The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  But Petraeus and Odierno enjoyed a kind of secret source of support: After four years of often fruitless combat, lower echelons of the American military were receptive to trying a new course. As Petraeus’s executive officer, Col. Peter Mansoor, would observe, “By the beginning of the surge in early 2007, the military had undergone a renaissance in its ability to connect with the Iraqi people, an adaptation that greatly assisted its ability to conduct counterinsurgency operations.”

  Although this phase of the war, beginning in early 2007, became known as the surge—with 30,000 additional troops ultimately sent to Iraq, for a peak strength of about 166,000—the number of troops was far less meaningful than how they were employed. The measure of their success, American soldiers were told, was not trends in American casualties but trends in Iraqi civilian losses. Despite their lack of backing from their superiors, Petraeus and Odierno were effective in conveying this message down through the echelons of their command, from corps to divisions to brigades, battalions, companies, and platoons. “Our mindset was not to kill, it was to win,” said Lt. John Burns, leader of a scout platoon in Baghdad during the Petraeus counteroffensive. “We constantly evaluated our situation and made certain we were fighting the war we had and not necessarily the one we wanted.” The time also was ripe for a different American approach. Sunnis had lost control of western Baghdad to Shiite militias, and their backs were to the wall. In Anbar Province, sheikhs were angry with al-Qaeda for muscling in on their cross-border smuggling operations.

  Success often looks inevitable in retrospect. But at the time in Iraq, the changes Petraeus and Odierno had implemented looked very risky—and indeed they were. Petraeus’s biggest risk was reaching out to the Sunni insurgents and offering them money to turn sides. He did not clear this move with President Bush. “I don’t think it was something that we needed to ask permission for,” he would say in an interview, but he probably had realized that the best course was not to put the president in a box, but instead to take action first and seek approval afterward.

  When Petraeus arrived in Iraq in February 2007, said Philip Zelikow, the State Department strategist, “he basically inherited a strategic void.” It was a surprisingly tough time. In the first days of the surge, there was an average of almost 180 attacks a day on American forces. For several months, through the entire spring of 2007, there was almost no sign that the changes were working. April was ghastly, with Baghdad feeling like a dying city under siege. May was worse, with 126 U.S. combat deaths, the worst month for American troops that year. Petraeus later would call this time “almost an excruciating period . . . [a] horrific nightmare.” In June, a smart colonel who knew Iraq well concluded that Petraeus had lost: “I think he had one shot at winning. Frankly, I think he’s past that point.”

  Yet even as that officer spoke, a major shift was under way. It was difficult to perceive and took months to fully emerge. The wide-ranging battle for control of Baghdad, a sprawling metropolis of about five million people, reached its climax in late spring and early summer. By June 2007 the new approach had begun to show results. As summer began, Sunni insurgents began coming over to the American side—not surrendering, but keeping their weapons and going on the American payroll in return for agreeing to cease their attacks on Americans. Eventually, more than 100,000 insurgents would turn. As they did, the sanctuaries of their more hard-core former comrades began evaporating, Petraeus recalled: “We were literally over-running their support zones, if you will, their command and control facilities.” There were ninety-three Americans killed in action in June 2007, then sixty-six in July, fifty-five in August, and, as the changes spread, just fourteen in December. The American role in the war in Iraq began to diminish.

  The following year, Petraeus would be promoted to take over Central Command. It looked as if he and those around him were successfully conducting a campaign not just in Iraq but inside the U.S. Army. Underscoring his newfound influence, he had been called back from Iraq to Washington to lead a promotion board to pick the Army’s new class of brigadier generals—an unprecedented assignment for a theater commander in the midst of a war. He appeared to try to push the selection of brigadier generals back toward the Marshall template, picking a slate notably heavy in officers with successful combat commands, especially leading infantry and Special Operations units. Among the colonels picked for promotion was H. R. McMaster, not only author of one of the best studies of senior generalship in the Vietnam War but also leader of one of the first successful counterinsurgency campaigns in northwestern Iraq.

  Afghanistan deteriorates

  Meanwhile, the other American war, in Afghanistan, was meandering without much strategic direction—which had implications for Petraeus’s future. The Afghan war was treated by American policymakers as a sideshow. The job of American generals in Afghanistan seemed to be, foremost, not to bother the Pentagon. “We were really an orphan headquarters, in many respects,” recalled retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan in 2004–5. He found it difficult simply to get the Army to send him officers for his staff: “They clearly had Iraq on their minds, but there was no interest whatsoever in providing us with anything but the absolute minimum level of support.” He eventually filled out his staff with aging reservists, leading to the joke that his headquarters represented “the world’s most forward deployed AARP chapter.”

  The Afghan war did not thrive on neglect. From 2004 to 2009, the number of reported security problems increased ninefold, with an even sharper rise in suicide bombings. The turning point in the war came in 2005, when the U.S. government repeatedly signaled disengagement from the war, first by calling for NATO to take it over and later by publicly stating that it planned to reduce its combat strength by 2,500 troops. Perhaps as a result, the government of Pakistan in 2005 seemed to go into opposition against the American presence in Afghanistan, its military intelligence agency again coming to the aid of the Taliban and other Afghan allies. There were even a number of incidents in which Pakistani border posts fired heavy machine guns in support of Taliban attacks.

  Even as Afghanistan became more dangerous, American attention remained riveted on Iraq. The Afghan war did not really come back into focus for Washington policymakers until 2009. As the Obama Administration began to pay attention to the Afghan war, its officials grew unhappy with its military leadership, especially Army Gen. David McKiernan, whom they saw as unable to adjust from a conventional approach to more of a counterinsurgency approach.

  What followed fit the post-Marshall model of top generals being removed by civilians. First McKiernan was relieved as the commander in Afghanistan in May 2009, on the general feeling of Defense Secretary Gates and other officials that a new leader was needed to take the war in a new direction. This was a reasonable position, and McKiernan in turn acted reasonably, retiring quietly and with dignity. As an Air Force officer and a retired Army officer wrote together, “The replacement of McKiernan reminds us that senior leaders have prerogative to build the team they feel is best suited to execute the selected strategy.” One could almost see the ghost of George Marshall nodding in approval.

  The next American commander in Afghanistan was Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was only in May 2010 that the Afghan war became the “larger” of the two wars for the United States, in the sense that there were more American troops there than in Iraq. A month later, McChrystal was fired and forced into retirement by President Obama after members of his traveling party unwisely—and inexplicably—made comments critical of the Obama Administration to a reporter for Rolling Stone. McChrystal was succeeded by Petraeus. For the second time, Petraeus had been assigned the task of trying to right a war that initially had been mishandled by Tommy Franks. Petraeus would serve in Afghanistan for a year before turning the war over to Marine Gen. John Allen, whom he had come to know through the recommendation of Gen. Mattis. It is difficult at this point to see whether Allen will have the same success in Afghanistan
that Petraeus had in Iraq in finding a way to extricate the Americans from a war.

  Since 2003, the overseers of the Afghan war have been Tommy Franks, Paul Mikolashek, Dan McNeill, John Vines, David Barno, Karl Eikenberry, McNeill on a second tour, David McKiernan, Stanley McChrystal, David Petraeus, and John Allen. In an interview, Gen. Barno said the biggest problem with American generalship was rapid turnover. “You have ten commanders in ten years, which is horrifically bad, and seven U.S. ambassadors, too,” he said. “So what you are going to have is chaos, no matter what your plan is.”

  Coda: A lieutenant colonel denounces today’s generals

  One day in late 2006, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, deputy commander of H. R. McMaster’s 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, attended a ceremony awarding the Purple Heart to soldiers in his unit who had been wounded in Iraq. It had been his second tour of duty there. Yingling, a 2002 graduate of the School of Advanced Military Studies who had earned another master’s degree—in political science, at the University of Chicago—went home filled with emotion and began to write. From his computer emerged a blast at Army leadership that would be published in the spring of 2007.

  “America’s generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy,” Yingling charged. It was the responsibility of a nation’s generals to calculate and explain how force would be used: “If the policymaker desires ends for which the means he provides are insufficient, the general is responsible for advising the statesman of this incongruence.” This, of course, was exactly what the generals had not done with the Bush Administration in considering Iraq. Nor, Yingling continued, had the generals understood the war they were fighting or been candid about it with the American people. “After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America’s general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public.” For more than three years, they had told the American public that they were making progress when they were not.

  But it was too much to expect the generals to suddenly wake up and start thinking differently, he added, because they were products of a system. That system, he said, “does little to reward creativity and moral courage.” Given that, he wrote, “it is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties.”

  To change the nature of American generals, Yingling called on the Army to use 360-degree reviews of officers and on the Congress to hold commanders accountable for failure:

  A general who presides over a massive human rights scandal or a substantial deterioration in security ought to be retired at a lower rank than one who serves with distinction. A general who fails to provide Congress with an accurate and candid assessment of strategic probabilities ought to suffer the same penalty. As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.

  Perhaps most provocative—and most painful of all for the post-Vietnam generation of generals—was Yingling’s charge that the generals of 2006 were repeating the mistakes of Vietnam, having failed to prepare their forces for the war they fought or to provide Congress and the American people with “an accurate assessment” of the Iraq war.

  One of Yingling’s closest friends, another Army lieutenant colonel, John Nagl, who had combat experience and a Ph.D. from Oxford, advised him to publish the essay anonymously. The two had been assigned adjacent offices when both were teaching at West Point in the late 1990s and then had been classmates at the Command and General Staff College together. Yingling declined to follow his friend’s advice and signed his name to the open letter—“which,” Nagl recalled, “I thought was a measure of poor judgment and strong character.”

  Unsurprisingly, Army generals spoke out against the article. At Fort Hood, Texas, where Yingling was stationed, Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, assembled about two hundred captains in the base chapel to hear his response to Yingling’s charges. “I believe in our generals. They are dedicated, selfless servants,” Hammond said. At any rate, he added, Yingling “has never worn the shoes of a general.” In other words, only other generals were qualified to judge the performance of Army generals. To emphasize the point, he gave Yingling a mediocre performance evaluation.

  Later that summer, a higher-ranking general, Richard Cody, the vice chief of staff of the Army, was speaking to a group of captains at Fort Knox, Kentucky, when one inquired about the Yingling article. Gen. Cody responded by asking the assembled captains for their opinion of the Army’s generals. He got an earful, including a follow-up question from Capt. Justin Rosenbaum, who had read H. R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty, about whether any Army generals should be held accountable for the mess in Iraq. That was enough for Cody. “I think we’ve got great general officers that are meeting tough demands,” he said. As for Rosenbaum’s query, he said that the people to blame were the politicians who had trimmed the size of the military during the post–Cold War reductions of the 1990s: “Those are the people who ought to be held accountable.”

  Despite being rejected publicly by Army leaders such as Hammond and Cody, Yingling’s article went on to be cited in speeches by Defense Secretary Gates and other senior officials. It also appeared in the curricula of some of the military war colleges. Yingling stuck to his guns and elaborated on his indictment. Early in 2011, he delivered a lecture at a Department of Defense school that found today’s generals “guilty of three important failures”: to prepare their troops for irregular warfare, to develop war plans that achieved the aims of policy, and to provide candid advice to civilian leaders. Later that year, he commented that “officers have ceased to police our own ranks, especially at the field grade and flag levels.” Asked whether contemporary U.S. Army leaders reminded him of World War I’s British army supposedly being “lions led by donkeys,” he responded, “There’s a good case to be made that we are less adaptive than the generals of World War I.”

  Yet the Army would have its revenge. Yingling was promoted to colonel, supposedly by the skin of his teeth and only after the direct intervention of the vice chief of staff of the Army, Peter Chiarelli. He wound up teaching at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, a joint effort of the American and German governments. It was not a bad place to land. But in the summer of 2011, Yingling was informed that he had not been selected to be a student at the Army War College, even though his own writings were being studied there. He decided to retire and move to Colorado to teach high school social science.

  None of these developments indicate that the Army has refused to change in recent years or that its generals are always inflexible or that no accountability exists. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan saw some improvement, but it was uneven and took far longer than it had in World War II. “I would say most of the current GO [general officer] crop, from a junior view, is the best I have seen since I was commissioned,” Maj. Neil Smith wrote from Afghanistan early in 2011. He went on:

  War has a way, like it did in WWII, of bringing the true performers [instead of] the garrison performers to the top. You see much less of the very hierarchical/domineering personality sets in the recently promoted general officers. This mission set in particular has rewarded those with interpersonal skills capable of synchronizing and working across the joint force, U.S. government agencies, and foreign partners versus simply being able to lead a military-dominated hierarchy.

  Yet it is unclear how deep the changes go, or how long they will last as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down and the American military establishment shifts back to peacetime mode. It is not difficult to find experienced officers who are uneasy with how today’s generals operate. “They have somewhat abdicated their role in developing their intent or guidance, their vision,” concluded Army Col. Dale Eik
meier, who served as a strategic planner in Iraq. “They’ve subcontracted that out to staff officers to come up with an intent or guidance for them.” To Eikmeier, this meant that “they’re not really showing leadership.”

  As defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld did a poor job at many things, including enforcing accountability. He was wont to loudly criticize and abuse subordinates, but he rarely actually fired them. His successor, Robert Gates, did an admirable job of restoring accountability. Gates was far quicker to react to failure, and he did it with a minimum of emotion. “With Gates, it is not to destroy people,” commented Gen. Mattis, who succeeded Petraeus as head of Central Command in 2010. “It is not vicious. It is just pure accountability.”

  Gates moved on from the Pentagon in July 2011, replaced by Leon Panetta. But whoever holds this position, it is difficult for civilian officials to reach below the highest levels. That means the job of enforcing accountability at all but the top level of the military must be done by the generals themselves. When Gen. Martin Dempsey took over as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the fall of 2011, he was the first Army officer to hold the job in a decade. Reporters were told of two changes in his office furnishings, each representing a major figure in Army history. Dempsey displayed in his office a portrait of George C. Marshall, but he chose to use the desk of Douglas MacArthur. It was a mixed signal. In addition, David Petraeus, who had seemed to promise a new direction for the Army, retired in the summer of 2011 to become director of the CIA. It seems his influence on the Army will be limited. It is possible that he might be brought back on active duty, but it seems a good bet that there will not be a “Petraeus generation” of generals. Indeed, even as Petraeus was leaving the Army, the service seemed to be edging toward burying the entire experience of counterinsurgency as a failed experiment. Dempsey stated early in 2012 that the Army was moving away “from counterinsurgency as kind of our central organizing principle” and instead would adopt “a global networked approach to warfare.” The commander of one of the Army’s most important training centers, Brig. Gen. Clarence Chinn, was even more emphatic, stating at about the same time, “We’re going to go back and make sure we’re well-grounded in the basics and fundamentals of war fighting.” In this reflex the Army of today resembles the Army of the 1970s, which turned away from Vietnam and refocused on conventional warfare skills. The problem with this, of course, is that it is more likely to be dispatched to fight messy small wars than conventional state-on-state battles featuring tanks and fighter aircraft. One of the lessons of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for potential adversaries is that it is difficult to wage conventional warfare against the Americans, and far more effective to hide in the population and employ guerrilla techniques.