Andrew Roberts: A Few Good Leaders of Men No Military Leader Can Be Expected to Win Without Bloodshed.
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‘American generals were managed very differently in World War Two than they were in subsequent wars,” writes Thomas E. Ricks, the former Pentagon correspondent of the Washington Post. “During World War Two, senior American commanders were given a few months in which to succeed, be killed or wounded, or be replaced.”
Mr. Ricks rightly puts this policy down to Gen. George C. Marshall, U.S. Army chief of staff from 1939 to 1945 and one of the chief architects of the defeat of the Axis. During World War II, 16 generals were relieved of their command out of the 155 who commanded divisions, as well as no fewer than five corps commanders. By contrast, the most senior soldier to be relieved during the eight years that the United States fought in Iraq after 2003 was a colonel, Joe Dowdy. “As matters stand now,” Mr. Ricks quotes another colonel saying, “a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses his part in a war.”
It is Mr. Ricks’s contention—this is a highly contentious book—that American postwar generalship has been severely substandard not just in recent years but for much of the six decades separating Dwight Eisenhower from David Petraeus. The author writes in an engaging, informed way, but what he says amounts to a caustic assault on American postwar military leadership. He argues that, without the possibility of generals being relieved of command, “the Marshallian approach to leadership”—emphasizing a relentless expectation of success and unwillingness to accept anything less—”did not work nearly as well, as we were to see in Vietnam and Iraq.”
If this book were to be published in jurisdictions without the First Amendment, several of today’s multistar generals might bring libel actions, principally Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003. “Franks fundamentally misconceived his war,” charges Mr. Ricks, “leading to the deaths of thousands of Americans and an untold number of Iraqis.” Mr. Ricks describes Gen. Franks as “strategically illiterate,” the “apotheosis of the hubristic post-Gulf War” general who “refused to think seriously about what would happen after his forces attacked.”
The Generals
By Thomas E. Ricks
(The Penguin Press, 558 pages, $32.95)
Such criticism doesn’t end with Gen. Franks. Gen Ricardo Sanchez, who took over from Gen. Franks in Iraq, is accused of being in “over his head,” “an inveterate micromanager” and the man largely responsible for “a tale of ineptitude exacerbated by a wholesale failure of accountability.”
What Mr. Ricks doesn’t explain—and when such charges are leveled, it is surely incumbent on him to do so—is how the Taliban and Saddam could have been overthrown and both countries pacified without the miscalculations and unexpected outcomes that plague even the best of military leaders in all wars. And given that it is the generals’ duty to carry out the orders of the politicians, how would a Gen. Thomas Ricks, even with 20/20 hindsight, have won anything approaching bloodless victories in Afghanistan and Iraq? We aren’t told.
Of course, Gens. Franks and Sanchez are only two examples of Mr. Ricks’s long roster of bad generals. It includes Douglas MacArthur (“vain and mendacious”), Maxwell Taylor (“the only advocate for direct U.S. engagement in Vietnam”), William Westmoreland (an “organization man” who aimed at “looking good rather than being good”), Colin Powell (“a master implementer without a strategy to implement”), Richard Myers and Peter Pace (who, when each was chairman of the Joints Chiefs, refused “to speak truth to power”) and George Casey (“treading water” in Iraq in 2004). George Patton was “admittedly unbalanced but nevertheless aggressive,” and therefore Mr. Ricks accepts that Eisenhower was right not to sack him for his various public-relations disasters.
By the end of the book it seems astonishing that America wasn’t defeated in any of its wars except Vietnam. Mr. Ricks blames Vietnam as much on Lyndon Johnson as on his Joint Chiefs. Neither, he says, “did their duty.” In one of a number of broad generalizations, he states that soldiers shouldn’t try to enter politics, which would have denied America the presidential talents of Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower.
Besides Marshall, Eisenhower and Gen. Petraeus there are a few—if all too few—generals who emerge well from this harsh though immensely readable book. They include Matthew Ridgway (who led U.S. airborne troops during the 1944 invasion of Europe), Lucian Truscott (“one of the best American generals of World War Two”), Jack Keane (who, with historian Frederick Kagan, provided the intellectual firepower behind the surge in Iraq) and James Mattis (who, as head of Central Command, favors “fiercely aggressive tactics”). Overall, however, Mr. Ricks believes that “there was a collapse of generalship in the 1960s,” which lasted until Gen. Petraeus’s surprise emergence five years ago.
Yet it is worth asking how Patton would have done trying to fight a hearts-and-minds war like the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, and how Truscott or Ridgeway would have fared when the enemy wore civilian clothing while planting IEDs at night. The fate of MacArthur in Korea doesn’t inspire confidence that they would have made the transition any better than he. And the number of divisional commanders that Marshall relieved in a war with many millions of Americans in uniform was still only 10%, whereas today the troop numbers in the U.S. Army are far smaller. Perhaps the United States just started out with fewer good generals in 1941 and therefore had greater reason to relieve them of duty. Ultimately, Mr. Ricks’s faith in the power of sacking generals en masse is unconvincing, though it makes for a highly entertaining book—so long as you’re not a general.
Mr. Roberts is the author of “Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War.”
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