Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 145

Can't get enough of my new book? Come and talk about the 1st ID in Chicago

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Tomorrow (that's Wednesday,
if you are keeping score at home) Nov. 28, I'll be at the First Division
Museum, just outside Chicago.
The whole thing kicks off at 7:30 pm. I'm looking forward to it in part because
two commanders of the Big Red One, Terry de la Mesa Allen and William DePuy,
are discussed at some length in my book. Oddly similar men -- terrific combat
commanders who got in hot water with their superiors.

If you can't make it, here
are some substitutes: I did a discussion on FireDogLake over the weekend of my new book. And right here is my discussion with Kojo Nnamdi and his listeners, an informed bunch. I
also was ranting on Howard Kurtz's CNN show on Sunday. Help, I am becoming critical
of the media!

Ricks mocks Fox, which cuts and runs

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Maybe I am getting
cranky as I go into my third week of book tour. I was on Fox News yesterday morning and said (as I had
indicated beforehand that I would) that the whole Benghazi story has been hyped. The anchor pushed back, so I defended my position. My view -- that Fox is openly
supportive of the Republican Party, and that the Benghazi incident was hyped in
part because it occurred near the end of the presidential campaign -- induced
heart flutters in some quarters.

I was surprised
that they cut me off instead of doing the manly thing and riding to the sound
of the guns. Whattabunchawimps. It reminded me of something that Col. Nathan R. Jessup
once said. Or, as a defense reporter commented to me yesterday, "The
story is not about Benghazi, it's about how Fox
can't tolerate criticism."

Some guy apparently claiming to be a spokesman for Fox
misinformed the Hollywood Reporter
that I apologized afterwards.
Unfortunately the Hollywood Reporter
didn't ask for specifics, or even ask me about it -- and I am not hard to find.
(Dude, that's an automatic F in Journalism 101.)

Finally: Okay, no network is responsible
for the hateful comments made by its viewers. But for what it is worth, here is
a sampling of e-mails I got from supporters of Fox. I was surprised at how few
wished to engage on the facts and instead just spewed nasty thoughts.

This was from Donna: "What
a sleazel Tom Ricks is spreading is Obamaganda! Guess he thinks his opinions,
etc. are so superior to half the country that he will say and do anything."

From Thomas: "You just showed what a liberal ass looks like
with his pants down. What an idiot!"

Jim wrote, "I saw your
Fox News interview on the HuffPost portion on my AOL page. I thought your 'performance' was really arrogant. Smug assholes like you is why I don't watch
the news anymore. You guys have divided up into either Obama bashers or Obama
ass kissers. As for what happened in Bhengazi [sic] it is obvious the Fox News
reporter you smartassed to does not know what happened there. You know what
though? You don't know what happened either. I think it deserves a little
scrutiny instead of a 'happens all the time' attitude that you offered
in your bullshit appearance on Fox."

From LH: "Shove off commie."

On the other hand, I served under Sinclair in Iraq -- and that’s a big reason I got out

By David Warnock

Best Defense same veterans' bureau

I
was surprised to see General Sinclair's
name
splashed all over the headlines recently. Surprised, and then elated. I was in
the 2nd HBCT 1 ID when Sinclair was passed the guidon and we were re-flagged as
the 172nd SIB. We were all tremendously excited for Sinclair to be our new
brigade commander. I came up in 1-18 IN, the unit he had commanded in OIF II.
When I showed up to the unit as a cherry E-1 in late 2005, the man was a
legend. According to my team and squad leaders who had served under him, he
could walk through walls and levitate buildings. They would have followed him
anywhere. 

By
the time he took over I was a sergeant and team leader myself, Col. Burton had
not been particularly well liked by us and we were thrilled to have Sinclair in
charge. However, the reality of his command time proved to be much different
than expectations. The brigade was cut up and reconstructed as a combined arms
battalion. My company, A 1-2 was attached to task force 3-66 AR and sent to
Grafenwoehr while the rest of the brigade stayed in Schweinfurt. This was a divisive
decision as Graf was still under construction when we moved in. There were not
enough barracks and as new replacements showed up one man rooms quickly turned
into two man rooms, or worse, NCO's were forced to room with new privates. Our
company area was not yet finished so we worked a mile away in the training area
in old billets. This was a logistical nightmare considering not many soldiers
had cars. Then came the great eye-pro proclamation. Sometime in summer 2008
Col. Sinclair took the "train how you fight" mantra to extend the practical
application to wearing soft caps and eye pro in garrison, everywhere. 

Beyond
all of those things, something was fishy in the leadership. The field grades
had changed. In 1st ID we were gifted with, for the most part, exceptional
officers. That was no longer the case. Our new round of commanders now made
chicken shit their first priority. We put up with it, of course, by telling
each other that this will all change when we get back to Iraq. 

It
didn't. Task Force 3-66 AR was detached and sent to Diyala province to assist
25th ID in clearing out the remaining al Qaeda in Iraq forces. The bull shit
got so neck deep on the FOB that being out in sector was almost relaxing. On
FOB Hammer, our battalion commander, Lt. Col. Rago, made a policy that we had
to march everywhere we went and an NCO had to escort his soldiers everywhere.
When we were staging for patrols we had to be in full kit or garrison uniform,
no in-between. I was once yelled at by our S-3 for standing by my truck wearing
a soft cap with IOTV. The officers became more concerned with our vehicles'
wire mitigation system than with our soldiers' morale. 

The
effects were profound on my generation of NCO's. We had all been through
Baghdad together, we knew our shit. We were young, fit, and competent. However,
we had a low tolerance for chicken shit. And that was something the Blackhawk
Brigade excelled in producing. Most of us loved being Sergeants -- but none of us
re-enlisted. Almost my entire generation ETS'd after that deployment. Those who
stayed in tended to be the shitbags who were promoted because they'd
re-enlisted. We were broken, but not by the enemy or back-to-back deployments,
or even by the stop-loss.

We
were broken by the pathetic leadership of 
Sinclair and his underlings. I often wondered what the hell had happened
to the earlier Sinclair versus the one we got. Whenever he would turn up, it
was to deliver some monotonous speech about our place in history. I once had
the dubious privilege of taking my men to a formation on our rare day off from
the COP, QRF, and maintenance to hear Sinclair explain his
"plankholder" club. A "plankholder" was someone who came
over with the pilgrims and performed manual labor in return for their passage.
I thought, in that 115 degree heat, "You mean an indentured servant, you
fuckhead." He then bestowed this honor on all the CO's and 1sg's, and
then biggest cheese dicks and lap dogs, not a proper leader among them. Also,
one of the only two females in the task force was made a
"plankholder" as well. Which, given recent developments, makes me
wonder.  

I
hope you are able to find this letter useful -- Sinclair, Rago, these men were a
massive reason for me getting out. The leadership took a serious turn during
my enlistment, I wish I knew why. 

David Warnock served
two tours in Iraq as an infantryman in the US Army and was honorably discharged
at the rank of sergeant in 2010. He is currently a senior studying sociology at
The Ohio State University.

Wait a minute!: I served under Petraeus in Iraq and I saw the difference he made

By Blake Hall

Best Defense veterans' bureau

"Tell me how this ends." General Petraeus posed
that rhetorical question to historian Rick
Atkinson in 2003. Petraeus then was commanding the 101st
Airborne during the invasion of Iraq. His question captured the fundamental
disconnect between what we were doing in Iraq - removing Saddam Hussein - and
the purpose of war, famously defined by Carl Von Clausewitz as the
"continuation of politics by other means." Because regime change is not a
coherent political strategy, Petraeus rightly wondered what our strategy would
be for Iraq, even as his soldiers advanced towards Baghdad.

I served under General Petraeus in Iraq after
he assumed command in February of 2007, and I have the utmost respect for him
as a leader, a soldier, and a man. I led a platoon that hunted high value
insurgent leaders in cities throughout Iraq, including Mosul, Lake Thar-Thar,
Baghdad and Karbala. Tactically, we were very good at capturing targets, but,
strategically, the reality on the ground under General Casey, before General
Petraeus assumed command, was farcical.

Prior to Petraeus' arrival, we sallied out from
our fortress like Forward Operating Bases to drive around Mosul or Baghdad for
a few hours at a time, only to leave the city with the insurgents as soon as we
returned to our base. Worse, we were frequently blown up by roadside bombs
while we were driving around, for insurgents could emplace explosives on the
streets with impunity while we were sleeping back at our base. I could never
hope to adequately articulate the deep sense of frustration that stems from
frequent orders to patrol streets with no clear purpose when said streets are
laced with explosives meant to kill you and your men.  It was like being the British during the
Revolutionary War except we had no strategic design to rule Iraq indefinitely.

We were targeted with bombs because Sunni Arabs
had no incentive to integrate into a post-Saddam Iraq. Though they had ruled
Iraq as heirs to the Ottoman Empire, they immediately became second
class-citizens once American democracy arrived in the country because they only
represented about 20% of the country's population. Paul Bremer's Coalition
Provisional Authority further decreed that no Baath Party member -- effectively
every Sunni in Iraq -- could hold any position in government. Then Bremer
disbanded the military, the one institution the Sunnis had left,
single-handedly creating a bloody insurgency that caused untold human suffering
for American and Iraqi families alike.

It was that context that drove the Sunnis to
invite Al-Qaida into Iraq in order to fight for their political rights. Over
tea in a house in Dora, an Al-Qaida stronghold in Baghdad from 2004 - 2007, a
Sunni sheikh from the Janabi tribe recounted to me the proceedings of a
gathering of Sunni sheikhs in 2003. He told me, "Some said the Australians, the
British and the Americans are the power now, we should work with them. Others
said we must fight." He paused and gave me a wan smile. "Maybe we should have
chosen differently."

General Petraeus possessed an intimate
understanding of these dynamics. After Paul Bremer exponentially increased the
size of the Sunni insurgency by disbanding the Iraqi Army, it was then Major
General Petraeus who made a trip down to Baghdad to let Bremer know that, "Your
policy is killing our troopers."  It was
General Petraeus who stabilized Mosul through the same methods he would employ
four years later, after much bloodshed and suffering, for the entire country.
And it was General Petraeus who understood that unless he himself wrote the
ending for Iraq, the American military might suffer the taint of defeat for the
first time since Vietnam.

General Petraeus inherited a crisis when he
took command of Iraq in 2007. The crisis had three components. First, a
ruthless offshoot of Al-Qaida, not present in Iraq when Petraeus made his
remarks to Atkinson, had established itself in Iraq after the Sunnis invited
them into the country out of desperation. Second, Sunni Arabs were being
slaughtered by Shi'a Arabs in Baghdad. Third, after four years of war, a
coherent political strategy for Iraq was non-existent.

Petraeus correctly
perceived that the American public and policymakers alike would conflate the
establishment of security in Iraq with victory. Michael Hastings has tried to
deride General Petraeus for that insight, citing a quote from Petraeus'
Princeton dissertation where he wrote, "What
policymakers believe to have taken place in any particular case is what matters
- more than what actually occurred." Rather than deriding General
Petraeus, however, he should be thanking the man who was able to extricate the
American military from a hopeless conflict without the taint of defeat. General
Petraeus was subordinate to civilian policymakers; the failure to set a
definable political strategy for victory in Iraq did not rest on his shoulders.

Iraq was
not, nor did it become, a clear and present danger to the national interests of
the United States of America except for the moment when Al-Qaida established a
presence on Iraqi soil. Petraeus homed in on that emergent threat to American
interests and he crushed the Al-Qaida network by brilliantly integrating
American military efforts with the Sunni tribes. I know because I hunted those
networks night and day with my men. Petraeus pushed us hard, I lost twenty
pounds in the months after he took control due to the operational tempo, but,
under his leadership, we decimated Al-Qaida in Iraq.

Today, we
are an Army that is not defeated and we do not have to navigate the
near-impossible question of how to extricate ourselves from the conflict in
Iraq, for our most brilliant General has solved that problem for us in a
masterstroke. Because of Petraeus, my men and I will be able to put our
grandchildren on our knees and tell them with pride about how we defeated
Al-Qaida in Iraq - never mind that they weren't there when we invaded; the
civilian policymakers bear the blame for that development. Because of Petraeus,
more American service members will return to their families, and more veterans
will live whole and fruitful lives.

I cannot
stand the hypocrisy of my country. We have presidents, presidential candidates
and corporate executives who fornicate and adulterate with impunity, some when
their wives were stricken with cancer, yet this one man who has given his
entire life to America errs one time and the media and hacks like Michael
Hastings attack him with impunity. There should be no mass audience for a
situation should remain a private issue between General Petraeus and his wife.

David H.
Petraeus spent the better part of a decade living in shitty little trailers in
Iraq and Afghanistan defending the freedoms that we all enjoy. That he is a human
being, and therefore fallible, should not come as a shock anyone. His were true
accomplishments. He erred in his personal relationship, yet he saved the lives
of thousands, and probably tens of thousands, with his intellect. The flaw is
miniscule when contrasted against the full body of his accomplishments.

If we are
angry, then we should be angry at the effect of war and separations on the
military divorce rate, which has steadily gone up as our men and women in
uniform spend more time away from their families. We should be angry at the
self-righteous tone of a country that insanely demands perfection from those we
respect. We should be angry that the incompetent policymakers who started these
wars without purpose are writing books and going on vacations despite the trail
of human suffering and empty beds they have left in their wake.

General
Petraeus allowed me, and my men, to tangibly achieve the strategic defeat of
Al-Qaida in Iraq, even if Iraq itself has slipped under Iranian influence.
Because of his leadership, the fifteen months in Iraq that my men and I spent
in Iraq actually matters in some meaningful way. Under his steady hand, we
achieved enough to get out of that country without severely compromising
American prestige and the finest military that America has ever enjoyed. It is
a national tragedy that we would let a personal scandal deprive the CIA of the
most brilliant military mind in the country.

Blake Hall , a former Army captain, led a reconnaissance
platoon in Iraq from July 2006 to September 2007. He is the founder of Troop ID , the first digital authentication engine capable of verifying military affiliation
online.

How can I embed with the British army?

They
just had a "best
curry" competition. A lamb biryani won. I am not sure that is really a
curry, but I am not gonna quibble as long as I get me a heaping plateful.  

December 2012

Cover Image: 






Link: 


http://www.foreignpolicy.com/node/141...



Preview Link: 


http://www.zinio.com/express3?issn=00...



Story1 Section: 


Cover Story



Story1 Title: 


The 2012 Global Thinkers List



Story1 Link: 


http://www.foreignpolicy.com/2012glob...



Story2 Section: 


Feature



Story2 Title: 


The Stories You Missed in 2012



Story2 Link: 


http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles...



Story3 Section: 


David Rothkopf



Story3 Title: 


The Opposite of Thinking



Story3 Link: 


http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles...



Issue Number: 


197

Turkey time

I'm off to a family Thanksgiving, so this will be the last set of
blog posts until Monday of next week.

A worrisome report on the eroded combat skills of an Army Stryker regiment

The 2nd
Cavalry Regiment (Stryker) is reamed out in an internal Army study for its performance last month at the Joint Multinational
Readiness Center, a training ground in Germany. It is worrisome that this unit
appears to have deteriorated so much, yet paradoxically reassuring that the
Army is using its maneuvers identify shortcomings.

The
conclusions are hair-raising. Everybody from the way senior leaders understand
command to the way privates poop comes in for criticism. Here are some of the
highlights:

--The report found "Commanders
and command sergeant majors tethered to command posts, rarely visiting
subordinate units. This results in a lack of mentoring and face-to-face
interaction to judge understanding of the operational situation and intent and
time to make on-the-spot corrections." And those corrections clearly were
needed. 

--Commanders give
lip service to "mission command" (basically, telling subordinate leaders what
to do but not how to do it) but in reality micromanage by issuing a stream of
"frago" orders that make minor changes in organizations and assigned
tasks.  "Despite
emphasis on Mission Command over the past year, most commanders still do not
feel comfortable allowing subordinates to operate broadly under their intent."

--Commanders also do not get out enough.  "Many
commanders are tethered to the command post, in essence becoming a chief of
staff. Commanders need to execute battlefield circulation, visiting subordinate
and supporting commanders in the field to ensure clear understanding of intent
and orders."

--Units are so
reliant on digital connectivity that when it was down, it resulted in a "total
loss of  situational awareness of
operations."

--Senior
NCOs didn't understand their role in sustainment.  Logistics and medical evacuation of the wounded also stunk.

--Soldiers don't even know how to do basic field
sanitation, and were "defecating
randomly on top of the ground in
unit positions."

"Hit the leather and ride, take
it all in stride," indeed. 

I asked
Col. Keith Barclay, commander of the regiment, what he thinks of the report.
This is his response: 

-- 

Thank you for the note and interest in our rotation.  It was a fantastic training event that
all our soldiers and multinational partners benefited from greatly as we
developed our leaders and soldiers to operate in support of unified land
operations.  As to the report you
reference, I have not seen the written training center observations from our
training center as of yet, but the after action reviews were very positive.

I would
refer you to the 7th Joint Multinational Training Command, commanding officer
for his comments regarding any other specific data; he was the deputy exercise
director for this exercise and would be in a position to answer your specific
questions."

--

Tom again. This is what Col. Lee Rudacille, the commander
of the training center, had to say:

-- 

We appreciate your interest in our recent Decisive Action
Training Environment rotation involving the 2nd Cavalry Regiment.  However, the document that you've
obtained is not a comprehensive assessment of the Regiment's overall
performance or capability.  I
simply recommend waiting for additional material to be available before making
comment on the unit's "overall" performance.

Please keep in mind that the purpose of the DATE is to
give Army units a highly stressful, complex and challenging environment to
evaluate current strengths and weaknesses.  We capture the results in order to sustain the positive, and
to improve areas identified as requiring additional training.  As you know, in the last eleven years,
the Army has focused almost exclusively on COIN operations.  In the last few years, we've done so in
environments with established infrastructure and set logistics systems.  We have Soldiers in leadership
positions who have only trained for and conducted COIN operations for the
entirety of their careers. This is partly why the DATE was designed - to place
us into something entirely different and to challenge us to incorporate a
fundamentally different way of leading through Mission Command.  It involves a highly complex set of
threats and it deliberately stimulates leaders to think about future
battlefields.  The training
environment is a safe place to learn hard lessons and prepare for future
fights.  It is not unreasonable or
remarkable that we found areas in which we must strive to improve.  The Army is a learning institution; we
cannot be afraid to hold a mirror to ourselves and honestly see our need for
improvement. 

As to the report itself, this particular document is one
of several that are for our internal use and not a comprehensive assessment.  Many of the topics in the report were
brought up by our evaluators and the 2CR Soldiers themselves during the AAR so
that we can learn and improve. 
These issues were not central to whether or not we were successful
overall when you consider that the DATE required that we combine offense,
defense, and stability operations within the context of Wide Area Security and
Combined Arms Maneuver, often simultaneously.  They are simply areas that we will improve on.

Again, I am
pleased our training in Europe has captured your attention, particularly so
since the Army is increasing its focus on training and developing leaders and
Soldiers for our future missions which I believe we do well. "

--

Tom
again: I asked Col. Rudacille if he had read the CALL report, and he wrote back
thusly:

--

Yes,
I've read the document.  Again, I
remind you that it isn't an AAR - it isn't comprehensive, it only looks at
select areas and it is not indicative of the unit's overall performance.  As the Exercise Director, I observed the
unit enjoy many successes during the training, and I witnessed learning at all
levels of the formation.  As
written, the report reflects events temporal in nature during a single training
event, the actions reflective of Soldiers who have operated in a COIN only
environment over the past several years, and a training environment designed to
challenge leaders at multiple levels. 
It is only partly accurate in that it omits the review of the entirety
of the DATE rotation containing only a small percentage of the total findings -
findings which will reflect the tremendous learning which occurred when
confronted with a difficult mission set."

FP’s book club discussion of 'The Generals'

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In case you didn't notice it  (it is hard to find on the site),
Foreign Policy has been holding a "book club" discussion of my new book.  Here is my response to the comments, which are very
interesting.

-- 

First, thanks to all who participated. I learned from
these discussions. I agree with much of what they wrote, but of course here
will focus on our points of disagreement.  

--I agree with Tom Donnelly that it would be
good if Americans paid more attention to the competence of our senior military
leaders. Unfortunately, as we have just seen, they seem to care more about the
sex lives of our generals than the real lives of our soldiers. The real scandal
of Iraq was not that the public over-valued David Petraeus, but that it
tolerated his three failed predecessors. Apparently mediocrity is acceptable if
it keeps its pants on.

--I like and admire retired Lt. Gen. James Dubik, but I disagree
with his concluding paragraph on the health of our Army. I am especially
worried by the state of its general officer corps. Yes, there are terrific
officers like him (his first project since leaving active duty is getting a doctorate
in philosophy, by the way) and H.R. McMaster. But there are not enough of them
to form a critical mass. They remain outliers, often seen by more conventional
officers as "50-pound brains" or even smartasses. I think the
majority of Army generals are under-educated conformists who tend to veer
toward risk-averse mediocrity, a tendency reinforced by the system of mindless
rotation of commanders we have used in our recent wars.   

--Likewise, Tom Keaney is a fine fellow
and an astute military analyst, but I think he is too quick to provide an alibi
for today's generals. Yes, it is more difficult to recognize success in small,
unpopular, messy wars like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan than it was in
World War II. Nonetheless, it is possible. Matthew Ridgway clearly turned
around American fortunes in the Korean War, succeeding where other generals had
failed. Creighton Abrams did better in Vietnam than William Westmoreland did,
though perhaps not as much better as some people believe. David Petraeus
succeeded in his mission in Iraq-he got us out of there-where his three
predecessors had failed.

I think Keaney's sense that the world is just too hard
lets off generals like Tommy Franks, who simply didn't understand his job. Yes,
the civilians above him were badly mistaken. But Franks seemed to think it was
a good idea to push al Qaeda from Afghanistan (a small, unstable Muslim nation)
into Pakistan (a big, unstable Muslim nation with nuclear weapons). Franks also
apparently believed that once he had taken the enemy's capital, he had won-when
in fact, that is when the real wars began in both Afghanistan and Iraq. I would
conclude from this and other mistakes that the Army had failed to prepare
Franks to be a general.   

--Bob Killebrew has every right to
invoke his own version of the ghost of George Marshall, especially because he
was the guy several years ago who told me I should learn more about Marshall.

But when I interviewed Marshall's ghost, contrary to
Killebrew's sense, Marshall was not at all pleased with the state of American
generalship. Lots of little things puzzled and irked him. Yes, as Bob
suspected, he didn't understand why the Army has neglected professional
military education, which should be its crown jewel during peacetime. He also
was shocked to see so many retired generals making a bundle in the defense
industry, and also endorsing political candidates and using the name of their
services while doing so. Both struck Marshal as abuses of the profession.

But what bothered him most, the old white-haired general
said in a slow, steady, quiet voice, was the failure of four-star generals to
carry out their roles in dealing with their civilian superiors. He was shocked
by the failure of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to speak truth to power on several
occasions, most notably during the Vietnam War and during the planning for the
invasion of Iraq. Indeed, he almost lost his temper when discussing how Gen.
Richard Myers allowed himself to be pushed around by Donald Rumsfeld. "How
can you go to war without a strategic rationale?" he wondered. 

--Jason Dempsey, like many readers
of the book, thinks that my emphasis on relief is too simple. The problem, he
says, is rather that the entire Army general officers corps is overly focussed
on tactical issues, and so if one small thinker were ousted, he simply would be
replaced by another. (This is my interpretation of what Dempsey wrote, but not
his words.) So, he believes, some other sort of remedy is necessary. I
disagree. I think that a few well-placed, undisguised removals would encourage
the others, as it did with the peers of Admiral Byng.

But where I think where Dempsey and I really part ways
is in our assessment of the adaptiveness of others-that is, the raw material of
our generals and their successors. I think that there are many intelligent,
determined, ambitious Army officers who would get the message that the ability
to think and adapt is valued by the institution, and is the route to
generalship. A little accountability could go a long way.

In other words, relief should not be seen as an end in
itself, but rather as one the two most basic tools of personnel
management-hiring and firing. I say, reward success, punish failure, and
promote the promising, and you will get more of the adaptive generals that our
nation needs -- and our soldiers deserve.   

The Navy fires them two by two

Two skippers of amphibious ships were relieved
for misconduct just weeks before they were due to turn over command. This makes
24 for the year, surpassing last year's total, according to the official scorekeeper.