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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
Robert Gates. Click image to expand.

On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave a speech that suggested what an interesting—perhaps even great—secretary of defense he might have become, if only he had more time and a less dreadful mess to clean up.

The speech was delivered to the Association of the United States Army, an organization that's happy to hear applause lines and boilerplate; but Gates used the occasion to call for a radical restructuring of the Army—its training, personnel policies, basic strategy, and missions.

He issued the call about halfway into the speech, when he noted that future wars will be more like Iraq and Afghanistan—"asymmetric" conflicts that don't play into the American military's traditional prowess for large-scale, head-to-head combat.

It is hard to conceive of any country challenging the United States directly on the ground, at least for some years to come. Indeed, history shows us that smaller, irregular forces—insurgents, guerrillas, terrorists—have for centuries found ways to harass and frustrate larger, regular armies and sow chaos. … We can expect that asymmetric warfare will remain the mainstay of the contemporary battlefield for some time. These conflicts will be fundamentally political in nature and require the application of all elements of national power. Success will be less a matter of imposing one's will and more a function of shaping behavior—of friends, adversaries, and, most importantly, the people in between.

To the civilian newspaper reader, this may seem a passage of dry common sense. But to an Army insider, it's practically a declaration of bureaucratic war.

The heart of the establishment Army is the tank and infantry corps. Its key mission is high-intensity, open-field combat against an enemy army of comparable capability.

Yet here was the secretary of defense saying that this kind of warfare isn't likely to recur any time soon. More than that, he was proposing that the Army move away from the mission of fighting any kind of war. Here was the hair-raising line:

[A]rguably 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. The standing up and mentoring of indigenous armies and police—once the province of Special Forces—is now a key mission for the military as a whole. [Italics added.]

Granted, Gates did not say "the War on Terror" is the only war that the Army has to gear up for. One of the Army's "principal challenges," he said, "is to regain its traditional edge of fighting conventional wars while retaining what it has learned and relearned about unconventional wars." But then, he added that these unconventional wars are "the ones most likely to be fought in the years ahead."

The implication was clear: The Army's primary mission—which drives its weapons procurement, its force structure, its culture, everything about it—is to be relegated to secondary status and supplanted by a focus on counterinsurgency, training, and advising.

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."

Nagl, who had a hand in writing Petraeus' counterinsurgency field manual, commands a unit at Fort Riley, Kan., that trains American soldiers to be advisers to Iraqi security forces. He also wrote a paper last June for the Center for a New American Security, a private think tank, proposing the creation of a separate Advisory Corps within the Army. Most Army generals hate this idea; Chiarelli argues against it, as well. But it is significant that Gates' line about "the most important military component" is taken very nearly verbatim from the first sentence of Nagl's paper. (For a comparison, click here.)

The point is, Gates has surrounded himself with, or been influenced by, some of the Army's most creative warrior-intellectuals; and if he'd been given a chance to be the defense secretary for longer than two years and a month (Bush appointed him on Dec. 28, 2006), he might have been able to put some reforms in motion.

His speech is short on specifics. "How the Army should be organized and prepared for this advisory role," he said, "remains an open question, and will require innovative and forward thinking." There would have been no point laying out a new policy—on advisers, a new promotion system, or any other matter of long-term structure—because he doesn't have time to implement it.

But it may be significant—it's certainly intriguing—that he recently appointed John Hamre as chairman of his Defense Policy Board. Hamre was deputy secretary of defense and, before that, Pentagon comptroller in Bill Clinton's administration. If Hillary Clinton is the next president (or even if someone else is), it's no stretch to imagine that Hamre will convey the Gates-Chiarelli-Nagl proposals.

Hamre's presence may signify something else of immense importance in the short term. For the past few years, from his perch at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Hamre has been highly critical of Bush's national-security policies, including his policies on the Iraq war. No doubt this is one reason Gates hired him. As a member of the Baker-Hamilton commission, Gates too was critical about the war and skeptical about the surge. In his confirmation hearings, when he was asked if it was a mistake to invade Iraq, he replied, "That's a judgment the historians are going to have to make." When the committee's senior Democrat, Sen. Carl Levin, asked him if we were winning the war, he replied, "No, sir."

Finally, and most pertinently right now, when Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., asked if he favored attacking Iran (a question that most appointees would have ducked on the grounds that it was "hypothetical"), Gates forthrightly said that he did not, adding, "We have seen in Iraq that, once war is unleashed, it becomes unpredictable."

This will be the true test of Gates' legacy—not whether he can go up against the Army to institute reforms (there's no time for that fight), but whether he can stave off Dick Cheney's campaign to mount an attack on Iran.

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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 .
Photograph of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
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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)

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