In the battle to be the most patriotic, people from both sides of the political spectrum has essentially given the military's leadership a free pass when it comes to their conduct of the war.
Military tactics tend to be considered a pretty esoteric science, and questioning the decisions of the generals in the field is thought to be in bad form. It is therefore unusual that we have someone openly questioning the conduct of a our military leaders.
The broad argument of this essay is that the tragedy of Iraq--that one of the most brilliant invasion successes in modern military history was followed almost immediately by one of the most incompetently planned occupations--holds a critical lesson for civil-military relations in the United States. The country's Constitution makes the president commander in chief and requires military leaders to follow his orders. It does not, however, require them to remain mute when poor plans are being prepared. Nor does it require them to remain in uniform when they are asked to undertake actions they know to be unwise or ill-planned.
One of the big hypocrisies of the Iraq War is how Bush and Rumsfeld absurdly tell us that the war's military commanders have the troops they've asked for. If they needed more they'd have them, a statement that is so blatantly false and disprovable it is almost is freightening.
Freightening, especially, because the media has so complicitly allowed them to get away with making it. Why weren't they sayng that to initial the warplanners when they asked for several thousand troops.
Nevertheless, the military planners aren't blameless in this.
The uniformed military in fact shares some of the blame for the mistakes made in planning the Iraq stabilization mission. That is partly because General Tommy Franks in the end was the author of the plan. Even if he was under pressure from Secretary Rumsfeld to produce a certain concept, he had every opportunity to voice his objections. It is also because the joint chiefs of staff, with the apparent exception of Army Chief of Staff Shinseki, reportedly blessed the plan as well. It is also because no member of the armed forces of the United States went public with his objections or resigned in protest even though the plan was the military equivalent of medical malpractice...
Who in the military officer corps should have done a better job? Primary responsibility must lie with General Tommy Franks and those elements of the joint chiefs of staff who blessed the warfighting concept. They gave their professional imprimatur to a military strategy that was innovative and solid for the invasion phase of the war yet negligently incomplete for the aftermath.
Second, those officers who did limited planning for the post-Saddam phase of operations at CENTCOM should have realized that their efforts were not receiving proper emphasis, support, or visibility. In the end, their efforts were not successful. CENTCOM did not have an overall framework for ensuring at least a modicum of security throughout most of the country that was conveyed to forces on the ground in advance. As a result, most division commanders had not worked out concepts of operations for the period after the Baathist regime fell. Their key officers had to resort to improvisation in whatever localities they found themselves; lower-ranking individual unit officers had no idea what was expected of them. Hospitals were looted, major buildings destroyed, shops ransacked, and chaos allowed to reign as American soldiers stood by. Iraq quickly became one of the most violent places on earth--not so much in terms of the ongoing resistance, which while brutal was limited in scale (especially at first), but particularly in the growing prevalence of street crime throughout the country.
You see why Franks would be standing up for Bush during the campaign. If O'Hanlan's malpractice analogy is true, history will not be kind to his repution as strategist and as a leader.
What could he have done differently? Plenty.
He could have stuck up for his troops and for his better judgment directly to the President, he could have leaked to the press, or he could have resigned in protest. Instead, he swallowed his better judgment, wasted his experience, and allowed a psuedo-intellectual like Donald Rumsfeld to bully him into a bad war plan.
For one thing, [the military's leadership] could have carried out detailed planning for the stabilization phase of the operation informally at CENTCOM even without explicit civilian permission. To avoid direct confrontation with Rumsfeld, it could have been viewed not as development of a formal plan but as backup analysis.
But that would probably not have been enough here. Leaks to the media would therefore also have been justified under the circumstances. Leaks are used on many matters of defense policy, sometimes for reasons no better than to embarrass political opponents. The uniformed military has itself leaked information about the readiness rates of individual divisions (data that are supposedly classified), about its unmet funding needs for weapon x or weapon y, and about other such issues, so it is hard to believe that the uniformed military is against such unauthorized releases of information as a matter of principle. In this case, the leaks would have been designed to improve the country's war plans and core security interests and to help save the lives of its troops -- certainly worthwhile objectives by comparison with the more frequent usages of leaks.
Finally, some military personnel probably should have resigned. If my charges are right that the willful neglect of planning for the post-invasion phase of the conflict amounted to professional malpractice, it was unprofessional and unconscionable for the uniformed military to stand by while such a plan was finalized and put into effect. This measure would have been extreme for the people resorting to it, requiring enormous individual sacrifice, but it would have been less costly than seeing so many lives lost, at least some of them needlessly and as a result of poor policy, since the invasion. And it would hardly have been unconstitutional or un-American. Military personnel cannot legally and constitutionally disobey orders while in uniform. That does not mean, however, that they must remain in uniform when asked to do things that violate either their ethics or their sense of proper professional conduct.
For the textbook example of how military dissent is supposed to be waged, you need only turn back the clock to 1998 and General Wesley Clark. After misjudging Milosevic's resolve, Clark quickly corrected his mistake by planning for a longer duration military engagement, and when he ran into bureaucratic roadblocks, wasn't afraid to risk--and lose--the Chair of the Joint Chiefs post to make sure that President Clinton fully understood his options.
General Wesley Clark, who contributed to the prevalent but incorrect U.S. belief that Slobodan Milosevic would be easy to intimidate through a few days of light bombing, subsequently got it right. Realizing that NATO had to prevail in the conflict and that his own civilian superiors allowed for no other possibility in their public utterances, he therefore had his staff examine options for escalation up to and including a possible ground war. He also sought to discuss the ideas with the White House and the Congress. Livid with Clark's unsanctioned planning activities and his willingness to share his military advice with others, Secretary of Defense William Cohen fought Clark at every bureaucratic turn and ultimately relieved him of command early. But Clark was right, putting the nation's need to win its wars ahead of standard decorum. If the Clinton administration did not want to hear about ways to ensure that the war could be reliably won, that was its mistake, and Clark was correct not to accommodate that mistake. After all, he never questioned any command given to him; he simply did his homework to develop backup military strategies to serve the Clinton administration's own stated and unflinching goal of winning the war.18 To give the uniformed military too much credit here would be a mistake; most of the joint chiefs reportedly fought the idea of escalation (and perhaps of any intervention in the Kosovo crisis in the first place) and may even have leaked their views to newspapers. But all the more reason why Clark was right to voice his opinions.
He would have made a great president. If only he was a better candidate.
Why does that sound familiar?
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