Military Responsibility

Check out this article in the Armed Forces Journal. He makes a very similar analysis to the observations I made in my posts The Iraq Plan and Foresight 20/20. However, he cites a very different cause. According to him, the military leadership never told the President that the understaffed Iraq forces could not be successful. Some quotes from the AFJ article: The most fundamental military miscalculation in Iraq has been the failure to commit sufficient forces to provide security to Iraq's population...Privately, many senior general officers both active and retired expressed serious misgivings about the insufficiency of forces for Iraq. These leaders would later express their concerns in tell-all books such as "Fiasco" and "Cobra II." However, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq with less than half the strength required to win, these leaders did not make their objections public. Given the lack of troop strength, not even the most brilliant general could have devised the ways necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. However, inept planning for postwar Iraq took the crisis caused by a lack of troops and quickly transformed it into a debacle. In 1997, the U.S. Central Command exercise "Desert Crossing" demonstrated that many postwar stabilization tasks would fall to the military. The other branches of the U.S. government lacked sufficient capability to do such work on the scale required in Iraq. Despite these results, CENTCOM accepted the assumption that the State Department would administer postwar Iraq. The military never explained to the president the magnitude of the challenges inherent in stabilizing postwar Iraq. I am not sure that this is entirely true, since all of the simulations mentioned are well-publicized. The President has an obligation to seek the advice of his military advisers IN THE MILITARY, not just Rumsfeld and Cheney. However, this discussion is still an interesting one. The quandary is well put in this quote: The debate is whether or not it is proper for a sitting general officer - whether or not he is charged with the responsibility - to speak out when he is ordered to execute plans he knows full well may be either poorly planned, under-manned, poorly equipped, or dangerously over-reaching. The argument among many in the civilian leadership - both in and outside of the Pentagon - is that they should remain quiet, salute smartly, and simply execute the orders they are given ... and that to do otherwise is to be disloyal, to be laying the groundwork for a military coup. Others though, believe that they are indeed charged with presenting their long-studied, long-prepared-for alternative points of view. Points of view which are based upon an adult lifetime of measured responses and reason. My father is a West Point graduate. He served 24 years in the military up to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, and from him, I know the answer to this question. Not only is it proper for a general to speak out, it is his professional and moral obligation to do so. The general will detail every possible negative outcome for the decision-maker, so that he will understand the full ramifications of the decision. Once the decision is made, however, the general will salute smartly and execute the orders. The general will not second guess the President in public, because he has already presented his case and received direction. I must assume that the decision to go to War in Iraq followed along these lines, where the military advisers detailed the risks to the President (or maybe the Secretary of Defense, which could have created the problem also), and the President and his civilian advisers chose the course of action that they did. The author of the AFJ article is also a Lt. Col., like my father, and shares the same views on military procedure (at least as detailed in the article). I wonder though, if he really believes that the military top brass really fell down on the job, or if it was that any article with a different perspective never made it to print. Blaming the sub-ordinates seems to be a favorite tactic of the current administration, and it would not be at all out of character if this were another example of it. But I still wonder...