Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 157

Was Smedley Butler representative of a radical trend in Depression-era Marines?

[image error]

Were the
radical left views of General Smedley "War is a Racket" Butler more widespread in the Marine Corps than we remember?

I ask
because I was reading a history of the 1932
Bonus March on
Washington by disgruntled World War I vets, and was surprised to see that the
Army didn't want the Marines at the barracks and 8th and I SW in D.C.
called out to help, supposedly out of fear that some of them "would side with
the revolutionaries." (p. 143)

You
know, typical left-wing jarheads.

Remember Brig. Gen. Sinclair?

We
knew Jeff
Sinclair got rushed out of Afghanistan back
in May. Now we know why: Forcible
sodomy and a kitchen sink of related charges.

As
of today, he is the Army's most famous
brigadier general.

Quote of the day: Did President Obama become the man Cheney wanted to be?

[image error]

From Ta-Nehisi Coates in a New
York Times column, meditating on the president as
a cucumber-cool natural-born drone assassin:

During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama earned the
G.O.P.'s mockery. Now he has earned their fear. It is an ambiguous feat,
accomplished by going to the dark side, by walking the G.O.P.'s talk, by
becoming the man Dick Cheney fashioned himself to be.

Tom
again: But if Obama truly possessed the killer instinct, why is VP Biden still
on the ticket? I think dumping him likely would have added one point to Obama's
vote in November. And that could mean a lot. 

Was Captain Bligh a micromanager?

As it happened, almost immediately after finishing the
Steve Jobs biography, I read Nordhoff and Hall's Men Against the Sea, about
Capt. William Bligh's epic voyage across the South Pacific after being ousted
by the mutineers who took HMS Bounty
from him. He sailed 3,600 miles in an
open 23-foot boat that was carrying 19 men, losing only one en route (to
hostile locals). Most people couldn't get a boat loaded like that across the swimming
pool. He brought it across an Atlantic-wide space.

Like Jobs, Bligh was a toxic leader -- yet clearly the right man
to pull off such an extraordinary feat of seamanship.

The 2011 Army survey: Actually, Tom, there is a lot to worry about in there

By Jörg Muth

Best Defense directorate of mission command

Thank you for posting the link to
the annual survey of Army leaders. To answer your question I think we
should start worrying now. While the report was exhaustive, transparent and
well crafted, it came from within the system and thus suffers heavily from betriebsblindheit -- company blindness.
That is a notable German word that describes the inability of a person who was
forever with a company to see certain problems. I read the report with the eye
of the sociologist, historian, and Army fan.

The first worrisome fact is that only 15.7 percent of uniformed
personnel were willing to take part in that survey. It is most likely that many
of two major groups whose responses would be most important did not reply --
those in combat units because they are too busy and those who want to get out
anyway because they are too disillusioned already.

There are discrepancies in the findings that are not solved.
When 70 percent of the leaders rank the leadership capabilities of their superiors as good, why do only half of the questioned want to emulate the behavior of their
leaders, and why are only 44 percent able to learn from them? After all, 70 percent point out that
their superior leads by example.

How is it possible to get so many favorable ratings on
leaders when 58 percent of those who think that the Army heads in the wrong direction
reflect that the Army is unable to retain the best leaders, and only 44 percent think
that the personnel promotions are accurate? The same level of identified toxic
leaders over the years shows that there is something wrong with the system of
weeding out incapable leaders.

Surveys like this from active duty soldiers need to be
corroborated with surveys from officers who left the service because they
believed the good leaders were not promoted. There was a survey not long ago
for West Point officers who left the service and they gave that as their second
most important reason to leave, just after the Army bureaucracy (82 percent).
Especially the agreement to leadership capabilities expressed in higher ranks
points out to the tendency that those who were the most streamlined were
promoted.

Obviously most (85 percent) leaders of the current survey showed
false confidence in their cross-cultural interaction abilities because the
feedback from foreigners about behavior of U.S. Army officers is way less
positive.

If the leadership is so outstanding, why do only 43 percent of
those stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan rate the morale of their unit as high or very
high? Samuel Stouffer in his seminal sociological work, The American Soldier, had recognized
in 1949 that in such surveys you need to distinguish between combat and
non-combat units. I predict that the leadership ratings for combat units will
be way worse if they were singled out for this survey. It is easy to lead by
example a staff stationed in a FOB, compared to a rifle company in Helmland,
Afghanistan. The tail of the U.S. Army is by now so big that only a fraction of
the leaders served in combat units, yet they are the most crucial.

Morale seems to be an issue and that needs to be addressed.
91 percent of the Majors and Colonels claim to be satisfied with their careers, yet
their personal morale level is at 63 percent (high or very high).

The idea of the survey is excellent, but what can be done to
improve it next year?

Make it shorter instead of more detailed to
motivate soldiers to participate. Focus on key leadership elements.
Bring in experts who know the Army but are not
in the Army for an out-of-the box perspective.
Distinguish between combat and non-combat units.
Corroborate the data of the survey with other
surveys, especially from soldiers who have left the Army.
Give room for quality answers and not only
closed questions. Before World War II, the German Army routinely used to ask its
juniors officers during the district defense examination for their opinion on a
certain topic and thus got a wealth of valuable input and creative ideas to
improve.

Jörg Muth, PhD, studied History, Sociology, the Law and Peace- and Conflict
Studies. He is an expert on the US Army -past and present. Jörg is the author
of Command
Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces,
1901-1940, and the Consequences for World War II. The book was placed by the Army Chief of Staff, General Raymond T.
Odierno, on his professional reading list. In June Command Culture received the 'Distinguished Writing Award' of the Army
Historical Foundation.

How the Australian commander in Afghanistan wound up in a psych ward

Maj.
Gen. Cantwell's account, here, is worth reading. "The next day I wave goodbye to Jane, who is in
tears, through the wire-impregnated glass of a door in a psychiatric ward. I am
locked in. When I find my way to my room, I sit and weep like a child. How did
it come to this? What the hell am I doing here?"

How Romney could still pull it out: Repudiate Bush on Iraq and Afghanistan

By Charles A. Krohn

Best Defense guest columnist

Mitt Romney, facing the clear
prospect of losing the presidential election, needs to throw a long ball. I
suggest he repudiate the invasion of Iraq and the handling of the war in
Afghanistan.

If  Romney demonstrates
courage by breaking with the past, it may restore vigor to his foundering
campaign. Some old Bush advisors may feel they are being thrown under the bus,
but the numbers favor the less-rigid and political savvy youth whose votes
could swing the election.

By not renouncing Bush's costly errors explicitly, Romney endorses them by default,
troubling many party loyalists looking for a clean break with disastrous
Republican decisions. And by having as his advisors several people who
championed "Curveball" (the phony CIA informer) and Ahmed Chalabi (the exile
who was a favorite of several senior Pentagon officials), he implicitly
endorses their failures.

Republicans should take pride
in the obstinacy of George H.W. Bush, who opposed the invasion of Iraq and
perhaps persuaded Brent Scowcroft to denounce the idea.  If Romney could
draw some inspiration from GHWB's fortitude, it would separate and purify the
party from its past miscalculations and perhaps swing the election.

(Author's
note: As a veteran of the Vietnam War, I share the anguish of survivors of
recent and on-going conflicts who mourn the loss of family and friends. It will
take several generations to overcome this pain. Nor can their sacrifices be
dismissed as useless exercises. They obeyed orders and executed the foreign
policy of their times. Errors in policy cannot be laid on their doorstep nor
blemish their memories. Amen.)

Charles A. Krohn is the author
of The Lost
Battalion of Tet. Now retired to Panama
City Beach, Florida, he served in the
Vietnam War, in Iraq in 2003-2004 as public affairs adviser to the director of
the Infrastructure Reconstruction Program, and later as public affairs officer
for the American Battle Monuments Commission.

Are Syria, Iraq and Iran the new axis of evil? And can Pakistan make a fourth?

It is interesting how Iranian influence is growing in Iraq. I keep on thinking of Joel Wing's conclusion that Iraq is still more violent than Afghanistan.

More babbling at the UN today.

And what about Pakistan? Can they join the axis? Or have they already, and we just don't want to say so? (There is a lot to be said for hypocrisy in both
diplomacy and child-rearing.) 

What did the new head of NDU write about while at the Army War College?

The
title of General
Martin's paper in 2000 was "Jesus
the Strategic Leader." On the face of it, not necessarily a bad
paper. I mean, making the argument would be an uphill climb, but Jesus of
Nazareth did initiate a spiritual revolution that transformed large parts of
the world. And he was into the trinity long before Clausewitz. In the hands of
the right thinker, it would be interesting to place Jesus in a strategic
context. (It also would be interesting to compare him as a strategic leader to
Moses, Siddh?rtha
Gautama Buddha, and
Mohammed.)

But not
in the hands of Martin. John
Schindler, a professor of national
security affairs
at the Naval War College, writes in his blog that Martin's essay is a stinker.
"The paper is poorly
done," Schindler writes. "I would have failed it . . . . In terms of academic quality, this is
crap, pure and simple."

I think Schindler is harsh but correct.
Parts of the paper read like parody. Not only are we told that Jesus assembled a "top team," it turns out he
would have made a good battalion commander. (All this time, I thought he had
been a corporal.) "Jesus recognized the value of conducting AAR's," Martin writes. With a straight face.

Indeed, Jesus was practically an Army Ranger. He
knew and taught the importance of traveling light, Martin observes. (Didn't he
say somewhere in the gospels, "Don't forget nothing"?) He also understood the importance of taking time
to recharge his batteries, we are told. And he knew how to pick his battles,
rendering unto Caesar.

Judas is mentioned in the paper, but Martin does
not grapple with the issue of how such a great strategic leader could be so
wrong about one of his 12 closest subordinates.

I could go on. But it is like shooting fish in a
barrel. At some point, one must just avert one's eyes from this mess. It does
make me wonder why someone thought he was just the guy to steer NDU
through a stormy era.
That said, his bio says he has a PhD in engineering management from MIT, and
that his dissertation subject was organizational change.  

Pakistani cabinet minister asks Taliban or al Qaeda (or anyone else) to whack anti-Muslim filmmaker for $100,000

I am
not kidding. A member of the Pakistani government is calling on our
enemies to kill an American.

This is
from the odd
Wikipedia entry about the guy: "He has
complain from pathan youth. He always uses to say that pattan youth does not
know about Kalabagh. They should get all the knowledge regarding to this
project and should come forward to protest against it. Whenever you pay a visit
to his office you will come to know that how tremendously he explains the whole
project." 

The Pakistani government said he
was expressing his own opinion.