Firing Generals
Firing Generals by Jim Lacey, National Review Online.
To paraphrase Shakespeare: “The first thing we do, let’s fire all the generals.”
This is the basic prescription of military journalist and writer Tom Ricks, who, in his new book, The Generals, blames our lack of success in Iraq and Afghanistan on the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s and our political leaders’ having lost the ability or willingness to fire failing generals. Unfortunately, many commentators are accepting this formula as true without asking some hard questions, such as: When and for what reasons should a general be fired? Should the Continental Congress, for instance, have sent George Washington into an early retirement after his dismal performance defending New York City? Should Lincoln have cashiered Grant after his less-than-stellar performance at Shiloh, or possibly a bit later, when he wasted six months flailing about in failed attempts to approach Vicksburg? Was General Lee ready for the scrap heap after his early failures in what is now West Virginia?
What about in the 20th century? Should President Wilson have called Pershing home, after he sat idle for over a year before getting into the fight and then, at the start of the great Meuse-Argonne offensive, saw his army mauled and stopped in its tracks? Should Roosevelt or the Joint Chiefs have fired Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher after he delivered so-so results at the Battle of the Coral Sea, and in the process lost one of our three precious carriers and had a second crippled? Of course, if Fletcher had been fired, he would not have been present at Midway, where he smashed the Japanese fleet and changed the course of the war.
And just how should the president, the secretary of defense, or the Joint Chiefs de exactly whom to fire? After the World War II debacle at the Kasserine Pass, a corps commander, General Lloyd Fredenall, was fired. But the Army chief of staff, General George Marshall, could just as easily have found cause to fire Fredenall’s boss — General Eisenhower. I will spare you the list of superiors who could just as easily have been held responsible for setbacks as their fired subordinates. Suffice it to say, it is a long one, and populated with the names of some of our most famous commanders.
Anyone reading Ricks’s previous bestselling book, Fiasco, would surely have walked away believing General Raymond Odierno was a failure. That was certainly Ricks’s assessment then. But two years later, when he published The Gamble, Odierno was apparently transformed and even Ricks was forced to admit that he is one of the heroes in the book. In truth, I believe whatever success we had in Iraq is directly attributable to Odierno’s leadership, and he continues to serve today as the Army chief of staff. We can, therefore, count ourselves lucky that, during our hardest moments in Iraq, Ricks was not responsible for picking which generals should be cashiered…
This article is relevant:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-dumps-smart-independently-minded-general_697440.html
I thought Mr. Lacey made some good and some not-so-good points.
First, I haven’t yet completed “The Generals” but in what I’ve read so far, I have not gotten the impression that Ricks’s solution to every problem is to fire a general. While it is a critical theme in the book, in the WWII section alone he discusses how Patton was kept on despite not fitting the “Marshall model” because of his unique ability to boldly employ armored forces in pursuit of the enemy, he discusses MacArthur being kept in the Pacific partly to prevent him from eroding unity of command back in DC, he does discuss Bradley ascending the ranks despite some setbacks and an often plodding operational tempo. He also discusses firings that perhaps should not have occurred (e.g. Terry Allen). Again, my read of Ricks’s book is that firing generals is not a cure-all, rather a cure-somethings. The ability to fire poorly performing commanders is a necessary tool for victory, not the only one. I feel like either I am reading Ricks incorrectly or Mr. Lacey is.
Second, Mr. Lacey’s point about deciding when a general should be relieved is a valid one. Mr. Ricks does describe the “Marshall model” which clearly emphasised qualities such as teamwork and the ability to remain calm under pressure. He seems to look upon this model somewhat favorably but does also touch on how this model can generate more “company men” and fewer bold leaders and can result in a risk averse mentality. In the parts I’ve read so far, Mr. Ricks does not answer the question “under what conditions should a general be fired.”
Third, I do take issue with Mr. Lacey’s assertion that, since the end of WWII, the results from Korea, Vietnam, OIF, and Afghanistan are all solely the fault of political leaders and insufficient public support. Was insufficient support really the problem in Vietnam or OIF? The Gulf of Tonkin resolution was essentially a blank check. How many dollars did we spend in Iraq? While, obviously, political constraints (especially in a democracy) impact military strategy, I think this has become the one-stop-shop excuse any time a war with the result we aren’t thrilled with. Generals get paid to operate at this level of war, of providing military advice to inform the political strategic decision and then apply military capability to support that strategy. Generals do not get paid to focus at the tactical level. It seems our military strategy in OIF ended at Baghdad, a tactical objective. To my understanding, there was no attempt to plan beyond the fall of Baghdad, or that such an attempt was stifled. Is this not a failure in generalship? Also, to say that everyone was ill prepared for the insurgency that emerged is problematic in two ways: 1) one of the tasks associated with generalship is to anticipate the future. Granted, that is a terribly difficult task but it is worth asking the question, why were we so ill prepared when insurgencies are so prolific around the world. 2) The 101st started doing COIN in ’03 yet its success was not replicated hardly anywhere until years later when GEN Petraeus published FM 3-24 and then enforced its application. To suggest that no one knew what to do to combat an insurgency until 2006 is simply ill informed. Again, a question worth asking is, why wasn’t the 101st’s success in Mosul replicated throughout Iraq? There are any number of generals who could have remedied this.
Finally, I think Mr. Lacey’s analogy of “would you fire a coach that never lost a game” is based on a misunderstanding of what the game is. Mr. Lacey talks about battles and campaigns but the game is not an individual battle or campaign. Generalship at the highest levels (CJCS, Combatant Commanders, MNF-I CDR, ISAF CDR, etc) is about winning and losing wars. If generals are the coaches then wars are the games they play. The battles being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan that Mr. Lacey points to are fought by SSGs, SFCs, LTs, and Captains. It feels like Mr. Lacey is grading 3 and 4 star generals based on someone else’s homework.