NATO AIR
Senior Member
two great op-eds today from two of the best conservative writers on the military, Ralph Peters and Max Boot... who actually take opposite viewpoints, but with good results for the reader.
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/67207.htm
RUMMY & THE GENERALS
By RALPH PETERS
April 19, 2006 -- IN the current duel over Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's future, two essential issues need to be addressed: Who are the officers on either side of the argument, and should retired generals speak out at all?
Whatever one thinks of the SecDef, the professional identities of his critics and his supporters tell us a great deal. The retired generals calling for Rumsfeld's resignation are recent combat commanders, veterans of Iraq and Middle East experts. They're the men who led from the front and who signed the condolence letters to bereaved families (and they didn't use an autograph machine).
Generals such as John Batiste, Gregory Newbold, Paul Eaton and Tony Zinni have something else in common, too: They're leaders respected by their peers for flawless integrity. Their reputations within their services - the Army and Marines - could not be higher. They are not and never have been political generals.
And these men have much to lose by going public with their criticism. They'll never get the lucrative defense-industry jobs in corporations whose profits depend on the favor of the Pentagon. They're not going to be offered plum appointments in any future administration, Republican or Democrat. They'll be frozen out of the Washington-insider's club. They face organized political attacks upon their personal reputations.
And yet they feel it their duty to speak to their fellow citizens, no matter the cost.
Who are the retired generals rallying to Secretary Rumsfeld? Check their credentials, please. When you see those "dead generals" pontificating on cable or network news, the crawl at the bottom of the screen doesn't tell you their corporate affiliations or explain their relationships with the Pentagon. If it did, you'd find that few are objective commentators.
Backed by its internal resources, a political party and the defense industry, the Office of the Secretary of Defense wields tremendous power. The critics stand alone, without affiliation or financial support, relying on the media to pick up their statements. The SecDef's staff can e-mail thousands of retired flag officers, cajoling them to use its talking points to defend Rumsfeld, with an implicit threat of exclusion from the magic circle if they defect to the critics.
The result? Many retired generals and admirals are afraid to speak out - worried about the executive slots and boardroom positions with which the defense industry legally bribes them. The revolving door is a very powerful silencer.
As for the generals who rush to defend the SecDef - using those OSD-disseminated talking points - they fall into three categories:
* Pathetic, aged retirees who desperately want to believe they're still Washington players and who will do anything for a scrap of official attention.
* Air Force generals - while the Army and Marines fought, Rumsfeld funded all of the Air Force's toys and can count on its support.
* And, most troublingly, serving officers selected by the SecDef for the military's highest offices.
Given the red-herring debate over whether or not military retirees have a right to speak out, we've overlooked a shameful and flagrant violation of the military's code of ethics: Active-duty officers are forbidden to make political statements.
Rumsfeld's critics played by the rules and retired before stating their cases. But what should we make of the Joint Chiefs chairman, Gen. Peter Pace, his predecessor and their colleagues who've offered Manchurian-Candidate praise of the defense secretary in public?
Those were political statements. By any definition.
If serving officers can't criticize public figures, neither should they offer endorsements. Secretary Rumsfeld notoriously cracks down on internal dissent, but he hasn't chided Gen. Pace for his on-camera flattery. If you're looking for the politicization of the officer corps, look no further.
Much of the pro-Rumsfeld blather has been laughable. A desperate Air Force general claimed on CNN that, with "only 21/2 years left" in the administration, it was impractical to change defense secretaries, since a new man wouldn't have time to master the system.
Utter nonsense, of course. A senator with a defense background would have a firm grip on the Pentagon in a few months. As for 21/2 years being a short time, imagine how different things might be if Rumsfeld had been replaced in the autumn of 2003.
Invoking our troops, one print pundit with no military background warned that dismissing the SecDef would give "anti-war" Democrats a political victory. In other words, depriving Democrats of an issue is more important than the fate of Iraq or the lives of our soldiers. Score a new low for the party hacks.
Then there are the academics who bemoaned the failure of military officers to speak out during the Vietnam War. Now that retired generals are speaking out against a war's inept prosecution, the faculty-lounge lions warn about a breakdown in civil-military relations.
Let's put the issue bluntly: Should military retirees - men and women who loyally served our country - be second-class citizens for the remainder of their lives, forbidden to state their opinions on military affairs? Should we penalize those who served in uniform? Are former politicians forbidden to speak out? Retired neurosurgeons? Teachers? Over-the-hill pundits?
If former military officers can't be heard on defense issues, on whom shall we rely for informed analysis? Politicians? Defense contractors? Professors?
In these years without a draft, when most citizens have no first-hand military experience, retired officers (and NCOs) have a duty to speak out. Those still in uniform must remain silent (this means you, too, Gen. Pace), but a man such as Maj.-Gen. John Batiste, who declined the offer of a third star rather than serve under Mr. Rumsfeld, has every right to be heard.
As the Washington machinery attempts to discredit honorable critics of Secretary Rumsfeld, this is truly a David-vs.-Goliath struggle. And the truth, as well as the valor, is on David's side.
Ralph Peters' most recent book is "New Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy."
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion....column?coll=la-util-op-ed&ctrack=1&cset=true
Max Boot:
A general disgrace
April 19, 2006
THE AMERICAN officer corps tried to blame the fall of Saigon on their civilian masters. If not for political restrictions in particular, no invasion of North Vietnam the U.S. would have won the war. So argued the late Col. Harry Summers in his celebrated 1981 book, "On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context." That was, at best, a gross oversimplification.
As then-Maj. Andrew Krepinevich showed in "The Army and Vietnam" (1986), the U.S. defeat could be attributed in large part to the inappropriate, firepower-intensive strategy adopted by the Army. In the absence of a better counterinsurgency doctrine, not even occupying all of Vietnam, as the French had once done, would have won the war. If the generals wanted to know who was to blame for their defeat, Krepinevich suggested, they should have looked in the mirror.
His analysis is now widely accepted, yet we are in the early stages of another stab-in-the-back myth in which officers line up to blame their civilian bosses for the setbacks we've suffered in Iraq. In the last few weeks, six retired generals and counting have called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
As it happens, I agree with their advice. As I first said on this page two years ago, I too think that Rumsfeld should go. But I am nevertheless troubled by the Revolt of the Generals, which calls into question civilian control of the armed forces. In our system, defense secretaries are supposed to fire generals, not vice versa.
The retired generals, who claim to speak for their active-duty brethren, premise their uprising on two complaints. First, many (though not all) say we should not have gone into Iraq in the first place. Former Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold calls it "the unnecessary war," and former Gen. Anthony Zinni claims that "containment worked remarkably well."
That is a highly questionable judgment, and one that is not for generals to make. They are experts in how to wage war, not when to wage it. If we had listened to their advice, we would not have gone into Kuwait or Bosnia or Kosovo.
Their second complaint about how the war has been fought is more valid. There is no doubt that the president and his top aides blundered by not sending enough troops and not doing enough occupation planning. But what about the blunders of the generals?
To listen to the retired brass, the only mistake they and their peers made was not being more outspoken in challenging Rumsfeld. But that's not the picture that emerges from the best account of the invasion so far: "Cobra II" by veteran correspondent Michael Gordon and retired Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor. They present copious evidence of Rumsfeld's misguided micromanagement. But they also show that Gen. Tommy Franks, the top military commander, was guilty of major misjudgments of his own.
"Tommy Franks never acknowledged the enemy he faced," they write, "nor did he comprehend the nature of the war he was directing." He was so focused on defeating the Iraqi armed forces that he ignored the threat posed by irregular fighters like the Saddam Fedayeen. After the fall of Baghdad, Franks was happy to declare victory and retire, unaware that the real work had just begun. Although some generals, such as then-Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, rightly warned about the need to dispatch more troops to pacify Iraq, Franks was eager to send units home as soon as they reached the Iraqi capital.
Franks' missteps included abruptly pulling out the top ground-force commanders who had run the invasion and replacing them with a new group headed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was not up to the job. Amid the inevitable change-of-command confusion, Sanchez did not adequately reconfigure U.S. forces for counterinsurgency and nation-building. In the absence of strong leadership from the top, U.S. division commanders were on their own.
As retired Gen. Jack Keane, not one of those calling for Rumsfeld's head, told the New York Times: "There's shared responsibility here. I don't think you can blame the civilian leadership alone." Yet that's just what some of his former colleagues are trying to do.
