Debating a Failure of Generalship and Leadership

….Gentile and I agreed nevertheless that Yingling failed to seal the deal by naming names, something that would’ve allowed readers the chance to test empirically whether the LTC’s overall thesis had merit.  Here’s Yingling’s nutgraf, words scribbled during the worst days in Iraq when Gentile commanded a cavalry squadron in Baghdad and I was stuck in Anbar as a lowly infantry SPC:

These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America’s general officer corps. America’s generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America’s generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress.

….Perhaps because it was so brief, Yingling’s essay lacked subtlety.  It’s not true that America’s generals in Vietnam saw the conflict merely in terms of conventional warfare, although some surely did.  He spun a dubious bit of scholarship on Malaya by John Nagl into a larger argument about Cold War generals choosing to orient American arms toward highly kinetic campaigns – as if the threat of Soviet arms in Europe had nothing to do with that.  And he peppered his analysis with bromides that remain unproven, perhaps my favorite being the chestnut that “?opulation security is the most important measure of effectiveness in counterinsurgency.”

That read better in 2007 than it does today. But Yingling’s larger point held true:  America’s generals failed to adapt our shrinking forces to how policymakers might direct their use, even if there was a re-emphasis on operations other than conventional war both in practice (Kurdistan, Bangladesh, Haiti, Somalia, Kovoso, Bosnia, Timor, Cambodia) and theory.

This is an important discussion because the failure of generalship is merely part of a larger paradigm of leadership by abdication and moral evasion that is corroding the fabric of American society to a degree not seen since the 1970’s. Or perhaps since the 1870’s. Colonel John Boyd once chided his brother officers for being willing to take a bullet for their country but not willing to risk their careers for their country. How much worse then is an elite civilian political class that grabs the largesse of government contracts with great gusto but is chronically unable to do the hard work of providing strategic leadership when in office?

Truman’s famous desk sign that indicated the buck stopped at his desk. To update the sign to fit the spirit of the times would require replacing it with a dead fish rotting from the head.

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