Ricks' Three (or Four) Books on Military Leadership

I've now finished the other half of Thomas Ricks The General: American Military Command from World War II to Today, and I have a bit of the yim yams.  It's still a valuable and instructive product but it's an almost entirely different book from the first half. No: it's more like three books, huddled uneasily under an attempt at a single overarching framework.

Remember the takeaway from the first half: George Marshall fired generals.  Great guy, George Marshall.  This is a story line that dominates the early chapters of Ricks' book, and one I find largely persuasive, if somewhat overdone and perhaps undercontexualized.

As if to provide a unifying theme for the whole, he keeps returning to the second half (was I wrong to sniff the pheremones of his agent here, who tells him he needs a single dominating soundbite?).  Anyway--the point is still relevant and plausible but increasingly it tends to obscure rather than to clarify three  (possibly four) other topic of greater saliency.  One might be tagged "bureaucracy" or "careerism," where we encounter more and more men who take the army as a job, not a calling--folks who are masters of get-along go-along, and of kiss-up, if not necessarily kick down.  Two is a glaring and calamitous deficiency in military doctrine--its failure to teach its officers anything about the political context and its blood cousin grand strategy.  This is the deficiency that gave us generals like Norman Schwartzkopf and Tommy Franks who might have been superb at running a platoon or even a battalion, possibly a division--but who had no conception how to think about the larger framework in which they were enjoined to operate.  Three would be what you might call "the civil-military conversation"--the way generals and presidents come to understand each other, their intentions and capacities.   It's the subject of at least one superb book in its own right=-Eliot Cohen's Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime, which Ricks cites with warm approval.

Laced into the middle of these is one spectacular and I think little-known narrative--the account of the rehabilitation of the Army after Vietnam in the hands of the (largely unknown, I suspect) General William E.DePuy.  DePuy is responsible for the two most important changes in the Army after Vietnam, one indispensible and one disastrous. "Indispensable" was the rehabilitation of th Army as a functioning instution--weeding out the thugs and the incompetents, initiating an effective program of training and generally restoring the Army's self-respect.  "Disastrous" was the Army's commitment to fight, as it were, the last war--to build its battle model around the idea of a ground war in Poland.  It's a fascinating story, heartening and horrifying all at once, and has a lot (though this is complicated) to do with the army we have today.

That's a lot for one book, or even for two or three, though I doubt Ricks could have found as broad an audience for two or three.  As it stands, Ricks doesn't always control his material, and he too often leaves you (perhaps ironically) aching for more probing on particular points.    Still for all such deficiencies, it's one of the best books on the (rather short) list of books that I've actually read about modern warfare.

Ricks on the Generals

Having spent four months as a cook at Fort Leonard Wood Mo in 1958, I feel comfortable pronouncing  on military matters (better qualified than most members of Congress, wouldn't you say?).  So I'm happy to declare Tom Ricks' Generals to be a fascinating read--imperfect, but full of good stuff which I, despite my vast experience, did not know.  

If you've read any of the reviews, you know the takeaway point: Marshall fired generals.  Eisenhower fired generals.  Ridgeway fired a few generals (in Korea, remember Korea?).  But after aside, since World War II, nobody fired generals, except in a few notorious cases where the President fired the Man at the Top.   The army became, in oversimplification, a careerist's army, on the order of the corporate megalopolis.  As in, how to succeed at extermination without really trying.

Related point: looking back from a later generation, it's possible to see more clearly what an awful cockup we made in Viet Nam: how completely we misunderstood the war and  how (consequently) we came so completely to mishandle it (Ricks' account of the My Lai massacre is harrowing--not news but worth retelling).

All this is worth the price  of admission.  But there are some disappointments.  Most important, Ricks doesn't seem to have much to offer on how it was the Army changed its command pattern so completely and so fast.  He does make the point that the Marshall/Eisenhower scheme worked fine in a big and popular war that we seemed to be winning; less so in smaller less popular wars where mischievous home front Congresscritters were always happy to find an excuse for interfering.  And he's got some wonderful side points about the different command structure of the Marines, always operating in, around, but never of, the Army.

You will surmise that I haven't finished the book yet; haven't got to the Bush wars where, from the standpoint of an outsider, the Army seems to have realized that there are things it hasn't done right and on which it must (or maybe not) change.  I suppose I'll have more to offer when I get there but for the moment, a vagrant thought: I've already remarked (tracking Ricks) on how much the 50s/60s Army reminds the reader of the 50s/60s corporation, where the trick was to keep your tie nicely knotted and your nose clean.  Of course that kind of corporate life has more or less vanished now.  Will it be possible once again to map changes in the modern Army onto changes in the much-transmogrified private sector?  If it is, you know  you'll read it here.

Oh, and One More Thing:  Can anyone recommend a comparable book on the leadership of the Vatican?    Management Lessons from Benedict XVI; now there's a page-turner.

LTCOL

Underbelly's Wichita correspondent, who doubles as military/defense analyst, meditates on the apparent source of a destabilizing tradition--the lieutenant colonel:

Ever notice how much trouble LTCOLs of various types cause?  Consider one LTCOL Custer – who famously was the youngest general in the Union army and the dumbest LTCOL on the books after he tangled with the natives in a field in the Black Hills. The Army would have been better off if they had left him a major general and parked him Washington to molder in the damp. He famously left his Gatling guns behind. To the sorrow of the 7th Cavalry. 

I’m sure I missed a few but the next one of note that I recall was LTCOL Ollie North, who among other things was termed the highest ranking LTCOL in the country at the time. Infamously, he escaped from imprisonment due to the interference of congress. Famously, he was represented by a potted plant in hearings. 

Now we have two examples to contemplate: one LTCOL Broadwell, who didn’t play well with others but can do a lot of pushups. She’s turned a lot of heads en route to being a soccer mom in the south somewhere. And finally LTCOL Allen West, recently one term congressman and soon to be talking head on Fox or worse. He seems to fail upward: having been ejected (with pension) from the army for violating the rules of war (’they are just guidelines’) but got elected to Congress by being nuttier than the other guy. Having failed as a congressman (who by definition have to get reelected or fail), he will now make six or seven figures mouthing off on Fox – where he will be limited to embarrassing himself rather than Congress.

As for Broadwell, well, she may be talking head – but not on TV. From her perspective, she’s likely better off in Carolina than in North Dakota. And her book will sell out -

Wiki has a list.  It includes  Aaron Burr, John C. Fremont and Henry Blake from M*A*S*H.  Also (remember him?)  Bill Kilgore:

In Uniform?

A  commenter at Bruce Bartlett's Facebook page reports that in 1932, at the time of the infamous "bonus march," it was still illegal for a military officer to wear a uniform in the District of Columbia.

No kidding?  Like Caesar not being permitted to cross the Rubicon?  Or the French hand-picking only one senior officer to come to town for the Bastille Day parade?  When did all that stop?

But then, at  time when wars are fought from air-conditioned mancaves outside Las Vegas, it doesn't really matter all that much any more.

The Admirals: What did Leahy Do?

I've finished my audioread of Walter Borneman's The Admirals, thus further filling in the many gaps in knowledge from my childhood in World War II, when I waited in fascinated apprehension, trusting they would get this damn thing over with before I turned 17, else I would have to go to war and would be killed.  Borneman's book is a satisfying read at least for someone as ignorant as I, though how it would hold up for the serious boffins is an interesting question to which I don't have the answer.  I am forced to revise a couple of  my untutored judgments.  I'd say that Ernest King, who commanded from Washington, is perhaps not quite as rotten a human being as he appears from a distance and probably on the whole an effective presence, though perhaps a bit more focused on winning glory for the Navy than winning victory for the allies.  On the other hand I'm revising downward my untutored  opinion of William Halsey--active and aggressive, always in the thick of the fray but culpable for a few whopper mistakes from all of which he seems to have walked away unscathed, at least in the eyes of an adoring public.  Halsey, that is, appears to be a natural master of showmanship--not the calculating megalomaniac that was Douglas MacArthur, but simply one whose instinctive effusiveness left him richly qualified for the role of hero.  Chester Nimitz comes across as just about on pitch with his reputation: steady, likeable, warm-hearted.

The puzzle for me is William D. Leahy, who spent the war at Roosevelt's ear, first as adviser on military matters and at the end--as Roosevelt was dying--the President's sole avenue of communication with the world.  It seems undisputed that if anyone stood had the full attention of the President, it was Leahy.

Yet what, exactly, did he do?  I haven't read Leahy's  own memoir of Leahy, nor any biography of him, but on Borneman's telling his record is oddly opaque.   Borneman does remark on their differences--Leahy was a "conservative" by the standards of  his time (which are not the standards of our time).  He also remarks on Leahy's unstinting fealty to the President whom he served, yet whose aspirations appear so different from his own.

Is that it?  Is Leahy then  merely (as MacArthur said of Eisenhower) a great clerk?   It seems unlikely.  Even if he left no dramatic mark, still it is true that one may exercise influence in ways that may not always be easy for a biographer to spot.   For example, Leahy  seems to have managed the President's agenda--some of it from the beginning, and all of it at the end when the other great agenda-setter, Harry Hopkins, and the President himself, were dying.   

There is at least one other possibility--one which Borneman, at least, does not explore.  That is: I wonder what are the chances that Roosevelt, the master manipulator, was simply using Leahy--defanging his deep-seated conservatism with flattering attention on the principle that you keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Of course there may be some mix of motives here, and the relationship may have evolved over time.  It could be that  Leahy began as a pawn in Roosevelt's larger chess game and grew genuinely  to respect and sympathize with his boss.  Beyond all that, it may be simply that Leahy was one of those people about whom it can be said: we don't know what he does around here, but we know that as long as he is here, a lot of things go right and not many go wrong.

Afterthought:  I turned 17 in 1953, long after World War II and a gnat's eyebrow too late for Korea.  By the time I did get to the military--as a reservist/trainee in 1958--nobody in the world was particularly mad at anybody, and I found the whole thing pretty much of a cakewalk.

Debate Sudden Death Overtime: Battleships

Governor Romney said in tonight's debate that we don't have the Navy we had in 1916.  President Obama said right, and we also have fewer horses and bayonets.

For valuable prizes, how many battleships are active in the United States Navy today?  Answer here.

A General Rates a General

All this military stuff: it's not that I'm so interested in military history per se--I'm no better at doping out a battle plan than I am an NFL offense.  It's rather more the "development" thing, as in how did Ike become Ike, or what moulded the four admirals who ruled the waves in World War II.  Of course might consider this issue in the context of almost any occupation (or more generally, "life-plan")--I recall a wonderful book from a few years back about how Lincoln became Lincoln, for example.   But the military provides particularly good lab specimens, for two reasons: one, they care about this stuff, and write about it and think about it a lot.  And two, they keep such good records. Each of the subjects under scrutiny leaves a long paper trail of documented assignments, efficiency reports and whatnot--also, in several cases, private diaries or introspective letters to loved ones.

Expanding on the topic, I'm remembering a fine one I read a few years back--The Class of 1846 by John C. Waugh, considering the class that provided so much senior manpower for the Civil War (20 general officers, counting both sides).  I won't rehash the whole product at the moment, but allow me to pick out one fascinating insight about the man who was second in the class of '46--but whom everyone, it seems, assumed would be the class star.  Of course he was not: he rather fizzled out as the first of Lincoln's several false starts in his search for an effective commander of northern forces in the Civil War.  The speaker here is not a member of the class of '46, but he is someone whose judgment has to be heard:

McClellan is to me one of the mysteries of the war.  As a young man he was always a mystery.  He had the way of inspiring you with the idea of immense capacity, if he would only have a chance. . . .  I have never studied his campaigns enough to make up my mind as to his military skill, but all my impressions are in his favor. . . .  The test which was applied to him would be terrible to any man, being made a major-general at the beginning of the war.  It has always seemed to  me that the critics of McClellan do not consider the vast and cruel responsibility--the war, a new thing to all of us, the army new, everything to do from the outset, with a restless people and Congress.  McClellan was a young man when this devolved upon him, and if he did not succeed, it was because the conditions of success were so trying.  If McClellan had gone into the war as Sherman,Thomas, or Meade, had fought his way along and up, I have no reason to suppose that he would not have won as high a distinction as any of us.

Waugh at 519.  The writer is, of course, the one who did succeed as Union commander, U. S. Grant,  17th out of 39 in the West Point class of 1843.  Fun fact: at the time he graduated, Grant stood 5'2" and weighed 117 pounds.

Update:  Here's David Frum's list of "worst generals."  Lot of room for second-guessing here, I suspect.

"Oh, My Offense is Rank!"--Justice for Javier

Tonight's trivia question: who was Xavier (Javier) Alvarez?*

Ooh, memories are short. He's Mister "Stolen Valor:" the guy who claimed, falsely to be a medal-of-honor winner, when in fact he was just a member of a municipal water district.  The feds prosecuted him  under a statute called the "Stolen Valor Act." Alvarez took a conditional plea bargain, reserving the right to challenge the constitutionality of the statute.  Two weeks ago (two weeks?) the Supreme Court held the act unconstitutional as a violation of free speech.  Not everyone was pleased: the vote on the court was six-three, with Scalia,Thomas and Alito in dissent.  At HuffPost, a commentator harrumphed "The Supremes Say It's Okay to Steal Your Valor."

But did they?  My friend Allison points me to a blog labelled "This Ain't Hell but You Can See it from Here"--a moniker that probably already gives you a clue which way this narrative is going.  Anyway, the good folks at "Hell" have cooked up something called the "Stolen Valor Tournament," in which egregious instances of stolen valor are pitted against one another for (what, exactly?--Oh, never mind).

And here's a twist:  in this competition, the "regionals" are named after Supreme Court justices--specifically, the justices in the majority who visited this (as it would appear) monstrosity upon us.  "The Justice Kennedy Regionals," etc., you get the idea.

I take it that the sponsors are less than highly amused at the court's decision in this case.   I think I can understand their disappointment, although to be candid, I think the court got this one right.  "Stolen valor" maybe a sorry piece of business, but I don't fancy the idea of the court's--any court's--messing around with the truth or falsity of particular utterances.

But here's the thing.  I hate to think what it says about me, but I have to tell you I find the "Hell" website simply hilarious.  The petty pomposities that people will stretch for--oh, my, I'm sure a nicer person than I am would feel some compassion for these poor devils (no women, so far as I can tell), but I simply cannot restrain the giggles. Here's a guy with  a navy cross and two purple hearts on his utility uniform.   Here's an ex-gunnery-sergeant who after 32  years' "service" is still wearing his stripes upside down.   And here's a "former Marine colonel"  charged with rape of a minor.  The charges were dropped for lack of evidence; he asked the local paper "to write about the good he’d done in his community and not the allegations against him."  Dutifully motivated, the paper checked the military record and found he never advanced beyond Pfc.  And my particular favorite: of the whole motley parade on "Hell's" roster, there's exactly one--one--who faked service in the Coast Guard.  Were I the commandant, I think my feelings might be hurt.

And do you anticipate my point here?  Recall HuffPost, saying that it's okay to steal valor.  But it's not okay, and the Supremes never said  it was okay.  What they said is that you can't prosecute and convict.   Which leaves open what I should think is the preferred remedy, on libertarian and general prudential grounds--the remedy of public mockery and derision.   For isn't this the ultimate message: one thing we know about these guys is that they aren't important enough even to send to prison.
 ===
*In an earlier iteration, some lunatic gave the defendant's name as "Lopez."  Apologies to Javier Lopez and all who love him.

Gray's Warriors

One more short book not to throw out: Glen Gray's The Warriors appears to persist in print, if just barely, but I suspect it wouldn't be there at all without the imprimatur of Hannah Arendt who wrote a preface to a 1967 reprint.  And Arendt, for her part, apparently undertook her task to correct what she saw as a great wrong.  She says the book "was almost entirely overlooked when it first appeared' (i.e., in 1959).  She adds that in time it had acquired "a group of readers in very different walks of life who cherished it as a triumph of personal discovery," but obviously she thought it deserved better, and so came to sponsor the edition which remains available today.

Yet if Gray seemed remote in his own time, today he seems as distant as a Tiepolo ceiling.  Gray was reporting--no, reflecting--on his own experience of war, from the sober and removed vantage of a small-college professorship, back in the days when a small-college professorship was a post of obscure dignity.  So much has happened, not least to the small colleges, but for our purposes much more important, to our understanding of war.

Recall the simple irony: some 11 million Americans "fought" (broadly defined) in World War II.  They brought home their stories.  Or so we thought; but in fact almost everything conspired to assure that the home folks just didn't get it. The military itself and the press had collaborated to put a benign face on the endeavor while it continued.  And the soldiers, for all their stories, really didn't want to talk about the worst of it; they much preferred to turn their face away and to get on with their lives.  Grant that we had The Naked and the Dead (and by the way, does anybody read it these days); but recall that Joseph Heller didn't finish Catch-22 until 1961--and that it didn't really gain traction until years later in a different war.

We've had on the whole rather better war writing since--think Tim O'Brien and Phil Caputo--to say nothing of the monumental "real war" movies llke Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now.  Compared to all of these, Gray is bound to seem irretrievably far away.

Arendt did Gray (and us) a great service, but I think she may have misunderstood its spirit. She says in her preface that "the first lesson to be learned on the battlefield is that the closer you were to the enemy, the less did you hate him."  But Gray deserves a more careful reading.  He does conjure up "the image of the opposing enemy as an essentially decent man who is either temporarily misguided by false doctrine or forced to make war against his better will and desire,."  He says that; he says also that this image "appeals to most reasonable men"--but he says that this image appeals to most "only after a war is past" (my italics).  During the war, we can expect that kind of detachment from "only  the minority of combat soldiers who are at the same time reflective and relatively independent in their judgment."  One is tempted to add: and for that very reason, perhaps not very good warriors?

Veterans' Health Care and the True Costs of War

Way back in my brief and derisory soldier days, I witnessed the phenom of a young man who somehow put a bayonet through his foot. They took him to a military doctor--another young man, this one presumably with good skills but a rotten attitude: he hated everything about the Army. "Son," said the doctor to the soldier, "the army got you into this mess, and the Army's gonna pay..."

Sounds like Danny Zwerdling from NPR has got himself (together with ProPublica) a nice story about the military perhaps fudging  on the benefits of aftercare for military brain injuries because it isn''t too eager to pay the cost of aftercare for military brain injuries.  At least he has caught the attention of Senator Claire McCaskill  who apparently thinks the story has legs enough to justify a Congressional hearing.

Yes, yes, I know this may turn out to be just the gleam in a reporter's eye but it does occur to me: in counting the costs of a war, you would want to count the cost of all damage inflicted on soldiers (and, hey, civilians) whether or not we own up to liability for that cost, not so?  If the military pays it, that's a cost. If the military doesn't pay, and the patient pays, that's still a cost.  If the militasry doesn't pay and the patient can't pay, that's still a cost, not so?  And if nobody pays because there is no potentially effective treatment and the victim brave American hero just languishes, that, too, would be a cost, yes?

Afterthought: recall my rotten-attitude doctor. I'm sure a major source of his ill humor was that he was limping along on Army wages (he was a de facto draftee) when he could have been out knocking back the big bucks. I'm sure he counted that as a cost.

Ne Exeat

The must-read daily newsletter of the American Bankruptcy Institute yesterday linked to this extraordinary piece about debt among the military (link). Takeaway point: "The number of U.S. troops barred from overseas duty because of deep personal debt has climbed substantially in recent years...." [The linked account credits the Associated Press, but I never saw it in any general news source].

The index here is the security clearance. Apparently if the service person has too much debt, he loses his clearance--and the number of clearances revoked for financial reasons grew more than nine times between 2002 to 2005--from 284 to 2,654 (and apparently still climbing).

Apparently if you lose your security clearance, you may lose your chance to go overseas. As Buce's Wichita bureau points out, there's a rich irony here: as a device for getting out of overseas service, buying a new Hummer sure beats shooting yourself in the foot.

Mentioned in Dispatches

Underbelly’s Wichita bureau, doubling on the military beat, weighs in with a couple of points I hadn’t focused on yet:

If the Shiites manage to get full control of Basra, I think that controls the sea exit. Then it’s time for Xenophon. CNN has a big piece on equipment shipped back to the States for repair and refurbishment. Lots of wounded Bradleys, tanks and zillions of Humvees. Even with out new arrivals, they estimated that it would take three years to get all the equipment salvaged and repaired. Bet there are going to be a lot of surplus HMVs in a couple of years.

But the major point is that the army is running out of equipment.

And again (I guess he is repeating himself, but perhaps worth it):

I’m still waiting for the press to figure out that if Basra is totally in Shiite control, we have no easy exit route. Even if the Navy had enough sea lift to pull out the men and equipment. If it turns into a bug out, Bush will go to the top of the ‘worst presidents’ list.

Several bloggers and one author in the Naval Institute Proceedings protest the growing shortage of equipment. Mostly they are talking about tanks, trucks etc but even something as simple as a machine gun has to have a replacement barrel after a few thousand rounds. Most of the heavy machine guns are configured so that one guy can replace the barrel quickly. But even the M-16 will not fire forever. They’ve got to be wearing out everything over there.

Afterthoughts: well, if all those Humvees are charred wreckage in the desert, they won’t do much to distort the secondary market. By “Xenophon,” I assume he is referring to the Anabasis, where the Greek mercenary army found itself cut off and stranded in central Mesopotamia, and had to claw its way out. Yes, but they made it home, even if they did have to leave their Humvees behind. The more chilling reference is still Herodotus: he who crosses the river Halys will destroy a great nation. Turned out to be true. Or that bit from British history, where the government sent five regiments out from Kabul, and only one survivor made it to Jellalabad.