Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (14 page)

The campaign that followed—popularly known as “the surge” because the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq temporarily increased—did avert unmitigated defeat. Violence in Iraq subsided, albeit for reasons that remain in dispute.
20
Yet the judgment of enthusiasts that the surge “easily bears comparison with Patton’s race across France or the Soviet destruction of German forces in 1944 and 1945” is unlikely to stand, if only because the results achieved proved so much less than definitive.
21
Even after U.S. commanders declared the surge a success, the insurgency in Iraq persisted—indeed, does so today with attacks and bombings in Baghdad and other cities (including Tal Afar) still commonplace.
22

More to the point, by embracing COIN as its new MO, the army in effect abrogated its claim to deliver swift and economical results. Counterinsurgency was “shock and awe” inverted—not quick, not cheap, and seldom conclusive. As such, it proved a hard sell to political leaders and citizens not known for their patience. On one point Sullivan had been right: his countrymen didn’t cotton to protracted, attrition warfare. So although Americans might admire Colonel McMaster’s achievements at Tal Afar, Captain McMaster’s heroics at 73 Easting were more to their liking, and what army leaders had led them to expect.

Petraeus offered deliverance of a sort—he “exemplified the Army finally getting it right in Iraq,” one officer observed—thereby facilitating its escape from Golgotha.
23
Yet COIN could not provide a lasting remedy for the collapse of institutional purpose in Iraq. For the best army in the world, “getting it right” was not the same as winning.

The army’s predicament midway in the Iraq War could be compared to that of the battleship navy after Pearl Harbor. Softening up enemy-occupied islands in the Pacific might qualify as honorable employment, but it was a far cry from what these ships had been designed to do: sink the enemy’s battle fleet. To be consigned to a supporting role was slightly embarrassing and left the battleship’s future looking dim.

So even granting the extravagant claims made by those likening Petraeus to Patton or ascribing to him the qualities of a “maverick savior,” the surge posed a problem.
24
If its “success” in Iraq defined the army’s principal contribution to national security, the service was in trouble.

Indeed, when General Stanley McChrystal’s attempt to export COIN to Afghanistan in 2009–10 fizzled, the counterinsurgency balloon quickly deflated. By 2012, the doctrine that Petraeus (drawing on the achievements of Colonel McMaster) had made his name promoting was just as dead as the power-projection doctrine Sullivan (inspired by the achievements of Captain McMaster) had inaugurated twenty years earlier.

If doubts remained, President Barack Obama removed them. His administration wasn’t giving up on power projection per se. His affinity for drone strikes, commando raids, and cyberattacks made that clear enough. Yet Bush’s successor had little appetite for starting new large-scale land wars. On that score Robert Gates, Rumsfeld’s successor as secretary of defense (retained by Obama), had made the definitive statement, telling the Corps of Cadets at West Point that “any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”
25
Gates no doubt intended this to be a headline-grabbing sound bite, and so it proved.

Unreconstructed hawks objected, of course. In the
Weekly Standard
, William Kristol found Gates guilty of failing to understand “that American power is a crucial force for good in the world” and charged him with “undercutting” the troops.
26
Still, in expressing an aversion to further invasions in the Greater Middle East, Gates accurately gauged the country’s prevailing mood. Generals like Gordon Sullivan could hardly interpret the secretary’s comment as anything other than a backhanded rebuke.

QUESTIONS OF PURPOSE

The serial disappointments of Iraq and Afghanistan—the two longest wars in U.S. history—had surprisingly little effect on the army’s overall standing in the eyes of the American people and American elites. An attitude of cordial indifference—akin perhaps to the way that most nonbelievers view the Sunday morning rituals of churchgoers—continued to prevail. Yet after more than a decade of continuous combat, what exactly did this army exist to do, either in its own eyes or in the nation’s?

A new generation of senior leaders stuck to the old script: the army exists to fight and win the nation’s wars, they insisted. With a fervor matching Gordon Sullivan’s two decades prior, they reasserted his single standard of success: clear-cut, unambiguous victory. Choosing his words with exquisite care, army chief of staff General Raymond Odierno told Congress in 2012 that his service had “successfully concluded” its operations in Iraq while efforts to “transfer security responsibilities” in Afghanistan were ongoing. Having avoided any mention of the
V
-word, he then unblushingly described the army as the “nation’s force of decisive action” ready to win any war “decisively and dominantly.”
27
Army General Martin Dempsey, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, echoed these views. With the Pentagon facing the possibility of modest cuts in the overall size of U.S. forces, he insisted that the country possessed “a military that can win any conflict, anywhere.” Reiterating a theme that Sullivan had once propounded, he stubbornly avowed that “capability is more important than size.”
28

Yet the army had emphatically
not
won the conflicts in which Odierno and Dempsey had recently participated. In truth, since 1945 the U.S. Army has not achieved anything approximating victory in any contest larger than policing exercises like the 1983 intervention in Grenada or the 1990 invasion of Panama. The army in which Odierno and Dempsey had ascended to the top could win battles, of that there was little doubt. Yet its ability to achieve real success in any war worthy of the name was subject to considerable question. At the end of the day, it’s outcomes that count, and the American army had struggled mightily to deliver the outcomes promised.
29

In the spring of 2012, Colonel Gregory A. Daddis, a historian teaching at West Point, conceded, “We’re not really sure right now what the Army is for.”
30
Here was candor rare among serving officers and virtually nonexistent at the three- and four-star level. In the navy, the air force, and the Marine Corps, no such existential confusion existed.

At roughly the same time, H. R. McMaster, by now a highly regarded major general charged with rooting out corruption in the Afghan government, commented in an interview with the
Wall Street Journal
, “We have a perfect record in predicting future wars—right?… And that record is 0%.” Yet despite this unerring appraisal of an unerringly dismal record, he found reason to take heart. “The story that will be told years from now,” McMaster continued, “is one of adaptability to mission sets and circumstances that were not clearly defined or anticipated prior to those wars.”
31
Yet as both Afghanistan and Iraq had demonstrated, adaptability is anything but synonymous with mission accomplishment, which had become difficult even to define. As a warrior-turned-anticorruption-czar, General McMaster personified the army’s adaptability. Still, by the time he completed his tour of duty in Afghanistan, had McMaster’s efforts to reduce official corruption there succeeded? By what standard? And why, apart from his availability, did it make sense to assign this chore to an American military officer? Merely to pose such questions provided one measure of the journey that McMaster’s army had taken since the heady days of 73 Easting.

The impulse to refashion the army into an instrument of global interventionism for use in places like Iraq and Afghanistan had not originated with Donald Rumsfeld nor with any of his immediate predecessors as secretary of defense. Acting on their own volition, army leaders had chosen that course. Disregarding the Cold War’s central military lesson—that land power is most effective when employed to deter and defend—generals dazzled by Operation Desert Storm eagerly embraced the proposition that the active employment of military power offered an attractive way to alleviate the world’s ailments. That the smaller post–Cold War army might have been better off attempting less with less—an appreciation of the risks and uncertainties inherent in war promoting an attitude of modesty and caution—received no consideration whatsoever. Neither did the possibility that such an approach might better serve the nation that the generals had sworn to defend while preserving from unnecessary harm the soldiers they professed to love.

PART III

SKIN IN THE GAME

How politicians, military officers, and intellectuals,
helped by a compliant citizenry, collaborate to avoid
unwelcome truths about the failing American way of war.

8

SMEDLEY AND FRIENDS

Call it Smedley’s syndrome: a senior U.S. military officer in retirement defects and thereby makes headlines. In doing so, he commits a kind of treason in the second degree, not betraying his country but calling into question officially sanctioned truths. After decades of unquestioning subservience to the national security state, he aligns himself with crazies and wackos, lending credence to views hitherto classified as disreputable, outlandish, or at the very least heretical.

Marine Major General Smedley Butler, the syndrome’s progenitor, achieved notoriety by announcing immediately upon his departure from active duty in 1933 that he had spent the previous several decades “being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” In left-wing circles, the general instantly ascended to the status of folk hero. Critics of U.S. policy welcomed with enthusiasm his admission that venality, not high ideals, had prompted Washington, acting at the behest of the moneyed classes, to intervene militarily in China, Mexico, and throughout the Caribbean (not to mention France in 1917). As for why the truth had for so long eluded him, they readily accepted Butler’s self-exculpatory explanation. “I never had a thought of my own until I left the service,” the general confessed. As a dutiful agent of a deeply corrupt enterprise, his “mental faculties [had] remained in suspended animation,” a condition he described as “typical with everyone in the military service.”
1
In antiwar circles, Smedley Butler remains even today a celebrated figure, a blunt teller of truths.

Six decades later, General Lee Butler (no relation to Smedley) offered yet another case in which a senior officer’s retirement from active duty inspired a sudden outburst of candor. An air force officer, Butler spent his career as a nuclear weapons specialist. During his rise to four-star rank culminating in his assignment as head of U.S. Strategic Command, he was by his own account “embroiled in every aspect of American nuclear policymaking and force posturing, from the councils of government to military command centers, from cramped bomber cockpits to the suffocating confines of ballistic missile submarines.” Butler “certified hundreds of crews for their nuclear mission and approved thousands of targets for potential nuclear destruction.” Here was a flesh-and-blood, if far less colorful, equivalent of Stanley Kubrick’s General Buck Turgidson, dedicated to the proposition that standing in readiness to blow up the planet held the key to keeping the peace. During the Cold War, antinuclear crusaders had denounced such thinking as madness. Air force officers had dismissed such criticism as naive.

Yet no sooner did Butler retire in 1994 than he switched sides, characterizing nuclear weapons as “inherently dangerous, hugely expensive, militarily inefficient and morally indefensible” and nuclear war as “a raging, insatiable beast whose instincts and appetites we pretend to understand but cannot possibly control”—just what the peaceniks had been saying all along.
2
The U.S. nuclear arsenal had not deterred the Soviet Union, he insisted; instead the “presence of these hideous devices unnecessarily prolonged and intensified the Cold War.”
3
As with Smedley Butler, the cause to which Lee Butler had devoted his professional life turned out—so he belatedly discovered—to have been false.

Some officers suffer the onset of Smedley’s syndrome only after a considerable lapse of time. Admiral William H. Standley offers an example. Prior to World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had appointed Standley to the position of chief of naval operations, the U.S. Navy’s top post. During the war, Roosevelt sent him to Moscow, where the admiral did a tour as U.S. ambassador. In between those two assignments, he served on the Roberts Commission, created in mid-December 1941 to investigate the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The commission’s purpose was to fix accountability for this disaster. Its hastily drafted report did just that, charging the senior army and navy commanders in Hawaii with “dereliction of duty.”
4
As a consequence, Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short lost their jobs; the people to whom Kimmel and Short reported and from whom they got their marching orders kept theirs. Standley and his colleagues concurred unanimously in the report’s findings.

Yet the commission’s narrowly drawn conclusions almost immediately fueled suspicions of a whitewash—suspicions that Standley himself ultimately endorsed. As with the Generals Butler, so, too, with Admiral Standley: the transition from insider to outsider gave rise to second thoughts. In 1954, he denounced the Roberts Commission’s findings, stating his “firm belief that the real responsibility for the disaster at Pearl Harbor was lodged thousands of miles from the Territory of Hawaii.” Kimmel and Short had been “martyred.” A fair-minded investigation would have found the uniformed heads of the army and navy back in Washington “fully culpable.” The whole purpose of the “hurriedly ordered” Roberts Commission, he now declared, had been “to forestall” any congressional inclination to ask unwelcome questions.