable to the average member of the public
  • Dissatisfied with the pamphlets that explained the US role in the war, Marshall commissioned Hollywood director Frank Capra to make a series of short films, Why We Fight
• Marshall was not just acting out of high-minded principle
  • Felt that one of the reasons that the US turned so isolationist in the inter-war years was because of the harsh and high-handed treatment that enlisted men had received from their officers in World War 1
  • This meant that when those recruits came home they spread anti-military messages throughout society, making the public leery of mobilization
• Another effect of the Marshall system is that it put an end to the general-as-politician in American life
  • The last officer to hold general's rank to be elected to the Presidency was Eisenhower himself
  • Prior to him (especially in the 19th century) there were a number of Presidents who'd been generals in the Army
    • Washington
    • Jackson
    • Grant
    • Harrison
    • Hayes
    • etc.
  • After Eisenhower, no general would even make it through the primaries, for either party

The Legacy of the Marshall System

• Marshall invented the criteria, and Eisenhower implemented them, but it was Bradley who carried the Marshall system forward into the post-war years
• Both Marshall and Eisenhower moved on soon after the end of the war, with Bradley becoming chief of staff of the Army in 1948
• Although Bradley was portrayed as "the GI's general", his record was far from sterling
  • Bradley's army enjoyed massive advantages in men, tanks and aircraft (greater than 100-to-1 in the case of aircraft)
  • Army was experienced, having fought from Normandy all the way to the French border
  • Yet he still took months to force the Siegfried Line
  • Many of the worst episodes of the Western Front took place in Bradley's command
    • Battle in the hedgerows of Normandy
    • Escape of German forces from the Falaise pocket
    • Huertgen Forest
    • Initial fumbling response to the German counteroffensive in the Ardennes
• Patton lamented Bradley's caution
• Under a commander like Bradley, one wins by avoiding losing
• However, this can drag a campaign on far longer than necessary
• The legacy of the Marshall system would be an emphasis on cooperation and coordination over individual daring, and competence over brilliance
• The generals of World War 2 were organization men, but they were men of a successful organization
• Failures among them were weeded out, not covered up

Part II: The Korean War

Chapter 9: William Dean and Douglas MacArthur: Two Generals Self-Destruct

• The Korean War had a much more mixed record of military leadership than World War 2
• While the US Army was humiliated by forces with inferior materiel and logistics twice, Korea was also witness to two of the finest instances of US military leadership
  • Marine Maj. Gen. O.P. Smith
  • Army Lt. Gen. Matthew Ridgway
• One of the biggest shocks in Korea was seeing just how much the Army had deteriorated from its World War 2 peak
• At every level, the Army was overaged, inexperienced, incompetent, and not physically capable of operating in the harsh Korean climate
• The Korean War was the beginning of the erosion of the Marshall system
  • It was much more difficult to dismiss officers in a small unpopular war than in a large popular war
  • Early high-level reliefs raised fears of Congressional inquiries
  • It says much about the mindset of the US Army, though, that it was more afraid of Congressional inquiries than it was of losing a war

The Destruction of General Dean

• Maj. Gen. William Dean was the commander of the 24th Infantry Division, based in Japan
• When North Korea invaded South Korea, his troops were the first to be dispatched
• Dean encountered a very difficult situation
  • Refugees clogging roads
  • South Korean troops panicking and fleeing
  • His own troops did not have the requisite air or armor support to effectively fight the North Koreans
• However, instead of stepping back and trying to bring order to the rear areas and organize a fighting retreat, Dean effectively turned himself into a 2nd Lieutenant and led individual patrols against North Korean tanks
  • Ah yes, the Rommel problem, only worse
• After getting lost on one of these patrols, he wandered the hills of the Korean peninsula and was eventually captured by North Korean troops, becoming the highest ranking prisoner of the war
• Although Dean received a Medal of Honor for his efforts and his subsequent captivity, by his own admission, he didn't deserve it
• The strains of Korea broke Dean, mentally and physically, leaving him unrecognizable to people who had known him before the war

MacArthur's Downfall

• The mystery with the removal of MacArthur was not the fact of his removal, but that it took so long for him to be removed
• Unlike in World War 2, the US military should have been able to easily outmatch the North Korean forces
  • United States had total air and naval control
  • North Koreans had little in the way of mechanization and artillery support
• Yet MacArthur did his best to make the war more difficult than it needed to be
  • Divided command structure
  • Complex amphibious and airborne assaults that needlessly complicated operational planning
  • Remained in Tokyo, visiting the actual theater of operations only rarely
  • Assigned people to combat commands on the basis of their personal loyalty to MacArthur rather than competence
• In addition, MacArthur seemed to go out of his way to antagonize Truman (though, in this he was behaving the same as with FDR and Herbert Hoover)
  • Visited Taiwan and issued a statement calling for the US to defend Taiwan, when that policy had not been officially decided
  • Disregarded a blunt private warning from Truman that he was getting out of control and that he was on thin ice
  • Repeatedly claimed to the press that the war would be soon brought to a victorious close, even as Chinese troops were moving to reinforce the North Koreans
• However, just as in World War 2, MacArthur was a political problem in addition to a poor general
• In the fall of 1950, however, MacArthur would finally cross the line
  • Issued a set of increasingly hysterical-sounding statements asking for authorization to bomb targets within China, which would have greatly expanded the war, and potentially brought in the Soviet Union as well
  • Undercut his support among conservatives and in the military
• The Chinese intervention was a tactical and strategic disaster, and American troops were poorly deployed to meet the new threat
  • Broad front
  • Thin reserves
  • Open flanks
• However, unlike in World War 2, the Army did not publicly fire any officers for this failure

Chapter 10: Army Generals Fail at Chosin

• The battles around the Chosin reservoir provide an apt comparison between two styles of leadership
• Marines were on the west side of the reservoir, Army was on the east
• Both sides suffered in the brutal cold
  • Frostbite
  • Equipment failure
  • However, the cold did reduce bleeding and infection, so it did provide some limited benefit to wounded soldiers
• The performance difference between the Army and the Marines at Chosin was stark
  • Both units had to retreat approximately 13 miles
  • However the Army unit was wiped out, while the Marines conducted a fighting retreat and established a new defensive position in good order
• The battle of Chosin reservoir started about three months after the Inchon landings
  • MacArthur was overconfident after the success of Inchon and was pressing his subordinates to press towards the Yalu River
  • He was doing this despite the fact that there were numerous indications that the Chinese had already reinforced the North Koreans and were preparing to attack
• Army and Marine dispositions at the start of the battle
  • Lt. Col. Don Faith's 1st Battalion of the 32nd Infantry Regiment arrives on the east side of the reservoir
  • They replaced the 5th Marines, under Lt. Col. Raymond Murray, who had been ordered to move to the west side of the reservoir to reinforce and consolidate the Marine forces in the area, and reduce exposure to flanking attacks
• Despite being initially ordered not to attack, Faith presses for permission to attack North and eventually receives permission
• Faith's 1st Battalion (32nd Infantry Regiment) was joined by a batallion from the 31st Infantry Regiment
  • Both the 31st and 32nd were part of the 7th Infantry Division
  • Unit from 31st was commanded by Faith's superior, Col. Allan MacLean
• Neither Faith nor MacLean had significant combat experience
  • MacLean had been a staff officer during World War 2, and had only been given command of this battalion after the previous commander had been dismissed for incompetence after the landings at Inchon
  • Faith, even more remarkably, had zero combat experience — his entire Army career until this point had been in support, headquarters, and other noncombat postings
    • I get the feeling that in Marshall's World War 2 Army someone like Faith wouldn't have even made Colonel's rank, much less gotten an actual battalion to command
• The units these men commanded were as green as their commanders
  • Neither had done much fighting, having been part of the second wave at Inchon
  • No experience in defensive preparations
  • No experience in fighting against numerically superior foes
• The first signs that things were starting to go wrong was when 1/32nd's reconaissance platoon rode forward to establish a surveillance outpost...and disappeared
  • No word from the platoon reached HQ, either by runner or by radio
  • The platoon was never heard from again
• Meanwhile, at this time, the Marines were picking up increasing indications that regular Chinese Army soldiers were interspersed among the North Koreans
  • Civilian chatter indicating that there were columns of Chinese soldiers moving in the North Korean rear areas
  • Captured Chinese soldiers
• However, MacArthur discounted the civilian chatter as "unreliable" and insisted that the captured Chinese soldiers were "volunteers", even though they insisted that they were PLA regulars
  • MacArthur's intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, was more interested in lobbying Congress and congratulating Joe McCarthy on his anti-Communist efforts than he was in receiving accurate assessments of the Chinese threat
  • In this, he was enthusiastically following his boss' lead
• The battle around Chosin reservoir begins in earnest on November 27-28, when elements of the 80th Division of the Chinese PLA attacked Faith's ill-prepared outpost
  • Note the disparity in numbers here: Faith is commanding a battalion — roughly 800 soldiers. He is being attacked by a division, roughly 10,000 soliders
  • Even if Faith had been competent, it would have been an extraordinary struggle to hold out long enough to be reinforced
• The next afternoon, Gen. Edward Almond, one of MacArthur's favored subordinates, arrives to assess the situation
  • Exhorts Faith and MacLean to keep attacking
  • When Faith tells Almond that he is facing off against two Chinese divisions, Almond replies angrily, "There aren't two Chinese divisions in all of Korea!"
• Both Faith and MacLean would be dead within three days
  • MacLean perishes in an ambush as he approaches troops that he thought were American but were actually Chinese
  • At this point command of the combined unit devolves to Faith
  • Faith was badly out of his depth, but his superiors did not seem to recognize that fact
  • There were seasoned senior officers who could have relieved Faith, but Faith's superior officer, Maj. Gen. David Barr chose to keep Faith in place
• On November 30, the Chinese overrun a hill overlooking Faith's position, rendering it untenable
• Faith begins to organize a convoy to retreat, and, at this moment, his lack of competence and understanding is most visible and costly
  • Convoy aims for another Army outpost, 4 miles to the south
  • However, Faith had not coordinated with the unit manning that outpost, and they had already retreated
  • The actual closest friendly unit was the Marine Corps outpost at the south end of the reservoir, 7 miles away, and they had even fewer troops than Faith did
  • Lack of planning meant that the convoy set out with vastly insufficient supplies of ammunition, esp. ammunition for its heavy machine guns
  • There was no coordination with friendly Marine aircraft that attempted to help, which resulted in some attacks by the aircraft hitting the convoy itself
  • As the convoy inched its way south along the shore of the reservoir, it encountered a Chinese roadblock
  • In the effort to fight its way past the roadblock, Lt. Col. Faith was killed
  • After Faith's death, what little discipline remained broke down completely and Army units scattered into the woods and onto the frozen surface of the reservoir itself
  • Survivors made their way across the surface of the reservoir to the Marine units on the other side, arriving shocked, injured and frostbitten
• In World War 2, a debacle like this would have resulted in officers being dismissed up and down the chain of command
• However, in Korea, only Barr was relieved

Chapter 11: O.P. Smith Succeeds at Chosin

• In many ways, O.P. Smith was more of a product of the Marshall system than his Army superiors
• Although he was a Marine general, Smith had attended the Infantry School when Marshall was teaching there
• Smith was hardened by his experience in World War 2, especially the amphibious assault at Peleliu, where the Marines suffered almost 40% casualties storming the beaches
• The three most important decisions that Smith made at Chosin were all made before the battle started
  • Consolidated his forces, pulling the 5th Marines from the east side of the reservoir to the west, and turning over then entire east side to the Army
  • Built two field airstrips at the south end of the reservoir
  • Placed himself at the south end of the reservoir, knowing that would be the schwerpunkt
• Another of Smith's strengths was that he understood his boss
  • In this case he understood that Edward Almond was an aggressive general who always wanted to attack
  • So, even when following orders to advance, Smith understood that he was advancing into a precarious situation and established a line of strong points along his preferred route of retreat so that when it was time to retreat, he could hop from one fortified bastion to the next
• Smith also understood his enemy
  • Realized that the Chinese lacked armor and artillery support, and therefore, as long as he could preserve his own, he would have the upper hand
  • Set up his firebases to emphasize high survivability in short-range combat, even though that meant giving up apparently attractive tactical positions
  • Understood that the Chinese were deliberately leaving some infrastructure intact as they "retreated" in order to draw individual American divisions forward into isolated positions
• Smith's preparation meant that the Marines at Chosin had a much different experience than the Army
• Where the Army was immediately overwhelmed and overrun, the Marines were able to hold fast until they started running out of supplies
• Smith then conducted a carefully planned fighting retreat from Chosin, to Koto-ri, and then from Koto-ri to the coastal plain
• In the process his one Marine division held its own against anywhere between 9 and 12 Chinese divisions
• If Smith's exploits had occurred in World War 2, he would have been one of the most famous generals in the Marine Corps, and perhaps even the United States military as a whole
• However, Smith's moment of glory occurred in Korea, which was a small, relatively unpopular war
• As a result, Smith is almost forgotten today, even among the Marines

Why The Difference in Leadership

• Years later, an analysis of the battle of Chosin reservoir showed that, at the level of enlisted men and junior officers, there was little difference between the Army and the Marine Corps
• The difference in performance is entirely due to the difference in competence of the senior leadership
• Fundamentally, the Army leadership in Korea didn't understand how to prepare for combat
  • Didn't think to pre-arrange logistics
  • No pre-set artillery support
  • Little communication or coordination with other nearby units or air support
• Lt. Col. Faith was unfortunately emblematic of the Army in Korea
• Of the 18 colonels leading regiments in Korea, 15 had no prior combat experience
• The Army was using Korea as a way for those who had been staff officers in World War 2 to have "their turn" leading units into combat
  • For the Army, Korea was a sideshow
  • The main focus was preparing for a potential ground war against the Soviet Union in Europe
  • As a result, the Army kept its best generals in Europe, and sent those who needed experience to Korea
• The Marine Corps, on the other hand, sent its best leaders to Korea
  • Marine Corps had a policy that anyone leading a unit had to have at least led the next smallest unit in combat (i.e. in order to command a division, you had to have had combat experience leading a battalion)
  • This was because the Marine Corps was a much smaller force
  • Was also facing questions from Congress about whether the post-Cold War military had room for a "small war" force like the Marines
  • As a result, the Marine Corps officers at Chosin were hardened (and often decorated) veterans of some of the worst fighting the US saw in the Pacific
    • Saipan
    • Guadalcanal
    • Iwo Jima
    • etc.

Chapter 12: Ridgway Turns The War Around

• On December 23rd, Gen. Walton Walker, then commander of all ground forces in Korea, was killed in a car accident
• Matthew Ridgway was appointed to take his place the same day
  • One of the reasons that the replacement was carried out so quickly is that it was clear that Walker was on his way out anyway
• Ridgway was another of Marshall's proteges
• Served as an aide to Marshall before appointed to command a division shortly before the Normandy invasion
• One thing I don't understand is that Ricks castigates the Army for putting inexperienced men in charge of divisions in Korea, and yet here's Marshall doing the same thing with Ridgway and getting excellent results
• Unlike Patton and MacArthur, Ridgway was a younger general, who took care that to ensure that he was neither putting himself or being seen to put himself above the troops
  • Literally so — Ridgway refused to review troops from a platform or reviewing stand, preferring to stand by the side of the road as troops marched by
• From the moment he was appointed, Ridgway set to work turning the US effort around
  • The first thing he did was visit MacArthur
  • Ridgway knew that maintaining a cordial relationship with MacArthur was vital to his own effectiveness, even if he didn't agree with MacArthur's policies
  • Next, he conducted a low-altitude aerial tour of Korea in a B-17 bomber, studying the terrain on which he would be ordering his troops to fight
  • Then, he visited Syngman Rhee, President of South Korea, and assured him that the American forces would not be retreating from the country
  • Finally, he conducted a tour of all his ground commanders, assessing the situation on the ground
• What Ridgway found on his tour was deeply concerning
  • Found that his division commanders didn't know the terrain they were operating on
    • Didn't know the names of prominent mountain peaks
    • Didn't know the name of the rivers that ran through their sector
    • Didn't know what ground was and was not suitable for armor
  • The US Army was roadbound, in terrain where the roads were little more than dirt tracks running up and down hillsides
  • Morale was pervasively low, from the front lines all the way to headquarters
  • Lt. Col. Winton, Ridgway's aide, summarized the situation as, "Weather: terrible. Chinese: ferocious. Morale: stinko"
• Ridgway was also deeply concerned that the 8th Army's headquarters was in a warm building 180 miles from the front
  • Fredendall in North Africa: the sequel
  • Ridgway ordered the headquarters moved north immediately
• Ridgway's initial survey indicated that, although he had been sent to regain the offensive, the 8th Army was in no shape to conduct offensive operations at that moment
  • Army was far too dependent on reliable telephone and radio communications
  • Unwilling to leave roads and go cross country in pursuit of the enemy
  • Lack of imagination when fighting a foe that they massively outmatched in firepower
• Ridgway realized that he would need to relieve a significant number of general officers in order to make the 8th Army into a fighting force that could effectively conduct offensive operations

Ridgway's Reliefs

• Ridgway embarked on a series of reliefs much like Pershing had carried out in World War 1 and Marshall had carried out in World War 2
• However, Ridgway's task was complicated by the fact that the US was not fighting a major great power war, but rather was fighting a limited "police action"
• Instead of being able to formally fire generals like his predecessors, he had disguise his firings as normal rotations
• Unlike Pershing and Marshall, Ridgway did not have the full support of the Army leadership in firing generals
• Twice, in January and February, he got messages from Army leadership in the United States warning him to be careful about the political optics of his firings
• As a result, Ridgway was not able to work as quickly as Marshall, and this actually caused the firings to be more painful
  • Instead of being given second chances, generals were often pushed into retirement after their reliefs
• Interestingly, one of the generals that Ridgway did not seek to fire was Edward Almond
  • Did not want to pick a fight with MacArthur, who viewed Almond very favorably
  • Also realized that, if properly restrained, Almond's aggressive streak could be put to good use
• Ridgway's firings would constitute an epitaph for the Marshall system
• Although he was trying to clean house in the same way that Marshall had cleaned house in World War 2, the politics of the Korean War meant that wholesale firings could not be carried out without attracting unwanted Congressional attention
• Korea was a small unpopular war that was going badly, and firings leadership is always more difficult in such a scenario
• This is definitely foreshadowing for Vietnam
• At the end of January 1951, Ridgway's change of leadership was beginning to have its intended effect
• US Army was successfully repelling North Korean and Chinese attacks
• Caused North Korean and Chinese troops to retreat to north of the 38th parallel and set the stage for a truce
• Ridgway's success also had the effect of altering the balance of power between MacArthur and Truman
  • MacArthur was arguing that the only two alternatives were abandoning the Korean peninsula or starting a broader regional war against China
  • Ridgway showed that the limited conflict on the Korean peninsula could be prosecuted successfully, undercutting MacArthur's claims

Chapter 13: MacArthur's Last Stand

• By January of 1951 MacArthur had taken the increasingly Manichean position that the only two alternatives in Korea were either complete withdrawal or expanding the war to encompass China
• Was talking about conducting air raids on China and encouraging the Nationalist government on Taiwan to invade the mainland
• Meanwhile, Ridgway was quietly turning the war around, conducting a limited advance to the Han River, digging in, and destroying Chinese and North Korean attacks as they came
• One of the often overlooked strengths of Ridgway is his handling of MacArthur
  • Even though Ridgway disagreed with MacArthur's policy prescriptions, he went out of his way to avoid denigrating them
  • Praised the "freedom of action" that MacArthur had "given" him to conduct the war as he saw fit
  • Kept careful records of his conversations with MacArthur, writing down the date and time that MacArthur told him specific things, in order to establish a paper record supporting himself in case MacArthur decided to turn on him
• Nevertheless, MacArthur undermined Ridgway eventually, by announcing at a press conference that the war was destined for a stalemate because of the "unreasonable" restrictions placed on him by Washington
  • This was frustrating to Ridgway because he had worked hard to raise troop morale and present the war as winnable to Congress and President Truman
• This outburst by MacArthur was, in many ways, the last straw
• Truman had already repeatedly warned MacArthur to avoid making independent policy statements
• On April 11, 1951 Truman released a statement relieving MacArthur of command
• MacArthur returned home to a hero's welcome, and publicly contemplated running for President
• One of the reasons Eisenhower decided to run for President was his concern that there was a chance, however remote, that MacArthur would get the nomination
• That said, Eisenhower's decision to run for office represents a stark departure from the distancing from politics that Marshall sought to inculcate in his subordinates
• MacArthur went to his grave believing that he could have won the Korean War if only he'd been allowed to use atomic weapons
• Today, MacArthur is not very well remembered for a man of his stature
• The Army remembers him as mostly a negative example — example of a general should not behave
• The Korean War stripped MacArthur of most of his World War 2 glory
• His intransigence poisoned civil-military relations for the next war — Lyndon Johnson, remembering MacArthur's constant betrayals of Truman, would keep his generals on a very short leash in Vietnam

Chapter 14: The Organization Man's Army

• By the mid-1950s, prominent individualists like Ridgway were leaving and the Army was swiftly becoming a collection of "organization men"
• The term "organization man" comes from William H. Whyte's book of the same name, summarizing the corporate culture of 1950s America
• "Organization man" culture
  • "The 'rough and tumble' days are over"
  • "Unorthodoxy is dangerous to the organization"
  • "Ideas come from the group, not the individual"
  • "Creative leadership is a staff function — if the chief wants creativity, he'll hire someone to be creative"
• The above points also describe Army culture during the '50s
• New rotation policies, which rotated officers among units on a regular basis, ensured that the officers who got ahead were bland careerists who could get along in all situations
• William Westmoreland was typical of this new breed of officer
• Another factor reinforcing the shift to corporatist thinking was the development of game theory
  • During the '50s, Thomas Schelling's mathematical models analogized fighting a war to operating in a market
  • "There is more than a semantic connection between a price war and a real war"
  • "There is at least a touch of similarity between, say, a threat to retaliate with nuclear weapons and a threat to retaliate by calling a strike"
  • Schelling proposed that his theories of deterrence and gradual escalation were not only applicable to the standoff with the Soviet Union, but were also applicable to smaller conflicts
    • "Limited war is essentially a bargaining process in which violence and the threat of violence is used, in which one tries to coerce or deter an enemy and cause him not to pursue all of the actions of which he is currently militarily capable"
  • The logic of limited war seemed compelling
  • In fact, in the '50s, thinkers like Robert Osgood were arguing that a war of attrition is exactly the sort of war where the US would have the greatest advantage against countries like Communist China

The post-Korean War Army's Search For A Mission

• The post-Korean War era was one of "doctrinal chaos"
• How would the Army adapt to the new nuclear era
• Nuclear weapons were proving revolutionary for the Air Force
  • B-52: first truly intercontinental bomber capable of delivering nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union from the United States
  • Air bases and air defenses to defend against Soviet bombers
  • Reconaissance satellites
• The Navy, while initially caught off guard by nuclear weapons had gotten in on the game with nuclear submarines
  • Nautilus: first nuclear powered submarine capable of operating under the North Pole
  • Polaris SLBM
• Compared to these, the thought of Army units maneuvering in the field seemed almost quaint
• In 1956, Gen. Maxwell Taylor unveiled the "Pentomic Army" doctrine
  • Army divisions reorganized into 5 independent "battle groups"
  • Designed to help units survive on an atomic battlefield
  • Characteristic weapon: "Davy Crockett" — small atomic warhead launched by a recoilless rifle
    • The problem with the Davy Crockett was that the radius of lethal radioactivity of the warhead was larger than the range of the launcher, so employing it was essentially a suicide mission
• Another role for the Army was in handling "brushfire conflicts", which had traditionally been the domain of the Marine Corps
  • "Small offenses do not warrant big bombs"
  • Army begins studying counterinsurgency — beginning of "special forces" schools
• The Army's new personnel policies contributed to the general sense of malaise
  • Officers and noncoms were often rotated into and out of units before they had a real chance to get to know their subordinates
  • Contributed to a sense among officers and enlisted men that they were nameless, faceless cogs in a bureaucratic machine
  • The policy of rotation contributed to the growing problem with micromanagement
  • Leaders had no familiarity with their subordinates, so they tended to micromanage, as they could not be sure who was competent and who was not
  • The policy of rotation also rewarded "star performers" who emphasized short term results at the expense of long-term unit health
    • This is still an ongoing problem in the US military. See Col "Ned Stark" writing in War on the Rocks to see that this is an ongoing issue even as of 2018
• Although the Army leadership was aware of the problem of micromanagement, it did little to address the root causes
• Instead the Army updated its leadership field manual and put out a series of bulletins advising leaders that excess supervision could be harmful
• Another reason for the Army's inaction on the issue of micromanagement is that a proclivity for micromanagement is how many of the Army's leaders had risen to general officer rank in the first place
  • There is a fine line between "attention to detail" and "micromanagement"
• By the late 1950s the Marshall system for choosing generals has completely collapsed
  • Generals are no longer chosen according to Marshall's criteria
  • They are no longer subject to being fired for non-performance
  • Ascending to the rank of General is now more akin to getting tenure as a professor than it is to becoming a combat leader
  • Generals are no longer subject to removal for professional incompetence, only moral lapses
• Unfortunately, when the military won't relieve its own officers, it falls to the civilian leadership to do the deed

Part III: The Vietnam War

Chapter 15: Maxwell Taylor: Architect of Defeat

• One of the remarkable forgotten facts about the Vietnam war is that the generals who were responsible for the US defeat in Vietnam were the junior and mid-level officers responsible for US victory in World War 2
• The US went into Vietnam with a sense that victory was inevitable
• The US military also went into Vietnam with a sense that the support of the American people was guaranteed
• The initial leader of US forces in Vietnam was Maxwell Taylor
• Taylor had previously risen to prominence with a book critiquing Eisenhower's defense policies, called The Uncertain Trumpet
• The book was influential among the staff of the new President, John F. Kennedy
• Unlike Marshall, who kept a certain distance from Roosevelt, Taylor emphasized his closeness and friendship with the new President
• While Taylor, as head of the Army, was technically subordinate to the Joint Chiefs, Kennedy distrusted the Joint Chiefs after the Bay of Pigs debacle and leaned on Taylor as his personal military adviser
  • Regarded as a man of "broad knowledge, quick intelligence, and sound judgement"
• In 1962, after two years, John F. Kennedy made Taylor the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, essentially making is pre-existing position as military advisor official
• After serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs for two years, Taylor would go on to be the US proconsul to South Vietnam, exercising leadership over both civilian and military sides of the US intervention
• Taylor was also responsible for appointing his successor, William Westmoreland, who is largely blamed for the US loss in Vietnam
• However, we should also blame Taylor for getting the US into war in the first place
  • Taylor was responsible for persuading both the President and the Joint Chiefs that Vietnam was a core priority, rather than a peripheral country
  • In 1954, the Joint Chiefs had considered intervening in Indochina to relieve the French (with nuclear bombs, no less), but were persuaded against because of a combination Army and Marine Corps opposition
  • Also, Eisenhower was not at all interested in a formal intervention in Vietnam
  • However, the US did take over the role of advising and training the South Vietnamese military
  • In this the US would begin a pattern of attempting to create a copy of the US Army in miniature rather than the counter-insurgency force that needed to be built
• The initial advisor to the North Vietnamese was Gen. Sam Williams (see Prologue)
  • While he acknowledged the danger that the Viet Minh posed, Lt. Gen. Williams was adamant that the South Vietnamese organized an army able to withstand a full-scale assault by the North
  • Disbanded six light infantry divisions that would have been useful as a counterinsurgency force
  • In 1960, when the government of South Vietnam began to train for counterinsurgency, Williams was appalled, thinking it was a waste of time and effort
• In 1960, Williams was replaced by Lt. Gen. Lionel McGarr
  • McGarr was not well liked by either his subordinates or his South Vietnamese counterparts
  • Rough, humorless and suspicious
  • In 1961, British consultants proposed a classic counterinsurgency effort
    • McGarr objected to it
    • Said it would be a waste of time
    • Would undercut the "offensive spirit" that the South Vietnamese army needed to develop
    • Nagl talks about this in Learning to Eat Soup With A Knife
• The US effort in Vietnam, all throughout the '60s, was marked by a sense of incoherency
• Large difference between what was necessary and what was done
• The US military did what it knew how to do, not what was necessary to win the war
• Taylor, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs assumed that the risks of a major war in Asia were low if the US intervened in Vietnam
  • Assured Kennedy that the North Vietnamese were "extremely vulnerable" to conventional bombing
  • Taylor wanted to go into Vietnam in order to demonstrate the continued value of the Army to the US national security strategy in an era where it seemed that nuclear weapons had made the Army obsolete
• In his new role, Taylor was intensely political
  • Actively fostered mistrust between generals in order to secure his own power
  • Misled fellow members of the Joint Chiefs and the President
  • Said whatever was expedient in order to get support for his priorities
• In order to consolidate his own power, Taylor had McGarr removed and replaced him with Paul Harkins
  • Unfortunately, Harkins' only virtue was his loyalty
  • Insensitive to political considerations
  • Unimpressive in reporting and analyzing the situation
  • Harkins was dismissed by Lyndon Johnson shortly after he succeeded the assassinated President Kennedy

Chapter 16: William Westmoreland: The Organization Man In Command

• Westmoreland was chose to replace Harkins, but he had many of the same flaws
• Many in the Army at the time opposed Westmoreland's appointment, arguing that he had no idea how to fight a counterinsurgency
• Although Westmoreland had done well early in his career as a battalion commander at Kasserine Pass, he was seen by many to be an incurious careerist, more concerned with looking good than being good
• More worryingly, Westmoreland had a reputation for mendacity
  • Claimed that he had been informed of a request to address a joint session of Congress at the last minute, even though he had actually prepared for weeks
  • In 1967, Westmoreland said that the "crossover point" had been reached in the Vietnam War, and that North Vietnam was running out of manpower, neither of which were true
• While many dismissed Westmoreland as an intellectual lightweight who could not understand the complexities of running a war, his defenders state that he was merely a pragmatist who was uninterested in theory
• Westmoreland was proud of the fact that he had not gone through the traditional Army officer training program; rather he had attended Harvard Business School, becoming the first officer to have done so while on active duty
• Viewed the Vietnam War as an exercise of management rather than leadership
  • But what is the difference between management and leadership? Doesn't good management imply leadership?
    • I think the distinction that Ricks is trying to draw here is that leadership cares about the end goal and is willing to abandon metrics if they're not seen as being indicative of progress towards the end goal
    • Management, on the other hand, is obsessed with metrics, and will maximize the metric even if it means sacrificing the end goal
    • In this case, Westmoreland was so caught up with maximizing body counts, he forgot to ask himself whether body counts were indicative of US progress towards stopping North Vietnamese forces
  • More concerned with means than ends
  • The US Army in Vietnam was lavishly provided with food, fuel, equipment and ammunition
  • Yet, Army generals did not understand the war they were fighting and struggled to come up with effective responses to the enemy
• Westmoreland was as bad at understanding how he should deal with civilian oversight as he was at prosecuting the war
  • Had the attitude that political leaders should state their long-term goals then get out of the way
  • In conflicts like Korea and Vietnam, this attitude was disastrous, because there was no easy "military" end to the war — the only settlement was political
• Westmoreland also didn't seem to think through the long-term strategic consequences of his decisions
• Example: how US ground troops were introduced to Vietnam
  • US had three jet-capable airfields in Vietnam
  • When US decided to bomb the North Vietnamese, Westmoreland asked for ground troops to help protect the airfields from ground attack
• Westmoreland brought a very "conventional" attitude to the war in Vietnam
• Believed that the only objective of an armed force was to seek out and destroy the enemy
  • To be fair, this isn't even true in conventional conflict
  • The goal is always to secure the objective, not kill the enemy
• Westmoreland and his subordinates tended to view the Vietnamese people as more of an obstacle rather than the thing they were fighting for
  • "It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it"
• Westmoreland didn't seem to understand that the North Vietnamese were using their (conventional) military to lure the US Army away from the areas that it was garrisoning so that the Viet Cong could establish themselves among the local population
  • Normally insurgents are the support force for the conventional troops
  • In this case, the conventional troops were the support force for the insurgents?

Chapter 17: William DePuy: World War II Style Generalship in Vietnam

• William DePuy, whom we know from the prologue, took charge of the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam
• Applied the lessons he'd learned from World War 2
  • Use massive amounts of firepower on enemy positions
  • Fire anyone incompetent
• Neither of these tactics were effective in Vietnam
  • Massive amounts of firepower not appropriate for a war fought among the people
  • Firing incompetents is no longer approved of by the Army
• DePuy was reprimanded by Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson for firing people as rapidly as he did
  • Told that he should invest more in training his subordinates
  • Striking departure from the US Army's attitude in World War 2, where Bradley had said that one of the keys to success as a divisional commander was being willing to relieve failing sub-commanders
• In DePuy's opinion, a war zone was no place for on-the-job training
• Leaders had to be properly trained before they got to Vietnam and put soldiers' lives at risk
• While many of DePuy's subordinates found him to be a thorough and tactically gifted commander, they also thought that his approach to relief might be a bit excessive
• In a previous era, DePuy's confrontational style and unwillingness to go along with the system would have resulted in his own relief
• However, ironically, DePuy was saved by the new worldview he disliked — instead of being relieved, he was sent out on "joint assignments"
• After Vietnam, DePuy's career would be revived and he would go on to help establish the doctrine that would serve the US Army well in Desert Storm
• However, for all his admirable willingness to fire non-performing officers, it's far from clear that DePuy had the right approach in Vietnam
• DePuy was an advocate of more firepower — "stomp the enemy to death"
• Didn't know what to do in a situation where "more dakka" was simply ineffective, or even counterproductive
• With DePuy's departure from Vietnam, the Army finally ended the Marshall approach of relieving underperforming officers

Chapter 18: The Collapse of Generalship in the 1960s

A. At The Top

• Lyndon Johnson and his advisers did not trust the generals they had in charge in Vietnam
• The problem was not that civilians participated too much in dictating the conduct of the war, but that senior military leaders participated too little
  • Yeah, but on the other hand, the military is subordinate to the civilians
  • If the civilians tell the military leadership to stay out of the way, what can the military leaders do?
• The US strategy was one of "graduated pressure" — incrementally stronger attacks that, in theory, would force Hanoi to the bargaining table
• The Army thought it was fighting a war of attrition, but didn't realize that the North Vietnamese were willing to sustain severe casualties
• Not all voices in the military agreed with the gradualist approach promulgated by Taylor, Westmoreland and MacNamara
  • In 1964, the Joint Chiefs made two attempts to send memos to the President and the Defense Secretary about their misgivings about the graduated pressure strategy
  • However, in both instances, Taylor, who was then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, managed to suppress the memo
  • Taylor systematically suppressed dissent and made it seem to the civilian leadership that the military was unanimous in supporting the graduated pressure approach, even when many in the military had deep misgivings
• Finally, in November 1965, the Joint Chiefs (now chaired by Earle Wheeler) went to Lyndon Johnson and presented a united front advocating for a major escalation of the war
  • Air raids against the North Vietnamese heartland
  • Mining Haiphong harbor
  • Increase US military commitment to an overwhelming level quickly in an effort to win the war
• Johnson's reaction was fury
  • Cursed out his commanders
  • Accused them of trying to get him to start World War 3
  • Told them to leave immediately and never speak of this again
• At this point, the Joint Chiefs should have all resigned, knowing that they no longer had the confidence of their commander in chief, but they did not
• Moreover, unlike FDR, Johnson never made any effort to explain to the American public exactly what we were doing in Vietnam
  • Another unlearned lesson
  • Did anyone explain to the US public what the military was doing in Iraq or Afghanistan?

B. In The Field

• The Vietnam War was an unwanted war for which the Army had not prepared
  • Unwanted? But didn't Maxwell Taylor get the Army into Vietnam in order to demonstrate to President Kennedy that there was a role for the Army in a nuclear-dominated battlefield?
• The officer corps had been trained to fight the Red Army
• Wanted a "force vs. force" battle
• However the situation in Vietnam demanded a different approach
  • Long-term patrolling of a single area
  • Efficient use of intelligence to discover and eliminate infiltrating Viet Cong
• The Army's response to these demands was willful ignorance
  • Did not send officers to the British jungle warfare school in Malaysia
  • Did not consult with French liaison officers on what lessons the French might have to share about Indochina
  • Did not put CIA/Special Forces trained Vietnamese fighters to use securing villages — instead used those fighters in a fruitless attempt to secure a porous border with Cambodia
• The Army pursued a strategy of operations in the hills in order to try to keep the "enemy" from the villages even though it was already clear that the Viet Cong had infiltrated the villages and were able to threaten local officials and steal South Vietnamese arms
• The Army also ignored its own junior officers' findings
  • A major US Army internal report (the PROVN report) stated that the "decision point" of the conflict was in the villages
  • However, this report also stated that US Army forces should continue to confront North Vietnamese communist units and attack their supply lines
• Moreover, even after the war, there was little sense in the Army that it had been responsible in any way for the failure in Vietnam
  • Many continued to state that the Army had "fought magnificently"
  • Blamed others (esp. civilian oversight) for limiting the Army and forcing it to retreat
  • Did not understand that the Army had squandered the first 3-4 years of the war (1963-1967) and that by the time the Army did figure out how to effectively conduct counterinsurgency, the broader government and public had lost patience
• The result of this was that firing generals became unthinkable for the Army
  • Firing generals would have meant admitting responsibility
  • Moreover, in a war where neither success nor failure was clearly defined, it was much more difficult to fire an officer for failing simply because it was much more difficult to determine if he was failing
  • Finally, firing a general, at that point, was seen as tantamount to questioning the multi-decade process that had resulted in him getting promoted to General, and as such was seen as an institutional critique of the Army itself

The Marine Road Not Taken

• Because the Army and Marine Corps occupied distinct geographical sectors of Vietnam, the Marines were able to pilot counterinsurgency strategies that the Army was not willing to try
• The Marine strategy was to move small units out to live among the villages, to deprive the Viet Cong of the recruits and materiel that they would need in order to carry on their insurgency
  • Almost a police, rather than military approach
• 3-phase approach
  • Battalion and larger forces of marines would go after large North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces, denying them the ability to move freely
  • Smaller counter-guerilla patrols would try to constrain the Viet Cong's ability to move freely in population centers
  • Put combined platoons of Marines and ARVN forces in villages, to train and equip the locals to resist Viet Cong coercion
• The key to the Marine approach was sustained engagement in a single area over a long period of time
• Allowed Marine units to develop a sense of what was "normal" and detect deviations from regular patterns
• This approach, while more effective, was not easier than the Army's big-battles-and-firepower strategy — while the Marines in the combined platoons were only 1.5% of all American forces in Vietnam, they represented 3.2% of all casualties, i.e. they were taking casualties at more than twice the rate of other units
• The Army looked at this approach and thought it was passive and static
• Marines weren't willing to "come out and fight"
• Westmoreland and DePuy dismissed the Marines' strategy as too labor intensive to implement across all Vietnam
  • However, this ignores the fact that the Marines did not intend to occupy the entire country
  • Rather the Marines strategy was to clear a space to allow indigenous forces to come in behind them without the threat of constant Viet Cong attack
  • This is rather similar to the "clear, hold, build" strategy that the Army pursued in Iraq, and it suffers from the same shortcoming — namely, it presumes that the indigenous state has enough capacity to consolidate and secure the gains that the US makes
  • As we saw in Iraq, and as I suspect of South Vietnam, the indigenous state did not have the state capacity to consolidate the areas that the US cleared
  • See further discussion below
• The Marine approach, however, was more cost-effective than the Army's strtategy
  • Marine counterinsurgency approach averaged a cost of $350 per enemy combatant persuaded to surrender under an amnesty program
  • The Army strategy averaged $60,000 per enemy combatant killed
  • Of course, those who surrender today can easily go back to fighting tomorrow
  • And in Iraq, we saw exactly this, with many "Sons of Iraq" militia forces turning their alleigance to Iran or ISIS after the US left (and stopped paying)
• DePuy's firepower-oriented approach was a constant of US strategy
• In Korea, Vietnam and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the US Army maintained that victory would have been possible if only the US had been allowed to unleash its full firepower
  • However, advocates of firepower have a hard time answering why extensive use of firepower in Laos and Cambodia (where the war was not subject to political constraints) did not work
    • First of all, Ricks is dead wrong here — the war in Laos and Cambodia was subject to severe political constraints
    • Neither Johnson nor Nixon wanted to be seen to be expanding the war beyond Vietnam
    • Firepower could be used, but only insofar as it could be used in a way that wasn't seen to be expanding the war
    • Moreover, all the firepower in the world does you no good if you have no targets
    • The Ho Chi Minh trail was not an appropriate target for American firepower
    • The US should have been attacking the North Vietnamese industrial base and ports, instead of trying to intercept shipments of arms once they were already on their way
      • What's easier? Trying to stop a package at the warehouse, or trying to stop it once it's already on the delivery truck?
  • Of course, the big counterexample to that is Afghanistan, where the Soviet Union used even more firepower than the Americans, to even more ineffectual results
• Another argument against the counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam holds that even if the Marines had been able to implement their strategy without interference and with the full backing of the United States, the price would have still been too high
  • North Vietnamese government was too patient and resilient
  • South Vietnamese government had too many problems
  • However, this ignores the opinions of the South Vietnamese themselves
    • South Vietnamese generals greatly liked the Marines combined platoon approach
    • Said it tied well with Vietnamese traditions of local autonomy and self-government
    • Combined platoon strategy beat the Communists at their own game, making the official South Vietnamese government more responsive to the people's security needs than the Viet Cong
    • Denied the Viet Cong the ability to assassinate and intimidate local officials
  • Again, I'm not sure about this
  • It's important to note that Ricks is quoting relatively senior Vietnamese officials, Generals, military chief of staff, etc
  • As we've seen with the Iraqi military, it's entirely possible for senior commanders to greatly overestimate the effectiveness of their forces, deploying what ought to be a vastly superior force only to see it turn tail and run away in front of an enemy with inferior numbers and arms
• Counterfactuals aside, the Army was vehmently opposed to the Marines' strategy because it didn't realize the kind of war it was fighting
  • Army wanted to fight a "war of attrition" against the North Vietnamese
  • However, the terrain in Vietnam made it very easy for North Vietnamese/Viet Cong forces to slip away from the Army's search and destroy raids
  • Meant that North Vietnamese chose the times and places of engagement, allowing them to choose how many casualties they would risk
  • Wars of attrition, especially those fought in far-away, strategically unimportant countries, are also very difficult to maintain popular support for
  • The only way the US could have won with its firepower intensive approach is if it had sent several divisions into North Vietnam
  • However, that would have risked a Chinese intervention (as happened in Korea), so that option was never considered

C. In Personnel Policy

• In Korea, the US Army adopted a policy of rotating individual soldiers, rather than entire units
  • Men should not be left in combat indefinitely
  • Allowed veteran soldiers to move to units where they would be of use in a potential conflict against the Soviet Union
• However, this policy destroyed unit cohesion, by removing the illusion that soliders arrived and left as part of their unit
• In Vietnam, the Army made this policy even worse by having separate rotation policies for enlisted men and officers
  • Enlisted men would serve out a full 1-year rotation
  • Officers could rotate out after 6 months
  • Argument was that officers would be "burned out" by command in "constant combat" after six months
  • However, very few units were in constant combat in Vietnam
    • Most units were non-combat logistics units
    • Even combat units were rarely in combat all the time
  • A post-mortem found that the cause of officer incompetence in Vietnam was not that officers were getting "burned out", but rather that they were not in place long enough to gain familiarity with their task and role
• The rotation policy encouraged an attitude of "ticket-punching", as both officers and enlisted men knew that they were only going to be there for a fixed duration
• Led to conservatism — primary priority was to survive for a year rather than take risks to defeat the enemy more quickly
• Undermined advisory role with Vietnamese military — advisors rotated out after six month too, leaving little to no continuity in liaising with the Vietnamese military
• Rotation also reduced the Army's willingness to relieve unfit commanders
  • By the time a commander became certain that one of his subordinates was unfit, it was often close to rotation
  • Easier to micromanage the failing subordinate and wait until he rotated out of theater than it was to relieve him

Combat Ineffectiveness

• While the US Army fought hard in Vietnam, it's not at all clear that it fought well
• Extreme conservatism largely attributable to the rotation policy meant that US troops rarely took the offensive and rarely initiated firefights with the enemy
• When the enemy was defeated, they were rarely pursued
• This meant that North Vietnamese and Viet Cong could, in almost all cases, set the terms of the engagement
  • When should the attack happen
  • How long should the attack go on for
  • When and how should the attack end
• This was compounded by lax security
  • Army officers would routinely discuss troop movements and battle plans on unsecured radios
  • Army officers would be susceptible to "honey traps", where female North Vietnamese spies would be sent to sleep with them and learn information about upcoming attacks
• The US Army was also not very good at maneuvering through the Vietnamese jungle
  • Captured North Vietnamese would routinely talk about how slow American troops were when moving through the jungle
  • Also talked about how US troops would reflexively call in artillery and air strikes, even on relatively minor targets
• Moreover, Vietnamese officers, even relatively junior ones, seemed to understand that the war would be won or lost politically, at the negotiating table, and that military operations were a means to that end
• This is something that even senior American officers did not seem to understand

Chapter 19: Tet '68: The End of Westmoreland and the Turning Point of the War

• In January 1968, the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive
• They launched a nationwide offensive, simultaneously attacking Saigon, 39 provincial capitals and a further 71 district capitals
• Militarily, this was a disastrous strategy, because the Viet Cong were in no way able to consolidate and hold that territory (even if they were able to take it)
• However, the goal was to cause an uprising among the South Vietnamese, causing widespread unrest that would finally oust the Americans
• The North Vietnamese assessment of the restiveness of the South Vietnamese population was mistaken
• South Vietnamese people and military units did not rebel, and in fact, fought back fiercely against the Viet Cong, decisively defeating them (in a matter of hours, in most cases)
• However, the Tet Offensive did show to to the American public that no place in South Vietnam was safe from attack, putting the lie to official US Army assessments that the US was on the verge of victory
• One of the bright spots of the Tet Offensive is the performance of Lt. Gen. Fred Weyland
• While Westmoreland was focused on the fortress at Khe Sanh, which he thought would be his Dien Bien Phu, Weyland was leery of moving American forces so far away from the capital
• He kept his troops near the capital and helped repulse the Viet Cong attacks during the Tet Offensive
• Although Tet was a tactical loss for the North Vietnamese, it was a strategic victory
• After Tet, the US leadership was in a state of shock and panic
• Moreover, there was widespread mistrust of the Army, and mistrust between commanders within the Army
• Shortly after the Tet Offensive was repulsed, Johnson relieved Westmoreland
• This would set the pattern for the new type of relief: instead of Army generals relieving subordinates, failure would accumulate until the top general was relieved by his civilian oversight
• The disaster of the Tet Offensive was instrumental in persuading Johnson that he did not have a good prospect for re-election in 1968, and he announced that he would not be running for another term
• The Republican candidate in that election, Richard Nixon, was determined from the outset to get the US out of the war

Coda: The Hue Massacre

• One of the cities where the North Vietnamese were not immediately repulsed was Hue City
• Communist troops occupied Hue for 25 days before they were ousted by American and South Vietnamese forces
• During that time, the Communists killed 2,800 people, burying them in mass graves

Chapter 20: My Lai: General Koster's Cover Up and General Peers's Investigation

• 1968 would also bring about the absolute low point of US Army generalship, with the failure of leadership that led to the My Lai massacre and cover-up
• The unit responsible was Charlie Company of 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Light Infantry Brigade, 23rd Infantry ("Americal") Division
• This unit was not one that had suffered massive amounts of combat stress — had only been in the field for 3 months
• However, the division was a "stray"
  • It, and its commander had not been requested by Westmoreland, but rather had been sent by the Army Chief of Staff
  • It was located in the far south, which was normally US Marine Corps jurisdiction, and thus its commander reported to a Marine general
  • Division was understaffed, especially in its headquarters
  • Given a large area of responsibility relative to its size and capabilities
• The massacre at My Lai really began the night before the mission, during the briefing given by Capt. Ernest Medina
• Although he never technically said the troops should kill civilians, he did say that they should kill all "enemies" and made it clear that everyone in the village was an enemy
• Charlie Company walked into My Lai hamlet the next day, March 16, 1968, under the leadership of Lt. Calley, and embarked on a campaign of rapes and murders that lasted the entire day
• This operation was not a unit going rogue
• They were supervised by helicopter by Lt. Col. Frank Barker, battalion commander, and Col. Oren Henderson, brigade commander
• The only witnesses to the killing who took any action to stop it were a pair of enlisted men flying a reconaissance helicopter: Hugh Thompson and Larry Colburn
• Thompson and Colburn put themselves in between the Army troops and a group of Vietnamese survivors and threatened to shoot if the Army soliders made any moves towards the civilians
• After flying back to base, Thompson promptly reported what he'd seen to Maj. Frederic Watke, his commanding officer
• Watke brought up the report with Lt. Col. Barker, who promised to look into it
• Shortly thereafter, Barker reassured Watke that only "a small number" of civilians had been killed, because of "justifiable situations"
• Barker's reassurance of Watke began the second crime at My Lai: the cover-up
• The next day, General Koster, the division commander, overheard Col. Henderson ordering a count of the bodies at My Lai
• Koster immediately countermanded the order, later justifying it by saying there was no specific requirement for the US forces to count bodies
• Two days after the massacre, Col. Henderson was officially tasked with finding out what had happened at My Lai
• His investigation, however, was primarily aimed at discrediting Hugh Thompson's testimony
• On March 28, Lt. Col. Barker submitted a routine after-action report, which stated only that an operation had taken place at My Lai, that it had been successful, and that the enemy had "suffered heavily"
• The Army also destroyed a number of documents that purported to show that a massacre had taken place
• This cover-up held for approximately a year
• In 1969, however, Ron Ridenhour, an ex-serviceman who had heard about the My Lai massacre from some of his friends, wrote a letter addressed to several Congressmen and the President alleging that something awful had happened in the Vietnamese village known to the US troops as "Pinkville"
  • Ridenhour called out Lt. Calley by name as having had a central role in the affair
• Col. William Wilson was tasked with carrying out an investigation into Ridenhour's allegations
  • Initially skeptical of Ridenhour's claims
  • However, as he traveled around Vietnam interviewing soldiers that had taken part in the spring and summer of '69, he was increasingly convinced of the truth of the My Lai massacre
• The testimony that broke open the truth of the massacre was given by Paul Meadlo, who had since been discharged from the Army
  • Meadlo gave an account of the My Lai massacre, describing how the US Army troops had slaughtered the villagers "like livestock"
  • When Wilson interrupted the interview to advise Meadlo of his Miranda rights, Meadlo was surprised that the fact that he was following orders did not shield him from prosecution
• After news of the massacre came to public light, Gen Westmoreland, to his credit, insisted on a full and thorough investigation and appointed Lt. Gen. William Peers to conduct a broader inquiry
• Peers conducted a remarkably thorough investigation given that he was operating under a 4-month deadline, after which the statute of limitations for many of the lesser crimes would expire
• One of the key pieces of evidence in Peers' report was the utter lack of evidence
  • Numerous mandatory documents were missing from the Americal Division's files
  • There were no destruction certificates saying when and where those documents had been destroyed
  • Either the documents never existed or they had been destroyed without authorization, both of which indicate a cover-up
• Peers' report listed over 30 officers who had committed offenses related to the My Lai massacre in addition to those already under criminal indictment
• However, despite the report and despite the abundance of other evidence, very little came in the way of criminal prosecution
  • Only one man, Lt. Calley was convicted for his actions at My Lai
  • Five others, including Oren Henderson and Ernest Medina, were acquitted
  • The Army chose to drop charges against the rest, reasoning that the acquittals in the early trials meant that it would be nigh impossible to get convictions in the later ones
  • Even Koster, who orchestrated the cover-up, got off lightly, with only a letter of reprimand and a demotion to Brigadier General
• It almost seems like the American who suffered the most from My Lai was Hugh Thompson
  • Endured death threats for years afterwards
  • Was treated as a hostile witness before Congress
• The response to the My Lai massacre represents a stunning failure of leadership of the US Army
• Instead of holding itself accountable for the failures in leadership that had led to the massacre and the coverup afterwards, the Army became defensive, and sought to protect those responsible

A Stunning Army Study of Army Officers

• After finishing his report on the cover-up at My Lai, Gen. Peers conducted a broader study into the quality of Army officers
• He was trying to answer a simple question: with so many officers who knew that something out-of-the-ordinary had happened, why had it fallen to an enlisted helicopter pilot to report on the atrocity?
• Peers' conclusion was that the Army's officer corps had drifted badly from its stated values
• The officer corps had become a place where lying and hypocrisy were expected
• In response to Peers' memo outlining these conclusions, Westmoreland tasked the Army War College with conducting a study of the Army's officer corps
• The study's conclusions were damning
  • "Duty, honor and country" have been replaced by "Me, my ass and my career" as the officer corps' core values
  • Officers are so busy producing statistical reports that they are failing to exercise leadership and make decisions
  • Officers report what their superiors want to hear rather than an honest assessment of ground reality
  • Pervasive suspicion between officers, leading to endless and inefficient CYA ("cover your ass") reports and exercises
• Westmoreland's reaction to the report, however, was tepid and contradictory
  • Agreed with the conclusions, but insisted that the report be placed under "close hold" to ensure that it wouldn't be used by Congress as a way to further bludgeon the Army command after the My Lai investigation
  • Eliminated the six-month command tour and conducted some other minor reforms
  • The lack of publicity around the report meant that Westmoreland's reforms appeared panicky and uncoordinated, rather than a thoughtful response to a thorough study of Army leadership issues

Chapter 21: The End of a War, The End of an Army

• The Vietnam War was not one long slow descent into quagmire, as many popular histories of the war portray it
• Instead it was a complex interaction between four groups
  • South Vietnamese
  • US Military
  • North Vietnamese military
  • Viet Cong
• By 1969, both the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army were feeling the strain
• The Tet Offensive of 1968 had been a disaster for the Viet Cong and had severely strained their clandestine network
• As the Viet Cong grew weaker, the North Vietnamese were forced to move more regular forces into South Vietnam
  • In 1965, 3/4 of the Communist forces in South Vietnam were Viet Cong
  • By 1970, according to Gen. Creighton Abrams, they were about 3/4 North Vietnamese regulars
• However, the North Vietnamese regulars infiltrating into South Vietnam were not more capable than the Viet Cong they replaced
• Took mass casualties conducting frontal assaults against US positions
• Could not utilize terrain as effectively as the Viet Cong, were not able to achieve reliable surprise against US troops
• By 1970, North Vietnamese leadership was sending orders to its army to avoid taking mass casualties in order to allow Paris peace conference continue
• The South Vietnamese Army in 1970 was increasingly capable and seasoned, but was not well respected by the US Army
• The US Army also had its own problems in Vietnam
  • In 1968, President Johnson rejected the Army's call-up of reservists
  • This forced the Army to rely much more heavily on active-duty noncommissioned officers to train new soldiers
  • This, ironically, forced the Army to rely much more heavily on conscription, which intensified the political opposition that Johnson had been hoping to reduce by not calling up reserves
• In addition, the US Army's troop rotation policies ensured that, as the war wore on, the US Army became less experienced, not more
  • Soliders were rotated out of Vietnam based on experience and seniority
  • At the start of the war, there were a number of highly experienced noncoms and junior officers with combat experience in Korea or even World War 2
  • By 1970, however, the typical officer in Vietnam had less than two years of experience

Abrams Takes Command

• In 1968 and 1969 there were three changes at the top which had an effect on the conduct of the Vietnam War
  • Lyndon Johnson was replaced by Richard Nixon
  • Robert McNamara was replaced by Melvin Laird
  • Gen. Westmoreland was replaced by Gen. Abrams
• While the Army likes to mythologize the difference between Abrams and Westmoreland, the actual change was more of a change in emphasis rather than operations
• Units out in the field did mostly the same things, but there was a greater emphasis on pacification and holding territory than on body counts
• Abrams, emphasized very early on that he was not interested in hearing how many enemies had been killed or in how many battles had been won
• Instead he took a close look at programs to ensure the security of South Vietnamese villages
• This change in emphasis came at an opportune time, as the best of the Viet Cong leadership had been killed by their fruitless attacks during the Tet Offensive
• However, the larger change was in the difference between Nixon and Johnson
  • Johnson wanted to win the war
  • Nixon wanted to end it
  • Nixon's approach was to make the Vietnam war a much greater responsibility of the South Vietnamese Army ("Vietnamization")
• Ironically, the US was leaving just as its changed approach was starting to pay dividends
  • The official North Vietnamese history of the war admits that starting in 1968, the US was beginning to wrest control of the countryside from the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese
  • Efforts to cut resupply of food and materiel to Viet Cong units were particularly effective, causing mass defections among Viet Cong forces
  • This led to a virtuous cycle for the Americans, as reductions in Viet Cong effectiveness meant fewer Viet Cong attacks, allowing US forces to concentrate more on building security infrastructure than sweep-and-clear operations
  • In addition the Phoenix Program was beginning to show remarkable effectiveness in either killing the Viet Cong high command or forcing it into hiding
    • But at what moral cost?
    • The Phoenix Program was a program that systematically captured and tortured Viet Cong in order to get information that would allow South Vietnamese forces to infiltrate Viet Cong networks
    • Yes, the Viet Cong were doing the exact same thing, but that still doesn't make it morally justified
• The problem was that the limited successes that were achieved by the Army came far too late to make a difference
  • By the time US Army generals started showing successes in Vietnam, the US had been involved in Vietnam for 13 years and had committed large numbers of troops for three
  • Moreover, even if there had been domestic political support for carrying on the war, it's not at all clear that the US Army would have been able to carry the burden
  • By 1969, Vietnam had become a poison pill in the Army itself
  • Experienced officers were doing all they could to avoid getting assigned to Vietnam, with predictably ruinous consequences
• As a result of Johnson, McNamara and Westmoreland's squandering of resources, the American public and American Army were too exhausted and depleted to take advantages of the opportunities that opened up in late 1969 and 1970

Massacre at Firebase Mary Ann

• By late in the war, the US Army in Vietnam was a mess
• Rampant indiscipline and drug use
• No operational competence
  • Defensive perimeters not maintained
  • Patrols only going out part of the way, rather than covering their entire patrol route
  • Troops turning on their officers
• However, even as the Army was disintegrating, the leadership was awarding itself more and more medals for valor
• On March 28, 1971 this indiscipline caught up to the US Army
  • Troops from the Viet Cong 409th Sapper Battalion broke into Firebase Mary Ann
  • Roamed for hours, shooting soldiers in their bunks and throwing explosives and tear gas into the bunkers and the command post
  • Ultimately, of 231 American troops at the base, 30 were killed and a further 80 were wounded
  • The reason the Vietnamese were able to do as much damage as they did was because the base was poorly situated and poorly defended
• Because of this disaster, Maj. Gen. James Baldwin was relieved by Gen. Abrams and replaced with Maj. Gen. Frederik Kroesen
• It was the last time an American general would be fired by another general for combat incompetence until the present day

The End of an Army

• According to Gen. Kroesen, the reason the Army collapsed in the '70s was because it didn't allow its junior officers to exercise leadership
• Junior officers in Vietnam were subject to close supervision by brigade and batallion commanders, which in turn eventually led to a situation where officers didn't exercise initiative at all and simply waited to be told what to do
• After Vietnam, the US Army that Marshall built was in tatters
• Instead an entirely new all-volunteer Army would have to be built, with only limited continuity with the Army from World War 2 through Vietnam

Part IV: Interwar

Chapter 22: DePuy's Great Rebuilding

• Starting in 1973, Gen. Abrams and Gen. DePuy would carry out a set of important reforms that would rebuild the Army from its post-Vietnam nadir
• However, these reforms would carry the seeds of the problems that would plague the Army in the insurgencies of Iraq and Afghanistan
• On July 1, 1973, Gen. DePuy took command of the newly created Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC)
• With the Army out of Vietnam, DePuy took the opportunity to refocus on conventional warfare, specifically against Soviet formations in Europe
• In this he sought to incorporate the lessons of the Yom Kippur War
• The Arab forces that the Israelis fought were thought to be a reasonable proxy, in terms of both training and equipment for the Soviet formations that the US would be facing off against in Europe
• DePuy also drastically overhauled the Army's training system, replacing time-based training with competency based training
  • Previous training doctrine allocated a certain amount of time to each training task, with soldiers rotating through training tasks on a fixed schedule
  • DePuy reformed that to a competency based system where the soldier had to demonstrate a particular level of competency with a task before he or she was allowed to move on to the next one
• DePuy also established the Army's National Training Center, at Ft. Irwin, in the Mojave desert
  • The NTC is the Army equivalent of "Top Gun"
  • Highly realistic combat exercises for infantry and cavalry
  • Use lasers and other simulators to determine in real time who shot first and best, making victory and defeat unambiguous
  • Dedicated "opposition force" (OPFOR) unit devoted to studying and implementing Soviet tactics to maximum effect against US forces
• The NTC was so successful, many Gulf War veterans would later report that their actual combat experience was less intense than their NTC training rotations
  • DePuy, like Josephus was seeking to turn drill into bloodless battle and battle into bloody drill
• DePuy also correctly understood that the trend in warfare was towards fewer, more sophisticated weapons, and he overhauled Army training and qualification procedures to reflect that fact
  • Threw his full backing behind the "big 5"
    • Patriot air defense system
    • Apache attack helicopter
    • Blackhawk transport helicopter
    • Abrams tanks
    • Bradley fighting vehicle
  • Overhauled infantry and armored battalion organization to take advantage of new weapons systems and technologies
• Another general considering how to rebuild the Army was Maj. Gen. John Cushman
  • While DePuy was focusing on rebuilding the Army's tactic, Cushman was thinking at a higher level
  • Wanted to focus on officers' ethics and the way they approached problems
  • Cushman's goal was to restore a sense of professional integrity to the Army's officer corps
  • Felt (along with many others) that Vietnam had created an environment where that encouraged "professional immorality" in the service of one's career
• Cushman's effort conflicted with DePuy's priority
• In the most generous reading, DePuy didn't feel like he had the resources to both teach the Army how to fight with new weapons and how to think while fighting
• DePuy's major concern was in training battalion commanders who would be able to survive and succeed in the opening hours of a hot war in Europe
• DePuy was criticized for trying to build an Army that was tactically adept but strategically ill-informed
• DePuy's response was that the strategic situation was actually pretty clear: win against the Soviet Union with inferior numbers
• However, in the long run, DePuy's emphasis on tactical maneuvers would lead to an Army that could conduct amazing attacks, but did not know what to do once the initial battles had been won
• Under DePuy, the Army also began to re-invest in doctrine
  • Prior to this, working on doctrine had been a backwater assignment for mid-level officers
  • DePuy elevated doctrine to a prestigious assignment for generals
  • This emphasis on doctrine ironically moved the Army in the direction that Cushman wanted it to go, because in order to create good doctrine, the Army had to consider some larger strategic questions
  • This new emphasis on doctrine resulted initially in "Active Defense", which was eventually repudiated, and "AirLand Battle", which would become the signature doctrine of the Army through the end of the Cold War, and which remains an important influence even today
  • AirLand Battle was not without flaws, however — emphasized "synchronization" of military operations, which would prove to be a drag on operational tempo in practice
• The end result of DePuy's reforms was an Army that produced brilliant batallion commanders but poor generals
  • The new intellectual home of the Army was the National Training Center
  • Army thinking focused on one-day to one-week timeframes — focus on winning battles
• For all the reforms, though the Army was also promoting the same personality types that it had been promoting since the end of World War 2
  • Hardworking
  • Determined
  • Conformist
  • Suspicious of innovation
  • Roughly the same personality type as Omar Bradley
• However, these generals were far more rigid than Marshall and Bradley, which was a bad sign
• Their subordinates saw them more as managers than leaders
• DePuy's reforms had fixed the "body" of the Army (junior and mid-level officers) but had not done anything for the "head" (generals)

Chapter 23: "How To Teach Judgement"

• Col. Huba Wass De Cezge noted that DePuy's reforms had taught the Army how to conduct engagements, but had not taught the Army why it conducts engagments in the way that it does
• Needed to train officers to be adaptable
• In the early '80s, he was assigned to a group at the Command and General Staff College of the US Army tasked with figuring out "how to teach judgement"
• De Cezge's answer to this question was radical — proposed a new school to train a new kind of officer
• Established the Department of Advanced Military Studies at Ft. Leavenworth
  • Designed to be "the intellectual version of Army Ranger School"
  • Best and brightest faculty
    • Advanced degree from a "first rank" university
    • Experience teaching
    • Experience commanding units
• The name of the school was changed to the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) by the second directory, Col. Richard Sennreich
• SAMS graduates were immediately recognized and valued by the greater military, but there were too few of them to immediately change the culture of the Army
• This was by design — the SAMS program was designed to train the next generation of senior officers
• But in the meantime, the current generation of senior officers was still around
• In both the Gulf War and Operation Iraqi Freedom, plans developed by SAMS graduates were only partially implemented
  • The Army was happy to use SAMS graduates to help plan attacks, but wasn't willing to listen to their advice on on the consolidation and occupation phases of the war

The Recovery Falls Short

• Despite the existence of SAMS, the nature of generalship in the Army tended to remain the same in the '80s and '90s as it was during the Vietnam War
• Despite many studies and surveys showing deficiencies in leadership and operational skill, along with too much careerism, the Army's leadership did little to change the process of training and promoting officers
• This was a reflection of the Army's lack of trust in its own officers
• Inverse relationship between trust and micromanagement — if you trust people you trust them to fix their mistakes
• The lack of trust was a result of the Army's lack reliefs for incompetence
  • Example: nobody was fired after the Desert One debacle
• Can't trust subordinates if you don't know that they haven't been filtered for quality
• The only reliefs that did occur were for personal indiscretions

Coda: The End of DePuy

• Gen. DePuy's rebuilding of the Army had been necessary, but not sufficient
• Army had regained discipline and a firm grasp of tactics
• However, Army's leaders were ill-suited to advising civilians and achieving operational and strategic success
• DePuy would pass away in 1992, having lived just long enough to see his rebuilt army crush the Iraqis in Desert Storm

Part V: Iraq and the Hidden Costs of Rebuilding

Chapter 24: Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf and the empty triumph of the 1991 War

• The two generals who had the highest prominence in the post-Vietnam military were Colin Powell and H. Norman Schwarzkopf
• Similar backgrounds
  • Commissioned in the '50s
  • Served as advisors and in combat in Vietnam
  • Both had demoralizing assignments with the Americal division
  • Both stayed in the Army after Vietnam and were part of DePuy's rebuilding
• Although Schwarzkopf was more worldly and sophisticated, having grown up in Iran, Colin Powell was more adept at politics
• Powell's skill in politics was largely due to his time as a White House Fellow
• Schwarzkopf, on the other hand, detested politics
  • Schwarzkopf got a taste of politics when he served on a commission that was recommending base closures
  • The commission came up with a plan for base closures that was rejected by Congress
  • Schwarzkopf blamed Congress for this, rather than considering his own blindness
  • The commission had gone off and worked in a silo without realizing the Congresspeople were important stakeholders that needed to be consulted
  • Moreover, the plan wasn't even good for the Army, long-term
    • The Army often recommended closing bases on the coasts and leaving open bases in economically depressed areas in the South
    • This made it more difficult for the Army to recruit as Army spouses were reluctant to move there, knowing they would find it difficult to get jobs

Going Along To Get Along

• In contrast, rather than rejecting how Washington works, Colin Powell set about studying it and mastering it
• Powell developed an independent power-base from the usual Army command structure, helped along by his outsider status
  • Graduate of City College of New York, rather than West Point
  • African-American
  • White House Fellow — early introduction to the world of politics
• Colin Powell had a strong resemblance to a general whom he admired: Dwight Eisenhower
  • Both had a reputation for genial charm that concealed powerful ambition
  • Both weathered early-career setbacks
    • Eisenhower was present as an aide to MacArthur where MacArthur brutally dispersed the Bonus Army marchers from Washington
    • Powell was on the staff of the Americal division during the My Lai massacre and subsequent cover-up
  • Both were consummate team players
• However, unlike Eisenhower, Colin Powell did not have a mentor like George Marshall, who was willing to stand up to the civilian leadership
• Colin Powell was firmly committed to a principle of "going along to get along" — "pay the King his shilling"
• This principle served him well as a junior officer and as a brigade commander, but it served him poorly as Army Chief of Staff and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, where he should have been challenging the civilian leadership

The Empty Triumph of the 1991 Gulf War

• From start to finish, the Gulf War was intended to be the "anti-Vietnam"
• Powell raised the need to mobilize reserves and the National Guard, two things which had been neglected in Vietnam, and which led to an over-reliance on conscript soldiers
• Schwarzkopf also ensured that troops rotated out as units, not as individuals
  • Cheney countermanded that order by saying that units would stay in theater "for the duration"
  • Signaled that the war would begin soon, and would be over quickly
• Schwarzkopf's plan for a direct assault on Iraqi positions initially found a cool reception among the civilian leadership, most notably Dick Cheney
  • Cheney established a competing planning operation because he did not believe that the Joint Chiefs were giving him the best plans
  • Thought that the military was unwilling to undertake the Gulf War, and therefore was presenting the civilian leadership with intentionally bad options
• The Gulf War would also highlight the new pattern of relieving generals
  • Gen. Michael Dugan, the Air Force chief of staff was relieved for implying that air power would single-handedly win the war and that Iraq would be a pushover
  • Was relieved by Cheney, a civilian, rather than by the military leadership
• As the airstrikes began, the military braced itself for the worst
  • Many in the military distrusted the new weapons that had been developed post-Vietnam
  • Colin Powell, in particular thought that the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM) was junk
• Instead the US military performed phenomenally well
  • Out of 700 aircraft conducting sorties, only one was lost
  • Tomahawks had great accuracy, even against well-defended targets
• However, as the war continued there were warning signs on the civil-military front
  • Iraq started a concerted effort to drag Israel into the war, which would have alienated the United States' Arab allies
  • Schwarzkopf, however, seemed to be blind to the broader political considerations
  • Felt that, because the Scuds were not an effective weapon, they posed no danger
  • Things got to the point where Dick Cheney had to intervene again
    • Personally ordered Schwarzkopf to divert aircraft to hunting Scuds
    • Felt that even if the mobile Scud launchers couldn't be found, the US needed to at least show that it was trying in order to mollify the Israelis
• Schwarzkopf was also slow to understand the implications of early battlefield results
  • Battle of Khafji: Iraqi armored offensive designed to invade and humiliate Saudi Arabia, forcing a start to the ground campaign on Iraqi terms
  • Offensive is a disaster for the Iraqis, as their armored columns are shredded by American air power
  • One Iraqi commander said that his unit had suffered more damage in a half-hour under American air attack than it had suffered in 8 years of fighting against Iran
  • Schwarzkopf is dismissive of this three-day battle, even though it showed that the Iraqi army was not nearly as formidable as he had thought it would be
• Despite the results of Khafji, Schwarzkopf was hesitant to begin the ground offensive
  • This hesitancy came to a head in February 1991, when Powell angrily ordered Schwarzkopf to start the ground offensive
  • Moscow had proposed a peace plan, and the US was running out of excuses to avoid a ceasefire that would give the Iraqis time to regroup and dig in further
  • Schwarzkopf accused Powell of being cavalier with US lives
  • Powell replied, angrily, that he too had been in Vietnam, and that it was unfair of Schwarzkopf to bring that accusation against him
  • Neither general appeared to display a grasp of the connection between political and military strategy
  • Both took it as a given that the actual fighting of the war was to be separated as much as possible from broader political considerations

Chapter 25: The Ground War: Schwarzkopf vs. Frederick Franks

• The ground war in Iraq confirmed that the US military had recovered, operationally, from its post-Vietnam lows
• However, the leadership of the US military had not re-learned the art of relieving subordinates
• Frederick Franks and Norman Schwarzkopf had vastly different expectations for how VII Corps would engage the Iraqis
• Franks was favoring a more cautious approach, whereas Schwarzkopf wanted aggression
• Franks was also worried about fratricidal fire during night operations, whereas Schwarzkopf wanted 24/7 operations
• This friction between Franks and Schwarzkopf was a key reason for why the US Army failed to completely destroy the Iraqi Republican Guard
• Impatient with Franks, Schwarzkopf ordered the Marines to begin their assault before the VII Corps was in place to block the Republican Guard retreat
• The correct thing to do in that scenario would have been to relieve Franks
• Not every relief has to imply incompetence — sometimes a relief just means that a superior has a different approach than their subordinate
• Schwarzkopf's blindness to politics showed up once again at the end of the war
  • Schwarzkopf believed that war could be divorced from political ends, even though, according to his own hero Clausewitz, the only purpose for war is to pursue political ends
  • As a result, there was almost no thought given by the military to the problem of war termination
  • Schwarzkopf went into a parley with his Iraqi counterparts with no advisors and very little knowledge of the broader political situation
  • As a result, when the Iraqis asked whether they could fly helicopters, he acceded, making himself complicit in the massacre of the Shia population, which was then rising up against Saddam
  • Of course, Schwarzkopf was not alone in this failing — few in the Bush administration had given any thought to how the war would end
  • As a result, Schwarzkopf was not given any guidance when the Iraqis approached and sought to terminate hostilities
• As time has gone on, the 1991 Gulf War has looked increasingly like a strategic draw
• The US military was brilliant tactically, but its tactics were largely divorced from strategic ends
• There was a widespread belief that the magnitude of the loss in Kuwait would automatically topple Saddam Hussein
• When that didn't happen, the US didn't really know what to do
• Saddam himself was somewhat perplexed at the conclusion of the Gulf War
  • In his view, the US had given him a "unilateral ceasefire"
  • In Saddam's opinion, he had taken on the combined might of the US, British, and allies' militaries and survived with his country and his armed forces largely intact
  • In both his mind and in the eyes of many of his peers, that counted as almost a victory
• The most important aspect of the end of the Gulf War was that the Gulf War never really ended
  • Instead it marked the beginning of 20 years of intermittent low-level hostilities that would be punctuated with brief periods of intense violence
  • US imposed a no-fly zone over Northern and Southern Iraq to (belatedly) protect the Shias and the Kurds from the Iraqi Army
  • Conducted strikes in 1993 to deter Iraqi aggression against the Shias
  • Deployed troops to Kuwait in '94 when it seemed that Saddam might be preparing another invasion
  • Conducted massive strikes in '98 in order to destroy Iraqi weapons production
• This state of smoldering violence would continue until the US invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003

Chapter 26: The Post Gulf War Military

• The Army emerged from the Gulf War very smug
• In hindsight, the roots of many of the problems that plagued the army during the Iraq War started after its victory in the Gulf War
• After the victory in the Gulf War, the Army abandoned its efforts at inculcating strategic thinking in its commanders
• De-emphasized SAMS
• There was a strong feeling that the US did not need to invest in its military as much in order to maintain primacy
  • End of the Cold War
  • Incoming Clinton administration was emphasizing the repurposing of military resources towards peaceful ends
• Few observers realized that, without a superpower peer, the US was more likely to use force abroad, as it was less strategically risky for it to do so
• After the end of the Cold War, the size of the Army was cut by 40%, from 749,000 to 462,000
• However, unlike prior post-war drawdowns (e.g. post World War 2, post Vietnam) this one was relatively successful in maintaining US military readiness
  • Managed to create a new, innovative type of mounted infantry, mounted on wheeled vehicles called Strykers, rather than tracked Bradleys
  • Goal was to create a new type of rapidly-deployable unit that could be flown into a combat theater rather than having to be shipped in
  • It's strange that Ricks is holding the Stryker up as an example of a military program gone right, because I remember there being a fair amount of controversy over the program
  • Namely, Strykers were held to be under-armed and under-armored, having many of the same problems as the Russian BTR
• However, this process reinforced the trend towards intellectual conformity that was already present in the Army
• Army wanted everyone to be on track to be a battalion commander
  • This lead to a shortage of skills in other fields
  • Led to outsourcing — Army was relying on private firms like MPRI to conduct strategic analysis
• Army continued to struggle with many of the same problems it had post-Vietnam
  • Overcontrolling
  • Micromanaging
  • Army seen more as a "bureaucracy" than a "profession"
  • Lack of trust between senior and junior officers
• Army paid lip service to innovation, while actually rewarding conformity and conventionalism
  • Appraisal forms said that innovation was a priority
  • However any officer that actually tried to innovate quickly found out that they were pushed out with descriptors such as "maverick", "immature", or "irresponsible"
• While there were several articles in Army journals arguing that these leadership problems could be fixed with more careful selection of leaders, no one was suggesting that relief could be a viable option
• Meanwhile, the all-volunteer Army continued to improve tactically
  • All soldiers, to some extent, wanted to be in the Army
  • Didn't need to be persuaded to learn skills
• However, while the Army was getting better at fighting it was neglecting consideration of all the other tasks that would be required to secure victory
  • Logistics
  • Economics
  • Politics
  • Diplomacy
  • I'm not sure this is entirely fair to the Army. The US government does have other institutions, most notably the State Department, which are supposed to be handling these considerations
  • I feel like, in Ricks' eyes, the Army is being held responsible for failures of the US government as a whole

Coda: Powell Stays On Too Long

• In 2001, Colin Powell becomes the Secretary of State for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
• Doesn't realize how far out of step his views are with his superiors
• Powell doesn't seem to realize that, as a civilian official, his job is to challenge and push back on the administration when it seems to be doing a foolhardy thing
• Instead he dutifully does his best to present the case for the invasion of Iraq, while grumbling privately

Chapter 27: Tommy R. Franks: Two Time Loser

• After Pearl Harbor, numerous American military officers were demoted or fired
• After 9/11 no one was fired or relieved
• Not quite sure this is a fair comparison
  • Prior to World War 2, all intelligence was military intelligence
  • Didn't have civilian intelligence infrastructure like the CIA, etc
  • As a result the intelligence failure that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor was one of military intelligence
  • In comparison, the intelligence failures that led to 9/11 were primarily that of civilian intelligence
• If Norman Schwarzkopf embodied the post-Vietnam military, Tommy Franks embodied the hubristic post-Gulf War military
• Like Schwarzkopf, Franks failed to think about what would happen after the invasion
• Assumed that the civilians had a plan for it
• Tommy Franks was the ideal result of DePuy's reforms
  • Tactically oriented, to a fault
  • Complete repudiation of Cushman's attempt to inculcate strategic thinking in general officers
• The US Army had become uncomfortable with linking political and military action
  • This was harmful during the Gulf War, and it was lethal in the Iraq and Afghanistan insurgencies
  • Unlike the US military, the insurgents saw military maneuver as a form of political action
    • How sure are we of this?
    • I see so many assertions about what "the insurgents" want, or what they're doing or why they're doing what they're doing
    • How factual are these assertions? Upon what evidence do they rely?
• The shortcomings of Tommy Franks started to become visible in late 2001, when he failed to capture Osama Bin Laden in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan
• Franks did not see the fighting in Tora Bora as a priority, and was content to leave the fighting to local groups supported by US airpower
• Did not want to risk troops to capture Osama Bin Laden
• The CIA officer in the region was certain that he had Bin Laden cornered, and requested a battalion of Army Rangers to help block the exits
  • Rangers could have been flown into forward bases in Pakistan, and then helicoptered into blocking positions in the mountainous region
  • However Franks did not believe the intelligence that indicated that Bin Laden was in Tora Bora and declined to send troops
    • I don't know; I'm inclined to side with Franks on this one
    • The intelligence at the time was confused
    • If Franks had committed a bunch of troops to the region and suffered massive casualties for no gain, he would have been criticized for the opposite reason
    • As I see it, Franks made the best decision he could with the information that he had
    • I don't think it's fair to say that Franks "deprioritized" the capture of Osama Bin Laden
• A similar lack of regard for broader strategic and political concerns is visible in Franks' handling of Operation Anaconda, a battle in the Shah-i-Kot valley, south of Kabul
  • Franks declined to provide adequate artillery support to light infantry units, allowing many Taliban and al Qaeda units to escape into Pakistan
  • Franks, however, seemed to view Operation Anaconda as a success
  • Didn't stop to consider that pushing Taliban units into Pakistan was a strategic defeat, as it merely spread the insurgency into a country with a larger population, a shaky security apparatus and a nuclear arsenal
• Franks' attitude towards the war in Afghanistan was summed up by an answer that he gave at the Naval War College in 2002
  • When asked, "What is the nature of the war you are fighting?" he replied, "That's a great question for historians"
  • He then proceeded to describe the tactics that were being used in Afghanistan, rather than speaking to the broader strategic or political ends
• Franks' shortcomings were made worse by Donald Rumsfeld
  • Rumsfeld micromanaged without providing any clear sense of strategic direction
    • Here, I think Ricks' criticisms are more accurate
    • Rumsfeld, in my opinion, was completely and totally out of his depth when it came to Afghanistan, much less Iraq
    • He had no idea what the political goals of the war were, and he had no idea how to use the tools that the military gave him
    • In the absence of clear strategic direction, the Army could do nothing but put out short term fires as they arose and jump from priority to priority, as officials rotated in the Department of Defense and the State Department
    • van Buuren speaks to this vacillation in We Meant Well
• The failures of Franks in 2001-02 in Afghanistan did not get as much attention as they ought to have because by that time, the US was already shifting priorities towards Iraq
• For the next 6 years, Afghanistan would become the "neglected stepchild" of the US military
• If Afghanistan hinted at Franks' flaws, Iraq brought them into the limelight
• Franks seemed to believe that strategic thinking was something that colonels on planning staffs did for generals
• Franks willfully blinded himself to the possibility of insurgency in Iraq
  • Classified documents at the time indicated that Franks believed that Sunni tribes would quickly fall into line once Saddam was gone
  • Testified to a "growing sense of resignation" amongst Sunni tribes towards the American occupation
• Franks' own autobiography testifies to his lack of strategic thinking
  • Book contains numerous tactical approaches towards how the war should start and how US forces should occupy Iraq
  • No thinking about what happens when the occupation is successful
  • No thinking about how to conclude the war and what happens to Iraq when the war is concluded
• Franks also failed to defend his subordinates when they did raise strategic questions
  • Shamefully left Gen. Eric Shinseki out to dry when he asked publicly whether troop levels for the post-war occupation were too low
• The failures in the Iraq war planning were noticed early, with reviews as early as 2004 warning about the lack of post-war stabilization planning
• While Franks deserves much of the responsibility for the initial US failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the failures are not his fault alone
  • Failures are emblematic of a broader breakdown in civil-military relations
  • Simply put: the US has forgotten how to end wars
  • This is a failure both of generals and of their civilian leadership
  • Complete disconnect between battlefield performance and promotion — "officers that do well don't get treated well; officers that do badly don't get treated badly"

Coda: The Sole Relief of the 2003 Invasion

• The only senior officer in 2003 relieved for non-performance was a colonel, not a general
• Col. Dowdy of the Marine Corps was relieved by Gen. James Mattis
• Dowdy had spent too much time securing the bridges north of al-Kut
• Mattis wanted his regiment to move faster and thus replaced him
• This is notable because this sort of relief would have been routine in the US Army of World War 2, but today it was extremely rare
• Overall, I think Ricks' point thus far is that the US military of today is like the pre-World War 1 French and British militaries
  • Leadership completely disconnected from performance
  • Basking in past glories
  • More concerned with appearance rather than effectiveness

Chapter 28: Ricardo Sanchez — In Over His Head

• Tommy Franks passed the responsibility for the Iraq War onto the Army's newest Lieutenant General: Ricardo Sanchez
• Sanchez is a tragic figure
  • Completely overmatched by the task at hand
  • Problems aren't his fault, and he has no idea how to solve them
• The war was marked by the extreme lack of cooperation between the military and civilian authorities in Iraq
  • Gen. Sanchez had most of the money, manpower and machinery
  • However, L. Paul Bremer, the top American civilian believed he outranked Sanchez
  • Relations deteriorated to the point where Sanchez was refusing to answer direct questions about military operations when asked by Bremer
    • And he was somehow proud of this, rather than acknowledging that a world where the chief of the US military in Iraq can't or won't talk to the chief of the US State Department in Iraq is a world where things have gone seriously wrong
  • At this point, either Sanchez or Bremer should have either stepped down or demanded that the other step down
  • However, each instead decided to bury their heads in details, hoping that the larger lack of strategic direction would somehow resolve itself
    • Spoiler alert: it didn't
• One of the results of Sanchez's vacillation was that different areas of Iraq were almost governed as if they were different countries
  • Some parts of Iraq were ruled very harshly, with US troops rounding up "military-aged males" (and in the process probably creating more insurgents than they captured)
  • Others were ruled loosely, with the US forces in the region coming to informal arrangements with the existing tribal structures, even if that meant letting some Baathists go
• A contributing factor to the US military failure in Iraq was the fact that none of the units were invested in the long-term security of their areas
  • Many units did whatever short term measures it took to reduce violence in their area, even at the cost of making things worse over the long term
  • The idea was to make things look good before your unit rotated home, and then any problems would be the job of the next unit to clean up
  • Many of these issues came to a head with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal
    • US troops were humiliating and torturing detainees
    • Fundamentally a failure of leadership
    • Troops that were guarding the prison were not given the resources to effectively police the prison
    • Prison became a dumping ground for captured prisoners from all over Iraq, as other units would ship captured detainees to Abu Ghraib, in an effort to make their own metrics look good
    • In addition to the torture, the prison became a vital recruiting ground for Al Qaeda and what would later become Islamic State, as US troops did not have the resources to effectively screen prisoners to separate insurgent leaders from small-time criminals
• In his failures in Iraq, Sanchez most resembled William Dean, in Korea
  • Although Sanchez was never captured by insurgents, he displayed a similar tendency to bury himself in minutiae in order to distract himself from the fact that the big picture was going very wrong
• There have been many memoirs and post-mortems written about Iraq, but few talk about the failures of military leadership
• The failures of US generals in Iraq and Afghanistan would lead to a continued skepticism around their advice by President Obama (and now President Trump)

The Troops: Lions often led by donkeys

• The leaders the US deployed to Iraq were trained but not educated
  • Training: how to deal with known problems rapidly and efficiently
  • Education: how to come up with novel solutions to unknown problems
• A useful counterexample is Mosul, under the 101st Airborne, led by General Petraeus
  • Petraeus implemented a counterinsurgency strategy from day 1, bringing peace to Mosul since almost the start of the war
• Ground troops often had good suggestions, but their senior leadership was not willing to listen to what the troops were saying
• By the time anyone took notice, three years had passed, which was almost the entirety of the time the US military spent in World War 2
• Franks is saying here that a policy of rapid relief would have massively sped up this learning process by promoting troops with firsthand experience of ground-truth reality into leadership positions
• The US military in Iraq was a meathead - strong, but stupid
• Troops were well trained and proficient with basic combat maneuvers - could execute whatever strategy the leadership expected them to execute
• The problem was that the military leadership in Iraq implemented the wrong strategy
• This is exactly the problem that Col. Cezge was trying to forestall by inculcating strategic thought in addition to De Puy's emphasis on tactical execution
• In fact, De Puy's reforms, as brilliant as they proved in the Gulf War, probably made the Iraq War worse
• Army never suffered any clear tactical setbacks that forced leaders to take a look at the strategic direction
• Instead senior military leadership was able to dither until it rotated out of theater
• Military as a whole dithered until the country ran out of money and patience
• Ricks asks the question of whether a military that was tactically worse would have actually performed better in Iraq
  • Actually losing battles to insurgents might have been a necessary shock to wake senior generals up to the necessity of changing strategy
  • Yeah, but on the other hand, the US lost battles in Vietnam, and that didn't wake up the leadership there
  • I'm not sure that a draftee army would have actually done any better in Iraq
• The Army has lost the vocabulary to even talk about accountability for performance
• Army studies no longer use the word "relief", instead preferring to talk about "performance departures" or "administrative remedies"

Coda: Lieutenant Colonel Sassaman's Breakdown

• If done properly, relief can be good for the individual officer and his career as well as the overall organization
• Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Sassaman was a high-flying officer when he was deployed to Iraq in 2003
• Cocky believer in the "three Fs":
  • Fear
  • Firepower
  • Force protection
  • De Puy would have loved this guy
• However during his deployment, he cracked, after he saw one of his subordinates killed
• Was at odds with his superior, Col. Rudesheim, over the use of artillery
• When Rudesheim gave Sassaman a direct order to ask permission before using artillery, Sassaman disregarded the command
• At that point, Sassaman should have been relieved
• However, although Sassaman received official reprimands, he was allowed to remain in command
• His unit slowly devolved into lawless behavior, culminating in an incident where two handcuffed detainees were pushed into the Tigris river, with one of them drowning
• Sassaman directly ordered his subordinates to lie to Army investigators about the incident
• Even this, however, was not sufficient cause for relief, as Gen. Odierno, then in charge of the 4th Infantry Division, just issued a written reprimand instead of removing or reassigning Sassaman
• After his deployment to Iraq, it was made clear to Sassaman that his career in the military was over and he was quietly allowed to retire
• If Odierno or Rudesheim had removed Sassaman at the first sign of trouble (i.e. when he started disobeying orders) they might have been able to put him to good use elsewhere instead of allowing him to destroy any hope of progress in that sector of Iraq

Chapter 29: George Casey - Trying, But Treading Water

• Sanchez was replaced in Iraq by George Casey
• Casey was a deeply conventional general, but recognized that conventional tactics were not working in Iraq
• Created a formal campaign plan, which Sanchez had never done
• Asked outside experts in counterinsurgency to come in and review US units
  • Experts reported that 20% of US units were operating effectively, 60% were struggling, and 20% were completely ineffective
• Casey set up a counterinsurgency academy at Taji, where incoming units were given one week crash courses in the basics of counterinsurgency tactics
• However, Casey was still not willing to move US troops out of their large bases into smaller outposts where they would live among the people, a basic tenet of counterinsurgency strategy
• Casey's term was also marked by two further war crimes, both of which reflected poorly on the leadership of the Army
  • Haditha massacre
    • Group of marines indiscriminately killed civilians after one of their own was killed by a bomb
    • Showed the essential bankruptcy of the American strategy in Iraq
    • Cannot protect people by killing them
  • "Black Hearts" incident
    • Group of Army soldiers gang rape an Iraqi girl and kill her and her family
    • Leadership knew about problems in that unit but did nothing
      • Here I think Ricks goes too far towards blaming the leadership, but not blaming the soldiers
      • What the soldiers did in the Black Hearts incident is absolutely inexcusable - can't say that they were were "let down" by their leadership or placed under too much stress
      • That said, I agree with Ricks that the leadership should have been held accountable in addition to the soldiers; leaders are responsible for knowing what their men are doing, and the fact that these soldiers could commit this crime and not be held accountable is a failure of leadership
• Under Casey, the overall impression of the US military was that of a force slowly sinking into quicksand
• There was never a single battle that was lost, but there was an overall sense of things spinning out of control
• Most notably, the US did not have enough troops, and units were chronically overstretched
  • Squads were doing the work of platoons
  • Platoons were doing the work of companies
• Rather than acknowledge this mismatch between objectives and capabilities, senior leadership in the military blamed junior and midlevel officers for not operating efficiently enough
• Casey's lack of awareness of the deterioration of the security situation led to his eventual relief by the Bush administration
• Casey lost the confidence of the President and the Vice President, and eventually Vice President Cheney asked him to step aside sooner than he had planned
• Casey is Iraq's equivalent of Gen. Walton Walker - general who didn't know how to fight was determined to fight

Chapter 30: David Petraeus: An Outlier Moves In, The Leaves

• If Casey was the Iraq War's Walton Walker, then Petraeus would be its Matthew Ridgway
• The appointment of Petraeus was made possible only by the stinging losses the Republicans suffered in the 2006 elections
• After those losses, Bush brought in outside advisers - was asked why no one had been relieved for their performance in the war effort
• Petraeus and the officers he brought in, like Raymond Odierno and James Dubik, who were considered to be intellectual outliers
• Petraeus immediately reverses some of Casey's more misguided initiatives
  • Moves US troops out of big bases and out among the people
  • Make protection of the Iraqi people the top priority
  • Begins negotiating with insurgent leaders
• The last one was the most risky because Petraeus did it without consulting the civilian leadership
  • Petraeus' goal with this was to give the civilian leadership plausible deniability in case his plan of negotiating with insurgents didn't work
• Petraeus' record in Iraq started with the 101st Airborne's occupation of Mosul
  • Mosul could have been one of the most violent parts of Iraq
  • Significant population of Iraqi Army and ex-Iraqi Army
  • Overlapping claims between Sunni groups and Kurdish tribes
  • Petraeus, however, manages to keep the situation under control
  • Doesn't fire all the Baathists, like he's instructed to
  • Maintains informal connections with both Sunni and Kurdish tribal leaders to maintain the peace
• Unlike Ridgway, when Petraeus took over the Iraq War, he was doing so at significant personal risk to his career
  • New approach did not have the backing of other military leaders
  • However, it did enjoy support among junior officers and enlisted ranks
  • Emphasis on force protection was a policy that originated from senior military leaders who were more worried about casualty numbers than stabilizing Iraq
  • Junior officers and enlisted men were more open to taking risks if it meant that they would be making progress towards defeating insurgents
• Although Petraeus' approach results in an initial uptick in US casualties, the casualties drop over time as Iraq stabilizes
• In 2007, Sunni insurgents began coming over to the American side
• This allowed the US to begin rolling up the remaining insurgent holdouts, bringing a measure of stability to Iraq
• Petraeus' success in Iraq gave him clout within the Army itself
  • Was chosen to lead promotion board - unheard for an active theater commander
  • Tried to promote officers with successful combat commands, such as H.R. McMaster

Afghanistan Deteriorates

• While Petraeus was getting Iraq turned around, the US effort in Afghanistan was getting more and more bogged down
• Neither civilian nor Army leadership considered Afghanistan a priority
• The decline in Afghanistan accelerated dramatically when, in 2005, the US signalled that it wished to turn Afghanistan over to a joint NATO force, and withdraw most of its troops
• This may have been the signal for Pakistan's ISI to begin intervening more on behalf of the Taliban
• Afghanistan only gained attention in 2009, when the incoming Obama administration treated it as a priority
• Continuing the theme of the post-Korea army, relief in Afghanistan would have to be carried out by civilian officials
• The general then in charge of Afghanistan, David McKiernan was asked to leave by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, as the new administration wished to pursue a different strategy
• McKiernan was replaced by Stanley McChrystal
  • McChrystal was forced out a month later after he and his staff made disparaging remarks about President Obama to a reporter from Rolling Stone
  • Ricks appears to agree with Obama's decision to fire McChrystal, even though McChrystal was arguably a good officer
  • The lesson of MacArthur shows that Presidents should not tolerate generals who disparage the civilian leadership
• McChrystal was replaced by Petraeus
• Petraeus would only serve a year before turning the war over to Marine Corps General John Allen when he was appointed to head the CIA
• The main problem with Afghanistan is that none of the leaders have really had time to set a strategy and see if it worked
  • 10 commanders in 10 years
  • 7 ambassadors in that time
  • This leads to chaos, no matter how talented and committed the individuals are
  • But, on the other hand, isn't this the result of taking the policy of "rapid relief" too far?

Coda: A Lieutenant Colonel Denounces Today's Generals

• Lt. Col. Paul Yingling wrote a summary in 2007 of the failures of Army leadership, and the causes of said failure as he saw it
• Yingling argued that Army generals let the nation down
• Should have spoken up when they realized that the forces being committed were not sufficient to the task at hand in Iraq
• Should have resigned, if necessary, than undertake a mission without the required resources
  • This is very easy for Yingling to say, but the Bush administration was determined to go to war with Iraq
  • If senior Army generals had resigned, they would have kept promoting until they got officers who were willing to undertake the mission with the resources given
  • It's not like the political opposition at home had enough clout to stop them
• Yingling accused the Army of repeating the mistakes of Vietnam
  • Refusal to acknowledge the nature of the conflict
  • Refusal to be forthright and honest with the American people
• Yingling called for the Army to reform its own assessment process
  • "360 degree" reviews - allow lower ranks to review senior officers
  • Greater Congressional oversight over the military
• The reaction to Yingling's article was swift and severe
  • Yingling's article was denounced by generals
  • Yingling himself was almost passed over for promotion from Lieutenant Colonel to full Colonel
  • Yingling was refused a slot at the Army War College as a student, even though his writings were on the curriculum there
  • Soon after Yingling retired and went on to teach high-school social studies in Colorado
• Even as Petraeus was leaving the Army, the Army was moving to refocus on conventional warfare
• The Army of today has echoes of the Army of the '70s, which dismissed the entire notion of counterinsurgency as a failed idea
• The problem is that the wars the Army is likely to be sent to fight are insurgencies, rather than high-end conflicts against near-peer adversaries

Epilogue: Restoring American Military Leadership

• The Army of today is a long way from the Army that Marshall led in World War 2, but it's not clear whose Army it is
  • I would argue that the Army is still DePuy's Army: deeply uncomfortable with fighting insurgencies, even though it's had to do just that for almost the past two decades
• The Army of tomorrow will be shaped by the officers of today who were blooded in Iraq and Afghanistan
• Today's Army has a much different relationship with civilians than Marshall's Army
  • In Marshall's day, a large number of Americans served in the military
  • Everyone either had served themselves or knew someone who had served
  • Today, less than 1% of all US citizens serve in the military
  • The biggest sacrifice most of us have made in the Global War on Terror has been taking off our shoes at the airport
• What would Marshall say if he were revived and asked to fix today's Army?
  • Tell generals to socially distance themselves from the President
  • At the same time, generals ought to be assertive when dealing with civilians, especially when those civilians are issuing nonsensical orders
  • The civilians, meanwhile, ought to holding generals accountable
    • There is a mistaken assumption today, in the Army, that once fighting starts civilians ought to get out of the way
    • This is not how the American military has operated, historically
    • Historically, civilians were engaged to the extent of setting goals for the military and then firing generals if those goals weren't being met
• Removing non-performing generals removes inertia from a military system that is overly geared towards inaction
• Today's Army is risk averse to a fault
  • Officers strive to be viewed as faceless bureaucrats rather than star performers
  • Widespread attitude of, "The less you do, the less you can be blamed for"
• The Army needs to be far more aggressive in pushing bad leaders out
  • Bad leadership is toxic to good leadership
  • The main reason for good officers leaving the Army is not that they earn more money in the civilian world, but because they see mediocre peers and subordinates get promoted
• Today, the military needs more strategic flexibility than at any point in its history since the Civil War
  • The old threat of the Soviet Union is long gone
  • Not clear how to fight new threats and integrate new technologies
  • Everyone gets it wrong at the start of a war - the ones who win are the ones who adapt faster
• In order to build this adaptability, the Army and its civilian overseers need to be more willing to relieve commanders who are not accomplishing objectives in the field
• Coupled with this policy of swift relief, there needs to be a policy of second chances
• Today, a relief is seen as tantamount to a court-martial
• We need to move from that attitude towards one that views relief as more like a substitution in sports
  • When a player is substituted out because they're not performing well, that single incident doesn't indicate that their career is in jeopardy or that they're a disgrace to the team
• The Navy has done a better job than the Army of maintaining a tradition of relief
  • More than 120 commanding officers in the Navy have been relieved between 2000 and 2011
  • This might be because the Navy doesn't do as good a job of screening junior officers and thus gets more non-performers into command ranks
  • However, it might also be because the Navy steers by Adm. Arleigh Burke's dictum that an organization that tolerates incompetence soon becomes incompetent
  • Two thoughts in response to this
    • First, this was written before the accidents with the USS John McCain and USS Fitzgerald
    • Those accidents revealed some pretty steep readiness issues inside the 7th Fleet in particular and inside the Navy's training and development system more generally
    • Second, one can argue that the Navy has this tradition because of the ancient naval custom of a captain being master and commander of his ship - a captain takes responsibility for everything that happens on their ship, good or bad, earned or unearned
    • The Army used to have this tradition with its divisional commanders, but as communications technology improved there was more and more micromanagement from high command
• Marshall might also consider updating personnel policies
  • Make it easier for officers to take leaves of absence for education and professional development
  • Allow successful commanders to remain in theater beyond their normal tours of duty if they wished to remain
  • Make the personnel system conform to the Army rather than the Army conform to the personnel system
• The fact that the US military has not conducted a wide-ranging assessment of its own leadership's performance in Iraq and Afghanistan (as it did after Vietnam) is not a good sign
• Another aspect of its leadership that the Army needs to examine is troop rotation
  • The unit-by-unit rotation policy in Iraq and Afghanistan was unquestionably better than individual soldier rotation policy that was in place in Vietnam
  • However, even unit-by-unit rotation had flaws
  • Both insurgents and local allies would take advantage of annual rotation cycle
  • One solution might be to have senior command (i.e. division and brigade commanders) remain in place while units rotate in and out underneath them
• The US Army also ought to look at when and how it encourages officers to leave the service
  • Right now, a Lieutenant Colonel will often retire on a full pension at the age of 43
  • Advances in health and medical care often mean that these men can still be of value to the Army
  • If they are competent and wish to remain, they should be allowed to remain
• The flip side of rapid relief is rapid promotion
  • Majors and Colonels who have displayed exemplary performance in the field should be promoted immediately to command, rather than shuffled off into a one-star apprenticeship in some backwater posting
  • Senior command should be seen as an earned privilege, not a right accorded by virtue of seniority
• The Army should also re-examine how it educates its soldiers
  • Emphasize clear thinking and writing
  • De-emphasize PowerPoint
  • Encourage soldiers to write for professional journals
  • Education standards at staff colleges should be dramatically tightened
• The US ought to be more deliberate in how it picks senior commanders
  • In Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, commanders were not picked based upon their competence or temperament
  • They were picked simply because they were available and most senior
  • This is not how Marshall or Eisenhower picked their commanders
• Many of the above proposals will be rejected by the Army bureaucracy on the grounds of fairness
• However, we should remember that the primary purpose of the US Army is to win wars not be fair to its officers
• If the Army does not conduct reliefs, then civilians will
• However civilian reliefs are necessarily more clumsy and disruptive than if the Army were able to handle its own affairs

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