Failure of the generals

In today's Wall Street Journal (firewalled), there's a story about Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, and his famously stinging essay criticizing the top leadership of the Army for its failures of leadership in Iraq. The piece is more broadly about the growing chasm of confidence separating junior-level officers from their seniors. Here's an excerpt:

In 2005, Col. Yingling volunteered to go back to Iraq with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. He was given responsibility for overseeing economic-development projects, Iraqi security forces and governance in Tal Afar, a small city in northern Iraq. The 3,500-soldier regiment's year was so successful that President Bush cited it in a nationally televised address.

When Col. Yingling returned to Fort Hood, he says, he found an Army that hadn't really changed. "The thing the Army institutionally is still struggling to learn is that the most important thing we do in counterinsurgency is building security forces and local government capacity," he said in an internal Army interview in 2006. "And yet all our organizations are designed around the least important line of operations:
combat operations."

A few weeks later, after attending the Purple Heart ceremony for the wounded soldiers, he decided he had to do something. His essay, "A Failure in Generalship," drew upon dozens of conversations he had overheard in mess halls and on patrol in Iraq. "It included no original thoughts," he says.

But it quickly made him something of a cult hero among the Army's junior and mid-grade officers.

At the Army's School for Advanced Military Studies in Kansas, where its brightest majors attend a one-year course on war planning, Col. Kevin Benson dropped lesson plans to let students discuss the article. "Most of the majors' reaction to the article was 'Right on,'" says Col. Benson, who until last month headed the Army school. Col. Benson says he counseled the young officers to be cautious about judging their superiors. "All right, you are going to have to work for some of these general officers," Col. Benson says he told them. "If you feel this way, what is your obligation to them?"

At Fort Hood, Maj. Gen. Jeff Hammond, the top general at the sprawling base, summoned all of the captains to hear his response to Col. Yingling's critique. About 200 officers in their mid- to late-20s, most of them Iraq veterans, filled the pews and lined the walls of the base chapel. "I believe in our generals. They are dedicated, selfless servants," Gen. Hammond recalls saying. The 51-year-old officer told the young captains that Col. Yingling wasn't competent to judge generals because he had never been one.

"He has never worn the shoes of a general," Gen. Hammond recalls saying.

The captains' reactions highlighted the growing gap between some junior officers and the generals. "If we are not qualified to judge, who is?" says one Iraq veteran who was at the meeting. Another officer in attendance says that he and his colleagues didn't want to hear a defense of the Army's senior officers. "We want someone at higher levels to take accountability for what went wrong in Iraq," he says.

It's interesting to read this today in light of a passage I read last night in Paul Fussell's World War I book, "The Great War and Modern Memory," which we're about to read and discuss in the Dallas Morning News summer book club. In Chapter 1, Fussell discusses how the scale of the slaughter, and its senselessness, shook an entire civilization. He gives as one example the British Gen. Sir Douglas Haig, who led his troops in a massive attack on German positions at the Somme. It was a massive planning failure that resulted in 60,000 British dead -- half the attacking force -- in one day.

Why the debacle? According to Fussell, it was partly to do with Haig's witlessness and lack of imagination. Another cause was the upper-class British officers' belief that the working-class infantrymen were too stupid to be taught how to attack "in any way except in full daylight and aligned in rows or 'waves.'" The British attack dragged on until it ended in November, having changed nothing.

Haig was promoted on New Year's Day to Field Marshal. By 1917, things were going so badly for the British that the government put up posters on the home front exhorting the population: "Don't think you know better than Haig."