The Generals… Readable but Flawed?
11.30.2012 at 10:19pm
Gian Gentile provides an intelligent dissection of Tom Ricks' The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today at the New York Journal of Books, deeming it "highly readable but flawed."
Tom Ricks’s new book The Generals regresses from Keegan and takes us back to a less complicated form of military storytelling in which wars’ outcomes were determined solely by the performance of army commanders.
The main argument to the book is simple: Relieve American army generals in war for poor performance and victory will be more attainable.
Read it here.
“But his simplistic solution is also quite dangerous if the policymakers and others who read it come to believe it is true. America at war with Syria, Iran, Yemen, sure—just relieve a few generals, get the right ones in place, and victory will be assured.’
If a number of generals had been relieved from 2005 through 2011 we might in fact be further down the road of mission command being accepted especially in the true “art of command” area—would have taken the relieving though to the level of 06s to be more effective.
The levels of micromanagement, lack of Staff dialogue and the lack or trust/moral courage might have improved in the same timeframe if the same standards we set in placing E4s thru E6s in jail (Abu Ghraib to Afghanistan)had been in place for the upper management.
Mr. Ricks thesis, I think, has merit but is not extended far enough down the food chain.
A combat commander has a responsibility to the men he commands. That is to weed out ineffective officers who either can’t get the job done or waste their men in trying to get it done. Both are inexcusable. In Vietnam a platoon leader or Company commander wasteful of his men was usually OIC of popcorn and movies in short order. Not always but it did happen. In my opinion the problem is that such Darwinian logic is too infrequently applied to the careerists and their men can SEE that failure. This sort of failure goes to the heart of your credibility as a leader… not just your career.
Certainly NOT relieving senior officer who don’t perform leads to ineffective officers replicating themselves since they are the ones who decide who gets promoted below themselves.
As in ANY large organization the most important job of the senior ranks is culling the turkeys. Always has been and always will be.
Finally, about the Vietnam/Westmoreland/Abrams thing that always seems to show up in Col. Gentiles writing:
I was there, and did the job.
I have not read all the reports and staff papers that Col. Gentile has probably read.
But the fact is that the old farts who were there, both as line unit officers and as MACV like me, are generally of the opinion that we were losing when Westy was in charge, we were wining when Abrams was and that, had Abrams BEEN in charge from the opening dance, the outcome would have been very different. Staff reports in that era, just as today tend to be more about putting derrieres in defilade than about any other issue.
50Bravo: In my humble opinion and from my aging observations LBJ’s large scale crusade to save South Vietnam was doomed to fail from the start regardless of the military strategy applied against the VC / NVA in country Vietnam. Both Kennedy and Johnson opted to intervene in a de facto civil war between the forces led by two opposing dictators – originally Diem versus Ho Chi Minh. The latter and Giap were far more popular with the Vietnamese on both sides for having driven out the French – as I heard quite a few ARVN and VNAF officers note while they were simultaneously deriding the incompetence and criminality of their own leaders, other than Ky who they all seemed to like, doing so after a few drinks in the NAS Pensacola O Club in the early Summer of 1965.
A combination of generally (but not all) incompetent ARVN generals and LBJ / McNamara’s restrictions on operations doomed their goal of establishing an independent South Vietnam in the face of continued movement of NVA forces and supplies into the South.
Westmoreland, who was prohibited from sending forces into the North, attempted to win by killing as many NVA as possible, but given Giap’s strategy that we would run out of patience for that war before he ran out of men the result was obvious. Abrams military strategy of pacification only succeeded as long the force size was a combined 500,000 or so US and maybe the same number of ARVN – a one million man ground force effort, with numerous thousands more US Navy and Air Force personnel providing available massive explosive power from aircraft and ships that could / would prevent the NVA being able to successfully invade the South while US and ARVN forces were dispersed over the countryside and not concentrated to combat an invading conventional force. As Lt. Col. Harry Summers pointed out, once the US withdrew its 500,000 man ground force contribution to the pacification effort and no longer was willing to provide protective air power for the South, Giap’s NVA conventional style invasion of the South mopped up the dispersed and obviously never concentrated ARVN while many of their leaders gathered up their money and jewels and fled the country. The mid range ARVN officers who ended up in the country that I know blame their generals for being completely incompetent in the face of the last NVA invasion.
Abrams large scale pacification effort may have provided a temporary vision of tactical success to pacification proponents, but given the US policy of withdrawing our forces from South Vietnam, its resulting dispersing of ARVN units across that country ensured their strategic defeat.
As noted by Bill M, in paraphrased form, despite measure taken to improve tactical performance, an overall flawed strategy, regardless of how expertly executed [will] still fail.
Presuming one believes there was value in achieving a temporary uncontested independence for the South Vietnamese in that war, the only military strategy to have achieved it would have been a truly unrestricted bombing and shelling campaign against the North accompanied by multi US divisions employed in large scale Sherman style raids with massive air support across that nation. That level of destruction would have motivated Ho Chi Minh to have agreed to end their campaign against the South, but they would have just waited until US forces left and then invaded the South and won.
Knowing Rick’s penchant for doing great research and then coming to the wrong conclusions in his previous books I’m going to wait for a used paperback of “The Generals”.
Gentile’s review says as much.
It is easy to critique a book regardless of the author—would enjoy seeing Gian’s response since he is on active duty on the lack of trust/staff team building fostered by BC/RC Commanders down to BN levels as well, the level of micromanagment demonstrated by the goup of middle management ie 06s through to two stars and their push back to the doctrine of mission command—mission command through from the art of command side not the science of control side ie C2.
Think what Ricks is alluding to is the “art” of command not the “science” side.
Would and could have General P been a great combat leader even while having an affair–most of our great combat generals had “issues”. a recent article indicated that those recruited into the general force with “issues” turned out to be great combat veterans-while having garrison problems—similar to what rick’s is saying although not at the general level.
Where were the current 1,2,3 stars in Iraq and or Afghanistan—leading from the front or the rear? In the German version of mission command “auftragstaktik” German generals lead from the front losing over 200.
JMO
I was a door gunner, the intellectual writings are interesting, strikes me as a little overthoght. It is really quite simple no matter the geography of the conflict/war, who has the most patriots who are willing to die for their cause/country? RVN ? not enough, Mid east ? please. The other most telling issue is coruption, please apply the above for the same result, works every time.