The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  The result of this feud between generals was that the Army’s rejuvenation would be tactical, physical, and ethical but not particularly strategic or intellectual. The Army was concentrating on its soldiers, which generally is the correct approach, but appears to have done so at the cost of paying sufficient attention to generalship. The centerpiece of the training revolution of the late 1970s, the National Training Center, at Fort Irwin, California, along with two other centers that were established later, radically improved the tactical skills of soldiers and their leaders. But it also tended to focus the Army overmuch on battalion command. A successful tour leading a battalion had long been the beginning of the Army’s path to becoming a general, but the training centers emphasized this even more. This new focus may have skewed Army views somewhat, leading officers to actually confuse battalion command with generalship. “From 1982 on, the National Training Center was the intellectual home of the Army, not the War College or West Point,” observed Col. Paul Yingling. In its training revolution, the Army effectively built a new body but placed atop it an old head—a head that had not performed well in Vietnam. Battalion and brigade commanders knew how to conduct a blitzkrieg, but when they became generals, they did not know what to do once that speedy attack was concluded. Nor did they receive adequate political guidance from their civilian superiors, which would have underscored the need for better planning for war termination. And so four times—in 1989 in Panama, in 1991 and 2003 in Iraq, and in 2001 in Afghanistan—Army generals would lead swift attacks against enemy forces yet do so without a notion of what to do the day after their initial triumph, and in fact believing that it was not their job to consider the question. The military historian Brian Linn put it well: “The fixation on winning day-long battles in a two-week NTC rotation may well have distracted an entire generation of combat officers from learning, or even thinking about, how to turn short-term tactical victories into long-term strategic results.”

  However unevenly, the Army was recovering from Vietnam. One signal of this was the controversial testimony before a congressional committee by Gen. Edward Meyer, the relatively new chief of staff of the Army, in May 1980 that, “right now, . . . we have a hollow Army.” The Army did not have enough recruits, and of those it did have coming in, only half were high school graduates. The Army also had huge budget problems, Meyer stated. His testimony made front-page headlines, but its meaning was missed. To outsiders, Meyer appeared to be admitting to failure. But to Meyer and those who understood what he was doing, it was rather that he was responding to the lack of integrity that had plagued the Army in the 1950s and even more in Vietnam, and that had come to be personified by William Westmoreland. Meyer was speaking truth to power. As James Kitfield perceptively wrote in describing the moment, “Meyer felt that lack of essential honesty and the breakdown in communication was exactly what had failed all of them—the civilian leadership, the military, the whole damn country—during Vietnam.” Civilian leaders did not appreciate his effort. As Kitfield relates it, after returning to the Pentagon from Capitol Hill, Meyer was called into the office of the secretary of the Army, Clifford Alexander, and asked to disavow the “hollow Army” comment. Meyer declined to do so but instead offered to resign, a gesture that was rejected. In this instance, the Army’s leadership was well ahead of its civilian overseers in shedding the lies and distrust that had so damaged discourse about the conduct of the Vietnam War.

  The one thing that did not change much as the Army rebuilt was the sort of personality favored among those promoted to general officer rank. It remained, as it had for decades, the Omar Bradley type: hardworking, determined, somewhat conformist, steady, prudent to a fault, and wary of innovation. In 1972, before the rebuilding, the Army sent twelve new brigadier generals to be evaluated by psychologists and others for two weeks. The experts found three managerial types among the twelve. Half were solidly in the mold of Bradley: “dependable, cautious, managerial type.” Here is how one insightful Army expert outlined that sort of officer:

  He can be counted on to do what is expected of him. He is a highly capable, competent, very intelligent individual who enacts a standardized leadership role quite effectively. He has energy and drive. He is slightly introverted, not to the extent of being unsociable, but to the extent of being distant and somewhat removed. . . . He’s trusting of others but not very flexible in his thinking and social behavior. . . . His weakness lies in his lack of innovativeness (in areas where innovativeness is appropriate but not organizationally required).

  Another three of the new generals were of the “outgoing managerial type”—more prone to act quickly and less interested in details. Only three of the twelve were deemed to be of the “potentially creative managerial type.” It was a small sample, but it appears to be representative.

  In the 1980s, after the rebuilding was well under way, David Campbell, a psychologist specializing in leadership, administered another battery of personality and intelligence tests to new Army brigadier generals. His results were remarkably similar to those in the 1972 study. The generals were relatively intelligent (with an average IQ of at least 124), hardworking, responsible, and conformist. Like George Marshall, they were rather cold in personal relations, with almost half the brigadier generals scoring a zero on wanting to be included socially, a result that Campbell found “astonishing.” But they were more rigid than Marshall had ever been in his professional thinking, scoring relatively low, Campbell found, “on the flexibility scale, which says something about their willingness, or lack thereof, to consider new, innovative solutions to problems.” The result, concluded retired Army Col. Lloyd Matthews, was “a maladaptive Army senior officer corps.” At just the time when the nation would need flexible generals, with the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a new set of problems and threats, the Army was selecting and developing the opposite type.

  Nor were Army subordinates satisfied with this crop of generals. In 1983, an Army survey found that one-quarter of new brigadier generals were seen by officers who had commanded battalions under them as unqualified to be generals. In the survey, conducted by Lt. Col. Tilden Reid, an Army War College student, 110 battalion commanders reported that about one-third of the Army’s new generals did not care about their soldiers, did not develop subordinates, and were more managers than leaders. Even more damning, the same percentage said that the new general they knew should not lead in combat and that they would not want to serve under that general again. Half the new generals were seen as micromanagers.

  This was a damaged crop of generals.

  An effort had been made to address these leadership flaws. In 1975, the Army established the Organizational Effectiveness Training Center, at Fort Ord, California. This was a radical departure for the service—a program that emphasized team building and adaptation. A study by the Army five years later found that the program had improved morale and the quality of leadership as judged by subordinates. Yet the program was always seen by many in the Army as suspiciously “touchy-feely,” even “beads and sandals.” Nor was it clear where it belonged in the Army: Was it a personnel function, or, as a leadership issue, should its commanders report directly to the chief of staff?

  In 1985, with its post-Vietnam reconstruction well under way, the Army terminated the program. In other words, as soon as the crisis was perceived to have passed, the Army’s leadership went back to the old ways. Army chief of staff Gen. John Wickham and Secretary of the Army John Marsh said as much in a statement to Wickham’s predecessor, Gen. Bernard Rogers, who had protested the closure. “While organizational effectiveness has served the Army well since the mid-seventies, the environment we find ourselves in today is different than when we took advantage of emerging behavioral science initiatives to help the chain of command solve tough issues,” they wrote. “Today, as you know, we are providing much better preparation for leaders prior to their assumption of command.” The official reason given was that leadership would be
taught at the new Joint Readiness Training Center, which, as Col. Peter Varljen pointed out, really represented a reversion to the old development of leadership skills “that could easily be measured in terms of mission accomplishment.”

  CHAPTER 23

  “How to teach judgment”

  T he struggle over the future of the force continued in other arenas. Almost as soon as DePuy and his principal allies had retired, new steps were taken to deal with the vacuum in the Army’s strategic education and thinking. DePuy’s 1976 edition of 100-5, the key Army manual, “was confined to the science of tactical engagements only,” noted Col. Huba Wass de Czege, an Army officer descended, unusually enough, from Transylvanian nobility. What the Army was teaching its captains and majors, he observed, was “all method—you know, here’s how you do a movement to contact. They had not been taught why you organize for a movement to contact the way the method prescribes. Why the prescribed distribution of forces and assignments? What’s the theory behind what it is you’re trying to do?” Wass de Czege had been pondering the Army’s lack of strategic ability for more than a decade, since he was a young Army officer “on a hill in Vietnam wondering why all the field grade officers above me hadn’t a clue about what they were sending me out to do.” He returned to the subject in the early 1980s, when Lt. Gen. William Richardson appointed him to a group at the Command and General Staff College that was asked to study “how to teach judgment.”

  Wass de Czege developed an idea about how to do just that. Knowing that his immediate superiors would oppose the idea, Wass de Czege waited until he knew he could get Gen. Richardson alone, which, as it happened, was during the first peaceful military-to-military exchange between the People’s Liberation Army of China and the American military. In June 1981, Wass de Czege buttonholed Richardson on the fantail of a boat on the Yangtze River and talked to him for an hour. What the Army needed, he said, was a new school that would teach an elite group of officers how to get beyond tactical thinking.

  Wass de Czege’s plea in China for educating officers was a sign that, with DePuy out of the way, Cushman’s opinions about doctrine were returning with renewed vigor. Richardson and others around him were admirers of DePuy, and Richardson, in fact, had been the general’s executive assistant at the Pentagon in 1968–69. Even so, they saw a need to balance DePuy’s rebuilding of the Army. “A system of officer education which emphasizes ‘how-to’ training applicable only to the present will fail to provide the needed education the US Army officer corps will need to be adaptive in the uncertain future,” Wass de Czege wrote in a 1983 study that offered a blueprint for the new school. “More officers must be educated in theories and principles which will make them adaptive and innovative.” The problem as he saw it was that Army officers were being trained by “marginally qualified,” “defensive and dogmatic” teachers at the Command and General Staff College who gave them the false hope of “formulas, recipes, and safe engineering solutions to make order of potential chaos.” The solution, he wrote, was that “a key segment of our officer corps must know how to think and not only what to think about war.” The Army could develop such officers by teaching them “better military judgment.” If there was, in fact, a science to warfare, he thought, then some small portion of its professionals needed to understand the theoretical basis of that science.

  Just two years after the conversation on the Yangtze, the Army launched a pilot program at Fort Leavenworth to do just that. The Department of Advanced Military Studies was an intellectual version of the Army’s Ranger School, which is legendary for pushing its participants to their physical limits. As Lt. Col. Harold R. Winton, the school’s first faculty member, put it, “The Army gave them the opportunity of a lifetime to study their profession in depth, in a no-holds-barred arena where their best ideas were put up against the best ideas of other people, and where they were used to winning arguments, they were now losing arguments.”

  The faculty was also selected differently than at most Army schools. Wass de Czege required that they have teaching experience and at least a master’s degree at a first-rank university (the first three professors had advanced degrees from Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Michigan), and in addition they had to have demonstrated the ability to command military units, which was important for winning the respect of their students. The new effort had an independent spirit that was consistent with its mission of teaching thinking and judgment, but it stood out in the hierarchical Army. For example, its second director, Col. Richard Sinnreich, without seeking clearance from the leadership of the Command and General Staff College, changed the program’s name, making it the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS). Sinnreich also flatly stated that the school was intended to address the mistakes of Vietnam and also of DePuy’s version of the 100-5 manual. “I came out of that war really unhappy. Something was broken. . . . [There was] a big huge intellectual hole in the Army’s understanding of how you go to war,” he said. In addition, the DePuy 100-5 made him worry that “here we were going right back to where we had been before, tactical as hell but not operational content at all. We’d win the first battle, but what about the war?” It was a legitimate concern, as subsequent American wars would demonstrate.

  The first class of thirteen students graduated in June 1984. In a farewell talk, Wass de Czege admonished them not to be intellectual show-offs. “When you get to the unit the one thing you absolutely do not want to do is talk about and quote Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. What you have to do is max the PT [physical training] test and get your hands dirty in the motor pool. You will succeed if you do those things and heed the motto of the German general staff to ‘be more than you appear to be.’”

  Word quickly got out that the new school at Leavenworth was producing a valuable new kind of officer. “Getting these guys was like gold,” recalled Robert Killebrew, chief of planning for the XVIII Airborne Corps in the late 1980s. “They came with missionary zeal and had been issued notebook computers—then rare—and were encouraged to network with their fellow graduates around the Army, all of whom went to pinpoint assignments in critical plans and ops jobs in divisions and corps.” A bonus, he recalled, was that they had the inside line on upcoming personnel moves and other inside knowledge. “They knew more about what was going on around the Army than anybody.” It also helped that Gen. Richardson, who had approved the idea, became the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations, a position in which he could strongly encourage personnel managers to allow good officers to apply to the new program. After that, Richardson took over as the head of the Training and Doctrine Command, with Leavenworth under his purview, which meant he could continue to protect and nurture the new school.

  In his 1983 study, Wass de Czege had predicted that if a school for advanced studies was established, it “would make a tremendous impact on the US Army by the year 2000.” He probably was overoptimistic by about five or six years. Over the years, some seventy-seven graduates of the new institution would join the ranks of the Army’s general officers. The first SAMS general was Charles Cannon, in October 1992, and the second, Robert St. Onge Jr., was promoted three years later. By 2000 there were a total of fourteen. In overseeing Army war games, Wass de Czege found he could spot the SAMS graduates even without knowing the background of the officers he was mentoring. They were the ones, he noted, who “just seemed to approach the issues at a higher cognitive level first and then to work from there to the practical level. They were able to make sense of complexity far easier than their peers.” Over the following decade, an additional fifty-five SAMS alumni became generals. All had taken away at least a bit of what one officer in the second class recalled learning at SAMS: “War is much more than a tactical battle of attrition.” No surprise nowadays, but a departure from what DePuy had practiced in Vietnam and taught for many years afterward.

  But however bright it was, the strategic lamp lit at Leavenworth was a small one—by design, because it was envisioned as a
n institution to find and polish an elite. It would take many years for the officers receiving this new level of education to develop into a critical mass. In the meantime, Army generalship would change very little. In fact, in the short run, the addition of SAMS graduates to the ranks of lieutenant colonels and colonels may have reinforced the trend among generals toward tactical orientation, by making the senior officers believe—falsely—that they did not need to think and read deeply about their profession, because the Army was producing officers who could do that for them.

  SAMS-trained planners first came to the forefront in the 1991 Gulf War, when Gen. Schwarzkopf employed eighty-two of them—if somewhat shortsightedly, using all of them for the attack and none for what followed. For the most part, the Army would be led in that war by DePuy-shaped men who, unfortunately, embodied Wass de Czege’s warning of 1983 about training rather than educating officers: “For nearly ten years we have attempted to train CGSC [Command and General Staff College] graduates for the ‘First Battle’ and for virtually nothing beyond that yet-to-occur confrontation.”