The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Most notably, the American military, as of mid-2012, has not steeled itself and launched a soul-searching review of its performance in Iraq and Afghanistan. Without such a no-holds-barred examination, akin to the Army review of the state of its officer corps conducted as the Vietnam War wound down, it might not do much better the next time it goes to war. But as long as it cares more about not embarrassing generals than it does about taking care of soldiers, it is unlikely to undertake such a review.

  EPILOGUE

  Restoring American military leadership

  T he American ground force today is a long way from being George Marshall’s Army, but it is not clear whose Army it has become. The post-Vietnam Army was created in large part by Creighton Abrams, William DePuy, Donn Starry, Maxwell Thurman, and Paul Gorman, but even their far-reaching influence is fading. It did not become the Army of David Petraeus—but nor is it, thankfully, the Army of Tommy R. Franks. Today’s Army is deeply strained, having fought for more than ten years since 9/11, with soldiers serving multiple combat tours while 99 percent of the American population has been asked to sacrifice nothing except its time and privacy when going through airport security checkpoints. Now the Army and the other services are facing a decade or more of budget cuts. The Army will be shaped by young officers, likely veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, who in the coming years will rise to command the force.

  What would George Marshall do if he could come back and fix things?

  First, I think that he would instruct his senior generals in how to interact with civilian leadership. He likely would tell the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top officers also to keep their social distance from the president, as he had with Franklin Roosevelt. At the same time, he would tell the generals to insist on being heard out by the president and his advisers—and to be candid when doing so, in a continual and vigorous dialogue. All too often in recent decades, our generals have believed that politicians should get out of the way once a war has begun. That is wrong. Rather, generals and politicians must, in the American system, collaborate in all three phases—entering a war, executing it, and ending it. In Supreme Command, the best book ever written about how presidents should oversee generals, military historian Eliot Cohen, who succeeded Philip Zelikow as counselor at the State Department, recommended a far more engaged approach. We do not need presidents to get out of the way of generals. Rather, we need presidents who are willing, when necessary, to push generals out of their own way if they do not succeed:

  Generals are, or should be, disposable. Statesmen should not, of course, discard them thoughtlessly, nor should they treat them discourteously. Yet all four of these statesmen [Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, and Ben-Gurion] showed themselves able to treat generals in line with Gladstone’s first requirement for success as a prime minister: “One must be a good butcher.” Indeed, it was the most mild-mannered of the four, Lincoln, who relieved commanders the most frequently.

  This is a good summary of how the system should work, with superiors, both military and civilian, rewarding those who succeed and removing those who fail. In wartime especially, this approach promotes to senior ranks those officers who tend to be younger and more energetic and so better able to adapt to the situation at hand.

  When civilians do not intervene, they add inertia to a military incentive structure that already tends, in its current form, to reward inaction. All too often, it is easy for civilians and military superiors to back away and to defer to the excuses of commanders at the front, which in recent years has proven to be a recipe for risk-averse approaches. As one battalion commander said about his captains in Afghanistan, “For a number of my officers, success equaled nothing that made them stand out for a year. So the fewer times you left the FOB [forward operating base], the fewer times you interacted with the locals, the fewer times you did anything—that was success.” This was a rational choice on the part of his subordinates, because in today’s Army, he said, the “B minus and C plus” officer fares better than the “A performer” who occasionally takes risks and fails.

  Second, in assessing the strategic situation today, Marshall might conclude that having adaptive, flexible military leaders who also are energetic, determined, cooperative, and trustworthy is probably more important now than it has been at any time since he was chief of staff. For most of the time since then, the primary task of the American military establishment was to deter or counter the might of the Soviet Union. The tasks were known and the strategy was set, so not much change or strategic revision was required. When other missions surfaced—most notably the wars in Korea and Vietnam and, as the Cold War ended, dealing with Iraq—the military proved less successful and perhaps prone to stalemates, which generals then blamed on politicians.

  Tolerance of below-average performance has a corrosive effect on the quality of leadership. Brig. Gen. Mark Arnold, an Army Reserve commander who in his civilian career was, among other things, an executive at General Electric, wrote that in one recent year, 94 percent of Army lieutenant colonels were promoted. That rate, he observed, “rings loudly of institutionalizing mediocrity.” The personnel equivalent of Gresham’s Law is that bad leaders drive out good ones. Indeed, Arnold noted that a study in 2010 by the Army Research Institute concluded that “the main reason talented people leave is not the lure of a lucrative civilian career, but because mediocre people stay in and get promoted.”

  The Army has been far better at improving tactically than it has been at improving strategically. That is worrisome, because we now are living in an era of strategic uncertainty, just as Marshall was in his first years as chief of staff, between September 1939 and December 7, 1941. Old adversaries have disappeared or are diminishing, and new ones may be emerging. In addition, nonstate foes, such as terrorists, loom much larger in American calculations than ever before. Thus, we have a strong need for leaders, both military and civilian, who not only can handle old tasks in better and more efficient ways but also can address new and different tasks. Civilian leaders should signal the military that they will tolerate robust debate with energetic military leaders, even when such discussions become uncomfortable. Sometimes contentious dialogue is a sign of healthy discourse. In exchange, military leaders should make it clear that when decisions are made, they will execute their orders vigorously—and will not share their dissenting positions with reporters.

  Usually, everyone gets it wrong at the beginning of a war, military historian Sir Michael Howard once observed: “In 1914 every army of all the belligerent powers shared a common doctrine of the dominance of the offensive and the inevitability of rapid and decisive campaigns. All navies believed in the dominant role of the capital ship.” The point, Howard continued, is not to be right at the outset—an almost impossible task—but to be able to change as a war unfolds. “In these circumstances when everybody starts wrong, the advantage goes to the side which can most quickly adjust itself to the new and unfamiliar environment and learn from its mistakes.” So, he said, the goal is to develop the “capacity to get it right quickly when the moment arrives.”

  How might such capacity be developed? If the Army is serious about having an officer corps that is adaptive, it needs to try to carry out a major cultural shift that enables it to embrace accountability, rather than shun it. This is not as difficult as it might sound. Generals should be relieved not just for personal foibles but for poor performance in command. A few such actions would send signals that would rapidly change the culture. As Col. Steven Jones wrote, “Accountability provides the motivation for change.” Put another way, accountability is the engine that drives adaptability.

  Marshall would know, of course, that the first step toward improving the capacity of leadership is to reinstate his policy of swift relief, with the option of forgiveness. This policy itself must be flexible, letting senior leaders err and learn. Yet persistent failure should lead to relief—which actually can benefit an officer if it stops him before he moves fr
om small but serious failures to unredeemable, catastrophic ones. And it certainly helps soldiers who have been suffering under an inept commander. Also, success rarely can be rewarded adequately if failure carries little or no consequence. Nor will the standout officer be watched and imitated as he or she should be.

  Also, there should be second and even third chances. It is essential to follow a policy under which relief from command does not terminate an officer’s career. In cases in which the firing was not caused by a character flaw or an unredeemable pattern of poor judgment, relieved officers should be assigned to good posts that carry the possibility of additional promotions and even a return to combat commands. Relief then could be seen as it was in World War II—not as a sign of the system failing but rather as a sign that the system is working.

  Marshall would remind top civilian and military officials to be poised to relieve commanders especially at the beginnings of wars. Yes, moving people causes turbulence, but it is better to endure friction in the personnel system than it is to unnecessarily lose people and battles. Also, when making such reliefs, it probably is better to announce them, in order to remove the mystery and dispel rumors, and also to make it clear that the removals are not punitive and might simply be a matter of bad luck or of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hiding firings only feeds the rumor mills and so unnecessarily increases uncertainty. A relieved commander’s peers and subordinates need to be informed about why something has happened so they can learn from it. There is so much uncertainty in war that what simple steps can be taken to reduce it should be used when possible.

  Reliefs should also be disclosed to the public. The Army’s leadership should place its duty to the nation over the perceived privacy rights of generals, or else it risks damaging the faith and trust of the people. Failure to relieve is sometimes a form of leadership indiscipline, and failure to disclose reliefs sometimes is an abuse of the stewardship role of Army leaders.

  In relieving leaders, the Army can learn from the Navy, which has maintained the practice of relief even as the Army has lost it, with more than 120 commanding officers relieved from 2000 through 2011. This parade of dismissals might occur, in part, because the Navy does not screen junior officers adequately and so only ousts them later in their careers. But the Navy also operates in this way in part because the sea service still steers by the approach Adm. Arleigh Burke summarized with his comment that “the first thing that a commander must learn is not to tolerate incompetence. As soon as you tolerate incompetence . . . you have an incompetent organization.” What the Army should avoid is the unforgiving approach the Navy takes, in which relief from command usually results in leaving the service and often a kind of isolation and disgrace.

  Implementation of the changes would require top-level attention and coordination for several years. In order for a policy of swift yet forgiving relief to succeed, it would need to be employed frequently enough to eventually be perceived as unexceptional. That is not the case now. One day in 2010, while on a research trip, I was discussing this book with a smart retired Army colonel near the Army War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. When I said I would recommend in it that the Army restore the tradition of relieving unsuccessful generals, this officer, though steeped in military history, muttered, “Why not just court-martial them?” and then walked away, cutting off the conversation. If relief continues to be seen in that way, as an extreme move tantamount to bringing legal charges, then we will not be able to revive the Marshall approach to relief.

  Marshall might then consider several smaller, somewhat tactical steps. One possibility to ease the transition to restoring the practice of relief would be to reexamine Gen. Starry’s proposal to make all command positions, from platoon leader to four-star general, probationary for their first six months. “There’s no way to tell whether you’ve picked good commanders until you put them in the job,” he observed. He suggested that the Army have a system under which a new commander who was not working out, for whatever reason, could be removed without detriment to his career. “The system should be willing, under a least-retribution or no-retribution policy, to say that this sort of work isn’t for that fellow, and in the first six months or so take him out if he doesn’t meet the standards.” However, it is unlikely that Marshall would endorse such a move, because it would inject the friction of uncertainty, especially in wartime.

  As a side benefit, a policy that punished failure and rewarded success that was implemented with integrity and care for the institution and its people likely would increase the retention of talented junior officers. A 2011 study at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government of young officers who had left the military found that their top reasons for doing so were not the high operating tempo or the chance of being maimed but rather two other factors: “limited ability to control their own careers” and “frustration with military bureaucracy.” The former officers overwhelmingly believed that the Army did not reward talent with faster promotions and did not do a good job of matching talent to jobs. The authors of the paper noted that an exodus of talented young officers is not just a problem in itself but also “a symptom of larger underlying institutional challenges.” Among the recommendations made by these departed soldiers was “Be willing to fire people for poor performance (not just send them to another unit or higher echelon where they will do less work, which actually exacerbates the problem by giving them a more impressive resume).” What the Army system valued more than talent was the ability to not “rock the boat,” another commented.

  Marshall also would consider updating personnel policies, something he actually spent a good deal of energy on as Army chief of staff before the United States entered World War II. He might even consider serious “360-degree” evaluations, in which superiors, peers, and subordinates would all assess the strengths and weaknesses of military leaders. The Army has tiptoed toward this for years. As it currently stands, such evaluations are available but only on a semivoluntary basis, with officers required to seek one such review every three years. However, the results of these evaluations are not included in officers’ performance reviews. As retired Sgt. Maj. Erik Wilson put it, this means that the voluntary reviews likely “will have minimal impact in ridding the Army of toxic leaders, but it will help the good leaders get better.” This sort of half measure only makes the Army look weak on the core issue of accountability. However, in considering 360s, it is also important to ensure that they do not reward the pleasant conformists and punish the brilliant outliers. All too often, an officer is promoted not for professional competence but because he has been deemed “a good guy” or, even more euphemistically, “a great American.” Both are essentially code words for being members of the club. Hence, the use of 360-disgree reviews will make much difference only if it is part of a larger set of changes that introduces consequences for performance, making managers want to search for the effective activist and to avoid those geared for risk avoidance and inaction. Remember Marshall’s prewar letter about Terry Allen and some other atypical officers: “There are very few of them, [who] are of that unusual type who enthuse all of their subordinates and carry through almost impossible tasks.”

  Marshall, alert to new technologies, would recognize that Information Age equipment can help the Army become more agile in personnel policy, such as by letting officers take leaves of absence from the service. Additional flexibility should be concentrated especially in the handling of leadership, regarding questions such as the duration of command tours. Successful senior commanders who have not burned out and wish to remain in place should be allowed to do so until good replacements become available. This would vastly increase the difficulty of managing general officers but would likely increase military effectiveness even more. And that goal, not predictability or making the manager’s life easy, is the real task of military personnel management. “Too hard for the personnel guys” should not be the Army’s default position.

  The Army al
so needs to engage in an introspective study of its performance in the post-9/11 wars. It should examine the good and the bad at both tactical and strategic levels. It should ask whether leaders at each level were held accountable and, if not, why not. The fact that such a wide-ranging review, akin to the study on professionalism done in 1970 as the Vietnam War wound down, has not been conducted is not a good sign.