Generals

Before getting to the meat of this post I should make two statements. First, is that I neither like nor dislike General Petraeus. I do not think he was as successful and great as many say he was nor do I think he was merely a PR expert who fooled us all into thinking he did something. I think the right answer is somewhere in between. He didn't win the Iraq War, but he did some things that allowed to take advantage of the situation (principally enforcing unity of effort and command that had been sorely lacking under previous commanders). The second caveat is that I have not read Tom Ricks' new book The Generals. While I have read Tom's articles on the book, I have not and will not read the book for the simple reason that I do not think that I could give it a fair review. I did write this after all. So any comments after this that talk about Ricks are made exclusively on his blogging and articles on the topic, not on his book, which I hope contains a lot more detail than its shorter versions.

Now that that is out of the way, let us turn to Dexter Filkins' new New Yorker piece, "General Principles: How good was David Petraeus?"  This is an unserious piece that plants Filkins firmly on Team Petraeus in the way that Stephen Colbert asks "Is he the best or is he the best ever?"  To set up the answer to that question, Filkins spends some time on modern generals:

In wars without front lines, American generals tend to stay inside fortified bases, where they plan missions and brief political leaders via secure video teleconferences. Their credentials are measured as much by their graduate degrees as by the medals on their dress uniforms. They are, for the most part, deeply conventional men, who rose to the top of the military hierarchy by following orders and suppressing subversive thoughts.

Emphasis mine. The first couple of sentences very clearly show that Filkins does not actually understand the general officer corps in any way. Have we had generals who never left their compounds? I am sure there have been a few, but they are the exception not the rule. Filkins portrays them as out of touch by misstating what most generals, and almost all general officer commanders, do: battlefield circulation. This is not the same as living in a patrol base with host nation security forces, but that is not what generals get paid to do. Similarly, general officer credentials are not measured by medals (this is, frankly, stupid - most generals have almost the exact same medals) or graduate degrees. They are measured by the commands they had (and essential staff positions) and how well they did in those commands (the bar for "how well" may be disputed), but certainly not by medals. Graduate degrees are part of the calculus, but like everything else takes a back seat to command performance.

Now let us turn to the sentence I italicized. Filkins state quite clearly that generals become such because they are sheep. I ask: where is your support for this statement? As evidence, Filkins provides the data point that in "recent years, eighty-four per cent of the Army's majors have been promoted to lieutenant colonel -- hardly a fine filter."  I know, you're all wondering what that has to do with general officer accessions. In short: nothing. While it is hard to find accurate numbers, it seems that there are about 20,000 active duty majors and about 10,000 active duty lieutenant colonels in the Army. The Department of Defense requires, by regulation, that at least 70% of majors eligible for promotion are selected for lieutenant colonel. Because the Army needs that many lieutenant colonels. And that has nothing to do with promotion to general officer, of whom the Army has 230 authorized (for reference, active duty combat arms branch promote more officers to lieutenant colonel in one year than the total number of generals). This data point is only useful in order to say that this alleged great purging of talent and brilliance is not happening at the 15-17 year mark of officer careers.

So that is not evidence (obviously). Like Ricks, Filkins trots out General Tommy Franks and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez as examples of the GO corps' mediocrity. (He also hits on General J.D. Thurman for not pronouncing Prime Minister Maliki's name correctly in 2006 - a data point so asinine to not warrant much rebuttal. If we promoted generals based on their linguistic skills we would have a smaller bench than we do now.) The problem with this approach is that neither writer has shown that officers more capable from these two retirees' cohorts were not selected for general in spite of this non-selected officers' superior capabilities. This is quite simple: if you want to say the generals we have (or have had) are mediocre, then you need to show how the not-mediocre officers were passed over for promotion and why. There is not, of course, much data to support that kind of analysis, but it is the logical discussion that needs to be had.

We can lament the fact that Franks and Sanchez were both promoted to general officers. But who were they competing with? Where are all of these brilliant go-getters who were passed over? What Ricks (again, in shorter form) and Filkins fail to address is the dearth of quality officer candidates from the early- to mid-1970s. Matriculation to ROTC and West Point from the late 1960s into the mid-1970s was not the best crop of candidate officers this nation has seen. There were years where West Point nearly did not fill all of its slots. West Point also suffered the worst ethics scandal in its history in 1976. What year groups were Franks and Sanchez? 1971 and 1973 respectively. General George Casey, another favorite beating horse of the general officer corps, was from the 1970 cohort. While there were some very fine officers commissioned in this era, I would suggest that these gentlemen were actually representative of the some of the best officers eligible for general rank. Smart guys did generally did not want to go to Vietnam. Or to an organization as broken as the U.S. Army after Vietnam.

But the most glaring hole in this discussion is Petraeus himself. If he is as good as Ricks and Filkins like to think, how did he become such a high-ranking general? There are two logical answers: 1) Petraeus is a sheep like every other general or 2) Ricks' and Filkins' thesis is incorrect. There is a third possibility that an exception was made for him, but that there might be exceptions runs against the "mediocre generals" meme and cause us to wonder why there are not more exceptions. If we look at Petraeus, we see a man who earned a PhD at Princeton University and who helped codify population-centric counterinsurgency into Army doctrine. But we also see a man who served as an aide to four generals (talk about back-slapping to get ahead...) and who tried to implement his counterinsurgency doctrine in Afghanistan and failed. I suspect if we put our personal biases aside, we would see that Petraeus, while quite smart, is really about as good his cohort (and certainly better than Franks and Sanchez who were unequivocal duds). Which are probably the best the Army could provide based on when these men joined.

Filkins' piece is full of bad history and illogical statements in order to puff up his hero. And while he is wrong about Petraeus, he is also wrong about generals in, well, general. Petraeus made it to the top by being as good as he could while also doing all the networking he could, like anyone with ambition in an organization. But it is false logic and intellectually dishonest to parade Franks and Sanchez as the model general officer before giving us Petraeus as the savior of the Army. The quality of officers should be distributed normally. Petraeus, Franks and Sanchez may very well be in the tails, but I doubt they are so distinct from the bulk of the quality of their cohorts, such as Generals Ray Odierno, Lloyd Austin, and Martin Dempsey (also from this generation of officers). Odierno is an especially applicable example of my point here. In 2003 and 2004 he reflected the Army he served and yet was able to adapt to the changing situation in Iraq as the operational commander during the Surge. Possibly a more impressive feat than what Petraeus', but it remains that the line between "good" and "bad" generals is a very fine line indeed.

Our generals are by no means perfect, but it is a lie to say they got where they are because they purposefully did not rock the boat. Competition to succeed is very intense. And yet we must remember that, particularly at the highest levels, generals are ultimately selected by the civilian leaders of DoD and the White House. Don't like Tommy Franks? Then ask Secretary Rumsfeld why he did not fire him - only he and the President had the power to do so. I also do not worry about the future of the Army generals. I think that the generals we have had and have today are just fine and reflect the Army they have grown up in. And that includes having studs and duds where delineating between the two is often difficult. Like every organization. I also firmly believe that Petraeus' fall is not the death-knell for a quality general officer corps. I think that the generals from cohorts of the 1970s have been below average from other cohorts (even if the individual generals are probably as high of quality compared to the cohorts who were not selected for general), we will see a significant increase in quality from cohorts of the 1980s and 1990s. Officers who served as battalion and brigade commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are the officers who understand the nuances and challenges of modern warfare. I assure you that mediocrity is not something that can be attributed to this group of fine officers.

Military reading lists, take 1,000,000

On Monday, John Arquilla published a critique of the U.S. Military Academy's "top ten military classics" – content and title both sourced to Tom Ricks – in which he proposed a "supplement" to the West Point list covering "the unequal struggles that have seen guerrillas, bandits, and commandos waging 'wars of the knife' against empires and nations." Arquilla's piece ran under the ridiculous and desultory sub-hed "Ten books that are better than The Art of War."

As I mentioned on Twitter* this afternoon, the West Point list is unimpeachable. The books that comprise it are so canonical as to be easily identifiable by just the name of the author: Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Jomini, Corbett, Mahan, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Delbrück, du Picq, Douhet. They are the very definition of "military classics," spanning thousands of years of the best thinking on strategic theory, the relationship between war and politics, and human factors in war.

The only inclusions that are even remotely controversial are the two I've listed last: Ardant du Picq's Battle Studies is widely misunderstood and unfairly blamed for the offensive à l'outrance and the horrors of the First World War, while Giulio Douhet's The Command of the Air is rather more fairly criticized as the discredited theoretical foundation for strategic bombing—the paradoxically-titled, empirically barren, and almost wholly speculative warfighting doctrine in which bombing civilians produces decisive strategic effect. 

But du Picq was (with Clausewitz) among the first modern military analysts to grapple with the reality that war and battle are fundamentally human endeavors, and to try to develop doctrinal concepts that were based solidly on a consideration of the fighting man's morale, mindset, and natural aversion to danger. (In this way he anticipated the later work of men like S.L.A. Marshall and Dave Grossman.) The real du Picq is almost unrecognizable in Arquilla's caricature:

For a more operationally oriented study of land battles, West Point chose Ardant du Picq's Battle Studies. This is a curious choice. Col. du Picq was killed in the Franco-Prussian War, but his belief that good morale could overcome concentrated firepower animated French strategic thought up to and during World War I—with near-catastrophic results.

This seems almost certainly to be an example of judging a book by its cover, as Battle Studies is hardly an "operationally oriented study of land battles." (It's instructive to note that a better translation of the title, Etudes sur le combat, would be something more like "studies on fighting" or "studies in combat"; the book is most definitely not a catalog of battles.) While historical cases are obviously included, the volume is far more accurately read as a meditation on the influence of changing technology and the evolving character of warfare on the army's raw materials: the men who fight and die. The very first paragraph of the book reads like this:

Battle is the final objective of armies and man is the fundamental instrument in battle. Nothing can be wisely prescribed in an army—its personnel, organization, discipline and tactics, things which are connected like the fingers of a hand—without exact knowledge of the fundamental instrument, man, and his state of mind, his morale, at the instant of combat.

And what of du Picq's juxtaposition of the ancient combatant's mindset with the soldier of his own era?

But let us look at man himself in ancient combat and in modern. In ancient combat:—I am strong, apt, vigorous, trained, full of calmness, presence of mind; I have good offensive and defensive weapons and trustworthy companions of long standing. They do not let me be overwhelmed without aiding me. I with them, they with me, we are invincible, even invulnerable. We have fought twenty battles and not one of us remained on the field. It is necessary to support each other in time; we see it clearly; we are quick to replace ourselves, to put a fresh combatant in front of a fatigued adversary. We are the legions of Marius, fifty thousand who have held out against the furious avalanches of the Cimbri. We have killed one hundred and forty thousand, taken prisoner sixty thousand, while losing but two or three hundred of our inexperienced soldiers. 

To-day, as strong, firm, trained, and courageous as I am, I can never say: I shall return. I have no longer to do with men, whom I do not fear, I have to do with fate in the form of iron and lead. Death is in the air, invisible and blind, whispering, whistling. As brave, good, trustworthy, and devoted as my companions may be, they do not shield me. Only,—and this is abstract and less immediately intelligible to all than the material support of ancient combat,—only I imagine that the more numerous we are who run a dangerous risk, the greater is the chance for each to escape therefrom.

Does this man sound like one who believed that "good morale could overcome concentrated firepower"—this man who argued that "to insure success in the rude test of conflict, it is not sufficient to have a mass composed of valiant men," but that those men must have "good arms" and "methods of fighting suitable to these arms and those of the enemy and which do not overtax the physical and moral forces of man"? Arquilla's evident unfamiliarity with this text underlines its case for inclusion. 

More than anything else, though, du Picq's importance can be best summed up by Michael Howard's poignant observation: 

La solidarité n'à plus la sanction d'une surveillance mutuelle: that has been the problem of morale on the battlefield ever since (MMS, p. 513).

The French is a direct quotation from Etudes: "cohesion is no longer ensured by mutual observation." Dispersion – necessary for survival in the face of fearsome modern weapons – challenges a man's courage, and cohesion through confidence in mutual support is the only way to bolster it. Howard, writing in 1984, recognized the endurance of this challenge.

Douhet is yet more controversial, largely because he is more well-known. The original airpower theorist is easy to criticize. He wrote at a time when the air weapon was novel, when some believed effective countermeasures in three-dimensional space were an impossibility. We should also remember how his contemporaries had been chastened by the destruction of the Great War, and it was widely held that mass armies, modern weapons, and restricted mobility had rendered landpower incapable of strategic decision. Douhet's theory of war – which made no distinction between combatant and civilian and held that overwhelming firepower concentrated on the sources of the enemy's moral and material power could achieve rapid, decisive effects – seems both more plausible and more moral through the lens of 1921. Indeed, David MacIsaac reminds us that Douhet's significance "resides less in his originality than in his being the first to pull together, in one place and in a structured order, ideas widely shared at the time" (MMS, p. 631).

But efficacy aside, the lasting influence of Douhet's ideas is enough to merit his inclusion among the "classics." The consensus view may hold that strategic bombing is theoretically implausible and empirically fraudulent, but the original airpower theorists have at the very least an extremely prominent thumbprint on the history of Air Force doctrine and concepts. While the U.S. air arm eventually moved away from Douhetian bomber-centric doctrine and toward the "anything that flies" conception of airpower elaborated by Billy Mitchell (MMS, p. 635), strategic bombing shares with modern concepts like rapid decisive operations and "strategic paralysis" an interest in identifying and targeting "critical nodes" on which the enemy's entire war effort rests:

Perhaps because they found it impossible to envisage bomber fleets of the size implied by Douhet, some of the instructors [at the Army Air Corps Tactical School] began to wonder whether it might be possible, through careful, scientific study of a nation's industry, to single out particular targets whose destruction would of itself bring to a halt an entire industry or series of industries. If a number of such 'bottleneck' targets could be identified and destroyed, it might be possible, with a relatively small force, to bring an enemy's war production to a halt with almost surgical precision, thereby rendering the enemy incapable of further resistance (MMS, p. 634).

One need only reference the ideas of Liddell Hart, Fuller, Leonhard, Boyd, Rumsfeld, Naveh, et al to see why such plainly fantastical thinking is still noteworthy in the modern day. Whether Douhet was right or wrong – and I do feel quite certain that he was wrong – the unfortunate lasting influence of his ideas about strategic directness through the indirect application of violence means those ideas simply cannot be willfully ignored. 

Having dutifully defended the inclusion of two "classics" Arquilla did not directly attack, I'll reveal the ultimate irony of his complaint that the USMA list is unduly focused on "the 'horizontal' dynamic of clashes of roughly equal great powers armed with the most advanced weapons" (as if this sounds quite like what Corbett was concerned with, or Sun Tzu or Clausewitz!): he didn't look at the whole list.

That's right, the "Top Ten Military Classics" are the first ten volumes listed... on the Officer's Professional Reading Guide Top 100 (auto-downloading .doc) issued by the West Point history department. Among the remaining 90 we find Asprey on guerillas, Galula on counterinsurgency, Linn on the pacification of the Phillipines, Bowden on Somalia, Bellavia and Fick and Junger on the post-9/11 wars, Herrington on the Vietcong and Moore and Galloway on the NVA, Grimsley on the Union Army and Southern civilians and Royster on Sherman and Sheridan. And Bernard Fall, Alistair Horne, Lester Grau, and Dexter Filkins. And Larteguy. And Marlantes. And O'Brien. 

And some dude named Mao...?

(Oh yeah, and even Anton sodding Myrer.)

*Thanks to Kelsey Atherton for collecting those tweets and creating the Storify page I've linked above.

CMR: balance maintained by the divide

CMR is a multifaceted topic with issues at many levels, the major branches of which regard the military’s relationship with the civil population of the state, the military’s function within the state, and the military’s relationship with the civilian government of the state who in turn strives to manage the first two facets in accordance with the values and needs of the state. Often these facets are conflated in debate which in incorrect. Each has issues and solutions that interrelate in various ways but should be considered in turn. As such, I intend here to take a cursory look at the first – the military’s relationship with the civil population. I think we can generalize the second – that the military’s function is to leverage its capabilities to meet state objectives throughout the world – for our purposes here. This is a topic deserving of more depth later as the U.S. military struggles to find its place in the world for the coming decades. The third I’ll discuss at a later date.

CMR Basics

Huntington describes the CMR as the friction between the military’s function and society’s norms:

The military institutions of any society are shaped by two competing forces: a functional imperative stemming from threats to a state’s security and a societal imperative arising from social forces, ideologies, and institutions dominant within the society. Military institutions which reflect only social values may be incapable of performing effectively their military function. On the other hand, it may be impossible to contain within society military institutions shaped purely by functional imperatives. The interaction of these two forces is the nub of the problem of civil-military relations.

He establishes this interaction as the conflict of conservative Military Realism with society’s American Liberalism.  Military Realism encompasses a worldview of “permanence, irrationality, weakness, and evil in human nature” and “stresses the supremacy of society over the individual and the importance of order, hierarchy, and division of function.”  American Liberalism is opposed to this Realism and is defined by five tenets (taken from both Huntington and Michael Desch’s chapter in American Civil-Military Relations: The Soldier and the State in a New Era):

1. indifference to international affairs,
2. application of domestic solutions to international affairs,
3. objectivity in international affairs,
4. ambivalence about war, and
5. distrust of military institutions.

These were not meant to describe the differences between political parties (the only difference between the parties may only apply to the fifth tenet). Liberal versus conservative instead denotes the fundamental differences between the American society as a whole (and the philosophical foundations of the American government) and the institutional worldview of the military mind required to effectively wage wars. This is not unlike other dichotomies proposed by others such as George Lakoff, de Tocqueville, or Herbert Spencer. The “interaction of these two forces” is in reality the clash ideals of individuality and democracy against the ideals regimented and hierarchical life.  Huntington asks the million-dollar question (on page 346 of the Belknap/Harvard edition printed in 2003): “how can a liberal society provide for its military security when this requires the maintenance of professional military forces and institutions fundamentally at odds with liberalism?”

Most of Huntington’s work centers on how the government of the state balances its security with its philosophy. Writing in the mid-1950s, he provides three options to the question above:

1. Cut military forces to the bone, isolating military institutions from society, and reducing military influence to negligible proportions. This maintains the purity of an American Liberal society at the expense of national security.
2. Accept increased military authority and influence but to insist that military leaders abandon their professional outlook and that military institutions be reformed along liberal lines.  This is good for society at the expense of military effectiveness.
3. Society adopted a more sympathetic understanding and appreciation of the military viewpoint and military needs.  This is good for the military but drives society to abandon its liberal heart. 

Interestingly, over 50 years after this was written and following both the transformation to an all-volunteer force and over 10 years of war, America has essentially taken the path of all three options in part. A purely professional force is by nature small. It is a force isolated to garrisons located throughout the country in places where (generally) not a lot of civilians live. Military influence in both political life and international affairs has increased. Society has adopted a more sympathetic appreciation of the military need. And yet military influence has not been reduced to negligible proportions, military institutions and philosophy has not liberalized, and society has not adopted a more sympathetic understanding of the military viewpoint.   

The result of this amalgam solution is a highly professional and effective military that enjoys nearly extensive (if not unlimited) support of that all important element of the Trinity: the people. The military keeps its Realism and society keeps its Liberalism. The political power of military elites is certainly concerning and is no doubt at least partially a result of the support the military enjoys from the population in contraposition to the popularity of civilian government institutions. I think it is important to make the distinction that military elites have not sought out (as a rule) the power and influence they exercise but instead have filled a role they have been asked to fill. (Would retired generals publically support candidates if the political parties did not seek their support for the benefit of the candidate? I do not think so for the most part.) I firmly believe that if military elites are not asked to fill those roles in the future that they will gladly abdicate them to civilians.

What This Means Today

In summation, we are in a situation there is a general balance of the military’s function with society’s norms. In my mind any imbalance is correctable and within an acceptable order of magnitude.  In spite of this and with regard to the people’s relationship with the military, a number of pundits and officials have declared at civil-military challenge or even a crisis, centered upon society’s lack of understanding of the military and their non-participation in military affairs. For example, Admiral Mullen stated in September last year that the “eroding” connection between the military and the people is a “very bad outcome for America […] an outcome that this democracy could not [stand] to have its military essentially detached from its people.”  While not calling for a draft yet, Mullen suggests it may be required in the future to bridge this population-military divide. Similarly, in the past two weeks both Tom Ricks and Stanley McChrystal have made calls for a return to compulsory service and a draft, respectively. Without delving into the particulars and bureaucratic issues of Ricks’ proposal (another topic altogether), both men have argued that compulsory service or a draft would ensure all (or at least more) Americans have “skin in the game” when making decision of war and peace.

However, and it’s a big however, none of these three have explained the consequences of current system to society or the military. What is the effect on society and the military if there is a detachment between the two? What is the result of only having only 1% of the population with “skin in the game”? Most superficially it seems the answer is unfairness.  It is not fair that only a few are waging war for 10 years. It is not fair that, in spite of extensive support, civilians do not understand what the military goes through. But I ask again: what is the consequence of this unfairness?  How does fairness result in a more effective military? How does this perception of fairness interact with American Liberal mores upon which our society is built?

A draft, or compulsory service, may bridge this divide between the military and the people, but that divide may be natural and necessary.  Intermingling these two elements of American society more than they currently do could potentially result in fundamental changes to either element by which they would not benefit. American Liberal philosophy is one of the things that make America great in other endeavors (principally with regard to social and economic constructs). Adding conservative Military Realism has the potential to adversely affect the acceptance of this societal philosophy. A wider-ranging exposure and subsequent understanding of military culture could potentially increase the influence and power of military elites beyond current levels, creating a new (and real) crisis of CMR (See, WWII – which is also an example of the military ceding its influence when it wasn’t need anymore). Conversely, the forced infusion of Liberalism into Military Realism could potentially erode military effectiveness due to the extent that military effectiveness is dependent upon its conservatism (See: draft, Vietnam War).  It is possible that the two conflicting forces could reach equilibrium, but equilibrium in CMR is rarely realized historically and there is no reason to assume that it would in this case, especially considering the potential risks to society and the military.

Leaving aside such issues as what the draftees would do, how their services are paid for, the creating of large bureaucracies to manage the process, a draft or similar course of action threatens civil-military relations more than any existing divides between the people and the military. It would be great if the people understood the military or felt some of the pain the military has felt during the past decade (it would only be fair were it so…). Not only is this understanding or fairness not necessary, it has a greater potential to upend the relative CMR balance we currently enjoy instead of fixing a different “crisis” altogether. The divide that does exist serves a purpose: it maintains the integrity of society and the effectiveness of the military. Simply put, we can have a divide or we can have an imbalance.  I choose a divide because I can get over the “unfairness” of it. Society or the military may take a long time to recover from an imbalance created for ill-advised or unsubstantiated reasons.

Auftragstaktik: a concept with a context

I'd not seen the Jorg Muth post on Auftragstaktik until Jason wrote about it yesterday, and it's a good thing: I probably would've ruined my girlfriend's whole weekend fulminating about it. As it is I particularly enjoyed the title of Jason's post – "Dead Germans did not perfect war" – both because 1) it's true, and 2) there's a sort of winking irony to it: the very concept of Auftragstaktik springs from the Clausewitzian and Moltkean realization that any efforts to "perfect war" were doomed to failure by the churn and friction of combat. The elder Moltke was indeed the first to put into words what every modern planner knows: no plan survives first contact with the enemy. (He put it more, well, German-y, as "no operation plan extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main body of the enemy.") To this way of thinking, there is no perfect solution because no two situations in war are the same.

Jorg Muth has written what sounds like a very interesting book contrasting the early-20th century officer education systems in Germany and the United States, arguing that the differences largely account for disparities in tactical effectiveness during the Second World War. (I've not read the book, only some summaries and review blurbs.) It's plain to see that he's used this essay on Ricks' blog as an opportunity to pitch the thesis of his book. But in doing so he fails to sufficiently account for the influence of strategic context and intellectual history on each army's concepts and methods of operation; accordingly he goes much too far in his single-minded critique of formal officer education.

Muth opens his essay by making the important point that "Auftragstaktik does not denote a certain style of giving orders or a certain way of phrasing them; it is a whole command philosophy." One could argue that it's even more than that: not just a command philosophy, but a theory of war, a leadership ideal, and a warfighting philosophy. Auftragstaktik was not simply the principle of minimalist orders and freedom of action in line with commander's intent, but an entire operational culture. (This point is very effectively made in then-MAJ John T. Nelsen's September 1987 Parameters essay, "Auftragstaktik: A Case for Decentralized Battle" (pdf), which is essential reading on this subject.) As such, it can't be abstracted from the conditions that produced and propagated it, nor understood when examined from only one perspective as Muth attempts to do. We can't pretend like the idea simply never occurred to American officers, or that they failed to register its evolution in foreign armies. Here's Muth:

Interestingly, the literally hundreds of American observers who were regularly send to the old continent during the course of the 19th century to study the constantly warring European armies completely missed out on the decade long discussion about the revolutionary command philosophy of Auftragstaktik. Instead they focused on saddle straps, belt buckles and drill manuals. This is one reason why the most democratic command concept never found a home in the greatest democracy. The U.S. officers simply missed the origins because of their own narrow-minded military education.

This is a staggeringly limited and insufficient explanation. Let's look at a few of the other reasons that, in Muth's words, "never has it been attempted to introduce the most effective command philosophy ever invented into the U.S. Army."

1. Auftragstaktik didn't spring into being fully-formed from Moltke's warrior-brain (nor from the inspiration of Frederick—a curious assertion): it was a product of a specific set of historical circumstances that the German army faced in the latter part of the 19th century.

Developments in the technology of war – notably the newfound ability to concentrate overwhelming and accurate firepower on massed troops – combined with the proliferation of railroads and the creation of a dense road system to both allow and force the geographic dispersion of armies over distances not previously envisioned. (Certainly Napoleon didn't have to deal with such complications. He embodied perhaps the Platonic antithesis of Auftragstaktik, and you could argue he had a pretty effective command philosophy.) As such, commanders had to delegate and devolve authority while imbuing subordinate leaders with a meaningful sense of purpose and intent in order to ensure that slow communications and distance from the commander-in-chief didn't render their formations immobile and useless.

These developments had an impact on the American way of war, too, of course. Sherman operated with tremendous freedom thanks to "mission orders" from U.S. Grant, and Lee often granted his cavalry commanders similar discretion. It would be difficult for anyone familiar with the Indian wars (and particularly the demise of Custer's 7th Cavalry) to assert that the late 19th-century U.S. Army was dominated by doctrinaire centralization of command and overcomplicated execution orders.

2. Germany's strategic context – that is, its geographic position and relative weakness – mitigated in favor of warfighting concepts that emphasized speed of decision.

By the turn of the 20th century, it was clear to the German general staff that any war with France would of necessity become a continental war. The famed Schlieffen Plan was a response to this realization: in order to survive a general war on two or more fronts, Germany would need to act decisively to defeat the main enemy through envelopment and a battle of annihilation, then concentrate its resources and offensive effort eastward. Only France's total defeat and surrender would suffice; there could be no limited political objectives or negotiated settlement, for the German army was too small and weak in comparison with its adversaries to survive an incomplete commitment of forces or an extended war of position and attrition.

This meant two things: first, that operational speed and initiative were vital to exploit early tactical success, and second, that the "commander's intent" was quite simple and required little interpretation. Commanders in the field had to be given the authority to operate without explicit direction so as to translate victory in battle into strategic decision through unrelenting pursuit and destruction of the remnants of the enemy force. (Guderian would later adopt the same approach in the east, only to learn that the tactically and operationally sound concept of Blitzkrieg failed at the strategic level, where in Gunther Rothenberg's words, the enemy "could trade space for time" and mobilize nearly endless reserves in a defense-in-depth.)

3. Moltke's views on decentralization and initiative at the tactical level were inextricably tied to a Jominian belief in the autonomy of the military within the confines of war. Rothenberg again:

[Moltke] argues that once the army had been committed to war, the direction of the military effort should be defined by the soliders alone. "Political considerations," he wrote, "can be taken into account only as long as they do not make demands that are militarily improper or impossible" (Paret 298).

Such an approach is sensible if we imagine that the Moltkean ideal of rapid decision through a battle of annihilation – one that "deprived the adversary of the means and the will to fight further" (Paret 302) – could render the military's contribution to policy clean, discrete, and self-contained. As far as the U.S. Army is concerned, such clarity may be preferable but has rarely been seen. (World War II is the obvious exception.) This wasn't a prescription for total war, however: Moltke did view war as policy and the army as the government's instrument, and believed that his conception of autonomous action within a defined and appropriate space would limit and professionalize violence.

But this mode of thinking, so important to the German ideal of military professionalism, would later inform the eventual divorce of operational concepts from strategy and fuel the evolution of Germany's senior officer corps from strategists into mere technicians of violence. The army's desire to preserve war as its separate, autonomous space led it to abstract the methods of war from its functions, working simply to solve the problem of how to maximize the application of combat power to the enemy. War had its own space, but it lost its linkage to policy. Hitler completed this slide by ideologizing state policy, eventually rendering German strategy nonsensical and ultimately hopeless. (This is a complicated argument and there's no space to flesh it out fully here; read Michael Geyer's chapter in Paret if you're interested.)

4. U.S. Army operations in World War II were similarly informed by history and strategic context, not just officer education.

From the middle part of the 19th century, the U.S. has been – for all intents and purposes – an island nation. This has led to brief periods of fascination with fortification and coastal defense, and more generally with a strategically defensive orientation. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point was founded and evolved in this context, and its (particularly early) focus on producing engineers and military technicians rather than spirited maneuver warriors is reflective of that. (It's no coincidence either that the Army has for quite a long period of its history been essentially Jominian, what with interior lines secured by manifest destiny.)

When we look at the different command philosophies in the German and American armies of WWII, it's impossible to ignore the plain fact that those armies were operating in wildly different strategic contexts. As I've already mentioned, Germany's need for quick and decisive victory led to an offensive orientation and an emphasis on initiative to exploit tactical success; but U.S. forces in that war were expeditionary and part of a multinational effort—they could not afford to endanger operational and strategic plans through well-intended tactical blunder. While the U.S. population was large and geographic distance from the fighting would have allowed for steady resupply and an extended campaign of attrition, it's difficult to envision continuation of the war if the Allied armies had been annihilated in 1944 and a continentally hegemonic Germany sued for peace. To put it more simply, U.S. commanders were less inclined to allow initiative because they didn't need (like Germany) to accept tactical and operational risk to have a hope of strategic success.

Let's also not forget that the U.S. officer corps (and army in general) was largely non-professional by the time of its landing in Europe; even if officer education and professional culture in the pre-war had emphasized the sort of freedom of action within a framework of consistency of thought that characterized Auftragstaktik, it's hard to believe such concepts could've been implemented across the 1944 force, or that they would have been decisive.

5. Auftragstaktik is fundamentally unsuited to the operations of the modern joint/combined arms force or the realities of modern recruiting and retention.

Niel Smith discussed this in his excellent rejoinder to Muth, but it's worth repeating and elaborating: while modern Army forces may operate in geographic dispersion and with significant responsibility devolved to them, the integration of supporting fires, ISR, and other enablers requires a sort of coordination and centralization that simply isn't possible when you give independently operating platoon leaders carte blanche. Muth's illustrative hypothetical is instructive for how it underlines the differences between 1945 and today: simply give one guy responsibility for accomplishing a discrete mission, assign him tanks to support his force, and let him get it done how he wants. But in the modern operating environment, you can't just give the tactical commander control of allied units, strike assets from different services, ISR platforms with a broader mission in the AO, and so on. All those enablers help him get the job done, but now he has to do the job in a more predictable, structured, and coordinated way. It's the trade-off for combat multipliers.

When we talk about moving toward an Auftragstaktik-style approach in the modern Army, we have to remember the point I made up front: this isn't just about "mission tactics" or mission orders or commander's intent, but a culture shift. Part of the reason it worked so well for the Germans, that they were able to tolerate initiative and independent thought and resort to non-"book" solutions is that both the officer education system and the entire way of doing business in the German officer corps contributed to the development of similar analytical frameworks. Moltke might've argued that you can account for your uncertainty about what the enemy will do through supreme confidence in what your own guys will do: even if you don't know how they'll do it, you have a sense for how they'll look at the problem and confidence that they'll accomplish the objective. But how do you embed this sort of collective thinking and cultural identity in the consciousness of a group of officers that turns over so quickly (I'm talking here about both the brevity of individual assignments and the low percentage of career officers)?

I couldn't help but let out a disbelieving grunt when I read Muth's assertion that in U.S. military schools, "doctrine reigned and not free independent thinking," accompanied by the helpful bromide that doctrine "is either based on past wars or on theory and thus can be no guideline for an officer in a present-day conflict." Guffaw. First of all, U.S. Army doctrine is authoritative, but not prescriptive: it provides a guide for action, not a template to be followed. It exists to distill best practices and boil down the collective wisdom of the service into basic principles from which specific tasks can be derived and training developed. Second, I wonder what Muth would think of this paragraph from the introduction to FM 3-0: Operations (pdf), the Army's capstone doctrinal manual:

Chaos, chance, and friction dominate land operations as much today as when Clausewitz wrote about them after the Napoleonic wars. In this environment, an offensive mindset—the predisposition to seize, retain, and exploit the initiative to positively change the situation—makes combat power decisive. The high quality of Army leaders and Soldiers is best exploited by allowing subordinates maximum latitude to exercise individual and small-unit initiative. Tough, realistic training prepares leaders for this, and FM 3-0 prescribes giving them the maximum latitude to accomplish the mission successfully. This requires a climate of trust in the abilities of superior and subordinate alike. It also requires leaders at every level to think and act flexibly, constantly adapting to the situation. Subordinates’ actions are guided by the higher commander’s intent but not circumscribed by excessive control. This is a continuing tension across the Army, aggravated by advanced information systems that can provide higher commanders with the details of lower echelon operations. The temptation for senior leaders to micromanage subordinates is great, but it must be resisted.

Sounds a lot like Auftragstaktik, huh? You can talk all you want about mission orders and initiative, but it doesn't work without the whole surrounding culture. That means building these ideas into doctrine and concepts, but also building them into the structure of the institution, individual and collective training, and yes, officer education.

I know this has gone on much, much too long and deals with a lot of complicated subjects, so I'm grateful if you've made it this far. I suppose in the end I'm grateful to Ricks for running Muth's essay, and for the discussion and thinking it has prompted. (I still think his argument is oversimplified and silly, though.) Stuff like this is essential to the process of sorting out what the Army of the future ought to look like, how it ought to be structured, how it ought to think and train and fight. It's interesting to see century-old concepts invoked in this context if only because it wasn't so long ago that the Revolution in Military Affairs crowd was trumpeting a future of Net-Centric Warfare, information dominance, and all the inevitable centralization that would be associated with it.

In some sense, Auftragstaktik represents one extreme on a spectrum that spans all the way across to the other extreme of perfect information and centralized mission command: one end believes there's no such thing as perfect information and that junior leaders ought to be empowered to operate in an environment where they can react to circumstances more quickly and coherently than could echelons above, while for the other side there's still a hope of understanding the enemy's thinking before he does and acting on a decisive point to near-bloodlessly defeat him. This latter idea, present throughout history (in the guise of strategic bombing, maneuver warfare, NCW, and other forms of "the indirect approach") and eminently un-Clausewitzian, will hopefully be consigned to the scrap heap at some point, but shows no sign of doing so just yet.

I will not boycott you again Tom - I will continue to engage you as my "solipsistic self"

Thank you, Tom, for pointing out that the United States has used the draft in the past 100 years. I obviously didn't know that since I was only born in 1980 and obviously nothing existed before me, at least nothing worth knowing. Or maybe my position on this topic is based on the realities of modern warfare, arms, and other conditions and not a "we've always done it this way" mentality. Possibly.

Yes, the draft was used in every major war the United States has fought since the Civil War through to Vietnam - most of these conflicts being of vital interest to the U.S., if not existential in nature. Obviously these conscripted forces performed very well - the Greatest Generation being the exemplar in this regard. There was a call and need for national service and it was well met.

I question the logic that if Americans were conscripted then the U.S. would not undertake foreign interventions because of greater effect on the elites and popular unrest. A war was fought in Vietnam with a conscript military with steady escalation. A war the ended after conscription ended. Decision-makers - politicians - have any number of reasons they make the choices they do, and I don't know how much their personal lives influence that (I'm sure it varies from politician to politician). As I mentioned in the comments to my last post on this topic, Senator McCain supported the Surge in Iraq and he did have "skin in the game" - a son in the USMC and another at the Naval Academy that was about to graduate. It didn't affect his decision making.

I also question the feasibility of conscription in today's economic conditions. All branches of the military are looking at where they can make cuts as our current wars start winding down and I'm not hearing any arguments from Congress or the Executive Branch to significantly increase spending to make these wars more "fair" when everyone is talking about cutting or at least stemming costs. They're much more concerned about weapons development and jobs in their constituencies, not adding tens of thousands (or more) people to the military's roles, with significant short term costs in paying, training, and equipping them and longer term costs in benefits. It is a political nonstarter because no one wants to pay for it.

And speaking of politicians, what do they benefit from re-instituting conscription? Pissed off constituents who feel their rights are being infringed? More national debt? An all-volunteer force is perfect for the political classes because they can use that force with minimal impact on the rest of America. I'd like to think they would do so out of their perspective of national interest and not personal politics, but we all know it's a little of columns A and B. They have zero interest in changing that paradigm - it's just bad politics for individuals.

The insulation of the military is also an absurd argument to bring back the draft. Draftees in our nation's history have been activated for 2-6 years of duty. I have no idea what the numbers are for those that stayed in after their commitment (and would be interested in seeing them if anyone has them), but are today's military leadership much different or more insulated than those during times of conscription? Are they not the same types of people that would have volunteered instead of getting drafted? Or stayed in after their conscription time elapsed? There has always been a core of military "elites" around which these conscripted forces were formed. That was the reasoning behind the founding of West Point - provide the professionals to lead the citizen soldiers when they were required. Conscripted junior enlisted and officers will not change the fact that the military's senior leadership will always be somewhat different from the rest of us.

So, yes, I do think that "some form of the draft just isn't gonna happen." Because it has been used in the past does not mean it will be used in the future. There's a whole other discussion of how the U.S. fights its wars now as opposed to WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam: it is technologically and capably superior to its foes, not based on mass. I think there's a good argument that our type of military does not benefit from losing its professional ideal. But that's another discussion for another time, just like how we'll have to sort out whether or not women get drafted and some other topics before this could be taken seriously as a real possibility. At the moment we can't afford a conscripted military, the politicians don't want one, it would have little to no effect on military "insulation", and probably isn't best for military readiness. If you want the people of this nation to care about war, then raise the hell out of taxes to pay for it. That will make people care and truly spread the pain (as opposed to a lottery that would likely have so many loopholes as to make the tax code look simplistic), even if that, too, is politically unlikely.

Would we reinstate it if a major conflict arose with existential consequences? Probably - and we probably should at that point. Until then there is no political will to do this nor any real reason. Except to make some people feel better that they're not the only ones paying for war. That's an unfortunate reality and will continue to be so until our actual survival as a nation is threatened. So no, I'm not being "solipsistic" or ignorant of our history. I'm looking at today with the benefit of having learned (yes, from books and not experience in this case) from that history and I don't see any real possibility of a draft in the near future nor the need for it.

I could care less about your indignation and sense of "fairness", the draft is a nonstarter

When we started this blog I assumed we would write about many various and sundry topics. But I never thought I'd ever feel the need to blog about reinstating the draft or compulsory service. Yet, here we are. For some reason, it has been a popular topic of late and I cannot fathom why. Some of the more prominent writers on the topic in the past weeks have been Tom Ricks and Crispin Burke. I cannot express enough how much I think reinstating the draft is a bad idea and I find the arguments for it to be somewhat less than compelling. Crispin tackles some of the hard numbers pretty well at Offiziere.ch, so I'm going to attack this issue from a more qualitative approach (while not completely devoid of numbers). I'm going to pose a lot of questions that I don't have the answers for because the answers are so patently outrageous as to immediately disqualify starting the draft/conscription. If you haven't thought about this things then you're not seriously considering this problem.

The biggest problem I have with the pro-drafters is that they seem to base their arguments on some sense of fairness as opposed to legitimate policy concerns. First, is the pro-draft argument that only 1% of the population is bearing the brunt of Iraq and Afghanistan. My response is: so what? How much of the population needs to be involved in these wars to balance the burden? When policymakers and politicians wrangle over 30 thousand troops here and there (as they should), how would drafting the vast majority of military age men and women affect the wars? Sure, putting 4 million (the number of citizens in the U.S. who reach their majority each year) Soldiers and Marines into Afghanistan and Iraq might be enough to execute the COIN strategy put forward earlier this year, but how on earth would we pay for that?

When we're staring defense efficiencies in the eye, how could any responsible government contemplate increasing the size of the force many times? What with the costs in pay, healthcare, retirement, and other overheads and all. There's also the question of what would these people do? Deploying soldiers costs a lot of money and we couldn't possibly have enough to do for all of them. Would they mainly train? Train to do what? We don't know what our relatively small all-volunteer military is going to do once these wars are over, how could we justify adding millions of people to that problem? The military is not a jobs program.

Then there's the oft-argued question of fairness with the all-volunteer force when it comes to the socio-economic status of enlistees. Crispin cites some numbers that suggest that our recruits don't necessarily come from the poorest as is usually argued, but surely many of them do. And I ask again: so what if they are? Being a private in most branches of the military is relatively low skilled work with huge amounts of supervision. Comparable work in the civilian world, if there is such a thing, would pay similarly to what a lower enlisted person makes, but without all of the long-term costs. While there are many wealthy kids who enlist in the military, the vast majority do not and leave this grunt work, literally and figuratively, to their less-fortunate fellow citizens. If being a soldier is the best you can do with your life than you do it. If it's not, then you do something else. I don't see that as a matter of fairness, I see that as a reality of our world where some people do the things they can and others do the things they want to.

The whole pro-draft argument almost always focuses on junior enlisted and ignores non-commissioned officers, warrant officers, and commissioned officers. The world has it's middle management and its elites. So does the military. These are all important for the functioning of organizations. Why do junior enlisted continuously reenlist and work their way up to the ranks? At that point it's not usually because there isn't anything else they can do - it's a free choice. Do officers go through their commissioning source because they don't have any other options? No. They do it because of very personal reasons for each of them. Just like the men and women who enlist. Those that stay in to make NCO ranks and those that join as officers may have more options in life, but the fact that they choose the military completely refutes the fairness argument of joining the military. It's not the only choice for the poor and less educated. It's an opportunity for those people, just as it is for the less poor and more educated. If it were the only choice, more of the poor and undereducated would enlist.

This probably smacks of an elitist rant, but I like to think of it as more of a realist rant. I came from a lower-middle income family and decided that I wanted to be a military officer and did it. That was my choice. I have no patience with these bizarre concepts of "fairness" that the poor are bearing the brunt of our wars and that that needs to be fixed. That canard isn't merely untrue, it's irrelevant. I spent nearly three years in Iraq, bearing a greater brunt than most military folks, and the vast majority of the people I served with, enlisted and otherwise, did so because they chose to join the military, not because it was the only choice they had. I cannot recall a single instance where someone thought it was unfair that they were at war when 99% of the population was unaffected by that war - we all knew that when we joined. You know what's unfair? Making a young man or woman (yeah, there's that whole topic I'm not even going to go into) go to war who didn't want to be in the military in the first place because some misinformed people thought something they did voluntarily was unfair to them. That's damned unfair. And it doesn't help the national interest to boot. So as the title of this post states, I really could care less about your indignation and sense of fairness on this topic. It's misplaced. The only thing a draft will accomplish is diminish the military's capabilities and satiate your sense of "fairness." Sounds like a couple of good reasons to infringe upon our fellow citizens' rights. But hey, you'll feel better, so that's something.

Boycott Lifted - an olive branch to Tom Ricks

Maybe because I'm feeling magnanimous this week or maybe it's because of yesterday's serious drama, but I'm officially lifting my boycott of Tom Ricks at The Best Defense. My opinion of Tom has ebbed and waned over the years, starting with very high esteem after I read Fiasco while in Iraq during the Surge. That book was one of the biggest reasons I'm in the business I'm in now - it had a huge influence on my professional life. But I slowly became disappointed with his writing and what I perceived as a lack of analysis in his new role as a blogger (and fellow at CNAS). This is only because I expected so much more from him after Fiasco and my expectations were not met.

However, those were my expectations - not any promises Tom made to me (after all I've only met him once or twice in person and very briefly at CNAS events) or any of his other readers. After consideration, it's not fair to him for me to project my own expectations on his work. He also runs a blog all on his own and posts multiple times a day (granted with many, many guest posts) and if I did that I would post plenty of things most of you would disagree with as well. This does not mean that I agree with everything he writes (or posts from guest bloggers), but the man still drives a lot of the conversation on defense issues in this town and around the interwebs because of his vast experience in the field when he covered it for a number of news outlets. When I look at what gets posted on the internet as a whole, Tom's blog is definitely towards the top of sane and reasonable. Even if I disagree with a lot of his content.

So Tom - your blog is back in my reader and my boycott is lifted. I do apologize for the snarky (and probably rude) things that I've said on this blog. I stand by the critiques of your work that I've written, but not the tone of some of them. And I'll probably continue to critique your work I disagree with in the future as well as point out when I agree and I think it's particularly good.

On reading things to intentionally piss yourself off

Blaise Pascal said that "man's sensitivity to the little things and insensitivity to the greatest are the signs of a strange disorder." My strange disorder is this: I willfully seek out writers that I know suck, and that I know are only going to piss me off. My "little things" are Bill Gertz and Ralph Peters.

As SNLII would surely remind me, I don't limit myself to Peters and Gertz: I aver that everything Gian Gentile writes is basically the exact same piece, and yet I continue to read it just to get myself all bowed up again. But this isn't that big of a deal, right? Everybody does it, I'm sure. After all, reading isn't just about learning (at least not for people like me) -- at least as important as the information content is the tone, the rhetorical exercise... the part where the writer is trying to convince me of something. I suppose it's a sign of the decline of the rhetorical art that much contemporary writing now consists primarily of assertion rather than argumentation (or so I assert).

But I digress. What I really want to get to is this: Ralph Peters and Bill Gertz suck. Bad.

What's worse than that, though? The fact that these two jokers are consistently included in the DoD's daily news digest, The Early Bird. Here's why this is a big deal: there are probably several thousand (into the tens of thousands) readers of the Early Bird every day across the Defense Department and the services. It's compiled by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, which gives this introduction on the entry page:

The Current News Early Bird is a daily compilation of published items and commentary concerning significant defense and defense-related national security issues. It aims to represent how the public, Congress and the press see military and defense programs and issues. The Early Bird is an internal management tool intended to serve the informational needs of senior DoD officials in the continuing assessment of defense policies, programs and actions. Further reproduction or redistribution for private use or gain is subject to original copyright restrictions.

So let's put it this way: Editorial decisions about what to include and what not to include are hugely influential in shaping what for many officers and DoD civilians will be the primary source of news for the day.

Peters, at least, is filed under the Opinion heading. Everybody knows how nuts he is, so I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time ranting about his terrible op-eds, always plagued throughout -- no matter the subject -- by a serious case of sudden expertitis.

(Just because I can't help myself, here's a taste from today's steamer:

Aid those already on your side, not your enemies: Our attempts to bribe our enemies with wells, make-work and welfare are doomed to failure. Reward your allies with aid projects; let the hostiles envy them -- and figure it out on their own.

Unconditional aid to tribesmen who just want your butt gone won't buy you lasting gratitude (that rarest human sentiment). Your generosity's read as weakness, not goodness.

In Ralph's Professional Tough Guy world, there's no such thing as a civilian population -- everyone's an "ally" or a "hostile." But I digress.)

Gertz, on the other hand, for reasons that are entirely obscure to me, has his weekly "Inside the Ring" column highlighted solo under its very own heading, under which -- so far as I can tell -- no other article ever appears: "National Security." Every Thursday, like clockwork, there it is:

NATIONAL SECURITY
17. Inside The Ring
(Washington Times)...Bill Gertz

The column is meant to be a quick hop around the most relevant defense issues of the week, both separating the wheat from the chaff for the general reader and letting defense insiders in on what their colleagues are talking about. (Gertz's Washington Times bio says that ITR "chronicles the U.S. national security bureaucracy.") Instead it's mostly a vehicle for Gertz to advance his pet interests: China hawkery, Democrat-bashing, and advocacy on behalf of those Peters types who seem to think all Arabs and Muslims are "terrorist potentialities." He throws down a whole lot of editorial commentary (occasionally extending to outright bullshitting) in a column that is meant to look like down-the-middle, just the facts ma'am reportage.

Want an example? Well, it just so happens that I have a particularly egregious one from today's column! In the very first section, Gertz reports on a 02 July memorandum from OSD to Pentagon leadership on the subject of military interactions with the press. He runs down what amounts to a book report on the memo and the media's reaction to it, paraphrasing Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell's press conference responses to questions on the subject.

Gen. McChrystal's ouster last month marked the second four-star to go down because of loose lips with the press, Mr. Morrell said. The first was the 2008 resignation of dovish U.S. Central Command commander Adm. William J. Fallon, who resigned after telling Esquire magazine that he was the only thing preventing a war with Iran.

Now this is total bullshit.

First of all, Fox Fallon did not "[tell] Esquire magazine that he was the only thing preventing a war with Iran." Here's what Tom Barnett wrote in his introduction to the Esquire piece:

If, in the dying light of the Bush administration, we go to war with Iran, it’ll all come down to one man. If we do not go to war with Iran, it’ll come down to the same man. He is that rarest of creatures in the Bush universe: the good cop on Iran, and a man of strategic brilliance. His name is William Fallon, although all of his friends call him "Fox," which was his fighter-pilot call sign decades ago. Forty years into a military career that has seen this admiral rule over America’s two most important combatant commands, Pacific Command and now United States Central Command, it’s mpossible to make this guy–as he likes to say–"nervous in the service." [snip] ...it’s left to Fallon–and apparently Fallon alone–to argue that, as he told Al Jazeera last fall: "This constant drumbeat of conflict . . . is not helpful and not useful. I expect that there will be no war, and that is what we ought to be working for. We ought to try to do our utmost to create different conditions."

Note: That's Tom Barnett writing. You see any direct quotes from Fallon that suggest that he thinks he's the only thing preventing a war? No, me neither. On top of that, Fallon came out afterwards and told Tom Ricks that Barnett's piece was "poison pen stuff" that was "really disrespectful and ugly." Sound like a guy who's pumping himself up as the last best hope for peace? So yeah, Gertz is basically just lying.

And the other bit, the "dovish" part? That's another d-bag move. Fox Fallon served 41 years in the U.S. Navy. He served in Vietnam, Bosnia, and Iraq, commanded an attack squadron, a carrier battle group, and two Global Combatant Commands, and he earned a Bronze Star and a Navy Commendation Medal with valor device, among dozens of decorations. Here's what he had to say when Barnett asked him what would happen if tension with Iran did boil over to the point of war:

"Get serious," the admiral says. "These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them."

Now he's a dove? Only for those morons who were dissatisfied with his low level of China hawkery while at PACOM, and his statements to the effect that fighting another major land war against the state directly between two other states in which we're fighting would probably not be an optimal outcome for anybody.

Who the hell is Bill effin' Gertz to call this guy "dovish"??

Ok, I'm getting myself all spun up over one little thing, but it should be clear by now that Gertz has no problem fabricating and casting false aspersions to advance his ideologico-editorial agenda. And this is a guy being reprinted in the Early Bird every single week, where senior leaders read his "analysis" as matter-of-fact reporting. F that.

GET BILL GERTZ OUT OF THE EARLY BIRD. (Or at least put him in the "Opinion" section.)

Firing officers who deserve it (or: I agree with Tom Ricks!!)

While reading it certainly violated my New Year's resolution, I thought Tom Ricks' op-ed in the Times was actually pretty good. After some cogent analysis on the events of the past day, he talks about an important issue: the Army doesn't fire enough people and really should do so more often. I imagine the Army's reluctance to do so stems from the old "zero defect" Army and how it destroyed morale up through the mid-1990s. And like most large institutions, their reaction to changing that culture was an over reaction. But the fact remains that bad officers (or officers promoted beyond their capabilities) don't get fired.

The other side of Ricks' argument, how failure to remove ineffective senior officers prevents talented junior officers from progressing, will become more of an issue as general officer careers are extended to 40 years. There are, after all, so many GO positions in the Army. If Iraq and Afghanistan are any indicators, too many senior officers are being kept on beyond their capabilities while extremely competent subordinates could easily replace them. This, too, will (and in some cases already has) caused morale problems in the middle ranks of the officer corps.

I would, however, be wary of anything like the anecdote that Ricks mentions about GEN Marshall promoting a major because he was doing a general's job. While there should probably be changes to the promotion system to streamline the advancement of our best officers, a system should still be used. Otherwise, there would be greater opportunity for abuses of patronage.

All in all, good work Tom.

Nulla dies sine Ricks

Because I hate to disappoint SNLII, I volunteer to make Inkspots' daily update on Tom Ricks.

While doing this, I may however cause unnecessary pain and elevated blood pressure in a few of my fellow bloggers, for Ricks' blog is among the finalists for the National Magazine Awards for Digital Media 2010. Ricks competes in the "best blogging" category, which "Recognizes excellence in online reporting, commentary and criticism in the form of a blog." Is the American Society of Magazine Editors mischievously trying to save printed press by promoting the worst of online journalism?

Tom Ricks Policy Brief on Iraq: Expectations Met

CNAS just released a new "policy brief" by Tom Ricks entitled The Burden: America's Hard Choices in Post-Election Iraq. Basically, it is a 6-page version of his NY Times op-ed from yesterday with pretty graphs and maps (ostensibly to give some semblance of 'analysis'). I don't think this violates my New Year's resolution because it was emailed to me and is not on his blog.

I think there are quite a few things wrong with this brief, but I'll just focus in on a couple points. First and foremost is the complete and utter lack of analysis used to derive his recommendations. Ricks recommends keeping 30-50K troops in the country to prevent another civil war from breaking out. This fails in two ways. First, he does not adequately show that a civil war is likely in post-election Iraq. Saying that there was a lot of violence over a couple of key issues, and that those issues are not yet resolved, and considering the last year of relative calm in spite of this is "isolated", does not prove, suggest, or even hint at the fact that violence will break out again. Secondly, he does not tie his recommended troop levels to any concept of how they might actually prevent his imminent civil war, other than by sheer presence. Where did he get these figures from? I'll guess a random number generator because I don't see the connection. As a side point, if 110K U.S. troops weren't enough to stop the 2006 civil war (requiring the surge of 30K additional troops), what the hell are 30K going to do to stop one? And if their mere presence doesn't stop an outbreak of violence, what are those troops supposed to do?

Second is his recommendation to renegotiate the SOFA. Unlike his op-ed, at least here he says it needs to be Iraqi driven. "Sending signals, early but privately" that the U.S. might stomach staying longer has been done very publicly this week by GEN Odierno. The Iraqis know they can ask for more help if they need or want it - but this completely ignores the fact that Iraqi politics probably prohibit their asking for more help unless significant violence does break out.

Third (and I'll end on this instead of beating a dead horse), is the complete lack of sources. I know: this isn't a dissertation. But the constant use of "observers", "leaders", footnoting his own two (somewhat dated) books, and anecdotes is not a substitute for rigorous research and analysis. Ricks is just screaming into his own echo chamber.

Should you chose to read this briefing, just keep these things in mind. This is not analysis. These are not serious policy recommendations based on anything tangible. This paper is using anecdote to support preconceived beliefs. In other words, it's a piece of Tom Ricks' recent work.

A New Year's Resolution

Boycott Tom Ricks. Like a lot of people, I've still been reading his blog in spite of how angry it makes me (and if you don't know why, Schmedlap has a great post on why he took Tom off his blogroll). This has been difficult road for me as Fiasco was a very influential book in my life and helped direct what I wanted to do after I left the Army. But enough is enough.

Tom couldn't have timed this post any better - at least in regard to my establishing a resolution for 2010. I'll put this as succinctly as possible for you Tom: you weren't right. At least by this argument. In his "shut down the service academies" series, he has raised a number of issues that could improve how those institutions produce better officers. But in his (yet another) unreleased report, the statements are damning to both USMA grads and scholarship ROTC grads because they are getting out of the service "at an unacceptable rate." First of all, that statement isn't aimed at USMA alone, but his beloved ROTC as well, so how on earth does that prove his point? And the last part of this post talks about the decline in officer quality due to the increased percentage of OCS-commissioned officers. I'm not going to refute any of the findings in this "report" (especially since there are only a few sentences quoted), but it takes a unique level of idiocy to think this proves that USMA should be shut down. Call me crazy, but if the graduates of the most expensive commissioning institutions are getting out in droves and that is causing a decline in officer quality, then maybe the problem isn't with the commissioning sources but how the Active Army retains those graduates.

And how does one define "unacceptable rate"? The Army (and other services) make a deal with those it educates: we'll pay for school and you owe us time that we think benefits both parties. If the Army thinks it is getting screwed because West Pointers and ROTC grads are getting out before they should, then the Army needs to make their active commitment longer. It's that simple. Or make Army service more acceptable over the length of a career.

I say that last bit because it simply isn't for most junior officers. Like many of my cohort, of my six-year Army career, I spent three of those years in theater. To say nothing of time spent away from home doing training at home station and at training centers. I don't have any regrets about doing those things, but I certainly couldn't have kept that pace up for another fourteen years. Especially considering that if I had stayed in I would have been guaranteed a fourth tour in a combat zone within eighteen months of my return from my third. And the impact? My kids had no idea who I was by the time I got out and it destroyed my marriage. If you were to survey the year groups of officers around mine, you would find my story to be the norm, not the exception.

So yes, we got out in droves. We all had a great education payed for by the taxpayers. The Army received years of combat service out of us in return. I'll say that again: years of combat service. Everyone wins. Does the future look a little bleak for both parties? It sure does - the effects of that blistering pace of operational use will be felt by me for the rest of my life, just as the Army is going to struggle to maintain an adequate officer corps until it rethinks how it does business.

Maybe Tom thinks that because the Army paid all that money for us, we should have to give more. I've given a lot (and I've given so little compared to so many) so I think he's about as wrong as one can be. And I, like many, still contribute to our national defense - just not in the ways that we used to.

I don't like to write negative posts, but this just had to be said. The Best Defense has been a shining example of how to make poor arguments about things the writer knows nothing about. I highly doubt Tom reads this blog, but if he does I have one piece of advice for him: stop blogging. It is destroying your legacy and you are making yourself irrelevant to serious discussion. I'm sure he disagrees with me on that, but it doesn't really matter. Whether or not he continues to blog is of no consequence to me. In the interest of stemming the proliferation of grey hairs on my head, I certainly won't ever read his stuff again.

Part of being a thoughtful commentator is knowing who to listen to

Tom Ricks seems to think it gives him credibility to post basically everything he gets from a .mil email account. Today he features commentary on "the stoopiding of the Army" from a "reserve captain at the Pentagon," whose 1,000-or-so word diatribe is posted essentially without comment. My favorite part is the closing, where he thanks our intrepid correspondent for "bring[ing] these issues to life," but there's really a lot more to talk about than just that.

First off, I'm a little bit stunned that this dude seems to think he's just stumbled across the key questions facing Army training, education, and personnel management. People have been talking about this extensively and intensively in various fora for the last eight years, for sure, and perhaps in slightly more circumscribed circles for a lot longer than that.

Schmedlap hits on some of the key criticisms in his comment at Ricks' blog, but I wanted to elaborate on a few more. So let's start at the start:

If the National Security Strategy outlined the need to win 2 conventional wars and stabilize 2 failed states, we could organize appropriately. We could identify our two nearest competitors for conventional conflict, China and Russia, and organize our conventional forces to deal with them and then we could identify the two closest potential failed states, Pakistan and Somalia, for example, and organize our unconventional, i.e. USSOCOM, properly in order to deal with those simultaneous Stability Operations. However, there needs to be a clear capability addressed for our future. What exactly does our country expect us to do in the future based on the major threats? It is time to recognize that our military is also needed for Stability Operations because failed states have been the major threat since World War II. It doesn't have to be conventional vs. unconventional/irregular. It can be both.

Personally, I believe that we need two separate organizations (conventional and unconventional) to deal with INTERstate wars and INTRAstate wars. Our mission has never included the need to resolve INTRAstate wars, i.e. failed states w/insurgencies. If that was the case and we were using the time-testing formula for peacekeepers /counterinsurgents per capita (50:1), we would need 180K troops to occupy and stabilize Somalia and around 3.6 million troops to occupy and stabilize Pakistan, for example. That would increase our military 10-fold (given the amount of troops we would need to conduct two conventional wars simultaneously and occupy those two countries as well), but would adequately reflect what the country wanted us to do.

See, that is the problem. If the military had the 560,000 SOF troops it would need to occupy Afghanistan (based on 28million pop.) and the 620,000 SOF troops needed to
occupy Iraq (based on 31million pop.), we wouldn't be in the predicament we are in today in either of those countries. An insurgency would never have been able to build, foreign direct investment could have come sooner, and international support would have been flowing into both of these countries.

If the NSS required all that, then the NSS would be a cripplingly, uselessly ambitious document. I sympathize with what this guy is saying, but this ain't the right approach.

To assert that the GPF will be responsible for MCO contingencies and USSOCOM for stability operations is to demonstrate ignorance of pretty much every doctrinal development associated with SO over the last decade. Stability operations are a core U.S. military mission, according to DOD Instruction 3000.05. They are also hugely manpower-intensive. Why in the world would we imagine that the best way to cover these mission areas was with SEALs, Rangers, Special Forces, and so on... when we have a hell of a lot less of them than line infantry, or MPs, or tankers, or artillerymen, or whatever else?

So we're going to split our force into two forces: GPF for MCO, and SOF for SO. But the SO component has to be a lot larger, because we're going to apply a nebulous 1:50 counterinsurgent to civilian ratio. So now we're in the ridiculous position of advocating for about five times as many "special" troops as conventional ones. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

And we'd need to increase the size of the military "tenfold," he tells us; shouldn't that call into question the advisability of the mission set we're settling on, seeing as that kind of expansion is COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE?

Unfortunately for the Army, the 2nd camp holds the senior positions of power within TRADOC, FORSCOM and the ARSTAF. Hence, we have seen 0 Counter IED initiatives transferred from the OCO to the Base Budget and our HumanTerrain Teams, PRTs and Advise and Assist Brigades are all ad hoc. We have no new Officer Branches of Service. Where are the MOS and Branches that cover COIN, SFA, Stability Operations, C-IED, etc.? They are all being pulled from traditional Branches like Civil Affairs, Infantry and MP and taught these additional skills in 3-hour blocs of instruction, but as a SECONDARY skill set, not a PRIMARY skill set, while their primary skills sets (IN, MP) depreciate.

Now he's really going off the rails. We need new branches for Stability Operations? Why don't we then have separate branches for offensive and defensive operations? Why don't we have MOSes for pistol shooting and rifle shooting, or for foxhole-digging (shamelessly stolen from Schmedlap)?

AABs (more accurately, modular brigades augmented for security force assistance) are not "ad hoc"; they're not completely purpose-built, either, but they are trained and augmented specifically to perform a specific mission set. Despite whatever whinging I've done in the past about this, the Army has actually made a ton of progress on this front.

This is really reflective of a much bigger debate, the one the Schmedlap has been covering pretty extensively (and Madhu has been referring to extensively!) on his own blog: whether we ought to be building a force specifically to do certain things, or whether the focus should be on making sure they know how to do things. There's obviously always going to be a blend here, but purpose-building and task-orienting every individual and unit in the force is a really quick and easy way to guarantee a whole lot of inefficiency, waste, and unpreparedness.

1) What is our mission? Is it to fight two fronts with two nation-states and occupy/stabilize one/two failed states? Is it to win on two fronts and hold on a third. Just what is it that our country wants us to do. What our mission is will drastically change our organization.

Easy: to fight and win our nation's wars. The harder part is figuring out exactly how to train, equip, man, spend, orient, and so on to accomplish that mission. No one is gonna spoon-feed this to us. Imagine the entire range of possible missions, assign probabilities and risk to each of them, apply the available resources and figure out how to get it done. This is why we have planners (ahem).

2) Is our current structure with the Combatant Commands having no control over the training of the force coming to fight their fight correct? Should each Combatant Commander be tasked with training his/her own force to address the problem areas in their AORs?

Yes, it is, and no, they shouldn't. There may be plenty wrong with Goldwater-Nichols, and we might need to rework our national security structures in certain ways to be better prepared for future conflict. Scrapping the COCOMs and establishing what would amount to autonomous regional armies is not one of the things that ought to be on the list.

You want to come up with a way to make sure that we lose a war in South America, in the apparently unlikely circumstance that we should have to fight one? Let SOUTHCOM train its own dedicated units, and make sure there's no overlap with the dudes over in CENTCOM who have actually fought in wars. Decentralize your training and doctrine to ensure that there's no consistency at all in the Army. Break the ARFORGEN construct and make sure you enlist dudes for ten-year contracts, all to be spent OCONUS.

ARFORGEN is a good concept. The services are responsible for providing trained and ready forces to the Combatant Commanders, who are then responsible for effectively employing those forces in operations. What's wrong with this system, I wonder? Did we have trouble in Iraq because the 10th Mountain didn't spend all its time running around in the desert at NTC? I don't think so. Scrapping this construct and making the COCOMs responsible for force provision as well as force employment is a really, really terrible idea.

1) Why are officers not promoted the instant they receive a higher degree of civilian education? Why are they only promoted based on time-in-grade? During the Civil War, many Generals were in their 20s and 30s. Why is an officer not promoted based on merit, knowledge and intelligence?

Because degrees don't mean dick. It's really weird to say "you ought to get promoted as soon as you get an advanced degree!" and then in the same paragraph, contend that promotions should be merit-based. Credentials do not equal merit! How about making promotions performance-based? But then we'd have to come up with an objective and comprehensive means to effectively evaluate performance, and we're not doing so well at that one, either.

But in reality, promotion to O-4 and upwards is merit and performance based (if imperfect). We don't have a whole lot of freedom to screw around with automatic promotion to O-3, either. If you think the Army has captain- and major-retention problems now, start telling people that if they suck at their job they might be stuck as lieutenants for a decade!

2) Why are officers not required to have a specific degree as it pertains to their branch? My friend in the Infantry had a Chemistry degree. Go figure. Wouldn't an International Relations degree be better suited?

Probably because THIS DOESN'T MATTER AT ALL. I wonder if this dude's friend is a bad infantry officer because of his chemistry degree. WTF is reading Thucidydes going to teach a 21-year old infantry lieutenant about fire and movement, which is really what he needs to master to do his job well? It's almost difficult for me to believe that this guy is a serving officer when he writes stuff like this.

3) Why don't officers have continuous distance learning requirements so by the time they reach O-6 they have earned a PhD in something relevant? And the enlisted could have a Master's Degree by the time they are a SGM?

Meh. Do we really need a whole bunch of Dr. Colonels? As Gunslinger likes to say about his old brigade commander (who just made BG not that long ago), he's the man you want to kill people and break things. You want to run that guy out of the service because he didn't write a dissertation?

(I do want to pause for a second here to say that Ricks' comment on this point -- "Frankly, I think the last thing we need is sergeants major with master's degrees... That's officer stuff..." -- is, put simply, idiotic. But you didn't need me to tell you that, did you?)

4) Why are they not increasing the pay to attract the best and the brightest into the military officer and enlisted ranks? If you offered 150K right out of college and 40K enlisted, you would get the best and the brightest, yet we spend ridiculous amounts of money on contractors and technology and new weaponry. The bottom line is that we live or die based on the quality and quantity of our people. Period.

This is gonna go great with our five-million man Army and 3 trillion dollar defense budget!

Ricks says "I think this officer speaks much wisdom, but I do have quibbles with his specifics." Well I have quibbles with anyone who finds a whole lot of wisdom in that email. This is not serious stuff. Institutional reform, like strategy, is about matching objectives with resources. That means priorities, not a fire-hose approach to "what's wrong with the military." Then again, considering how far off most of these suggestions are, and how misguided the underlying analysis, I'm not sure even prioritization would help.