Slate's Bizbox
war stories: Military analysis.

Secretary Gates Declares War on the Army BrassUnfortunately, he doesn't have time to fight that battle.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, Oct. 12, 2007, at 10:22 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

He ended the speech with yet another remark bound to drive a stake into the collective heart of the traditional Army. Speaking of the junior and midlevel officers "who have been tested in battle like none other in decades" and who "have seen the complex, grueling face of war in the 21st century up close," Gates said:

These men and women need to be retained, and the best and brightest advanced to the point that they can use their experience to shape the institution to which they have given so much. And this may mean reexamining assignments and promotion policies that in many cases are unchanged since the Cold War.

Again, to civilians, this may seem unremarkable, but to the military establishment, it was a spark on the third rail. The promotion system is the way the traditional culture perpetuates itself. The board that promotes colonels to generals is filled entirely by current generals, who tend to seek successors who match their own image. This process permeates the entire culture. One colonel told me, in the course of reporting on another story, "Everyone studies the brigadier-general promotion list like tarot cards. … It communicates what qualities are valued and not valued."

Gates was telling the Army's leading lobby organization that the qualities valued by the current crop of generals are the wrong qualities.

At least as interesting as Gates' speech are the sources of its ideas. Most of them seem to have come from his military assistant, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, former commander of multinational forces in Iraq and, at the start of the war, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division.

In an article for the current issue of Military Review, called "Learning From Our Modern Wars," Chiarelli anticipates the main points in Gates' speech. He stresses the importance of reorienting the military to "full-spectrum operations," with a shift of emphasis away from high-intensity operations toward counterinsurgency missions and advising indigenous security forces. (An earlier article in Military Review, dated July-August 2005, had a considerable influence on the thinking behind the Army's field manual on counterinsurgency, which Gen. David Petraeus directed a year later.) Chiarelli also calls for a "top-down review of the roles and missions of all … elements of national power," across the U.S. government. And he urges an overhaul of the promotion system to take into account the views not only of a candidate's superiors but also of his or her peers and subordinates, who often have a keener sense of an officer's qualifications.

This call for a change in the promotion system is also widely associated with the views of Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, who wrote a very controversial—and, in military circles, almost universally read—article in Armed Forces Journal titled "A Failure of Generalship." Yingling's article has made him a hero among many junior and midlevel officers—and an object of fear or contempt among many generals.

In an earlier Armed Forces Journal article, published in October 2006, Yingling and Lt. Col. John Nagl wrote, "The best way to change the organizational culture of the Army is to change the pathways for professional advancement within the officer corps. The Army will become more adaptive when being adaptive offers the surest path to promotion."

This is precisely what Gates and Chiarelli are advocating.

Nagl may be, at least indirectly, the source of Gates' most dramatic remark—that "arguably the most important military component in the War on Terror is not the fighting we do ourselves, but how well we enable and empower our partners to defend and govern their own countries."

VIEW AS SINGLE PAGE
Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
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 .
Photograph of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Remarks from the Fray:

Robert Gates appears to be talking about nothing less than shifting the focus of the American Army from mainly attack and defense directly to functions of administering an empire. Is the intent then to perfect a model of empire-building? Why does this make you happy, Mr. Kaplan? Is America to be the new Rome? Are there more Iraqs on the horizon?

Clearly this capacity is needed at this moment in time with the US mired in Iraq. But the wisdom of drastically and permanently altering the military this way is more than a little suspect, IMO.

--wayhey1

(To reply, click here.)

I beg to differ with the writer's conclusion that Gates does not have time to do anything about it. In hospitals (also very complex turf protecting organizations) I have observed that if a new CEO does not make necessary changes in the first two years, change will probably not happen. A new boss brings an expectation of change so Gates should pick his targets carefully and go for it. He will then be able to get out before the heat gets too high.

--Diomede

(To reply, click here.)

This conflict between the need to prepare for two different kindns of war at once -- the "conventional" and the "guerilla", has stymied other nations in the past. There is no simple answer to the problems posed. France, for example, had two different armies (though naturally with some overlap) for much of the 20th Century -- the 'Metropolitan' which focused on conventional warfare with major opponents (first Germany, then the USSR) and the 'Colonial', which focused on guerilla/peacekeeping overseas and in the territories.

Despite this the French were defeated in Vietnam and Algeria, and some of the 'specialist' forces became a threat to the nation itself.

--fozzy

(To reply, click here.)

As is often the case, US military planners seem intent on fighting their previous war - not their next one. Gates' emphasis on assymetric warfare is horribly wrong.

The world economy is now globalised. Rather than being segmented into mostly independent sections, it is a single organism. For America's opponents to damage America, they can now strike at the arteries and capillaries of this organism.

The most vulnerable are shipping lanes. The US is now massively reliant on Asia for economic prosperity, and Asia is massively dependent on raw materials delivered along these trade arteries. That is why countries like China and Japan are investing massively in their navies.

If Iran were to close shipping through the Gulf of Hormuz - as it has threatened to do in the event of conflict - the results, according to the Heritage Foundation, would be devastating. If Iran disrupted oil supplies for two quarters, in the US this "would result in roughly 1 million fewer jobs one year after the strait was blocked". If Iran were able to enforce the blockade with nuclear weapons, the situation would of course become far less recoverable.

But this would be only the tip of the iceberg. China's political stability relies on the government's ability to oversee constant job-creation. This relies on ever-greater exports to the US. In the above scenario, millions of Chinese would lose their jobs due to a contraction in US demand for Chinese imports, creating an unprecedented crisis, one that would probably involve state violence on a huge scale - Tiananmen many times over. It would create a credit crunch in the US, which is heavily dependent on borrowing from China, and begin a vicious circle of economic shrinkage even on top of the tight oil supplies.

This is why Dick Cheney is so hawkish towards Iran. Talking at the Iranians is not going to dissuade them from securing a stranglehold on the global economy and by extension, the US. Gates seems oblivious to this danger.

--GreenwichJ

(To reply, click here.)

(10/13)

Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
PLUS » Ruth Marcus: Berlin vs. Baghdad Q&A