| Sorry if this is redundent or already been covered. The article has a lot of good information for discussion.
NARRATIVE DISCORD
Critiques of Iraq War Reveal
Rifts Among Army Officers
Colonel's Essay Draws
Rebuttal From General;
Captains Losing Faith
By GREG JAFFE
June 29, 2007; Page A1
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.
DEBATING IRAQ
• The Situation: Officers' critiques of U.S. failures in Iraq are roiling the military.
• The Background: Conflicting explanations for what's gone wrong reflect divisions between younger officers and more conservative generals.
• The Bottom Line: The debate could shape how the Army looks going forward and sow mistrust in the ranks.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. (Read the article.1)
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."
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.
Post-mortems of battlefield failures are nothing new. The Army used Col. Harry Summers's "On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War" to explain its failure in that war and to chart a future course. Col. Summers blamed the loss on political leaders who hadn't mobilized the country for war and Army officers who hadn't pushed hard enough for an all-out assault on North Vietnam's army and its capital. Instead, the generals had wasted energy battling a guerrilla threat that was just a distraction, he argued.
"Summers was immensely influential," says retired Col. Don Snider, a professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. His book buttressed a shift in focus within the Army during the 1970s and 1980s away from preparing for small wars and toward being ready for a conventional fight with the Soviet Army in Europe.
The first of the Army's explanations for Iraq was embedded in its new doctrine for fighting insurgencies. That effort was overseen by Gen. David Petraeus, now the top general in Iraq. Written in 2006 by a bevy of active-duty officers, historians and a human-rights advocate, the doctrine criticized the Army for turning away from guerrilla war after Vietnam. "The story of how the Army found itself less than ready to fight an insurgency goes back to the Army's unwillingness to internalize and build upon the lessons of Vietnam," an introduction to the document reads.
The Army is learning in Iraq how to fight such wars better, the document says. But its authors, including Gen. Petraeus, worried that the lessons may have come too late -- after the American people had run out of patience.
Since then, other officers have weighed in with competing failure narratives. Earlier this year, Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap, an Air Force officer in the Pentagon with a penchant for stirring up debate, suggested that Gen. Petraeus's narrative missed the point. The U.S. was stru |
