[Dialogue] An interesting commentary on integrity

[George Holcombe]

This article is making the rounds. It hits the generals hard for not  
standing up to the politicians.

Challenging the Generals

FRED KAPLAN, New York Times, August 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/magazine/26military-t.html? 
_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
On Aug. 1, Gen. Richard Cody, the United States Army’s vice chief of  
staff, flew to the sprawling base at Fort Knox, Ky., to talk with the  
officers enrolled in the Captains Career Course. These are the Army’s  
elite junior officers. Of the 127 captains taking the five-week  
course, 119 had served one or two tours of duty in Iraq or  
Afghanistan, mainly as lieutenants. Nearly all would soon be going  
back as company commanders. A captain named Matt Wignall, who  
recently spent 16 months in Iraq with a Stryker brigade combat team,  
asked Cody, the Army’s second-highest-ranking general, what he  
thought of a recent article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling titled “A  
Failure in Generalship.” The article, a scathing indictment that  
circulated far and wide, including in Iraq, accused the Army’s  
generals of lacking “professional character,” “creative intelligence”  
and “moral courage.”

Yingling’s article — published in the May issue of Armed Forces  
Journal — noted that a key role of generals is to advise policy  
makers and the public on the means necessary to win wars. “If the  
general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war  
with insufficient means,” he wrote, “he shares culpability for the  
results.” Today’s generals “failed to envision the conditions of  
future combat and prepare their forces accordingly,” and they failed  
to advise policy makers on how much force would be necessary to win  
and stabilize Iraq. These failures, he insisted, stemmed not just  
from the civilian leaders but also from a military culture that “does  
little to reward creativity and moral courage.” He concluded, “As  
matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater  
consequences than a general who loses a war.”

General Cody looked around the auditorium, packed with men and women  
in uniform — most of them in their mid-20s, three decades his junior  
but far more war-hardened than he or his peers were at the same age —  
and turned Captain Wignall’s question around. “You all have just come  
from combat, you’re young captains,” he said, addressing the entire  
room. “What’s your opinion of the general officers corps?”

Over the next 90 minutes, five captains stood up, recited their names  
and their units and raised several of Yingling’s criticisms. One  
asked why the top generals failed to give political leaders full and  
frank advice on how many troops would be needed in Iraq. One asked  
whether any generals “should be held accountable” for the war’s  
failures. One asked if the Army should change the way it selected  
generals. Another said that general officers were so far removed from  
the fighting, they wound up “sheltered from the truth” and “don’t  
know what’s going on.”

Challenges like this are rare in the military, which depends on  
obedience and hierarchy. Yet the scene at Fort Knox reflected a  
brewing conflict between the Army’s junior and senior officer corps —  
lieutenants and captains on one hand, generals on the other, with  
majors and colonels (“field-grade officers”) straddling the divide  
and sometimes taking sides. The cause of this tension is the war in  
Iraq, but the consequences are broader. They revolve around the  
obligations of an officer, the nature of future warfare and the  
future of the Army itself. And these tensions are rising at a time  
when the war has stretched the Army’s resources to the limit, when  
junior officers are quitting at alarming rates and when political  
leaders are divided or uncertain about America’s — and its military’s  
— role in the world.

Colonel Yingling’s article gave these tensions voice; it spelled out  
the issues and the stakes; and it located their roots in the Army’s  
own institutional culture, specifically in the growing disconnect  
between this culture — which is embodied by the generals — and the  
complex realities that junior officers, those fighting the war, are  
confronting daily on the ground. The article was all the more potent  
because it was written by an active-duty officer still on the rise.  
It was a career risk, just as, on a smaller scale, standing up and  
asking the Army vice chief of staff about the article was a risk.

In response to the captains’ questions, General Cody acknowledged, as  
senior officers often do now, that the Iraq war was “mismanaged” in  
its first phases. The original plan, he said, did not anticipate the  
disbanding of the Iraqi Army, the disruption of oil production or the  
rise of an insurgency. Still, he rejected the broader critique. “I  
think we’ve got great general officers that are meeting tough  
demands,” he insisted. He railed instead at politicians for cutting  
back the military in the 1990s. “Those are the people who ought to be  
held accountable,” he said.

Before and just after America’s entry into World War II, Gen. George  
Marshall, the Army’s chief of staff, purged 31 of his 42 division and  
corps commanders, all of them generals, and 162 colonels on the  
grounds that they were unsuited for battle. Over the course of the  
war, he rid the Army of 500 colonels. He reached deep into the lower  
ranks to find talented men to replace them. For example, Gen. James  
Gavin, the highly decorated commander of the 82nd Airborne Division,  
was a mere major in December 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl  
Harbor. Today, President Bush maintains that the nation is in a war  
against terrorism — what Pentagon officials call “the long war” — in  
which civilization itself is at stake. Yet six years into this war,  
the armed forces — not just the Army, but also the Air Force, Navy  
and Marines — have changed almost nothing about the way their  
promotional systems and their entire bureaucracies operate.

On the lower end of the scale, things have changed — but for the  
worse. West Point cadets are obligated to stay in the Army for five  
years after graduating. In a typical year, about a quarter to a third  
of them decide not to sign on for another term. In 2003, when the  
class of 1998 faced that decision, only 18 percent quit the force:  
memories of 9/11 were still vivid; the war in Afghanistan seemed a  
success; and war in Iraq was under way. Duty called, and it seemed a  
good time to be an Army officer. But last year, when the 905 officers  
from the class of 2001 had to make their choice to stay or leave, 44  
percent quit the Army. It was the service’s highest loss rate in  
three decades.

Col. Don Snider, a longtime professor at West Point, sees a “trust  
gap” between junior and senior officers. There has always been a gap,  
to some degree. What’s different now is that many of the juniors have  
more combat experience than the seniors. They have come to trust  
their own instincts more than they trust orders. They look at the  
hand they’ve been dealt by their superiors’ decisions, and they feel  
let down.

The gap is widening further, Snider told me, because of this war’s  
operating tempo, the “unrelenting pace” at which soldiers are rotated  
into Iraq for longer tours — and a greater number of tours — than  
they signed up for. Many soldiers, even those who support the war,  
are wearying of the endless cycle. The cycle is a result of two  
decisions. The first occurred at the start of the war, when the  
senior officers assented to the decision by Donald Rumsfeld, then the  
secretary of defense, to send in far fewer troops than they had  
recommended. The second took place two years later, well into the  
insurgency phase of the war, when top officers declared they didn’t  
need more troops, though most of them knew that in fact they did.  
“Many junior officers,” Snider said, “see this op tempo as stemming  
from the failure of senior officers to speak out.”

Paul Yingling did not set out to cause a stir. He grew up in a  
working-class part of Pittsburgh. His father owned a bar; no one in  
his family went to college. He joined the Army in 1984 at age 17,  
because he was a troubled kid — poor grades and too much drinking and  
brawling — who wanted to turn his life around, and he did. He went to  
Duquesne University, a small Catholic school, on an R.O.T.C.  
scholarship; went on active duty; rose through the ranks; and, by the  
time of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, was a lieutenant commanding an  
artillery battery, directing cannon fire against Saddam Hussein’s army.

“When I was in the gulf war, I remember thinking, This is easier than  
it was at training exercises,” he told me earlier this month. He was  
sent to Bosnia in December 1995 as part of the first peacekeeping  
operation after the signing of the Dayton accords, which ended the  
war in Bosnia. “This was nothing like training,” he recalled. Like  
most of his fellow soldiers, he was trained almost entirely for  
conventional combat operations: straightforward clashes, brigades  
against brigades. (Even now, about 70 percent of the training at the  
Captains Career Course is for conventional warfare.) In Bosnia, there  
was no clear enemy, no front line and no set definition of victory.  
“I kept wondering why things weren’t as well rehearsed as they’d been  
in the gulf war,” he said.

Upon returning, he spent the next six years pondering that question.  
He studied international relations at the University of Chicago’s  
graduate school and wrote a master’s thesis about the circumstances  
under which outside powers can successfully intervene in civil wars.  
(One conclusion: There aren’t many.) He then taught at West Point,  
where he also read deeply in Western political theory. Yingling was  
deployed to Iraq in July 2003 as an executive officer collecting  
loose munitions and training Iraq’s civil-defense corps. “The corps  
deserted or joined the insurgency on first contact,” he recalled. “It  
was a disaster.”

In the late fall of 2003, his first tour of duty over, Yingling was  
sent to Fort Sill, Okla., the Army’s main base for artillery  
soldiers, and wrote long memos to the local generals, suggesting new  
approaches to the war in Iraq. One suggestion was that since  
artillery rockets were then playing little role, artillery soldiers  
should become more skilled in training Iraqi soldiers; that, he  
thought, would be vital to Iraq’s future stability. No one responded  
to his memos, he says. He volunteered for another tour of combat and  
became deputy commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which  
was fighting jihadist insurgents in the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar.

The commander of the third regiment, Col. H. R. McMaster, was a  
historian as well as a decorated soldier. He figured that Iraq could  
not build its own institutions, political or military, until its  
people felt safe. So he devised his own plan, in which he and his  
troops cleared the town of insurgents — and at the same time formed  
alliances and built trust with local sheiks and tribal leaders. The  
campaign worked for a while, but only because McMaster flooded the  
city with soldiers — about 1,000 of them per square kilometer.  
Earlier, as Yingling drove around to other towns and villages, he saw  
that most Iraqis were submitting to whatever gang or militia offered  
them protection, because United States and coalition forces weren’t  
anywhere around. And that was because the coalition had entered the  
war without enough troops. Yingling was seeing the consequences of  
this decision up close in the terrible insecurity of most Iraqis’ lives.

In February 2006, Yingling returned to Fort Sill. That April, six  
retired Army and Marine generals publicly criticized Rumsfeld, who  
was still the secretary of defense, for sending too few troops to  
Iraq. Many junior and field-grade officers reacted with puzzlement or  
disgust. Their common question: Where were these generals when they  
still wore the uniform? Why didn’t they speak up when their words  
might have counted? One general who had spoken up, Eric Shinseki,  
then the Army chief of staff, was publicly upbraided and ostracized  
by Rumsfeld; other active-duty generals got the message and stayed mum.

That December, Yingling attended a Purple Heart ceremony for soldiers  
wounded in Iraq. “I was watching these soldiers wheeling into this  
room, or in some cases having to be wheeled in by their wives or  
mothers,” he recalled. “And I said to myself: ‘These soldiers were  
doing their jobs. The senior officers were not doing theirs. We’re  
not giving our soldiers the tools and training to succeed.’ I had to  
go public.”

Soon after Yingling’s article appeared, Maj. Gen. Jeff Hammond,  
commander of the Fourth Infantry Division at Fort Hood, Tex.,  
reportedly called a meeting of the roughly 200 captains on his base,  
all of whom had served in Iraq, for the purpose of putting this  
brazen lieutenant colonel in his place. According to The Wall Street  
Journal, he told his captains that Army generals are “dedicated,  
selfless servants.” Yingling had no business judging generals because  
he has “never worn the shoes of a general.” By implication, Hammond  
was warning his captains that they had no business judging generals,  
either. Yingling was stationed at Fort Hood at the time, preparing to  
take command of an artillery battalion. From the steps of his  
building, he could see the steps of General Hammond’s building. He  
said he sent the general a copy of his article before publication as  
a courtesy, and he never heard back; nor was he notified of the  
general’s meeting with his captains.

The “trust gap” between junior and senior officers is hardly  
universal. Many junior officers at Fort Knox and elsewhere have no  
complaints about the generals — or regard the matter as way above  
their pay grade. As Capt. Ryan Kranc, who has served two tours in  
Iraq, one as a commander, explained to me, “I’m more interested in  
whether my guys can secure a convoy.” He dismissed complaints about  
troop shortages. “When you’re in a system, you’re never going to get  
everything you ask for,” he said, “but I still have to accomplish a  
mission. That’s my job. If they give me a toothpick, dental floss and  
a good hunting knife, I will accomplish the mission.”

An hour after General Cody’s talk at Fort Knox, several captains met  
to discuss the issue over beers. Capt. Garrett Cathcart, who has  
served in Iraq as a platoon leader, said: “The culture of the Army is  
to accomplish the mission, no matter what. That’s a good thing.” Matt  
Wignall, who was the first captain to ask General Cody about the  
Yingling article, agreed that a mission-oriented culture was “a good  
thing, but it can be dangerous.” He added: “It is so rare to hear  
someone in the Army say, ‘No, I can’t do that.’ But sometimes it  
takes courage to say, ‘I don’t have the capability.’ ” Before the  
Iraq war, when Rumsfeld overrode the initial plans of the senior  
officers, “somebody should have put his foot down,” Wignall said.

Lt. Col. Allen Gill, who just retired as director of the R.O.T.C.  
program at Georgetown University, has heard versions of this  
discussion among his cadets for years. He raises a different concern  
about the Army’s “can do” culture. “You’re not brought up in the Army  
to tell people how you can’t get things done, and that’s fine, that’s  
necessary,” he said. “But when you get promoted to a higher level of  
strategic leadership, you have to have a different outlook. You’re  
supposed to make clear, cold calculations of risk — of the  
probabilities of victory and defeat.”

The problem, he said, is that it’s hard for officers — hard for  
people in any profession — to switch their basic approach to life so  
abruptly. As Yingling put it in his article, “It is unreasonable to  
expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to  
institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late 40s.”

Yingling’s commander at Tal Afar, H. R. McMaster, documented a  
similar crisis in the case of the Vietnam War. Twenty years after the  
war, McMaster wrote a doctoral dissertation that he turned into a  
book called “Dereliction of Duty.” It concluded that the Joint Chiefs  
of Staff in the 1960s betrayed their professional obligations by  
failing to provide unvarnished military advice to President Lyndon B.  
Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as they plunged into  
the Southeast Asian quagmire. When McMaster’s book was published in  
1997, Gen. Hugh Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, ordered  
all commanders to read it — and to express disagreements to their  
superiors, even at personal risk. Since then, “Dereliction of Duty”  
has been recommended reading for Army officers.

Yet before the start of the Iraq war and during the early stages of  
the fighting, the Joint Chiefs once again fell silent. Justin  
Rosenbaum, the captain at Fort Knox who asked General Cody whether  
any generals would be held accountable for the failures in Iraq, said  
he was disturbed by this parallel between the two wars. “We’ve read  
the McMaster book,” he said. “It’s startling that we’re repeating the  
same mistakes.”

McMaster’s own fate has reinforced these apprehensions. President  
Bush has singled out McMaster’s campaign at Tal Afar as a model of  
successful strategy. Gen. David Petraeus, now commander of United  
States forces in Iraq, frequently consults with McMaster in planning  
his broader counterinsurgency campaign. Yet the Army’s promotion  
board — the panel of generals that selects which few dozen colonels  
advance to the rank of brigadier general — has passed over McMaster  
two years in a row.

McMaster’s nonpromotion has not been widely reported, yet every  
officer I spoke with knew about it and had pondered its implications.  
One colonel, who asked not to be identified because he didn’t want to  
risk his own ambitions, said: “Everyone studies the brigadier-general  
promotion list like tarot cards — who makes it, who doesn’t. It  
communicates what qualities are valued and not valued.” A retired  
Army two-star general, who requested anonymity because he didn’t want  
to anger his friends on the promotion boards, agreed. “When you turn  
down a guy like McMaster,” he told me, “that sends a potent message  
to everybody down the chain. I don’t know, maybe there were good  
reasons not to promote him. But the message everybody gets is: ‘We’re  
not interested in rewarding people like him. We’re not interested in  
rewarding agents of change.’ ”

Members of the board, he said, want to promote officers whose careers  
look like their own. Today’s generals rose through the officer corps  
of the peacetime Army. Many of them fought in the last years of  
Vietnam, and some fought in the gulf war. But to the extent they have  
combat experience, it has been mainly tactical, not strategic. They  
know how to secure an objective on a battlefield, how to coordinate  
firepower and maneuver. But they don’t necessarily know how to deal  
with an enemy that’s flexible, with a scenario that has not been  
rehearsed.

“Those rewarded are the can-do, go-to people,” the retired two-star  
general told me. “Their skill is making the trains run on time. So  
why are we surprised that, when the enemy becomes adaptive, we get  
caught off guard? If you raise a group of plumbers, you shouldn’t be  
upset if they can’t do theoretical physics.”

There are, of course, exceptions, most notably General Petraeus. He  
wrote an article for a recent issue of The American Interest, a  
Washington-based public-policy journal, urging officers to attend  
civilian graduate schools and get out of their “intellectual comfort  
zones” — useful for dealing with today’s adaptive enemies.

Yet many Army officers I spoke with say Petraeus’s view is rare among  
senior officers. Two colonels told me that when they were captains,  
their commanders strongly discouraged them from attending not just  
graduate school but even the Army’s Command and General Staff  
College, warning that it would be a diversion from their career  
paths. “I got the impression that I’d be better off counting  
bedsheets in the Baghdad Embassy than studying at Harvard,” one  
colonel said.

Harvard’s merits aside, some junior officers agree that the promotion  
system discourages breadth. Capt. Kip Kowalski, an infantry officer  
in the Captains Career Course at Fort Knox, is a proud soldier in the  
can-do tradition. He is impatient with critiques of superiors; he  
prefers to stay focused on his job. “But I am worried,” he said,  
“that generals these days are forced to be narrow.” Kowalski would  
like to spend a few years in a different branch of the Army — say, as  
a foreign area officer — and then come back to combat operations. He  
says he thinks the switch would broaden his skills, give him new  
perspectives and make him a better officer. But the rules don’t allow  
switching back and forth among specialties. “I have to decide right  
now whether I want to do ops or something else,” he said. “If I go F.  
A. O., I can never come back.”

In October 2006, seven months before his essay on the failure of  
generalship appeared, Yingling and Lt. Col. John Nagl, another  
innovative officer, wrote an article for Armed Forces Journal called  
“New Rules for New Enemies,” in which they wrote: “The best way to  
change the organizational culture of the Army is to change the  
pathways for professional advancement within the officer corps. The  
Army will become more adaptive only when being adaptive offers the  
surest path to promotion.”

In late June, Yingling took command of an artillery battalion. This  
means he will most likely be promoted to full colonel. This  
assignment, however, was in the works nearly a year ago, long before  
he wrote his critique of the generals. His move and probable  
promotion say nothing about whether he’ll be promoted further — or  
whether, as some of his admirers fear, his career will now grind to a  
halt.

Nagl — the author of an acclaimed book about counterinsurgency  
(“Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife”), a former operations officer in  
Iraq and the subject of a New York Times Magazine article a few years  
ago — has since taken command of a unit at Fort Riley, Kan., that  
trains United States soldiers to be advisers to Iraqi security  
forces. Pentagon officials have said that these advisers are crucial  
to America’s future military policy. Yet Nagl has written that  
soldiers have been posted to this unit “on an ad hoc basis” and that  
few of the officers selected to train them have ever been advisers  
themselves.

Lt. Col. Isaiah Wilson, a professor at West Point and former planning  
officer in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division, said the fate of  
Nagl’s unit — the degree to which it attracted capable, ambitious  
soldiers — depended on the answer to one question: “Will serving as  
an adviser be seen as equal to serving as a combat officer in the  
eyes of the promotion boards? The jury is still out.”

“Guys like Yingling, Nagl and McMaster are the canaries in the coal  
mine of Army reform,” the retired two-star general I spoke with told  
me. “Will they get promoted to general? If they do, that’s a sign  
that real change is happening. If they don’t, that’s a sign that the  
traditional culture still rules.”

Failure sometimes compels an institution to change its ways. The last  
time the Army undertook an overhaul was in the wake of the Vietnam  
War. At the center of those reforms was an officer named Huba Wass de  
Czege. Wass de Czege (pronounced VOSH de tsay-guh) graduated from  
West Point and served two tours of duty in Vietnam, the second as a  
company commander in the Central Highlands. He devised innovative  
tactics, leading four-man teams — at the time they were considered  
unconventionally small — on ambush raids at night. His immediate  
superiors weren’t keen on his approach or attitude, despite his  
successes. But after the war ended and a few creative officers took  
over key posts, they recruited Wass de Czege to join them.

In 1982, he was ordered to rewrite the Army’s field manual on combat  
operations. At his own initiative, he read the classics of military  
strategy — Clausewitz’s “On War,” Sun Tzu’s “Art of War,” B. H.  
Liddell Hart’s “Strategy” — none of which had been on his reading  
list at West Point. And he incorporated many of their lessons along  
with his own experiences from Vietnam. Where the old edition assumed  
static clashes of firepower and attrition, Wass de Czege’s revision  
emphasized speed, maneuver and taking the offensive. He was asked to  
create a one-year graduate program for the most promising young  
officers. Called the School of Advanced Military Studies, or SAMS, it  
brought strategic thinking back into the Army — at least for a while.

Now a retired one-star general, though an active Army consultant,  
Wass de Czege has publicly praised Yingling’s article. (Yingling was  
a graduate of SAMS in 2002, well after its founder moved on.) In an  
essay for the July issue of Army magazine, Wass de Czege wrote that  
today’s junior officers “feel they have much relevant experience  
[that] those senior to them lack,” yet the senior officers “have not  
listened to them.” These junior officers, he added, remind him of his  
own generation of captains, who held the same view during and just  
after Vietnam.

“The crux of the problem in our Army,” Wass de Czege wrote, “is that  
officers are not systematically taught how to cope with unstructured  
problems.” Counterinsurgency wars, like those in Iraq and  
Afghanistan, are all about unstructured problems. The junior and  
field-grade officers, who command at the battalion level and below,  
deal with unstructured problems — adapting to the insurgents’ ever- 
changing tactics — as a matter of course. Many generals don’t, and  
never had to, deal with such problems, either in war or in their  
training drills. Many of them may not fully recognize just how  
distinct and difficult these problems are.

Speaking by phone from his home outside Fort Leavenworth, Wass de  
Czege emphasized that he was impressed with most of today’s senior  
officers. Compared with those of his time, they are more capable,  
open and intelligent (most officers today, junior and senior, have  
college degrees, for instance). “You’re not seeing any of the gross  
incompetence that was common in my day,” he said. He added, however,  
that today’s generals are still too slow to change. “The Army tends  
to be consensus-driven at the top,” he said. “There’s a good side to  
that. We’re steady as a rock. You call us to arms, we’ll be there.  
But when you roll a lot of changes at us, it takes awhile. The young  
guys have to drive us to it.”

The day after his talk at Fort Knox, General Cody, back at his office  
in the Pentagon, reiterated his “faith in the leadership of the  
general officers.” Asked about complaints that junior officers are  
forced to follow narrow paths to promotion, he said, “We’re trying to  
do just the opposite.” In the works are new incentives to retain  
officers, including not just higher bonuses but free graduate school  
and the right to choose which branch of the Army to serve in. “I  
don’t want everybody to think there’s one road map to colonel or  
general,” he said. He denied that promotion boards picked candidates  
in their own image. This year, he said, he was on the board that  
picked new brigadier generals, and one of them, Jeffrey Buchanan, had  
never commanded a combat brigade; his last assignment was training  
Iraqi security forces. One colonel, interviewed later, said: “That’s  
a good sign. They’ve never picked anybody like that before. But  
that’s just one out of 38 brigadier generals they picked. It’s still  
very much the exception.”

There is a specter haunting the debate over Yingling’s article — the  
specter of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. During World War II, Gen. Dwight  
D. Eisenhower threatened to resign if the civilian commanders didn’t  
order air support for the invasion of Normandy. President Franklin D.  
Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill acceded. But during  
the Korean War, MacArthur — at the time, perhaps the most popular  
public figure in America — demanded that President Truman let him  
attack China. Truman fired him. History has redeemed both presidents’  
decisions. But in terms of the issues that Yingling, McMaster and  
others have raised, was there really a distinction? Weren’t both  
generals speaking what they regarded as “truth to power”?

The very discussion of these issues discomforts many senior officers  
because they take very seriously the principle of civilian control.  
They believe it is not their place to challenge the president or his  
duly appointed secretary of defense, certainly not in public,  
especially not in wartime. The ethical codes are ambiguous on how  
firmly an officer can press an argument without crossing the line.  
So, many generals prefer to keep a substantial distance from that  
line — to keep the prospect of a constitutional crisis from even  
remotely arising.

On a blog Yingling maintains at the Web site of Small Wars Journal,  
an independent journal of military theory, he has acknowledged these  
dilemmas, but he hasn’t disentangled them. For example, if generals  
do speak up, and the president ignores their advice, what should they  
do then — salute and follow orders, resign en masse or criticize the  
president publicly? At this level of discussion, the junior and  
midlevel officers feel uncomfortable, too.

Yingling’s concern is more narrowly professional, but it should  
matter greatly to future policy makers who want to consult their  
military advisers. The challenge is how to ensure that generals  
possess the experience and analytical prowess to formulate sound  
military advice and the “moral courage,” as Yingling put it, to take  
responsibility for that advice and for its resulting successes or  
failures. The worry is that too few generals today possess either set  
of qualities — and that the promotional system impedes the rise of  
officers who do.

As today’s captains and majors come up through the ranks, the culture  
may change. One question is how long that will take. Another question  
is whether the most innovative of those junior officers will still be  
in the Army by the time the top brass decides reform is necessary. As  
Colonel Wilson, the West Point instructor, put it, “When that moment  
comes, will there be enough of the right folks in the right slots to  
make the necessary changes happen?”

Fred Kaplan is the national security columnist for Slate and author  
of the forthcoming book “Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas  
Wrecked American Power.”



George Holcombe
14900 Yellowleaf Tr.
Austin, TX 78728
Home: 512/252-2756
Mobile 512/294-5952
geowanda at earthlink.net


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