The response from Tom Ricks that ARMY magazine declined to carry in its pages

During the summer, the Best Defense is in
re-runs. Here are some favorites that ran in late 2012 and in 2013. This item originally
ran on Feb. 26, 2013.

You'd think ARMY
magazine would welcome a free piece about Iraq from a best-selling author. Apparently
not -- they have declined to run this response I wrote to their two articles
about my new book, The Generals. I
even said they could run it as a letter to the editor, but no. They didn't say
why. I am sorry to see them turn away from what might have developed into a
good, vigorous debate about what the Army should learn from its time in Iraq.

Make up your own
mind -- below is the letter apparently too hot for them to handle.

Sirs:

Thank you for carrying articles about my new book, The Generals: American Military Command From
World War II to Today, in both your January and February issues. I appreciate
the attention. However, I think that Brig. Gen. John S. Brown's commentary, "Do
We Need an Iraqi Freedom Elevator Speech?", requires a response.

General Brown makes several questionable assumptions in the
article.

The first is that in 2003 the Army did in fact understand
unconventional warfare in Iraq. Sure, there were isolated instances of
individuals, such as the one he cites. I interviewed many of these people and
wrote about many of them in my 2006 book Fiasco.
But one swallow doesn't make a summer. General Sanchez and other senior leaders
did not act upon such instances, and instead focused on large-scale
indiscriminate roundups of "military age males." The fact that they did not
take advantage of those moves underscores the point of my new book that the
troops did not fail in Iraq, but that
the Army's leaders at the time did.

Also, throughout General Brown's piece, there runs an
assumption that having more troops would have made a major difference during the
initial year of occupying Iraq. This is an unproven point. In my opinion, given
the poor leadership of Lt. Gen. Sanchez, having twice as many troops on the
ground in 2003-04 might well have resulted in having twice as many angry Iraqis
driven to support the insurgency. Given the indiscriminate roundups and
associated abuses that occurred that year by the units at Abu Ghraib, by the 82nd
Airborne and by the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Anbar Province, and by the
4th Infantry Division in north-central Iraq, such a result seems
more likely than not. In addition, those roundups stuffed thousands of people
into the detention system, overwhelming the system and clogging the
interrogation of suspected terrorists, as well as helping provoke riots inside
the jails.

Did the Army really give a good account of itself in Iraq,
as General Brown asserts? If so, I would counter, why did it take the Army
until early 2007 to begin operating effectively in that war? The preceding
period of maladaptive operations, from 2003 to 2007, lasted longer than the
U.S. Army fought in World War II.

General Brown depicts the Army as a surprisingly passive
institution. Things just kind of happened to it. For example, in passing he
mentions Lt. Gen. Sanchez. But who selected Sanchez to command in Iraq? Who
thought that he was the best person for the job? Did that just happen to the
Army, or was its leadership simply a group of bystanders? The Army had a
responsibility to provide
the very best of leadership, talent, resources, and priorities to the fight in
Iraq. Did it?

Yes, I understand that the relationship between the defense
secretary and the Army's leadership was toxic in the spring of 2003, a crucial
period that shaped much of what followed. But this does not excuse the failure
to have an adequate Phase IV plan for Iraq, or for Army generals to say that
they had all the troops they needed if they indeed believed they did not, or to
insist that things were going well when it was clear to anyone on the streets
of Baghdad that they were not. All this cannot be blamed on Ambassador Bremer
and other civilians. At any rate, I would say that part of the duty of generals
is to speak truth to power, even with it makes civilian overseers
uncomfortable. It is not clear to me that the Army's generals did this in
2004-06.

The bottom line is that General Brown's commentary could
only be written by someone who never actually witnessed our war in Iraq.

The issue here is more important than someone simply
misunderstanding my book. I worry that a narrative is emerging in today's Army
that holds that the military pretty much did everything right, but that the
civilians screwed things up. Certainly, the Bush administration made huge
errors in invading and occupying Iraq. I've written more than one book that
looked at those.

But the military also made mistakes, and I don't see those
being addressed. This should be a time of sober reflection, not of hunkering
down and refusing to listen to reasonable criticisms. Why do we not see now
reviews akin to the Army War College's 1970 study on the state of the officer
corps? Until we see such hard, probing analysis that does not spare the
feelings of our generals, the accounts of the Iraq war that capture the
attention of the public and the Congress are indeed likely to be written by
outsiders.

Sincerely,

Thomas E. Ricks

Washington, DC