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The Generals
Thomas E Ricks is a war reporter for The Washington Post who grew up in Afghanistan, was embedded with the US military during the invasion of Iraq and who over the last decade has become the leading American journalist writing about the US's adventures in both those theatres. His new book The Generals is a broader look at the US Army's command structure from WW2 to the present day. The book has one central thesis which is that American generalship reached its apogee in the period 1944-5 when General George Marshall was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and did not suffer fools gladly. Marshall encouraged the policy of "rapid relief" whereby generals and other senior officers who just weren't cutting it were replaced by officers who it was felt could do the job better. Ricks believes that this policy worked well to get rid of incompetent men who needlessly sacrificed their soldiers lives or who just couldn't get the job done efficiently enough. There were 3 big exceptions to Marshall's policy in WW2: 1) General Mark Clark who was a liar and an incompetent in the Italian theatre but who was protected because of political reasons. 2) Field Marshall Montgomery - a preening martinet and overly cautious plodder but who, of course, was untouchable because he was the most famous British General of the war. 3) General MacArthur - another liar and egomaniac, but a famous five star general who didn't finally get relieved until Harry Truman had to fire him during the Korean War because of repeated insubordination.
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The Korean War is one of Ricks's hobby horses and in fact that part of The Generals could have done with some judicious editing. But the case Ricks makes is bolstered by data from Korea and especially Vietnam where I was shocked to learn that not a single senior officer was ever punished for the Mi Lai massacre or its embarrassing cover up. By the Vietnam era "rapid relief" of incompetent generals had gone out of style and by 2001 it was almost unheard of. A very bad thing in Ricks's book. The post Vietnam morale of the US Army in unpacked and the boost in fortunes that came after Gulf War I. Ricks is very good on the George W Bush invasion of Iraq, pouring scorn on the generalship of Tommy Franks and particularly Ricardo Sanchez, two unimaginative men utterly out of their depth and whose blunders - Ricks claims - were responsible for the deaths of thousands of US service personnel.
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The only general of the modern era to be praised unconditionally in Ricks's book is General David Petraeus, who Ricks feels could be the model of a new breed of American staff officer. The book of course went to press before Petraeus blew up his own career by having an affair with his own gushing and decidedly creepy biographer. All in all a fascinating history of the US Army and its leadership over the last 60 years and a must read for anyone who wants to understand the military debacles over the last decade.
29 comments:
Thanks fr the heads up. I enjoy reading Ricks, and I'm looking to increase how much non-fiction I read. This will go on the list.
Funny, when you wrote of the "rapid relief"policy in WW2, my first thought--swear t God--was "Oh, yeah? What about Mark Clark." Then he was the first exception mentioned.
I'll be reading this.
Picked up Callsign Hades about the 1 Royal Irish in Afghanistan Adrian, have you heard of it?
Dana
Mark Clark - what a clown. The real hero of the first part of the book is Marshall himself. Ricks makes a strong case for Marshall as an exemplar of American generalship.
Matt
Thats a new one on me. I shall check it out. I do know that the Royal Irish were based at Camp Bastion where my little brother was based for 9 months (largely hating every minute of it).
Have you read Nemesis by Max Hastings? He savages MacArthur for his handling of the Philipines campaign. I suppose any high command becomes stiff with careerists if it isn't being challenged by the demands of a total war. America's military actions since Vietnam have been all about the utilization of vastly superior military technology, not superior generalship. In this new age of drones and cyberwarfare it's possible that generals will become redundant, or at least diminished in their importance.
Cary
I have read Nemesis, in fact I think its the best of the (many!) Max Hastings books on WW2.
I like the fact that Hastings doesnt bang the patriotic drum for the Brits or Australians in Nemesis. (He may in fact have gone a little overboard downplaying the Australian contribution in the Pacific theatre).
Interestingly both Ricks and Hastings praise the Generalship of the US Marine Corps, but as you say, are utterly unimpressed by MacArthur.
Aw hell, that wanna-be celebrity scum down in Tampa tried to mess with the Yankees!
http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/jill-kelley-and-natalie-khawam-history
Matt
If only A Rod could somehow be involved and we could get rid of him forever.
Have you seen the betting for the AL Pennant? The Yankees are big outsiders and but for the home town punter effect would probably be at 15-1.
http://www.belmont.ag/live-lines/baseball/al-pennant
Yes, I'm well out of my depth here, but Petraeus is a bit of a test, isn't he, on the hubris detector scale?
No one with enough power gets fired in the US unless you mess with with enough other people in power. Like Bernie Madoff.
But Abu Ghraib and John Yoo and the Bush admin. Punishment came to 'rogue' grunts and a general who said civilian subcontractors handled the interrogations.
I think if I read Rick's book I'd get angrier than I already am, and I started off this morning in such a good mood.
Seana
Hubris, arrogance, you name it. If he'd been French of course they'd have promoted him.
Sheiler
You might like this book. The last quarter will make your blood boil but the first bit will probably not effect the blood pressure too much.
Yes, the French have different priorities.
I have to say that the whole 'embedded' thing has always struck me as deeply, deeply suspect. Or at the very least a little too cozy.
Yes, I suspect that between the policy of embedding journalists and the shrinking number of newspaper and magazines that have foreign correspondents, Americans may have seen their last great war reporting for some time.
Peter, Seana
I dont think the problem is embedding so much as the word's association with the Bush administration.
Hemingway and Gelhorn were embedded with US forces in WW2 as was John Ford, John Steinbeck etc. The great Vasily Grossman was embedded with the Red Army at Stalingrad. Isaac Babel was embedded with the Red Cavalry. Churchill was embedded with British forces in the Boer War. In the US Civil War reporters were embedded with both sides. The same with Napoleons Grand Army. Callisthenes was embedded with Alexander The Great.
Indeed one wonders how war reporting would be possible without embedding. Like I say I feel its the word and its associations that are causing you problems not the concept.
You very well could be right. It's just that idea of government's OKing reporters' presence had never before been stressed as much as during the Bush wars.
Well, I know you know more about this stuff than I do, Adrian. But looking into this a little, I found a NYT piece on the subject. It supports much of what you say, but then ends with Seymour Hersh denouncing the practice. I suppose it depends on what you think of his opinions, but at least he articulates many of the qualms I have about the practice.
Seana
You gotta respect Sy Hersch but his "embedding began in the last decade and a half with the first gulf war" remark is just plain wrong. He doesn't know what he's talking about.
Incidentally Ricks's book has a brilliant 10 pages or so on Mi Lai.
That would be interesting.
I think that I'm still going to disagree here on the importance of them thinking up the jargon embedding. It's fine if journalists want to ride along with the troops, and also brave. But my impression from the second Gulf War was that the government had figured out a way to make journalists more biddable, by threatening to not give them any access if they didn't play by their terms. It was easier, I'd think, when coming to terms was the only way to actually get out there. The press was pretty craven all on its own, I'd say. As was almost everyone else. I think glamorizing the idea of 'embedding' was just another way of managing the dissent. Which isn't of course to say that propoganda was invented in 2003.
In January, I didn't blog much, but I spent my time reading. I didn't read THE GENERALS but it was discussed some in what I read:
My Share of the Task: A Memoir by General Stanley McChrystal; The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War by Fred Kaplan; Kill Anything That Moves by Nick Turse; and finally, The Outpost by Jake Tapper.
The military bureaucracy was getting nowhere in Afghanistan until General Patraeus and some other young guys took over and shook up the bureaucracy, having the military employ villagers to make new roads in the outcountry and other work projects.
In an effort to actually help the Afghans.
The trouble was and is, that they just replaced one bureaucracy with another. As a tandem read of Jake Tapper's book with Nick Turse's book makes clear, Afghanistan has become another Viet Nam. Our military sees any local in possession of a gun as an insurgent, even when they might simply be people doing what the Republicans say comes as a natural right, taking to arms to protect their own families.
The problem is not with the troops, but is instead systemic.
The Afghans are simply waiting for us to get out so that they can ditch our puppet. Nothing has changed, except that we have killed a lot of them while getting some of our own killed--and now we have built them some roads.
I highly recommend Jake Tapper's The Outpost along with Nick Turse's Kill Anything That Moves.
Seana
I'm not sure I understand your point. What was different about the embedding practices practiced under Bush as opposed to Nixon, or Johnson, or FDR, or Wilson or Lincoln? Again I suspect you're getting hung up on the word itself and the connotations that go with it.
Richard
I've read a few of those POV soldier based memoirs but I was really looking for something that outlined the whole issue of command failure in the US military and Ricks's book did a nice job of delineating that.
I think your analysis of Afghanistan is a little more complex that your precis here. Most Afghanis are not waiting for us to get out, most Afghanis do not care for the Taliban. But its a North/South thing, a Pashto/Dari thing, a Taji/Afghani thing and most of all its a Pakistan thing.
Pakistan has been playing the long game since the getgo and when we're gone the Pakistanis will go back to ruling Afghanistan as a quasi protectorate.
I suppose the difference is in degree, but also in finding a word that glamorizes the cooptation.
An interesting piece here by David Ignatius, who, unlike any of us here, was actually embedded.
Seana
That was a great piece by Igantius. I like him.
And I think its a good thing if the journalists, intellectuals and commentators who didnt ask enough questions in 2001-2003 now started wondering how they were all so fooled. I dont know what Ignatius's position was on the Iraq invasion but its amazing that Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Andrew Sullivan etc. who were big cheerleaders for a war of choice havent suffered any kind of reputational hit.
Adrian, I realize that the Taliban are not liked. Jake Tapper, who was with them, points out again and again instances where, as in Viet Nam, so much of Afghanistan has so many different little ethnic groups and so many isolated villages that weren't even much aware that there was such a thing as a central government, until we got there and told them.
Their rivalries were more with one another than with us, but they don't like outsiders period. And when troops first showed up in the Hindu Kush range, the natives thought they were the Russians again.
The current administration and the current military bureaucracy, as with the last one, ignores negative feedback and keeps a rosy positive optimism about the situation, just as they did in Viet Nam. To be realistically negative about it is to be unpatriotic, and we all want to support our troops.
We don't want to think that our money (over a trillion dollars spent in the middle east) has been wasted. We don't want to think that our dead keep dying for nothing, or next to it.
Richard
Exactly. It has created some baroque and bizarre situations...
One of the most bizarre things in my own family is the fact that that my little brother an officer in the Royal Navy was sent to language school for a year to learn Farsi and then sent to Afghanistan, a landlocked country, to work as an intelligence officer. It just cracks me up that this has got to be the last thing he possibly imagined when he joined the navy.
Long after the Russians, British and Americans are gone the Pakistani ISI will still be pulling the strings...
Speaking of Ignatius, did anyone here happen to read The Increment? A lot of people seemed to like it in Santa Cruz, though I haven't gotten to it yet, though I may even have a copy lying around the house here somewhere.
Oh, and yes, pundits do seem to be kind of invulnerable, although apparently not on the Fox news network recently.
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