Front page article in today's Wall Street Journal on the divisions within the leadership ranks of the Army--often following generational lines--over strategies and tactics in Iraq (sub req):
Last December, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling attended a Purple Heart ceremony for soldiers injured in Iraq. As he watched the wounded troops collect their medals, the 41-year-old officer reflected on his two combat tours in Iraq.
He was frustrated at how slowly the Army had adjusted to the demands of guerrilla war, and ashamed he hadn't done more to push for change. By the end of the ceremony, he says, he could barely look the wounded troops in the eyes. Col. Yingling just had been chosen to lead a 540-soldier battalion. "I can't command like this," he recalls thinking.
He poured his thoughts into a blistering critique of the Army brass, A Failure In Generalship, published last month in Armed Forces Journal, a nongovernment publication. "America's generals have been checked by a form of war that they did not prepare for and do not understand," his piece argued.
The essay rocketed around the Army via email. The director of the Army's elite school for war planners scrapped his lesson plan for a day to discuss it. The commanding general at Fort Hood assembled about 200 captains in the chapel of that Texas base and delivered a speech intended to rebut it.
"I think [Col. Yingling] was speaking some truths that most of us talk about over beers," says Col. Matthew Moten, a history professor at West Point who also served in Iraq. "Very few of us have the courage or foolhardiness to put them in print."
We linked to Col. Yingling's piece when it appeared and I find it heartening to hear that it incited such a response among his fellow soldiers.
The controversy over Col. Yingling's essay is part of a broader debate within the military over why the Army has struggled in Iraq, what it should look like going forward, and how it should be led. It's a fight being hashed out in the form of what one Pentagon official calls "failure narratives." Some of these explanations for the military's struggles in Iraq come through official channels. Others, like Col. Yingling's, are unofficial and show up in military journals and books.
The conflicting theories on Iraq reflect growing divisions within the military along generational lines, pitting young officers, exhausted by multiple Iraq tours and eager for change, against more conservative generals. Army and Air Force officers are also developing their own divergent explanations for Iraq. The Air Force narratives typically suggest the military should in the future avoid manpower-intensive guerrilla wars. Army officers counter that such fights are inevitable.
Unfortunately, you don't always get to choose the type of war that you fight. Part of the reason that the Army has struggled in Iraq is that their leaders decided that the lesson of Vietnam was not to get involved in wars like it again rather than learning how to fight and win a counterinsurgency struggle.
The generational divide is fueling a fight over how the Army should use the extra troops it is getting. The Army wants to build five more brigades, which consist of 5,000 to 7,000 soldiers each. But some young officers, such as Lt. Col. John Nagl, an Iraq veteran who helped write the new counterinsurgency doctrine, want more radical change. He contends the extra troops should be used to build a new, 20,000-man advisory corps focused on training foreign forces.
"The most important military component of the Long War [on terrorism] will not be the fighting we do ourselves, but how well we enable and empower our allies to fight with us," he wrote in an essay published by the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank.
Although senior Army officials don't like Col. Nagl's idea, it has some support among Pentagon civilians in Defense Secretary Robert Gates's office. "A big question right now in the Pentagon is: How do you get the Army to begin this debate about itself and what it should look like after Iraq?" says Andrew Hoehn, a former Pentagon strategist and senior analyst at the Rand Corp., a government-funded think tank. Frustration among junior officers could drive bottom-up change, he says.
We've had Lt. Col Nagl come on as a guest on the Northern Alliance Radio Network a couple of times. He's one of the new generation of Army leaders who are trying to get the military to adapt to the reality of the type of war that we are currently facing in Iraq (and will likely face elsewhere in the future). The success or failure of their efforts at reforming the military from within will have a lot to say about America's prospects for success in the Long War.
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