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.