It was tragic that the career of
General David Petraeus was brought down by a mere affair. It should have ended
several years earlier as a consequence of his failure as our commander in
Afghanistan. Petraeus, like every other theater commander in that war except
Stanley McChrystal, could have been replaced by a concrete block and nothing
would have changed. They all kept doing the same things while expecting a
different result.
Thomas Ricks’s recent book The
Generals has reintroduced into the defense debate a vital factor the press and
politicians collude in ignoring: military incompetence. It was a major theme of
the Military Reform Movement of the 1970s and ’80s. During those years, a
friend of mine who was an aide to a Marine Corps commandant asked his boss how
many Marine generals, of whom there were then 60-some, could competently fight
a battle. The commandant came up with six. And the Marine Corps is the best of
our services.
Military incompetence does not begin
at the rank of brigadier general. An old French proverb says that the problem
with the generals is that we select them from among the colonels. Nonetheless,
military competence—the ability to see quickly what to do in a military
situation and make it happen—is more rare at the general officer level. A
curious aspect of our promotion system is that the higher the rank, the smaller
the percentage of our competent officers.
Why is military incompetence so
widespread at the higher levels of America’s armed forces? Speaking from my own
observations over almost 40 years, I can identify two factors. First, nowhere
does our vast, multi-billion dollar military-education system teach military
judgment. Second, above the rank of Army, Marine Corps, or Air Force captain,
military ability plays essentially no role in determining who gets promoted.
(It has been so long since our Navy fought another navy that, apart from the
aviators, military competence does not seem to be a consideration at any
level.)
Almost never do our military schools,
academies, and colleges put students in situations where they have to think
through how to fight a battle or a campaign, then get critiqued not on their
answer but the way they think. Nor does American military training offer much
free play, where the enemy can do whatever he wants and critique draws out why
one side won and the other lost. Instead, training exercises are scripted as if
we are training an opera company. The schools teach a combination of staff
process and sophomore-level college courses in government and international
relations. No one is taught how to be a commander in combat. One Army
lieutenant colonel recently wrote me that he got angry when he figured out that
nothing he needs to know to command would be taught to him in any Army school.
The promotion system reinforces
professional ignorance. Above the company grades, military ability does not
count in determining who gets promoted. At the rank of major, officers are
supposed to accept that the “real world” is the internal world of budget and
promotion politics, not war. Those who “don’t get it” have ever smaller chances
of making general. This represents corruption of the worst kind, corruption of
institutional purpose. Its result is generals and admirals who are in effect
Soviet industrial managers in ever worse-looking suits. They know little and
care less about their intended product, military victory. Their expertise is in
acquiring resources and playing the military courtier.
When one of these milicrats gets a
wartime command of a division, a corps, or a theater, he does not suddenly
confront the fact that he does not know his business. He lives in a bubble, a
veritable Persian court of staff officers who make sure bad news is minimized
and military decisions are reduced to three “staff options,” two of which are
insane while the third represents doing more of the same. The “commander,” or
more accurately chairman, blesses the option the staff wants and retires to his
harem (sorry, Dave). If the result is another lost war, the general’s career
suffers not at all. He may go on to become the chief of staff of his service
or, in Petraeus’s case, director of the CIA. As Army lieutenant colonel Paul
Yingling wrote at the height of the Iraq debacle, a private who loses his rifle
suffers more than does a general who loses a war.
America’s military did not fail in
Somalia, Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan because its budget was too small, nor
because it lacked sufficient high-tech gizmos, nor because the privates and
sergeants screwed up. Part of the blame belongs to civilians who set
unrealistic military objectives. But a good part should go to America’s
generals, far too many of whom have proven militarily incompetent. A serious
country should do something about that
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