At the end of World War I, the German Army surrendered on foreign territory after nearly seizing Paris six months earlier. Thus it was hard for many Germans to believe their country had been defeated on the battlefield. Instead, many came to believe that a "stab in the back" by an incompetent and meddling civilian leadership had prevented the military from executing plans for successful resistance. If the civilian politicians had only listened to the military, they argued, everything would have been all right. In fact, the German military had been thoroughly defeated as a result of its own catastrophic decisions during the 1918 offensive, and these same senior military leaders had demanded an armistice. Nevertheless, for many, especially among the military leadership, the stab in the back was a comforting myth.1
An obscure piece of history? Not at all. The same myth is developing today about the war in Iraq. As difficulties have mounted, many commentators, especially senior military officers, have sought to put the blame on civilian leadership and to exonerate the military.
Some examples2:
Tommy Franks's first plan, presented to the Secretary of Defense for some 470,000 troops, was the right plan, and the one that they wound up with, which was, in my judgment, forced on the military, was the wrong plan.
[Our military] has done a superb job. I think that the fighting qualities of the men and women who are serving in Iraq are unsurpassed. . . . There is such an enormous disconnect between the strategic and the operational level out there . . . both Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz ought to be fired.
I blame the civilian leadership of the Pentagon directly. Because if they were given the responsibility, and if this was their war, and by everything that I understand, they promoted it and pushed it—certain elements in there certainly—even to the point of creating their own intelligence to match their needs, then they should bear the responsibility. . . . I can't speak for all generals, certainly. But I know we felt that this situation was contained. Saddam was effectively contained.
There was a certain, in my judgment, arrogance on Secretary Rumsfeld where he couldn't listen to other people's viewpoints. The secretary's office had to stop meddling in the deployment and let army commanders have the units they believed they needed to fight. . . . The war is way too important to be left unilaterally to Secretary Rumsfeld.
An article in The New Yorker summed up this view:
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his inner circle of civilian advisers, who had been chiefly responsible for persuading President Bush to lead the country into war, had insisted on micromanaging the war's operational details. Rumsfeld's team took over crucial aspects of the day-to-day logistical planning—traditionally, an area in which the uniformed military excels—and Rumsfeld repeatedly overruled the senior Pentagon planners on the Joint Staff, the operating arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "He thought he knew better," one senior planner said. "He was the decision maker at every turn."3
A corollary to this stab-in-the-back argument might be called "General Johnson's lament." General Harold Johnson was Army Chief of Staff in 1964-1968, during the period when the conflict in Vietnam grew in intensity. Although he was very concerned about what was happening to the Army, he decided not to resign, so he could continue to work on the Army's behalf. Later he regretted his decision, calling it a "lapse of moral courage."4 General Johnson's anguish made a deep impression on later generations of military officers. In its moderate form, the lesson learned exhorts military officers to candidly speak their minds. That's fair.5 In its extreme form, however, it implies that military officers had the right answers but were too loyal and respectful of civilian leadership to speak up. The problem is thus an excess of military virtue. Applied to Iraq and Vietnam, this belief is not only historically wrong, but also self-serving nonsense.
All of this is an evasion of responsibility. The leadership challenge in the face of military adversity is to avoid the temptation to allocate blame, however emotionally satisfying that may be, and instead turn that intellectual energy toward combat assessments and lessons learned. Only then can an institution adapt and succeed. That means confronting mistakes and misjudgments by both the military and civilian leadership. To do that, we must understand better where these myths come from.
A Long History
Tension between military commanders and civilian politicians is inevitable because of their differing professional perspectives. Consequently, the military's desire to blame civilians for battlefield misfortunes is not new. Germany's stab-in-the-back myth is the best known because of its political impact in undermining the Weimar Republic, but every defeat engenders criticism of civilian leadership by some elements of the military establishment. This includes the United States. In the Revolutionary War, for example, military commanders blamed defeats on the Continental Congress's failure to provide supplies. In the Civil War, Union generals criticized President Abraham Lincoln for pushing them to attack before they were ready. In World War II, military officers blamed President Franklin Roosevelt for the disaster at Pearl Harbor, many claiming that the local commanders, Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short, were scapegoats for political mistakes.
Vietnam, however, is the classic case. Military officers, already angry with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara because of his leadership style, blamed him personally for failure in Vietnam. The similarity between those accusations and the developing dispute with Secretary Rumsfeld is striking. It deserves closer examination, because the experience in Vietnam may show us where we are headed now and what we can do about it.
Rumsfeld and McNamara
The first step is to look at the Secretaries themselves, because wartime decisions are made in the context of a Secretary's whole tenure in office, and there are strong parallels between Rumsfeld and McNamara. Both had some military experience as young men, but outside combat zones. Both had senior experience in business, which shaped their views on running large organizations and gave them immense self-confidence. Both believed in using objective, quantitative measures to make decisions. Both came into office with a mandate for change. Most important, both believed in strong leadership from the top. McNamara put it clearly:
A public manger . . . can act as either a judge or leader. As the former, he waits until subordinates bring him problems for solution, or alternatives for choice. In the latter case, he immerses himself in his operation, leads and stimulates an examination of the objectives, the problems and the alternatives. In my own case . . . the responsible choice seemed clear.6
Both stirred up opposition when they applied this philosophy of leadership because the result was making decisions that sometimes contradicted military advice. McNamara canceled the B-70 bomber, for example, which Air Force leaders denounced as "unilateral disarmament" while trying to overturn the decision in the Congress. Rumsfeld canceled the Crusader artillery system, which caused the Army to lobby behind the scenes to save it and eventually got the Secretary of the Army fired as a result. In both cases there were bruised feelings and mutual suspicions.
Wartime Decision Making & Military Reaction
Parallels continue for how wartime decisions were made. McNamara worked actively to set force levels and to direct certain military operations, such as establishing the "McNamara line" to stop infiltration. McNamara and President Lyndon Johnson famously (or infamously) intervened in the targeting process for the air war.
Many military officers blamed the defeat in Vietnam on the way the civilians had run the war.
- General Curtis LeMay, Air Force Chief of Staff, 1961-1965: "My quarrel is with those who usurp the military professional's position—those who step in front of him and who volunteer military advice with little knowledge of or experience in such matters. . . . [Vietnam] is a war commanded by civilians in the Pentagon who have little military experience. . . . This is a war concocted by the arms-controllers of the Kennedy/Johnson administrations."7
- Admiral Ulysses S. G. Sharp, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, 1964-1968, denounced "the judgment of those civilian, political decision makers who chose out of flagrant arrogance or naïve wishful thinking to ignore the sound, time-vindicated principles of military strategy."8
- General Ira C. Eaker, World War II air commander in Europe: "In all our past wars we had professional military leaders and amateur soldiers. Vietnam is our first war where we had professional soldiers and amateur leaders."9
But a later school of military scholarship, mainly from younger officers, questioned the military's role in the failure. For example, then-Army Major Andrew Krepinevich blamed the Army directly: "The Army's conduct of the war was a failure." He argues that its warfighting concept, which focused on a conventional war of firepower, made it "an inefficient and ineffective force for defeating insurgent guerrilla forces in a "low intensity' conflict."10 Similarly, Army Colonel Harry Summers considered the paradox between U.S. tactical success and strategic failure. He examined Army strategic thinking and concluded it was "deficient," "shallow," and had failed.11 Then-Army Major H. R. McMaster criticized senior military leaders for their parochialism and lack of moral courage to speak their minds. Although he held the civilian leadership primarily responsible for decisions, he devoted an entire chapter in his book Dereliction of Duty to "the five silent men" of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.12
Decision Making for the War in Iraq
Rumsfeld, like McNamara, also intervened actively in operational planning. He scrapped the existing deployment plan and substituted a process whereby Central Command would request specific units (through a "request for forces" or RFF), and the Secretary would approve them through a deployment order. Where he thought forces were excessive or imbalanced, he pressed Central Command and the services to justify the request. If unconvinced, he did not approve the force package. The notion thus has grown that Rumsfeld ignored military advice and substituted his own plan.
The problem is that, according to the military participants, this is not true. General Tommy Franks, who was Commander, Central Command, and the officer ultimately responsible for operations, states forcefully in his autobiography that he drove prewar planning and supported the result. He is proud of producing what he sees as an innovative plan based on jointness and "new operational and strategic paradigms"—speed and mass of effect. He believes prewar exercises "validated" the plan and its assumptions. Finally, he describes briefing all the service chiefs and getting their approval. He does describe repeated discussions with Rumsfeld as the planning evolved, but sees this as the appropriate interaction of a commander with his civilian leaders.13
General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been emphatic that "there has never been a better exchange of viewpoints between senior military and civilians as occurs today at the Pentagon." He repeatedly has denied that before the war senior military leaders advised against military action. Further, he dismissed as "absolute rubbish" accusations that civilians had ignored military advice.14
Indeed, none of the military commanders involved has come forward to say he disagreed with the final plan. Apparently, they had the opportunity. As Daniel Goure, a Pentagon adviser, relates:
On the morning of March 13, six days before the first coalition air strikes on Baghdad, Donald Rumsfeld attended a crucial war meeting. "It was detailed stuff, and there was not a word of dissent from anyone in that room," said Daniel Goure, who attended the meeting. "Not from anyone. And remember the whole armchair-general crowd was there. No one said: 'Are you sure you've got enough troops?' Everyone was on board with the plan."15
The conclusion is inescapable: Franks and Rumsfeld—indeed the entire military and civilian leadership—were in this together. You cannot criticize one without criticizing the other.
One exception exists—General Eric Shinseki, then Chief of Staff of the Army. In prewar testimony, he stated that the occupation force in Iraq would need to be "several hundred thousand," much larger than the planned force.16 Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz immediately disagreed, calling the estimate "wildly off the mark." General Shinseki retired four months later. The story thus has thus grown up that "General Shinseki disagreed with the plan and was not only ignored but was fired by Rumsfeld."17 General Shinseki can claim to be the only senior official, military or civilian, who recognized beforehand the demands of occupation, but he was not fired for it. General Shinseki's advice was ignored (perhaps to the nation's detriment), but he retired at the normal time, after the customary four years in office. In addition, he was not in the operational chain of command, so his comments were informed observations—not recommendations from the responsible officer. Finally, General Shinseki had clashed frequently with Rumsfeld over how transformation should be applied to the Army, so this was the latest in a long series of disagreements.
Learning from Experience
Clearly, events have not unfolded in Iraq the way anyone had foreseen. Faced with this disappointment, the instinct is to allocate blame. Although temporarily satisfying, it is an intellectual dead end. Instead leaders, active and retired, military and civilian, need to think about how to do better both in Iraq and in future conflicts.
In part, this means an aggressive combat assessment. The military has been vigorous in analyzing warfighting operations and equipment in Iraq and then using these insights to adapt to new circumstances. Both the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) and the Marine Corps' Expeditionary Force Combat Assessment Team had analysts embedded in operational units during the major combat operations phase and have continued their engagement during stability operations. These efforts focused on assessing tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). CALL produced two major products: On Point, which describes and analyzes warfighting operations during the march to Baghdad, and Initial Impressions on Stability and Support Operations, which focuses on support functions during the occupation. CALL also has produced a variety of tactical handbooks for such topics as convoy operations, mission rehearsal, and route clearance.18
More difficult are the higher-level operational and strategic issues, particularly those that deal with controversial decisions made by senior military and civilian officials. These issues may seem too hard for military institutions to take on, but, unfortunately, the debate about what went wrong and what to do about it will not wait. Civilians and retired officers already are producing a large literature about the conflict, and political forces soon will start reshaping the military in response. Without a coherent design of forces and doctrine, military institutions will be whipsawed by changing political winds. The 9/11 Commission shows what happens when a professional community, in this case the intelligence community, leaves reform to others. The desire to do something, impelled by grieving relatives and a national sense of urgency, overwhelms any effort at deliberate debate.
The Schlesinger Panel that investigated the Abu Ghraib prison abuses provides one model for approaching this problem. Comprised of members with extensive national security experience but from outside the government, the panel recruited a quality staff and conducted extensive research with unfettered access to data. Although the press focused on the political aspects of the panel's findings, the panel's criticisms were, in fact, evenhanded, citing both military and civilian failures. The report was factual, put incidents into a wartime, operational context, and analyzed issues at all levels, from tactical to strategic/political. It was not shy about pointing out specific failures by specific individuals, both military and civilian.19
Another model might be what the Army did with Colonel Harry Summers in the late 1970s. Summers, a veteran of both Korea and Vietnam, did a tour with the Chief of Staff's strategic assessment group. This introduced him to the war's operational and strategic issues. He then went to the Army War College, where he taught, completed his research, and wrote his findings. The Army leadership did this consciously, because it realized that, although it had a program for understanding the war's tactical lessons, it had no mechanism for understanding the broader issues. As Lieutenant General DeWitt Smith, then-Commandant of the Army War College, noted, "No profession . . . can lay claim to enduring professional responsibility and worth unless it is sufficiently open, thoughtful, self-assured and courageous to support self-analysis and criticism." These assignments allowed Summers to hone his ideas and consult the extensive primary sources that were becoming available, both of which were needed for a work to rise above the routine products of the military bureaucracy and make a major intellectual contribution. By working out of an academic institution, he also avoided the need to staff and seek consensus on his writings. His book, On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context, became required reading for a generation of Army officers.20
The beginnings of such an effort for Iraq may be under way. For example, Army historian Major Isaiah Wilson III has written an essay based on his research and personal experience in theater. In it he criticizes the military and civilian leadership for a lack of planning for stability operations. He is particularly critical of military commanders for failing to understand the conflict they faced. The Army apparently has been willing to allow this work to go forward.21
Leadership in Troubled Times
The challenge for today's leadership is to make such an effort now, not ten years after the conflict is over. Fostering this kind of assessment requires intellectual courage by both civilian and military leaders. On the one hand, those involved in past decisions understandably seek to justify and defend their actions. On the other hand, critics tend to politicize history, to judge with the benefit of hindsight, and to settle old scores. All of this must be resisted. The key is intellectual perspective, difficult to achieve given the great issues involved and the emotions engendered, but essential for military institutions to adapt and to thrive.
Finally, everyone needs to approach the intellectual task with a measure of humility. Decision makers act in an environment of great uncertainty. It is hard for us, looking back and knowing the outcome, to capture what it was like to know the beginning only. The fact that some decisions may come out badly does not make the decision makers either fools or knaves.22
Colonel Cancian served 33 years on active duty and in the reserves as an infantry and artillery officer. His last assignment was with the Marine Corps' combat assessment team for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
1. See, for example, Gen. Erich Von Ludendorff, Ludendorff's Own Story: August 1914-November 1918 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1919), p. 417. One irony is that in postwar Germany conservatives made "stab in the back" accusations against a liberal government. Today in the United States, liberals make these accusations against a conservative government. back to article
2. These quotations are from retired general officers who spoke on the record. Names are omitted because the issue is intellectual perspective, not specific personalities. See John Diamond and Dave Moniz, "War Critics Rile Rumsfeld, Myers," USA TODAY, 1 April 2003; "Executive Intelligence Review," 14 January 2005; Vernon Loeb, "U.S. Officials Blame Rumsfeld for Small Army," The Washington Post, 31 March 2003; interview on CBS Sixty Minutes, 23 April 2004; "Four Star Generals Take on Bush, Iraq," interview on Channel 14 WFIE, Evansville, IN. News reports contain many similar quotations from serving officers, but these are all anonymous. To be fair, the recent political campaign exacerbated emotions and probably inclined commentators to articulate harsher, and more personal, attacks than might otherwise have been the case. back to article
3. Seymour M. Hersh, "Offense and Defense: The Battle between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon," The New Yorker, 7 April 2003. back to article
4. Lewis Sorley, Honorable Warrior: General Harold K. Johnson and the Ethics of Command (Lexington: University Press of Kansas, 1998), p. 304. back to article
5. See Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, USMC, "Critical Dilemma: Loyalty versus Honesty," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 2005, p. 2. Also "Dissent Is Not Disloyalty," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, July 2003, p. 2. back to article
6. Robert McNamara, The Essence of Security (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 87-88. back to article
7. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay with MGen. Dale O. Smith, USAF, America Is in Danger (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968), pp. 1, 249, 250. LeMay later took his opposition to a higher level when he ran for vice president in 1968 on George Wallace's third-party ticket. back to article
8. Ulysses S. G. Sharp, Strategy for Defeat (San Rafael, CA : Presidio Press, 1978), p. 268. back to article
9. Cited in LeMay and Smith, America Is in Danger, p. 249. back to article
10. Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 4, 259. back to article
11. Harry G. Summers Jr., On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1981). back to article
12. H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty (New York: Harper Collins, 1997). back to article
13. Tommy Franks, American Soldier (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). According to Franks, the only decision maker who argued against the plan was Colin Powell, then Secretary of State. Powell still adhered to the "Powell doctrine" of overwhelming force and therefore believed the force was too small. Franks argued that innovations in war fighting had rendered such a doctrine obsolete. back to article
14. Gerry J. Gilmore, "No Rift between Senior DoD Civilians, Military over Iraq," American Forces Press Service, Washington, 7 August 2002; Jonathan Weisman, "Rumsfeld and Myers Defend War Plan," The Washington Post, 2 April 2003, p. 19. back to article
15. "Dissent Rounds on Rumsfeld," Daily Telegraph, 30 March 2003. back to article
16. The specific statement was: Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI): "General Shinseki, could you give us some idea as to the magnitude of the Army's force requirement for an occupation of Iraq following a successful completion of the war?" Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki: "In specific numbers, I would have to rely on combatant commanders' exact requirements. But I think . . ." Levin: "How about a range?" Shinseki: "I would say that what's been mobilized to this point, something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers, are probably, you know, a figure that would be required." (Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate, Hearing, 25 February 2003). back to article
17. Senator John Kerry, for example, repeated this notion in the second presidential debate and thus gave it wide circulation. back to article
18. Col. Gregory Fontenot, USA (Ret.), LCol. E. J. Degen, USA, LCol. David Tohn, USA, On Point: The U.S. Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Initial Impressions Report: Operation Iraqi Freedom Stability Operations—Support Operations, May 2004, both from Center for Army Lessons Learned, Ft. Leavenworth, KS. The reports do grapple with some controversial TTPs, for example, substituting air power for organic artillery and the lack of intelligence at the tactical level. back to article
19. See Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review DoD Detention Operations, August 2004. Panel members were James Schlesinger (chairman, former Secretary of Defense), Harold Brown (former Secretary of Defense), Tillie Fowler (former member of Congress) and General Charles Horner, USMC (Ret). back to article
20. Summers, On Strategy, foreword. back to article
21. Thomas E. Ricks, "Army Historian Cites Lack of Postwar Plan," The Washington Post, 25 December 2004, p. A01. The essay itself has been discussed at conferences but has not been publicly released. back to article
22. Paraphrased from Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 440-41, and Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), foreword. back to article