Gen. Tommy R. Franks would use SAMS graduates even less effectively twelve years later, in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when a plan developed by “SAMSters” for the occupation of Iraq was only partially executed before being discarded. Most notably, that plan called for keeping the Iraqi army whole and assigning it to reconstruction tasks, rather than sending it home in disgrace, as would happen in mid-2003. By 2009, a SAMS brochure read like a critique of the shortcomings of non-SAMS Army generals: SAMS graduates, it said, “are innovative leaders, willing to accept risk and experiment; are adaptive leaders who excel at the art of command; anticipate future operational environments; apply critical and creative thinking skills in order to solve complex problems.”
The recovery falls short
Despite the existence of SAMS, the flaws of Army generalship tended to remain the same in the 1980s and ’90s as in earlier decades. Most notably, the complaints about micromanagement by senior officers that plagued the Army in the 1950s and ’60s would continue into the rebuilt Army of the 1980s and ’90s.
Numerous internal Army studies dissected the institution’s problems, but the Army’s leaders seemed incapable of responding effectively to these findings. In 1984, an Army survey found that leadership skills were the second greatest weakness in officer development, following operational skills. In 1985, officers reported broad dissatisfaction with a culture of careerism. An internal survey conducted at about the same time found a consensus opinion that bold and creative officers could not survive in the Army and that it was led by generals who behaved more like corporate managers than leaders. In 1987, a survey of 141 senior Army sergeants produced a startling profile of Army officership of the day. Some 57 percent of the NCOs reported that officers showed slight or no loyalty downward, while only 8 percent felt that officers would stand up to superiors on their behalf. More than 43 percent thought officers lacked flexibility. In perhaps the greatest departure from the old Marshall template, exactly 50 percent said officers had a slight or no sense of team play, and slightly more said that officers cared more about staying ahead of their peers than they did about their soldiers. Forty-eight percent said that officers did not inspire trust and confidence. The sergeants graded officers most harshly on integrity, with 62 percent stating that officers to a great extent tended to cover up incidents that made them look bad.
There is an inverse relationship between trust and micromanagement. The more one trusts subordinates, even to the point of allowing them to make their own corrections after erring, the less necessary it is to hover over them. Lack of trust has corrosive effects within organizations, slowing them down and cramping their ability to move information quickly, adjust to new circumstances, or engage in prudent risk taking. “Not trusting people is an invitation to organizational disaster,” Lt. Gen. Walter Ulmer Jr., the Army’s foremost expert on leadership at the time, warned in 1986. A significant portion of the Army did not trust its superiors, according to another 1987 survey, done at the Army War College, in which 30 percent of respondents said their leaders did not live up to ethical standards.
When the rare public relief occurred, it was almost always in order to punish personal indiscretion rather than professional incompetence. Indeed, despite all the complaints about micromanagement, with its presumption of close oversight and swift correction, the Army seemed to tolerate ineffectiveness—which is surprising, because in combat, ineptitude gets soldiers killed unnecessarily. In 1985, Maj. Gen. Clay Buckingham would look at the state of the Army and conclude, “As a rule . . . general officers do not get relieved for incompetence.” No generals were fired after the “Desert One” hostage rescue debacle in Iran in April 1980, nor after the Beirut barracks bombing in 1983. When reliefs did occur, they were carried out very quietly, with little public disclosure.
Donn Starry, a thoughtful general who had the courage to act on his convictions, actually came to the conclusion that the Marshall approach of swift but nonterminal relief was the correct one. The way to do this, he thought, was to give new commanders an initial probationary period in which they could be tested and, if necessary, removed without much harm to their careers. “It would be much better if we had a system in which we said, ‘All right, we’re going to put this guy in command,’ and then six or eight months later, you say, ‘I don’t think old George is going to make it,’ so we take old George out without any retribution or black mark on his record.” But Starry finally decided that it was beyond the Army’s ability to be so innovative in its approach to leadership. “That required a cultural change that I just think is beyond our scope.”
Coda: The end of DePuy
DePuy’s rebuilding of the Army had been necessary and magnificent—but insufficient. As Lt. Col. Suzanne Nielsen wrote in a 2010 assessment, “The Army gained tactical and operational excellence but failed to develop leaders well-suited to helping political leaders attain strategic success.” That is a devastating critique, because it charges that the Army, despite all the self-congratulation about its rebuilding, was failing to carry out its core function as a servant of the nation. It is perhaps the best epitaph for the Army’s performances in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Some insiders understood the shortfall. “We were trying to change the Army,” Richard Sinnreich, one of the founders of the School of Advanced Military Studies, would conclude. “We have been a failure.” But such statements were rare.
William DePuy’s legacy lived on in the Army in other ways. In the early 1980s, one his followers, Maxwell Thurman, revitalized Army recruiting and, in the process, perhaps saved the concept of the all-volunteer force. Thurman would rise even higher a few years later, in mid-1989, when Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, contemplating launching an attack on Panama to oust Manuel Noriega, decided that Gen. Frederick Woerner, the senior American officer in Panama, was not up to the job. Cheney fired Woerner and replaced him with Thurman, who was just a month away from retiring. “I figured it was my obligation to make certain I had somebody there that I had confidence in and who I trusted,” Cheney explained later, in a clear formulation of the proper relationship between civilian leadership and senior officers. Again the new pattern asserted itself: When the military stopped relieving senior generals, civilians started doing so.
Gen. DePuy’s last major public appearance came on the eve of the Gulf War, when the formidable Army he had played such a large role in creating was deploying to fight in the Middle East. It was December 1990, and he was nearing the end of his life. The old general was asked by members of the House Armed Services Committee to discuss what war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, then occupying Kuwait, might be like. He would end with his beginning, reaching back to his time as a young officer in the hard summer after the D-Day invasion of France, in June 1944. “Let me use the example first of Normandy,” he told the committee. He focused on “the Falaise pocket,” in which some ten thousand German soldiers were killed and perhaps another fifty thousand taken prisoner as they tried to flee eastward. “They were moving over essentially one road,” he noted—an eerie foreshadowing of how the Gulf War would end a few months later, with a “highway of death” for Iraqi soldiers fleeing northward. In the following year, DePuy would deteriorate rapidly into dementia. He died in September 1992. But by then he had seen the Army he had rebuilt demonstrate its tactical prowess to the world.
PART V
IRAQ AND THE HIDDEN COSTS OF REBUILDING
The Army in 1991, on the eve of the Gulf War, had 710,000 soldiers, which was 80,000 fewer than the Army that had come out of Vietnam. But it was more effective in almost every way: better trained, better equipped, and better led—at least at the tactical and operational levels of war.
CHAPTER 24
Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, and the empty triumph of the 1991 war
T he two generals who dominated the public image of the Army of the early 1990s—what might be called the newly vigorous, actively deployed, post-post-Vietnam force—were Col
in Powell and, joining him but not supplanting him, H. Norman Schwarzkopf. They were oddly similar men, near contemporaries with parallel experiences in the military: Both were commissioned in the late 1950s and served two tours in Vietnam, first as advisers and then with the bottom-scraping Americal Division. Despite those demoralizing assignments, both stayed in the Army through its post-Vietnam crisis of confidence and labored to rebuild it. In background, both also were somewhat outliers for the Army—Schwarzkopf being a liberal intellectual from New Jersey, Powell a black inner-city New Yorker, also generally liberal but less of an intellectual.
Yet there was one major difference between the two: Schwarzkopf, who had grown up partly in Iran, was more sophisticated, but it was Powell, a son of the South Bronx, who proved more adroit in working in the political world of Washington. The experience that formed Powell, and perhaps resulted in his elevation beyond four-star generalship to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs and then secretary of state, likely was not his service in uniform but rather his time as a White House Fellow.
Schwarzkopf never had any such assignment, and his lack of exposure to the world of politics would show in his contentious dealings with Washington during the 1991 Gulf War. He had the opposite experience: In an early brush with Washington seventeen years before that war, he had been part of a team that labored to develop a list of suggested installations for the Army to shutter as part of its budget cutting. “We were confident that this was the best and fairest base-closure list in military history,” he remembered. What he meant by that was that it was based on the Army’s assessment of what fit the needs of the Army and of the likely impacts on the economy and the environment. When Congress rejected the proposal, Schwarzkopf concluded that there was something wrong not with his thinking but with the political system: “Eighteen months of hard work counted for nothing. . . . To accomplish anything in Washington meant having to compromise, manipulate, and put in the fix behind the scenes.” Schwarzkopf did not pause here to consider his own blindness. He had spent more than a year on a project that would deeply concern hundreds of members of Congress, who would have to approve the proposed closures, but he had not taken that into account before coming to his conclusions. In addition, the Army’s views on base closures would ultimately prove to be hardly “the best” course for the nation, nor even for the Army. Left to its own devices, the Army, in subsequent rounds of closings, tended to shutter installations on the coasts and leave open those in economically depressed sections of the rural South, which, among other drawbacks, was discouraging to military spouses looking to find work. Congress was more attuned to changes in the population than the Army was.
Going along to get along
Colin Powell, by contrast, learned early on not to reject how Washington works but to study it. “Democracy did not always function well in the light of day,” he would remember being advised during his time as a White House Fellow, part of an idealistic program that introduces small numbers of highly promising young Americans to the workings of government. “People have to trade, change, deal, retreat, bend, compromise, as they move from the ideal to the possible. To the uninitiated, the process can be messy, disappointing, even shocking. Compromise can make the participants look manipulative, unprincipled, two-faced.” Powell thrived in this environment, attracting the notice of rising Republican officials such as Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci.
Powell was, in many ways, exactly what the Army needed after Vietnam, to repair its relationship with Washington. Political leaders respect political power, and Powell developed an independent political base. He was a general the American people felt they could trust. He brought to his positions not just a political savviness but also a personal history that appealed to the public. He was black, from a working-class background, and also was a graduate of City College of New York, carrying none of the Westmorelandesque odor of West Point. His combination of an easygoing public persona and an intense work ethic resembled Eisenhower’s, for whom he “always felt a special affinity. . . . I admired him as a soldier, a President, and a man.” Like that earlier officer, he believed in maintaining an atmosphere of “perpetual optimism.” Also like Ike, he brought to the Army a knack for geniality, a trait that might stem from the fact that both men had become powerfully ambitious relatively late in life, after their military careers had begun and their personalities largely had been formed.
That appearance of easygoing motivation might have enabled both men to be involved in troubling episodes without being tainted by them. Ike’s military and political careers were not damaged by his being present during MacArthur’s 1932 attack on the Bonus Marchers. Nor was Powell much hurt by being on the staff of the Americal Division during the attempted cover-up of the My Lai massacre, or by being brushed by the Reagan Administration’s bizarre attempt to illegally fund the Nicaraguan contras by selling weapons to Iran. (In fact, Powell once observed that the latter scandal helped his career, by creating a vacancy in the post of national security adviser to President Reagan in 1987, when he was the deputy adviser. “If it hadn’t been for Iran-Contra,” he once cracked to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., “I’d still be an obscure general somewhere. Retired, never heard of.”) Also like Eisenhower, Powell enjoyed solving problems. But while Ike was drawn to human puzzles, Powell preferred to relax with the more predictable mechanical issues offered by automobile engines, making a hobby of rehabilitating old Volvos. “Cars, unlike people, lack temperament,” he once explained. “When working on them, I was dealing not with the gods of the unknown, but the gods of the certain.”
Even more than Eisenhower, Powell seemed to attract, or locate, the right sort of mentors, and, better than most officers, he learned how to advance. He worked briefly for Gen. DePuy, that most influential of officers inside the post-Vietnam Army, and in his memoir he labels himself a “DePuy alumnus.” After his White House fellowship, he moved to Korea to take command of the 1st Battalion of the 32nd Infantry Regiment, the same unit Lt. Col. Don Faith had led so tragically on the east side of the Chosin Reservoir in 1950.
But it was command of a brigade that seems to have been more significant for Powell’s career and his approach to generalship. Successful brigade leadership as a colonel is an essential hurdle to clear before promotion to one-star general. In his memoir, as he recalls his time in brigade command, Powell offers an odd little sermon about going along to get along. There is an element of defensiveness in it, but there is also pride, perhaps that of a triple outsider—an African American and New Yorker with an ROTC commission—who learned how to play the Army’s game. “I had long since learned to cope with Army management fashions. You pay the king his shilling, get him off your back, and then go about what you consider important.” He was not inclined to become one of those irritating Army dissidents, he says, in a sentence burdened by three metaphors: “I detected a common thread running through the careers of officers who ran aground even though they were clearly able—a stubbornness about coughing up that shilling. They fought what they found foolish or irrelevant, and consequently did not survive to do what they considered vital.” This willingness to cope was a recipe for getting ahead, as Powell’s subsequent career would demonstrate. It was a trait that would serve him well for decades—but ultimately might have led to his undoing. Powell might have been training himself to kowtow just when he was reaching the age and rank at which he should have been starting to shake off such deferential habits. Retired Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, looking back on his Army career, observed that “the higher you rise, the more pressure there is to conform and to be a loyal team player. The phrase I kept hearing was, ‘stay in your lane.’” This meant, he said, that one should keep quiet and not comment on anything other than one’s own duties: “When we want your opinion, we’ll beat it out of you.” In 1991, Powell, having risen to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would prove to be an Eisenhower without a Marshall—that is, a master implementer lacking a re
al strategy to implement. His efforts to prod Cheney and his other superiors into mulling the strategic questions would be rebuffed: Cheney would effectively tell him to stay in his lane.
The empty triumph of the 1991 Gulf War
Norman Schwarzkopf also benefited from Colin Powell’s growing influence in Washington. He held his position as commander of American forces in the Gulf War because of Powell. When the post of commander of Central Command (Centcom), the American military headquarters for the Middle East, opened up in 1988, it was, according to a fairly recent tradition, the Navy’s “turn” to fill it. But Powell, by then Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, believed that the position should go to someone familiar with ground forces—that is, from the Army or Marine Corps—rather than an admiral. He intervened with his old friend and mentor Frank Carlucci, then secretary of defense. “And that,” Powell stated, “is how Norm Schwarzkopf came to obtain the command that would propel him into history.”
On the ground, in the air, and even in diplomacy, the Gulf War of 1991 was designed as the anti-Vietnam. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, Powell already had moved from the White House back to the military and had become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A major factor driving both Schwarzkopf and Powell as they prepared the American response to Saddam Hussein’s attack was a determination not to repeat the mistakes of the war in Indochina. Looming over all discussions was the Weinberger Doctrine, which Powell had helped develop and which held that America should never go to war again halfheartedly and without the support of its people.
At White House meetings during the run-up to the American intervention to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait, Powell kept in mind his dismay at the men who had constituted the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1960s, “fighting the war in Vietnam without ever pressing the political leaders to lay out clear objectives for them.” His determination to do so led him to raise the question, at a White House meeting, of “if it was worth going to war to liberate Kuwait”—a query that provoked Defense Secretary Dick Cheney to lecture him later that day, saying, “You’re not Secretary of State. You’re not the National Security Advisor anymore. And you’re not Secretary of Defense. So stick to military matters.” Nevertheless, Powell pointedly would flag the need to call up the Army and Marine Reserves, a major stumbling point in the earlier war.
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