The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Perhaps surprised at this munificence, the Iraqi general sought to confirm the meaning of Schwarzkopf’s statement. “So you mean that even the helicopters that is armed in the Iraqi sky can fly, but not the fighters?”

  “Yeah,” Schwarzkopf said. “I will instruct our Air Force not to shoot any helicopters that are flying over the territory of Iraq where we are not located.” With that exchange, he helped seal the fate of southern Iraq’s Shiites, who, encouraged by the U.S. government, were then beginning to rise up against Saddam Hussein. In the following days, Iraqi army attack helicopters would fly over alleys and cities, machine-gunning rebels. This fact would be remembered bitterly by Iraqis when Americans returned to Iraq twelve years later.

  The failure to consider the conditions of the end of the war was hardly Schwarzkopf’s alone, of course. Rather, it indicates that there was a lack of guidance from Washington. Ultimately, this was a failure of civilian leadership, and it suggests that during the 1991 war, civil-military discourse was not as healthy as was depicted at the time. Military historian Robert Goldich noted that this failure is particularly interesting because Bush Administration officials were so deft in organizing and sustaining the coalition, and also in winning political support at home. Yet they had a blind spot when it came to war termination. “They fell down on their job a lot more than Schwarzkopf did on his,” Goldich concluded.

  Reviewing the Bush Administration’s handling of the end of the war, Gideon Rose, now the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, concluded that “the U.S. war effort split open at its politico-military seam.” The lesson here is that simply getting along should not be the goal for civilian and military leaders. Healthy discussions sometimes become heated, especially when assumptions, failures, and omissions are examined. Nonetheless, they must be encouraged, and the occasional flare of a temper must be expected and tolerated.

  After the war ended, both Schwarzkopf and Powell also brought a poor sense of history to their judgment of its significance. They viewed it through the prism of the Vietnam War, and in that context it undeniably was impressive: In less than two months, the U.S. military and its allies defeated a large Middle Eastern army that had forty-three fielded divisions. In just four days of ground combat, American forces had destroyed or captured 3,000 tanks, 1,400 armored vehicles, and 2,200 artillery pieces, with a loss of just 240 soldiers. Yet the two generals came to believe that their short war’s conclusion marked a terminus in history akin to World War II. At one point, Powell and Schwarzkopf even discussed the feasibility of holding the cease-fire ceremony aboard the USS Missouri, to evoke MacArthur’s acceptance of the Japanese surrender aboard that ship in 1945. That idea was put aside only for logistical reasons, and instead the ceremony was held in a tent. The table used for the signing of papers was slated for donation to the Smithsonian Institution, “in case they ever wanted to recreate the Safwan negotiation scene.”

  Powell is a puzzle here. He had become almost the opposite of MacArthur, a general who might have been too sensitive to politics. Defending his thinking about ending the war perhaps before it was over, with Saddam Hussein still in power and the Republican Guard intact enough to suppress the Iraqi uprising, he wrote, “We were fighting a limited war under a limited mandate for a limited purpose.” Schwarzkopf was more self-congratulatory: “For once,” he concluded, “we were strategically smart enough to win the war and the peace.”

  But with the passage of time, the 1991 war looks increasingly like a tactical triumph but a strategic draw at best. As such, it foreshadowed the American experience in the Iraq of the early twenty-first century. Schwarzkopf, in both good and bad ways, embodied DePuy’s post-Vietnam Army: He knew how to fight a war, but not to what end. He had realized DePuy’s dream of winning the first battle of a war—almost for the first time in American history—but he called off the fighting prematurely. In other words, his “victory” came at the high but undisclosed price of not being attached to any stated strategic objectives. He personified what Lt. Col. Antulio Echevarria later would outline in an Army War College monograph as the contemporary American way of war:

  Its underlying concepts—a polyglot of information-centric theories such as network-centric warfare, rapid decisive operations, and shock and awe—center on “taking down” an opponent quickly, rather than finding ways to apply military force in the pursuit of broader political aims. . . . [It] is about winning battles—not wars—in the Information Age.

  Schwarzkopf had done passably well in tactical operations, but he had been flummoxed—even angered—when asked to connect those operations to strategy. A critique by two Australian defense experts put an even sharper point on it: “The confusion surrounding the termination of the operation, the negotiation of a ceasefire by General Norman Schwarzkopf in the apparent absence of any guidance from above, and the litany of strategic opportunities thereby foregone . . . all indicate a surfeit of attention being paid to a single operation and a failure to ensure that the campaign fitted into a strategy.”

  So, despite all the efforts not to repeat the mistakes of Vietnam, in the muddled ending of the 1991 war there was a disconcerting echo of the earlier war. Just as the Vietnam War had been waged on the unexamined and flawed assumption that a strategy of attrition eventually would lead Hanoi to a breaking point, so was the 1991 war fought on the unexamined and flawed assumption that a decisive battlefield defeat would cripple Saddam Hussein and lead to his downfall. As Cheney had put it, “The assumption was that Saddam would never survive the defeat, that you could not impose this sort of battering on Iraq and Iraqi armed forces and have Saddam stay in power.”

  Saddam Hussein’s view of the ending of the war was very different from Schwarzkopf’s. Tapes captured after the American invasion of 2003 would show he was a bit perplexed about why the Americans had given him what he called “a unilateral ceasefire.” But he had no doubt about the major lesson of the war: Less than two years after it ended, he observed, George H. W. Bush was out of office, but Saddam himself was still in power. “Bush fell and Iraq lasted,” he told aides. Despite some hard hits, the war, he concluded, was “a victory for us, one way or the other.” He had taken on the combined might of the Americans, the British, and their allies and survived. In the Arab world, that was quite a victory.

  As the Gulf War ended, it was difficult amid all the hoopla to discern the echo of the Vietnam War, but some perceptive observers, such as retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, heard it. “As a mechanism to advance the cause of global peace and harmony the war proved a total bust,” he wrote. “Apart from restoring Kuwaiti sovereignty, Operation Desert Storm solved remarkably little.” In fact, noted Bacevich, the effect of the 1991 campaign might have been pernicious, in that it led American leaders to believe that they could use their military might to remake the Middle East in a manner more consistent with American interests.

  The most important aspect of the ending of the 1991 Gulf War is that it really never ended. Rather, it marked the beginning of two decades of low-level hostilities—punctuated by several rounds of intense violence—between Americans and Iraqis. For the following twelve years, during the containment phase, America would be involved in Iraq mainly in the air but occasionally on the ground. It was not a full-blown war, but it certainly was not a state of peace. First, in April 1991, not long after Schwarzkopf’s ceremony at Safwan, the United States imposed a no-fly zone, covering all Iraqi aircraft, including helicopters, in the north of Iraq in order to protect Kurds fleeing an Iraqi offensive. Then, to ensure that the refugees did not settle in Turkey, it sent in Army and Marine units to protect them as they returned to Iraq. In August 1992, the United States declared a similar but far larger no-fly zone for southern Iraq. It conducted air strikes in January and June 1993 in response to actions by Saddam Hussein. It deployed troops to Kuwait in 1994 when he appeared to be threatening to invade again. The biggest round of air strikes came over four nights in December 1998, when
the U.S. military fired 415 cruise missiles, more than it had expended during the 1991 war. The missiles, as well as 600 bombs, hit 97 sites, mainly weapons production facilities and military headquarters, and appear to have had a devastating effect on the efforts and morale of Iraqi weapons scientists. In the 1991 war, American aircraft had flown a total of 110,000 sorties; in the subsequent decade, they would average 34,000 sorties a year over Iraq—that is, nearly one-third of a Desert Storm every year.

  Finally, in 2003, American ground forces would again fight Iraq, and this time occupy it.

  CHAPTER 26

  The post–Gulf War military

  The Army, like the country as a whole, emerged from the 1991 Gulf War understandably relieved, and also very pleased with itself—probably too much so. The American military of that time may or may not have been the best the nation ever fielded, but it certainly was among the most self-satisfied. In a Fort Leavenworth course on the combat operations of corps and divisions, the Army gave 99.5 percent of the officers an “above average” score. “Basking in the glow of victory in Gulf War I, we became complacent . . . ‘the best trained, best equipped, and best Army in the world!’” recalled Maj. Chad Foster. “We spoke of ourselves only in the superlative.”

  Nearly twenty years later, after the Army’s missteps and failures in occupying Iraq, retired Army Gen. Jack Keane, a former vice chief of staff, concluded that the problems had begun in the Gulf War: “The thing that killed us was the 1991 Gulf War. Intellectually, it bankrupted us for the rest of the decade.” Partly as a result of its overestimation of its victory in the Gulf, the Army failed to continue to build on its success in the 1980s, when it had been rebuilt and reequipped. Gen. Huba Wass de Czege, who had helped build this Army, worried that in the aftermath of the victory in Kuwait, “shallow ‘bumper sticker’ concepts captured the imagination of DoD officials and the public—‘Shock and Awe,’ ‘Global Reach—Global Power,’ ‘Operational Maneuver from the Sea,’ ‘Rapid Decisive Operations.’” Just as the Army had abandoned “organizational effectiveness” programs in the 1980s as soon as it was on the road to recovery, so, too, in the 1990s were intellectually oriented programs like the School for Advanced Military Studies given less priority, and instead the Army placed a new emphasis on “digitization” and other Information Age technologies. Applications to the school began to decline, and the quality and influence of its graduates likely did as well.

  To be fair to Army leaders of the time, it was an odd, unsettled period. The Cold War was over. It wasn’t clear what would come next, but there was a feeling in political Washington in the early 1990s that the military was facing a period of dormancy. Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992 on a platform that emphasized, among other things, “defense conversion,” or redirecting Cold War defense assets toward peaceful, domestic purposes. Trimming the defense budget produced what was called at the time “the peace dividend.” Reflecting this assumption, the size of the Army was cut by nearly 40 percent, from 749,000 soldiers in 1989 to 462,000 a decade later. Few observers realized that superpower competition had kept a lid on many conflicts and that without the presence of the Soviet threat, it would be far easier (and less strategically risky) for the United States to use force abroad—as it would do in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and, most of all, the Middle East.

  There has never been a truly successful drawdown of American military forces after a war. Marshall, Eisenhower, and Bradley were inspired by the troubles of the post–World War I reduction to try to do better after World War II, but they failed and did worse, creating an undertrained, underequipped, out-of-shape force that would be sent to Korea in the summer of 1950. The American military was flat on its back after Vietnam. If there ever was a reduction that came close to success, it likely was the post–Cold War drawdown of the 1990s. That most recent reduction is hardly remembered today, and this is one measure of its achievement. Even as the Army shrank, it managed to conduct some innovative experiments, such as creating a new, faster, lighter type of unit built around wheeled (rather than tracked) armored vehicles called Strykers. “Not all went right, but a lot did,” commented Lt. Gen. James Dubik, now retired but at the time involved in designing and training the first Stryker battalions.

  Yet even that reduction in the force had its flaws, most notably that it reinforced existing trends toward intellectual conformity and complacency in the Army. “It only took one boss to say something not nice [in a performance review] and that was it,” recalled Col. John Ferrari, whose career survived that era. He continued: “The nail that sticks up gets whacked. The Army whacked everyone who wasn’t on track for battalion command. To be that, you had to be the S-3, the XO, and then battalion command. And one day we woke up and looked for a Spanish-speaking officer to be a defense attaché, and they were all gone.”

  The Army was so pressed to keep its combat units filled that it turned to the private sector for some of its intellectual functions, Ferrari explained: “We outsourced our thinking. We had MPRI [a consulting company led by retired Army generals] to write our doctrine, we had retired colonels as instructors, and we didn’t have battlefield feedback shaping doctrine. . . . It cost us in the decade of war.”

  The Army’s nagging leadership problems persisted. When the Army Command and General Staff College surveyed officers in 1995, it found the same concerns that had been reported in the Army War College’s 1970 Study on Military Professionalism. “The overcontrolling leader and the micromanager remain alive and well in the Army today,” retired Army Col. Lloyd Matthews wrote in 1996, in a statement that was greeted as uncontroversial. A year later, retired Maj. Gen. John Faith wrote an article bewailing military micromanagement that was essentially no different from the articles in Military Review four decades earlier. He also noted that there seemed to have been no attempt by anyone to refute Matthews’s charge.

  A study done at West Point as the century ended came to several startling conclusions about the state of the Army:

  The Army was “more bureaucracy than profession”—that is, officers didn’t look at it as a profession, and saw themselves as time-serving employees of a highly centralized organization.

  While there have always been tensions between junior officers and senior ones, there had also grown a gap between them that had eroded trust: “Unless commanders establish a culture of trust within Army units, soldiers will not feel free to tell the truth, and without transparent honesty in interpersonal relations and official reporting systems, effectiveness suffers. This downward spiral induces micromanagement on the part of leaders.”

  By increasingly relying on retired officers to help write doctrine and teach and train troops, the Army was contributing to its own de-professionalization, because the retirees were working not for the Army but for for-profit companies.

  A paper written at about the same time by Col. Michael Cody at the Army War College accused the Army of institutionalized hypocrisy, preaching a doctrine of innovation while actually awarding risk-averse behavior:

  Departing from the tried and proven solution to problems or recurring situations is in fact discouraged in a number of different ways by senior leaders, for lots of different reasons, despite the brave rhetoric to the contrary suggested on the appraisal forms. The message received by the junior officer is: don’t take risks, don’t depart from the norm, and don’t dare be less than successful in using a new approach.

  The Army had developed a set of code words to ostracize those who departed, Cody noted: “irresponsible, maverick, immature, reckless.”

  The plague of micromanagement appeared to be worse than ever in the Army, despite periodic attempts to tamp it down. In 2000, Lt. Col. Lee Staab surveyed fifty people who had left the Army as junior officers and found that every one of them “felt that there was a high degree of micro-management within their final assignments on active duty.” Maj. Anneliese Steele concluded in a monograph done at the School o
f Advanced Military Studies that “relationships between junior and senior leaders tend to be dysfunctional.” Even as the Army and Marines were invading Iraq in the spring of 2003, Military Review carried yet another article worrying that Army leadership was perceived, in the words of Col. Peter Varljen, as “self-serving, short-sighted, out-of-touch, unethical, and averse to risk.” The Army was led by managers and “performers” rather than by leaders. These men focused more on “short-term mission accomplishment” than on “developing effective organizations,” concluded a study by Col. Steven Jones at the Army War College the same year. Senior officers were skilled at following rules but not in inspiring subordinates or rewriting the rules when necessary.

  Despite these persistent problems with leadership, one of the obvious remedies—relief of poor commanders—remained exceedingly rare. Two prominent generals, Walter Ulmer and Montgomery Meigs, published essays about generalship in Parameters, the journal of the Army War College—the former in 1998, the latter in 2001. Both were candid and offered a variety of thoughts. Ulmer argued that the Army could do better in selecting its senior leaders. Yet neither suggested that relief could be a viable solution to the problem. Dismissal, a basic tool of Army officer management in the 1940s, was beyond the realm of conception sixty years later. The vocabulary of relief had been lost.

  The post–Cold War era, with its unpredictability in battles and even in foes, would demand a new flexibility in military leadership. Yet it appeared as if adaptability and risk taking largely had been bred out of American generals.