The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  As part of any such review, personnel policy should be scrutinized, especially the policy of troop rotation. This is a difficult issue for which no good answers exist, and even Marshall might despair of solving it. Even so, the policy should be reviewed with an eye to better grasping the damage it does to American combat effectiveness—and especially to military leadership. The unit approach to rotation used in Iraq almost certainly was better than individual rotations, which in Vietnam were shown to be demoralizing and damaging to cohesion. Even so, the problems associated with unit rotation remain all but unexamined—and there are many, even if the Army does not wish to examine them. In Iraq, as each unit left, the successor unit tended to pronounce the situation a mess—and then announce twelve months later that it had solved the problem, only to have the next unit go through the same sequence. Also, Iraqis soon learned how to manipulate the rotation cycle. This was not just a matter of insurgents becoming increasingly sophisticated, and so having a better learning curve than the rotating Americans did, but also of local allies using the twelve-month horizon of American commanders to suit their own ends. An Iraqi general once related how it was easy to handle a new American commander working on a one-year timeline. First, he said, you would decline to meet with him, or simply not show up. Next you could have a series of sessions at which you resisted the changes he was recommending. In the third phase, you would begin to agree but argue over implementation. Finally, about eight months into the talks, you would slowly begin making his desired changes. By month ten, he noted, the American commander’s focus would shift to his impending redeployment, and the pressure was off. And then, at month thirteen, the American commander’s successor would sit down for a cup of tea, and the cycle would begin again. In order to deal with this problem, the Army and the Marine Corps should examine the possibility of keeping division and brigade commanders and staffs in place and rotating individual battalions and companies underneath them. Here again, such an approach would be difficult to manage and would introduce new problems, but it would likely be more effective in combat and other operations in the long term.

  In another personnel matter, the military should recognize changes in the health of middle-aged officers and stop retiring them after twenty years of service. Senior sergeants, especially infantrymen, often do need to retire after twenty years in the field, but officers alternate tours in the field with desk jobs and therefore tend to suffer less damage to their knees and spines. Today, many forty-three-year-old lieutenant colonels who retire on the full pension to which they are entitled after twenty years of service look like relatively young men, not even middle-aged. They have many years of good service left in them, and many would be willing to provide it.

  To implement such changes and make them work, the military would need a major shift in its attitudes, beginning at the top with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Army chief of staff, and the rest of the Army’s senior generals. Leadership should not be seen as a matter of officers taking turns or waiting in line, as sometimes seems to be the case in the Army. Leading soldiers is a privilege, not a right. Just as getting that position is earned, so should keeping it be. The other side of the coin is that, if failure is punished with relief, success can be rewarded with fast promotions. A colonel who has notably thrived in leading a brigade or regiment in combat should not be shuffled off to an obscure one-star apprenticeship in the backwaters of the Army but instead should be considered immediately for a top post in a division—as either its commander or its assistant commander. This notably was not the case in the first years of the Iraq war, when one’s performance as a combat commander seemed to have little or no bearing on subsequent posts. Simply comparing the performances of different commanders was treated as an act of questionable taste.

  In the same vein, how officers are prepared and selected should be examined. Are we picking determined, dedicated, flexible team players in the Marshall mold? If not, why not?

  In an environment where success and failure actually are noticed and acted upon, it would be good to help more general officers succeed. To do this, commanders need to be educated less on what to think and more on how to think—and also on how to adapt. They need to learn how to learn. All too often, our generals think like jumped-up battalion commanders—that is, lieutenant colonels. “We don’t educate [our officers] to be generals,” a Special Operations colonel told researchers from the RAND Corporation a few years ago. This can be remedied, and should be, because critical thinking is an essential tool of top command. Some people have the ability instinctively, while others have cultivated it on their own by closely studying military and cultural history, but it also can be taught, especially by sending rising officers to pursue advanced degrees at elite civilian institutions, where many of their basic assumptions will be challenged. As an added benefit, many would learn to write clearly, a skill notably lacking in many American generals in this era of PowerPoint bullet-point briefings that lack verbs and causal thinking and all too often confuse a statement of goals with a strategy for actually achieving them. Along the same lines, parts of American military culture sometimes take a dim view of writing for professional journals. This should be changed, and can be, if credit is given by promotion boards for publishing notable and influential articles.

  We also should consider new programs for generals, tailored to their needs. A one-year course of preparation might aid new brigadiers in their duties. Another possibility would be to send them to live overseas in third-world countries for a “sabbatical” year of broadening. These officers could study at a university, train with a foreign military, or even do Peace Corps–style work. While this would be difficult to fit into the current military career pattern, there is no good reason, in an era when senior officers tend to be far healthier than they were decades ago, to force people to retire after thirty or even thirty-five years of service.

  Yet such unconventional career moves will have a long-term beneficial effect only if they are seen not as distractions but as stepping-stones to promotion and choice assignments. To improve the crop of officers contending to become generals, we also should make intermediate-level military education—the midcareer schooling given to majors and lieutenant commanders—more rigorous. Right now, some U.S. military staff colleges seem to operate as disguised yearlong bonding-and-relaxation sessions. One of them has become so lax and uncompetitive that rules were instituted to prevent more than half the students in certain courses from receiving A’s, leading to jokes about “no major left behind.” Selective entrance examinations, frequent paper-writing assignments, and reading loads equivalent to those at civilian graduate schools should be adopted, except when there is a clear and compelling reason not to do so. The taxpayer is entitled to nothing less, especially in an era of tightening defense budgets.

  Again and again, Marshall likely would return to the theme that when choosing senior leaders, the needs of the nation should come before the needs of the individual or even the service. Do not just assign to a mission the next available officer of appropriate rank, as the Army seems so often to do. “It is depressing how so many of our senior officers and officials in Vietnam, especially at the middle levels, were picked on the basis of normal institutional criteria or even the convenience of the institution rather than because they were regarded as particularly qualified for the job,” Robert Komer wrote in his clear-sighted autopsy of why the U.S. government failed in the Vietnam War. Similarly, in the summer of 2003, when the Army made Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez the commander of U.S. military operations in Iraq, it did so essentially because he happened to be on hand. That is a negligent, even reckless way to handle the national interest. Marshall spent much of his energy studying the jobs he had to fill and picking the right people for them. He selected Eisenhower for supreme command in Europe not because he thought Ike was a fine fellow but because he believed Ike possessed the specific combination of ambition, steel, and cooperativeness that was needed fo
r leading a coalition effort. Ike, in turn, kept Patton viable because he knew that at some point in the war the Americans would be chasing the Germans across northern Europe, and he calculated that Patton was temperamentally perfect for leading such a grand pursuit.

  We also should reward commanders who cultivate and maintain cultures in which their subordinates feel free to exercise initiative and speak their minds freely. Gen. Petraeus was fond of quoting a sign put up by a company commander in western Baghdad: “In the absence of orders and guidance, figure out what they should have been and exercise vigorously.”

  As a fallback position, military leaders should at least consider ways to keep alive the careers of outliers and innovators such as David Petraeus and Paul Yingling. It is probably asking too much that such types, who make many officers uneasy, become generals during peacetime. But there should be ways to keep them in the military so that they can be called upon during a crisis. The thought was put best by Yingling: “Intellectuals are most valued when the dominant paradigm begins to break down. In this moment of crisis, the heretics become the heroes, as they have already constructed alternative paradigms that others haven’t considered.” So, he concluded, “in large organizations, the challenge is to keep the skeptics from becoming extinct.”

  It is easier to prescribe all these changes than to foresee how they might be implemented. We should not look to Congress for legislative remedies. There has been a steady decline in the number of members of Congress who understand the military, especially the intricacies of the internal workings of personnel policies. In 1969, there were 398 military veterans in the House and Senate; a decade later there were 298. At the beginning of the 112th Congress, in 2011, there were 118. Congress should be asked to do more, but realistically, the best that can be expected is that some of its members might support and protect efforts by civilians in the executive branch—or dissidents inside the military—to initiate needed reforms.

  Any attempt to make such reforms likely will be attacked by the military bureaucracy. The Army’s civilian overseers, both in the Pentagon and in the Congress, should be wary when the Army rejects suggested changes and defends current personnel policies on the grounds of “fairness.” This tends, in reality, to be code for placing the interests of officers and the institutional Army above the interests of the rank-and-file or of the nation as a whole. The foremost example of an abusive policy being promulgated in the name of fairness was the six-month command tour in the Vietnam War, which spread the burden of combat among officers but without a doubt resulted in more soldiers being killed and the war being prosecuted less capably—and so did not serve the nation. If self-sacrifice is in fact an Army virtue, then the officer corps must sometimes practice it as a matter of policy. There is no clear way to formalize this warning, but one informal way is to keep in mind this question: Fair to whom—the officer corps or the soldier and the nation?

  This leads to the final and most important step, which is to abide by the belief that the lives of soldiers are more important than the careers of officers—and that winning wars is more important than either. This is both fundamental and all that needs to be said to justify the previous steps. As Marshall understood during World War II, instilling that attitude is healthy for a military that protects a great democracy.

  If the military declines to follow this course and fails to restore the traditions of accountability, then it seems likely that the current trend will continue: When generals don’t fire generals, civilians will. Thus it is really not a question of whether to relieve generals but of who will relieve them. As unhappiness with the conduct of a war increases, pressure will build to get rid of someone. That is the message of the historical record of the past sixty years. Since the Army lost the tradition of relief in the Korean War, each conflict has instead been marked by the firing of top commanders by civilians: MacArthur in that war, Harkins and Westmoreland in Vietnam, Woerner before Panama, Dugan during the Gulf War, Wesley Clark after Kosovo, Casey in Iraq, McKiernan and McChrystal in Afghanistan. These ousters are necessarily clumsier and tardier than internal military moves would be, because they are less like routine maintenance and more like blowing the safety valve on a boiler. But, as with a boiler under pressure, even a late move generally is better than the alternative of doing nothing.

  Gen. George C. Marshall was the father of the modern U.S. armed forces, the military of the American superpower. He is shown at left in October 1941, just weeks before the United States entered World War II. Despite his position atop the biggest armed force in history, he was foremost a soldier. Right, he washes his face in Normandy, France, in June 1944, not long after the D-Day landings.

  Pictured here in World War I are two officers who would play key roles in World War II. Left, Marshall’s reserve is evident in his expression. Right, Douglas MacArthur’s imperiousness was already well developed.

  Four unusual lunch partners in Casablanca, Morocco, in January 1943. From left: White House adviser Harry Hopkins (an unlikely ally of Marshall’s throughout the war), Lt. Gen. Mark Clark, President Franklin Roosevelt, and, back to camera, Maj. Gen. George Patton. Roosevelt’s relations with his senior generals were a model of civil-military relations.

  Maj. Gen. Terry de la Mesa Allen (left), commander of the 1st Infantry Division, and Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley examine a map in Sicily in July 1943. The following month Bradley would fire Allen, one of his most successful commanders—only to see Gen. Marshall send Allen back to Europe in command of another division.

  Two of the major players in the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, one of the most memorable engagements in American military history. Gen. Douglas MacArthur (center) ordered Maj. Gen. O. P. Smith (right), commander of the 1st Marine Division, to charge northward to the Chinese border. Smith resisted that directive and so probably avoided a major military catastrophe that could have wiped out thousands of Marines.

  Before and after Chosin: Above, members of the 7th Marine Regiment, part of Gen. Smith’s 1st Marine Division, march toward the reservoir in November 1950. Left, the following month, Smith stands at a Marine’s grave after the battle.

  MacArthur fired: Above, President Truman’s order removing him in April 1951. Below, the ousted general speaking at Soldier Field in Chicago two weeks later, at the height of his popularity. At this point he still may have thought he would be elected president the following year.

  Two more doomed Army generals: Lt. Gen. Walton Walker (far left) talks with Maj. Gen. William Dean early in the Korean War. By the end of the year, Walker would be dead and Dean captured by the North Koreans. Dean was the highest-ranking American to be taken prisoner during the war.

  Lt. Gen. Matthew Ridgway (left) would succeed Walker and, early in 1951, turn the war around, in the process undercutting MacArthur’s political standing.

  Maxwell Taylor arguably was the most destructive general in American history. As Army chief of staff in the 1950s, he steered the U.S. military toward engaging in “brushfire wars.” As White House military adviser during the early 1960s, he encouraged President John F. Kennedy to deepen American involvement in Vietnam. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he poisoned relations between the military and the civilian leadership. He was also key in picking Gen. William Westmoreland to command the war there. Here Taylor (center) meets with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and President Kennedy.

  President Lyndon Johnson tries to clean up the mess he inherited in Vietnam. His relations with senior military leaders were even worse than Kennedy’s. Here he meets with advisers on his Texas ranch in December 1964. Counterclockwise from Johnson (third from left): Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, Army Gen. Earle Wheeler, Deputy Defense Secretary Cyrus Vance, Gen. Harold Johnson, Adm. David McDonald, Gen. Wallace Greene, Maj. Gen. Chester Clifton, and Defense Secretary McNamara. Johnson would eventually treat the Joint Chiefs in a manner that Marshall would not have tolerated.

  Gen. Creighton Abrams (far
right) would succeed Westmoreland as the American commander on the ground in Vietnam and by many accounts did a much better job. Here he speaks with Maj. Gen. George Forsythe, then the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division.

  The life of Gen. William DePuy (left) is in many ways the story of the modern U.S. Army. He fought in a hard-luck unit in Normandy in the summer of 1944. He commanded a division in Vietnam, where he was credited with inventing the term “search and destroy.” And he played a central role in the post-Vietnam rebuilding of the U.S. military. Here he instructs a soldier in tactics, his favorite subject.

  Two future generals deeply influenced by their time in Vietnam: Colin Powell (above right) stares upward after being injured in the crash of the helicopter behind him. Norman Schwarzkopf (below left) helps carry a wounded South Vietnamese soldier.

  Powell and Schwarzkopf (above) during their month of triumph, February 1991, when the forces under their command made short work of the Iraqi military. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney sits next to Powell. But Schwarzkopf and many other generals missed the message of the Battle of Khafji (below), resulting in a war plan that instead of destroying the Iraqi military pushed its most important units back into Iraq.

  Schwarzkopf’s odd handling of his generals was best illustrated by his miscommunications with Gen. Frederick Franks (above). Franks suffered from Schwarzkopf’s overestimation of the effectiveness of the Iraqi foe. Schwarzkopf would describe Franks in his memoirs as jittery and overcautious.