The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Meanwhile, as a result of the DePuy-era reforms, the Army continued to improve tactically. The all-volunteer force had come into its own. Everyone who was in the military had asked to be there, and most had learned a lot. It was a well-trained, professional, competent force. But the soldiers often were better at their tasks than the generals leading them were at theirs. In Iraq, the U.S. Army would illustrate the danger of viewing war too narrowly. “When war is reduced to fighting,” strategic expert Colin Gray once warned,

  the logistic, economic, political and diplomatic, and socio-cultural contexts are likely to be neglected. Any of those dimensions, singly or in malign combination, can carry the virus of eventual defeat, virtually no matter how an army performs on the battlefield. . . . When a belligerent approaches war almost exclusively as warfare, it is all but asking to be out-generalled by an enemy who fights smarter.

  That troubling thought set the stage for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its aftermath, when the American military would be “out-generalled,” to use Gray’s term, by an insurgency that appeared to have few if any generals—but had a better conception of how to wage war in Iraq.

  Coda: Powell stays on too long

  Colin Powell’s last memorable act in government was to clear the way politically for that invasion of Iraq, with a speech at the United Nations early in 2003. Just eight years after writing his Horatio Alger–like memoir, the decent, go-along-to-get-along general would go along one more time, this time with catastrophic results for his reputation.

  For several years, Powell had tried to turn a blind eye to the growing split between his beliefs and those of the Republican Party. After retiring as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in September 1993, he had veered onto the thin ice of an old general involved in politics. Like Douglas MacArthur, he delivered the keynote address at a Republican National Convention. Just as the Chicago convention of 1952 had soured on MacArthur in response to his talk, the San Diego convention of 1996 was unhappy with Powell’s speech, in which he emphatically supported affirmative action and abortion rights. (In another odd parallel, the 1952 Republican convention had been the first to nominate a World War II vet, Eisenhower, while the 1996 convention would be the last, selecting another Kansan, Sen. Bob Dole.) Had Powell left for private life at that point, his reputation would have remained unblemished. But late in his career, his exquisite sense of timing deserted him. He stayed in power too long, becoming secretary of state in 2001 for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, men whose views were strongly at odds with his. They were willing to let him be secretary of state but not to make policy, and Powell was slow to grasp the nature and extent of his isolation.

  Again there was a failure of discourse at the top. Like MacArthur in Korea, Powell was an old general at odds with his president. He thought he could bring his chief around and remained unwilling to face the fact that he could not and rather needed simply to get out of the way. Unlike MacArthur’s, Powell’s disagreements with his command in chief were grounded in loyalty. He remained a good, obedient soldier—and that would be his undoing, in part because he now was supposed to be acting as a civilian official. In his tragic final act, he dutifully carried water for the Bush Administration, traveling to the United Nations in February 2003 to deliver the speech that laid the diplomatic groundwork for the American invasion of Iraq. It was a bravura performance, in which Powell played on all the credibility he had developed during three decades of public service. “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,” he said early on, with CIA director George Tenet sitting behind him, literally backing him up. “These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” He then appeared to divulge intercepted communications—an extraordinary act, given that those are usually the most classified sort of intelligence. He discussed with great confidence Iraq’s biological weapons factories, its stockpile of chemical weapons, its intentions to acquire nuclear weapons.

  We now know that almost every single assertion he made in that speech was questionable and that, in fact, much of it was doubted at the time by experts in the intelligence community. Most embarrassingly, his claims about Iraq’s biological weapons turned out to have been based mainly on the statements of one Iraqi defector, code-named Curveball, whose allegations had been discredited even before Powell presented them to the world. In May 2004, long after the damage had been done by his speech and the United States was mired in Iraq, the CIA would officially recant everything Curveball had asserted, spurred perhaps by having learned that Curveball had not even been in Iraq during some of the time when he claimed to have witnessed important developments. Powell’s UN speech also relied on a second informant on biological weapons, but that source had been formally declared a fabricator months earlier by the Defense Intelligence Agency, and no one had informed Powell about that fabrication notice. The UN speech, unfortunately, would become the epitaph to Powell’s long career. “Who went to the United Nations and, regrettably, with a lot of false information?” he said in 2011. “It was me.” In another interview, he lamented, “I will forever be known as the one who made the case.”

  In 2003, Powell did the job the Bush Administration needed him to do, putting war skeptics on the defensive. Powell “presented not opinions, not conjecture, but facts,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stated to a gathering of European allies not long afterward. He continued, “It is difficult to believe that there still could be question in the minds of reasonable people open to the facts before them.”

  Yet behind closed doors, Powell still had doubts. Shortly before the invasion of Iraq, he called Gen. Tommy R. Franks to ask him whether he was sure he had enough troops in his war plan. Powell thought there were sufficient troops to get to Baghdad but was concerned about what would happen after that. “But Tommy was confident,” Powell said ruefully. “They had enough to get to Baghdad, and it fell beautifully, but then the fun started.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Tommy R. Franks

  Two-time loser

  After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the top American military officers in Hawaii were drummed out of the military. After the surprise attacks on 9/11, no one was fired or took responsibility. Nor were subsequent setbacks punished.

  The representative general of the post-9/11 era was Tommy R. Franks. If Norman Schwarzkopf embodied both the qualities and the limitations of the post-Vietnam military, Tommy Franks was the apotheosis of the hubristic post–Gulf War force. Like Schwarzkopf, Franks refused to think seriously about what would happen after his forces attacked. One lesson of Vietnam, he had concluded, quite mistakenly, was that such political issues simply were someone’s else’s job. “During the Vietnam War, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his Whiz Kids had repeatedly picked individual bombing targets and approved battalion-size maneuvers,” he wrote in his memoirs. Then, in an intellectual non sequitur, he continued, “I knew the President and Don Rumsfeld would back me up, so I felt free to pass the message along to the bureaucracy beneath them: You pay attention to the day after and I’ll pay attention to the day of.”

  This is not all the fault of Franks. He is best understood as exactly what the post-Vietnam Army was trying to create, the natural and desired outcome of Gen. DePuy’s insistence on a tactical focus and the parallel repudiation of Gen. Cushman’s call for a broader-minded, deeper-thinking sort of senior officer. As Cushman later observed of Franks, “His development approached the ideal career pattern of senior officer development at the time.”

  Most generals, at worst, get the opportunity to lose one war. Franks bungled two in just three years, and in both he would illustrate the shortcomings of the force built by DePuy. The post-Vietnam tendency of the American military to decouple political questions from military operations, and the willingness of their civilian superiors to go along with that approach, were damaging in the 1991 war, which was a c
onventional conflict. But it became lethal to the American cause in the counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan, starting in September 2001, and in Iraq, starting in March 2003. Army Maj. William Taylor would write years later from Afghanistan, “The American military is simply uncomfortable and weak at linking political repercussions to military action. In stark contrast, the insurgents see military and political action as one in the same, and consequently are quite effective in shaping their violence to send a message.”

  The warning signs about Franks began flashing in late 2001, with his bumbling effort to capture Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora, along the Afghan-Pakistani border, about ninety miles southeast of the Afghan capital, Kabul. Coming just three months after the stunning attacks of 9/11, the Tora Bora fight provided the best chance American forces had to kill or capture the al-Qaeda leader. Yet Franks seemed inattentive, almost as if the battle were someone else’s problem. Like Schwarzkopf with Scuds in 1991, he did not see bin Laden’s capture as crucial to his campaign, a goal for which he should risk casualties and a messy fight. Unlike Schwarzkopf, he was content to provide airpower, with 700,000 pounds of bombs being dropped in the area of Tora Bora during just a few days in December 2001.

  The CIA officer in charge at Tora Bora was certain he had bin Laden cornered, though his team remained outnumbered on the ground. He repeatedly requested a battalion of Army Rangers to help press the attack and seal the escape routes into Pakistan. This could have been done by airlifting the Rangers into Pakistan, where the United States had forward bases at the time, and then flying them by helicopter into the relatively low-altitude areas north and southeast of Tora Bora, where they could establish blocking positions. But Franks, perhaps acting under the direction of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, declined the request. He cited several reasons in his response, among them his desire not to inject more troops, the time it would take to send them, and his sense that the intelligence on bin Laden’s location was less reliable than the CIA believed. The best evidence indicates that bin Laden walked out of Afghanistan and south into Pakistan in mid-December 2001, perhaps wounded in the shoulder.

  Four months later, Franks would make a similar mistake during Operation Anaconda, declining to provide adequate artillery support to light infantry units that had pinned down several hundred al-Qaeda fighters in the Shah-i-Kot Valley, south of Kabul. Franks explained this refusal in political terms: He was trying to follow the limitations on troop numbers imposed by Rumsfeld. Again, the al-Qaeda men escaped into Pakistan. “I thought it was a very successful operation,” the general said afterward. “I thought the planning that was done was very good planning, and I think the result of the operation was also outstanding.” He somehow seemed to believe that it was a net strategic gain to push the Islamic extremists from Afghanistan into neighboring Pakistan, a far more populous country that suffered from a shaky security situation—and possessed a nuclear arsenal estimated to contain at least one hundred warheads. One could believe such a course was wise only if one were failing to think strategically. This was a failure of both Franks and his civilian overseers—Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush. Rather than check one another’s thinking, the civilian and military sides were reinforcing one another’s shortcomings.

  Not long after the Anaconda battle, Franks spoke at the Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island. A student heard his talk and then posed the most basic but most important sort of question: What is the nature of the war you are fighting in Afghanistan? Franks, in his answer, indicated that he did not have a clue. “That’s a great question for historians,” Franks said. He then answered in a wholly tactical manner, discussing how U.S. troops cleared cave complexes in Afghanistan. It was a sergeant’s answer, not a general’s. He was repeating Westmoreland’s episode in Vietnam in which that commander told senior officers he would share with them the principles of war, then proceeded to tell them how to care for a squad. Franks “really was comfortable at the tactical level,” concluded an officer who was in the audience that day.

  Privately, Army strategists agreed with that verdict, according to an after-action review of the first part of the Afghan war completed at the Army War College the following summer by fifty-one Army officers and civilian officials from the Army staff and its major commands, including Army Special Operations Command and Central Command. The report is especially striking in that it is not the work of the media or academic specialists but of Army insiders writing for internal consumption. These military professionals explicitly faulted both Franks and Rumsfeld for their decisions as well as for their style of leadership. A document prepared for public release played down the problems caused by the two men, but an internal memorandum on that subject was scathing. “The lack of a war plan or theater campaign plan has hindered operations and led to a tactical focus that ignores long-term objectives,” it stated in regard to Franks’s efforts. It found that his headquarters suffered from “many disturbing trends including a short-term focus.” But, nodding at Rumsfeld’s failings, it went on to say that “all participants at the conference from all commands complained about the problems caused by a lack of clear higher direction.” It particularly faulted the limitations on troop numbers imposed by Rumsfeld and enforced by Franks, saying that they “have had a significant negative impact on operations.” Unfortunately for Franks and for the war effort, Rumsfeld proved to be the worst sort of micromanager, one who interfered incessantly but did so without providing clear overarching direction. In other words, this was both a failure of generalship and a failure of civil-military discourse. It was an important warning sign: Under Rumsfeld, the quality of civil-military discourse would further erode, eventually coming to resemble the days during the Vietnam War when Lyndon Johnson became estranged from his Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  The failures in Afghanistan in 2001–2 probably did not get as much attention as they normally would have, because by the spring of 2002 Franks and many of the other leaders of the American military establishment already were shifting attention and resources away from the Afghan war, which for another six years would become a kind of stepchild of conflicts. It would not thrive on neglect.

  If Afghanistan hinted at Franks’s shortcomings, Iraq would reveal them in full, painful display. Historically, thinking about war and then arriving at conclusions that can be implemented has been the core task of generals. Yet, in a bizarre mutation of military thought, Franks seemed to believe—and to have been taught by the Army—that thinking was something others did for generals. In his autobiography he referred to his military planners, with a whiff of good ol’ boy contempt, as “the fifty-pound brains.”

  Part of the problem was Franks’s personality. He was that most graceless sort of leader, both dull and arrogant. His memoir, while often evoking Tom Clancy’s adventure novels, still revealed the man well, sometimes inadvertently, in its evasions and omissions. He opened the book with his recollection of the time his father placed him in the electric chair at a Texas state prison, expressing the warning that “this is the ultimate consequence for the ultimate act of evil.”

  On larger questions, the memoir is not reliable as a historical record. For example, he claimed in it that the aftermath of the Iraq invasion “actually was going as I had expected—not as I had hoped, but as I had expected.” If he really had held such grim expectations, he should have shared the thought with his headquarters before the invasion. In fact, his assertion contradicted the formal planning documents produced by his subordinates. For example, one classified PowerPoint briefing given shortly before the invasion of Iraq stated, under the heading “What to Expect After Regime Change,” that

  most tribesmen, including Sunni loyalists, will realize that their lives will be better once Saddam is gone for good. Reporting indicates a growing sense of fatalism, and accepting their fate, among Sunnis. There may be a small group of die hard supporters that willing [sic] to rally in the regime’s heartland near Tikrit—but they won’t last long
without support.

  In addition, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who took over the Iraq war from him, stated in his own memoirs, which are angrier but more accurate than Franks’s, that Franks had told him in June 2003 that American forces would be out of Iraq later that year. Again, Franks resembled Westmoreland, making statements in a memoir that made him look good but were easily shown to be false.

  Although Franks in his memoir depicted himself as a maverick who wrote poetry and read “Bertram Russell,” he failed to offer an example of fresh or even mildly offbeat military thinking. He apparently had nothing to remember about his time at the Army’s schools. Judging by his lack of comment, the Army War College, where he might have learned about connecting operations to national strategy, had absolutely no impact on him. Nor did he have anything of substance to say about the pivotal Tora Bora battle, which he mentioned only in passing.

  Not long before the invasion began, Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, expressed concern that the force lacked sufficient troops for occupying Iraq. For his pains, Shinseki was effectively ostracized inside the Rumsfeld Pentagon. It was a low point in civil-military discourse. “The treatment of Army General Eric Shinseki after testifying honestly (and, as it turns out, accurately) . . . is widely viewed as an object lesson of the most negative type,” wrote Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap Jr. Franks said nothing about that in his book. When asked about Shinseki’s concerns in an interview, he dismissed the question, saying that Shinseki “didn’t provide anything that all of us didn’t already know.” Franks also dwelled in his book on the variety of ways he had devised to start the Iraq war (“Generated,” “Running Start,” and “Hybrid”) but had little to say about how he thought it should end and what steps he took to bring that about. He insisted that he did a lot of hard thinking about postwar Iraq, but in a chart he proudly reproduced in the book, outlining his “basic grand strategy” for the war, there was nothing to support that claim—it was all about attacking. In fact, his chart represented not a strategy but a disparate collection of tactical approaches.