Middle management ranks senior management... in the U.S. Army

Followup to an earlier post:

On Aug. 1, Gen. Richard Cody, the United States Army’s vice chief of staff, flew to the sprawling base at Fort Knox, Ky., to talk with the officers enrolled in the Captains Career Course. These are the Army’s elite junior officers. Of the 127 captains taking the five-week course, 119 had served one or two tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, mainly as lieutenants. Nearly all would soon be going back as company commanders. A captain named Matt Wignall, who recently spent 16 months in Iraq with a Stryker brigade combat team, asked Cody, the Army’s second-highest-ranking general, what he thought of a recent article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling titled “A Failure in Generalship.” The article, a scathing indictment that circulated far and wide, including in Iraq, accused the Army’s generals of lacking “professional character,” “creative intelligence” and “moral courage.”

[...]

General Cody looked around the auditorium, packed with men and women in uniform — most of them in their mid-20s, three decades his junior but far more war-hardened than he or his peers were at the same age — and turned Captain Wignall’s question around. “You all have just come from combat, you’re young captains,” he said, addressing the entire room. “What’s your opinion of the general officers corps?”

Over the next 90 minutes, five captains stood up, recited their names and their units and raised several of Yingling’s criticisms. One asked why the top generals failed to give political leaders full and frank advice on how many troops would be needed in Iraq. One asked whether any generals “should be held accountable” for the war’s failures. One asked if the Army should change the way it selected generals. Another said that general officers were so far removed from the fighting, they wound up “sheltered from the truth” and “don’t know what’s going on.”

Challenging The Generals (Fred Kaplan, New York Times Magazine, 26 August 2007)

A failure of generalship

You will read, in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere today, of an article in the Armed Forces Journal, written by Lt. Col Paul Yingling, which criticizes the senior leadership of the United States military in very blunt, harsh terms.

If you are interested in the Long War at all, let me urge you strongly not to get your synopsis of this article from the newspaper. The entire article is posted, for free, on the Web for all to see, and read, and it's worth twenty minutes of your time to read it for yourself and think hard about it.

This is too vital a topic for you to let someone else, even an accredited professional journalist as fine as the Post's Thomas Ricks, chew your food for you and tell you what it tastes like.

The journalists I've read today are quoting the flashy and angry bits of the article, and they can't be blamed for that; it's a long complex piece, it's hard to summarize, and they're out to sell newspapers.

Yingling isn't a naysayer, in my view... he's someone who has taken a hard look at what's at stake and is very worried:

For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq's grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war.

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.

Here's the link. Go read it:

Armed Forces Journal: A Failure In Generalship

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Update, 4/28/07: Chapomatic has a thoughtful, personal reaction, as well as a useful roundup of commentary from the milblogosphere and beyond.