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It's Patriotic To CriticizeHow our generals got so mediocre.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, May 16, 2007, at 5:30 PM ET
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty. Click image to expand.

Since Donald Rumsfeld's departure from the Pentagon, American military officers are starting to speak their minds again—and what some of the best of them are saying is even darker than expected.

The latest outburst of frankness came on May 12, when Maj. Gen. Benjamin "Randy" Mixon, commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, told reporters, via teleconference from Tikrit, that he didn't have enough troops to stem the growing violence in Diyala province, east of Baghdad.

Under Rumsfeld's reign, commanders were effectively under orders not to request more troops in private, much less in front of the press.

Yet in the scheme of things, Gen. Mixon was merely filing a complaint. Two weeks earlier, a lower-ranking officer, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling—deputy commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment—issued a jeremiad.

In a blistering article in the May issue of Armed Forces Journal, published on April 27, Yingling likened the debacle in Iraq to the disaster in Vietnam and blamed them both on "a crisis in an entire institution, America's general officer corps."

Yingling's essay is the most stunning—and maybe the most fiercely intelligent and patriotic—public statement I have ever read from an active-duty officer.

Were Rumsfeld still secretary, Yingling would likely find himself reassigned to some humdrum logistical-supply depot. Even now, his prospects for getting promoted to general have been dealt a severe setback.

Tomorrow's generals are chosen by today's generals, and Yingling charges most of this generation's generals with lacking "professional character," "moral courage," and "creative intelligence."

The author is no crank. At 41, a veteran of both Iraq wars and a graduate of the School for Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, the Army's elite postgraduate strategy center, Yingling is widely thought to be one of the brightest, most dedicated up-and-coming officers. The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment was the unit that brought order to Tal Afar through classic counterinsurgency methods (at least until the unit left, at which point things fell apart). Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, has cited the Tal Afar campaign as the model of what he is now trying to do—with less adequate resources, under more dire conditions—in Baghdad.

Yingling's argument is tightly reasoned. Policy-makers go to war to accomplish political objectives. Generals must provide the policy-makers with an estimate of the war's likely success. "The general," he writes, "describes both the means necessary for the successful prosecution of war and the ways in which the nation will employ those means. If the policymaker desires ends for which the means he provides are insufficient, the general is responsible for advising the statesman of this incongruence. … If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results."

Sound familiar?

"America's generals," he goes on, "have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq. First, throughout the 1990s, our generals failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly. Second, America's generals failed to estimate correctly both the means and the ways necessary to achieve the aims of policy prior to beginning the war in Iraq." Finally, "the military never explained to the president the magnitude of the challenges inherent in stabilizing postwar Iraq."

He finds it "almost surreal" that "professional military men blame their recent lack of candor on the intimidating management style of their civilian masters." The real problem, he writes, is a shortfall of moral courage—reinforced by institutional incentives.

The "tendency of the executive branch [is] to seek out mild-mannered team players to serve as senior generals," he writes. But, he adds, the services "are equally to blame. The system that produces our generals does little to reward creativity and moral courage. … In a system in which senior officers select for promotion those like themselves, there are powerful incentives for conformity. It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to … expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties."

Yingling proposes an overhaul in the military's system of promotion, allowing generals to be selected by junior, as well as senior, officers. In combat, he writes, junior officers "are often the first to adapt because they bear the brunt of failed tactics most directly." Therefore, they are also more likely to recognize—and reward—innovative, adaptive commanders.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and the author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. He can be reached at .
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.
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