Both the media (NY Times, WSJ, Time) and blogs (SWJ, Abu M, Danger Room, Wings over Iraq, Best Defense, Armchair Generalist, ATTACKERMAN, to list only a few) are alight over the profile of General Stanley McChrystal in the forthcoming issue of Rolling Stone, weighing in on whether McChrystal ought to / will be fired now that he has been recalled to Washington, rather than attending his regularly scheduled AF-PAK meeting by teleconference.
There are many ways in which this crisis echos the profile of Admiral Fox Fallon in Esquire that led to his resignation and retirement during the Bush administration. Secretary Gates’ official statement does not bode well for the general, but still leaves the President room for maneuver:
I read with concern the profile piece on Gen. Stanley McChrystal in the upcoming edition of ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine. I believe that Gen. McChrystal made a significant mistake and exercised poor judgment in this case. We are fighting a war against al Qaeda and its extremist allies, who directly threaten the United States, Afghanistan, and our friends and allies around the world. Going forward, we must pursue this mission with a unity of purpose. Our troops and coalition partners are making extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our security, and our singular focus must be on supporting them and succeeding in Afghanistan without such distractions. Gen. McChrystal has apologized to me and is similarly reaching out to others named in this article to apologize to them as well. I have recalled Gen. McChrystal to Washington to discuss this in person.
Regardless of the strategic concerns in practice in Afghanistan (see Abu M above) and the theoretical concerns of civil-military relations in principle, what might actually be just as important are the domestic political implications, as suggested by a statement from Senators Lieberman, Graham and McCain:
We have the highest respect for General McChrystal and honor his brave service and sacrifice to our nation. General McChrystal’s comments, as reported in Rolling Stone, are inappropriate and inconsistent with the traditional relationship between Commander-in-Chief and the military. The decision concerning General McChrystal’s future is a decision to be made by the President of the United States.
While these three are saying it is an issue for the the President, by calling McChrystal’s comments ‘inappropriate and inconsistent’ with American civil-military relations, they are suggesting Obama only has one option, if he’s really the Commander-in-Chief. The groundwork has been laid for second-guessing a decision.
There are likely going to be others on both sides of the aisle that will make this a lose-lose for Obama. If Obama keeps McChrystal, he is likely to be attacked for not having control over the military, as President Clinton was similarly accused in the 1990s. If Obama fires McChrystal, he is likely to be attacked for his lack of wisdom in having selected such a ‘loose cannon’ in the first place, especially after having fired General McKiernan, McChrystal’s predecessor. The President was less vulnerable to the latter charge in the previous case, because McKiernan was not ‘Obama’s general,’ but had been put in place during the Bush administration. Just as Obama now ‘owns’ Afghanistan after two troop increases and strategic reviews, he likewise owns McChrystal.
In the end, unlike the Fallon episode, this is an issue of style and personalities, not policy substance. McChrystal and his team basically won the debate last autumn on strategy. That Secretary Gates has to talk about ‘unity of purpose’ rather than ‘effort’, much less ‘command’, however, suggests one of the ways in which the United States (both directly and via NATO) has created a command structure that elevates the importance of playing nicely with others, since no single person is in charge of all aspects of strategy in theatre. Quoting from the President’s BP interview, he doesn’t have a single ‘ass to kick’, though he’s letting a particular one flap in the wind for now…
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As Robert Duvall’s Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore so elegantly phrased it, “Someday this war’s gonna end… ” God willing the American Republic will endure long after Afghanistan ceases to be a major conflict, and with it the vital tenet of civilian control of the military. The long view mandates that General McChrystal must go. This is a leadership test for President Obama, unwanted, unexpected and highly consequential. There are capable replacements on McChrystal’s staff that could maintain continuity of effort without the unhelpful burden of an overt challenge to the credibility of U.S. civilian leadership and war planners.
Five minutes of worthwhile further reading here: http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45870
No officer is irreplaceable and I agree that if for no other reason than it is bad form for him to continue to lead, especially in a combat environment– where he has so badly and publicly undermined his own moral authority as he has done–wittingly or not.
Thanks for the interesting link, Jon.
I agree that the primacy of civilian control of the military is fundamental to American democracy, but there might be ways that the President could both assert control and keep McChrystal, should he want to do so. I doubt that is what is going to happen at this point, but I still think it’s not an either/or situation of civilian control (in the bluntest sense of firing McChrystal) or strategic success in Afghanistan (assuming it is both possible and more likely, if you keep McChrystal – both questionable assumptions, of course…).
This was just posted on the Daily Kos, reputedly an influential and connected (to the White House) left leaning blog that sees something more sinister at work:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/6/23/878659/-McChrystal-is-the-Tip-of-the-Iceberg
Well, that’s that.
Not disagreeing–just supplementing.
Supplement most welcome – I was commenting on the Generals firing.
As the late comedienne Gilda Radner used to say in one of her memorable personas “Never Mind.”
We are Screwed now. The only chance there was, wasn’t totally supported, properly maned on the Civilian side, and now is for all practical purposes, Finished.
Remember, People make fun of what they don’t understand. And in this attempt to somehow end something , a War, that never should have been, a different approach was, and is, needed.
And now what? A Grand Calvary Charge, Nepolian style? Tanks racing across who knows what? A Bombing Campaign? Just to have a War most might understand?
A sad day for the forces who have sacrificed so much, and a sadder day for the Afghanistan that could have been.
And, Yes, I am a supporter of Gen. McChrystal.
And, No, I will not sleep any better tonight.
You raise a very interesting point. How is the US going to get out of Afghanistan?
In Iraq there is oil to keep forces in place as well as a much less dangerous and lengthy supply line. Afghanistan on the other hand has its supposed mineral wealth locked beneath its soil, but those are more estimates than reality, and a long supply train which is difficult to secure.
So the question is how will the US leave? The plan as we keep hearing it seems to be based around making the Afghan National Army (ANA) strong enough to secure Karzai’s government in power but anyone who knows how the things went in Afghanistan after the Soviets left know that such a position is perilous and very dependant on support.
The Taliban swept to power in the early 90s after the government the communists left in power finally fell to a combination or warlords, internal fraction and atrophied support from Russia.
In the process of withdrawal the Soviets lost big time and the effects of that loss helped contribute to the breakup of the Soviet Union (will the US union be the same?) and Afghanistan teetered on total collapse before it had stability brought to it by the Taliban taking it over. What’s the possibility that something similar will happen this time?
It seems unlikely that the US will just unplug from Afghanistan (unless something serious debilitates its ability to support its forces there) but even if there is immediate plan to withdrawal any plan it does have may hinge on a ‘decent interval’ as kissinger put the phrase (and as Snepp chronicled in his book) to allow the US to get out and save face before its puppet government falls. How will the US do this?
Currently the argument is still focused on winning but the McChrystal article indicates (maybe even shows) that there is a gulf between the reality of Washington and Kabul, that the US military is caught in a bind and unlike Vietnam where there was intense pressure from the public to get out the current anti war movement in the US is much smaller and exerts much less (if any real) pressure on US policy in Afghanistan (there have been no sieges of the Pentagon by protesting citizens or bags of s**t being throwing at returning soldiers) so the government and the military are caught in the web of the relentless boosterism and spin that has characterised the war effort. A dynamic in which no dissent is tolerated creates perceptions which do not match the reality – the hallmark of military failure.
Much like Vietnam how can years of saying that victory is just round the corner be erased from people’s minds even when the reality is that the US is sinking into a quagmire which will make Vietnam seem like a sideshow?
This is where McChrystal comes in. His dissent in RS and the tone of the article raises the spectre of an inability to operate in an environment which has defied comprehension by the ordered systems of conventional military thought or the rehashed pseudo gibberish of the COINistras.
His efforts to make hearts and minds work (which is more an ideal than an operable reality) has revealed the deep bind that any conventional army find itself in when it operates in such an environment as Afghanistan (or Vietnam, Algeria, Rhodesia, Mozambique, Palestine/Israel, Russia and many others).
The US can stay and try to get out by creating a buffer for its decent interval by building the ANA which will only exacerbate the problems which are currently at work tearing the situation apart, simply pull up stakes and bug out as fast as possible and let the real struggle begin or try to just sneak out quietly under the cover of something bigger (some bigger disaster) and hope everyone is to preoccupied to notice.
McChrystal in outing his dissent becomes less like William Westmorland or McArthur (both of whom still wanted to fight and win the war) and more like Paulus at Stalingrad (a man confronted with the horrible reality after a long illusion). He may not be speaking for the Taliban yet but if him and his staff show even a quarter of the contempt for the politicians as they do in the article its still an indicator that there is a rift between the manipulators in the bunker and behind the lines and the men tasked with fighting on the front.
What’s McChrystal (or any replacement) to do in this situation? As long as Washington is unwilling to face the reality of its perilous position the soldiers doing the job will be made to operate in situations which will become increasingly dangerous (as they are now). The Marja offensive became a military waste smothered in layers of glossy PR which is already being expunged from the record and the Khandahar Offensive has been postponed (perhaps indefinitely) as the ability of the ANA or the Afghan government or even the US to operate successfully is in serious doubt as casualties mount and the population remains unwilling to be won over.
What’s McCrystal to do, he has been made out to be some sort of COIN Wizard but as many have pointed out the ROEs he has ordered may have put soldiers at more risk and achieved little in the short or even mid term. Perhaps the fault lies in the idea that COIN is even a viable doctrine at all. Its successes are few and its failures many and the successes it does have were bought in environments which favoured the Counter Insurgent and were restrictive to the insurgent, does the situation in Afghanistan fit this?
This leaves little option but outright military failure. One by one the smaller coalition partners have withdrawn while casualties mount and the costs rise. Tensions in the region have slowly risen and the stability of regional neighbours has worsened as the effects of Afghanistan’s lethal cocktail of corruption, drugs, warlords, social and economic failure, poverty, outside intervention, rampant and easily available arms and weapons and a history of factionalism cross borders and start to poison others. How does any military, not just the US, extricate itself from such a situation? How does an empire which has run rampant come to an end?
The answer exists in history (military and general) and its not plesant. The hubris which underlies all the arguments for this conflict by the US is fostered by the deadly illusion which like previous military failure cannot see or acknowledge the outcome which is becoming more and more inevitable.
The irony of this situation is that its basic military thought which has answers to these questions. Good soldiers know when to pull back, a smart commander knows how to go over to the defensive but in the misaligned reality which the COIN doctrine and US foreign policy promotes there can be no halt of the offensive, no strategic realignment and no acknowledgement of the reality.
In such a bind a man such as Mchrystal finds himself, yet he is no saint, as the RS article makes clear for all to see this is a man who ran Phoenix Program style murder squads and had a hand in military cover ups of the worst kind, what kind of prescription can a man, painted as military maverick by RS, have for a situation that has thwarted better minds than his?
If his anger and frustration are clear then it begs the question is what is it like on the ground? Even if previous historical examples of failure in COIN are ignored the argument that the US is winning or can win in Afghanistan need to overturn the great doubt that the situation on the ground creates. Words alone cannot win wars and Obama can keep or fire him (Hitler swapped generals like that as well) and it will make little difference.
Getting out of Afghanistan has yet to become the priority as talk of the surge and the buying time through the Khandahar Offensive still predominate but withdrawal is not a simple option. Even if the lives at risk by a military bungle like Vietnam can be avoided the potential for immense loss of prestige, face and power is apparent for any power in a situation as this.
In Afghanistan the US may be fighting for its very life, it may be fighting for its survival as a superpower, it may know that any step back now indicates a fate worse than staying and as such do the politicians in Washington know the greater reality more than the men on the ground who measure the situation as soldiers through time have always done – through blood and earth.
Call me a pessimist, but I think you are ascribing way too much rationality and principle to what the current US administration
will likely do in Afghanistan. I think they will jump at the first opportunity to exit regardless of the flotsam and jetsam left in the wake of it and will merely spin things the best they can. The American people, for a wide range of reasons–economy, lack of journalistic rigor and ethics in failing to present the issues clearly, increasing self-absorption and ignorance of any “big” issues (beyond the latest reality show craze) etc.–do not IMHO have the “heart” and certainly not the “mind” for a protracted COIN effort in Afghanistan or anywhere else.
Our current masters have made it abundantly clear that foreign policy is way down on their list of priorities and perhaps even more to the point their abilities. The State Department from the Secretary on down is now a place more for patronage (or isolating potential political enemies) than skill and experience.
They are much more concerned with “transformative change” of our domestic political, social and economic systems and the consolidation of the power (largely by extra-Constitutional fiat). Once accomplished this in turn will transform the US in the international arena into that kinder and gentler “nation” that can then participate in the global progressive elite that will care for us great unwashed.
I’m following Etienne de Durand through the maze of French writing on guerre psychologique. It’s probably only a maze because of my atrocious French.
Anyway, I’ve just read Orville Menard’s paper ‘The French Army Above the State’ which makes an argument of relevance here. It’s not that the US is about to have a coup, but Menard’s point about an army deciding it has a higher loyalty to patrie and nation than etat is useful. Do armies owe loyalty to the nation conceived as a timeless entity, reaching back to the foundational myths? Or do they owe primary loyalty to the state – embodied in the institutions and administrations of the day?
Clearly it depends on the representativeness of the regime, but on balance I favour the latter. Myths are just that, nations and cultures shift. There is no timeless state, and invoking it allows one to take exception to incumbents in the interests of apparently grander values than the grubby business of daily politics.
Back to the stacks…. Incidentally, does anyone know where I can get back issues of the Revue militaire d’information?
Interesting reading, I am sure. Thanks for the link.
Some older, less Ameri-centric civil-military relations literature (I am speaking of Harries-Jenkins and Van Doorn) speak specifically to this point. They believe that seeing oneself as the guardian of the nation, rather than the servant of the state, is a form of militarism. I suppose Turkey is the prototypical contemporary example.
Good stuff fb. I found the Revue, incidentally, in the BL, of course…. coming my way shortly. Thank the Lord for google translate.
At least form the perspective of a US military officer who at least fashions himself to be of the “warrior class,” I do not think it is a “zero sum” thing but rather should involve a balance of the 2 in a nation like the US. This is embodied in an officer’s oath of office (given at each promotion) to “support AND defend the CONSTITUTION [NOT the current government or even the President] against ALL enemies, foreign AND domestic.” (my emphasis) This tension, much like that built into all the structural aspects of the Constitution is quite intentional.
The difficulty in your argument is the following question: WHO is competent to determine when allegiance to the government of the day is NOT equal to allegiance to the state? MacArthur thought he knew better than Truman, for example. The norm of civilian primacy over the military means, however, there are some things the military is not competent to judge. Yes, there is an inherent tension, but the default should be that civilians are right. And if they are wrong, they have a right to be wrong.
I, like you, am US military officer, but I loath the the “warrior class” concept. Just as our founding documents use the phrase “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” I think the same should be true of our military. The more our military represents the society it serves, the better. I joined to serve my country, not hide from it (or look down on it) in some monastic order.
Well stated. That would pretty much be my opinion as well.
Well said. I’m glad it seems it’s not just me that twitches at the “warrior” thing.
To the extent your comment was directed toward mine, I can but say that I do not see anything in my previous posts that suggest I have any contrary view as to the Constitutional norm of civilian control of the military. At the same time, however, and as a bit of an aside, I would note that the Constitution is not a “cafeteria” such that neither politicians in the Executive and Legislative branches nor judges in the Judicial branch, can pick and choose those bits they like and dislike over time. If course this does not also suggest that observance of one norm (civilian control for example) is dependent on the similar observance of others, although I suppose it can raise nice philosophical questions as to the application of the oath of office (…”all enemies foreign AND domestic”…) in terms of your “WHO” question–that is WHO (and by what standards) are such “domestic enemies.” This is especially troubling with the evident application of Alinksy’s wonderful rules by many senior officials in our current administration in demonizing wide swaths of the American citzenry for crass political reasons.
As to your point about the “warrior class,” without parsing what you mean by “warrior,” (for purposes of this post, suffice it to say I do not attribute the pejorative “Attila the Hun” connotations that some, especially our European cousins, seem to read into this term) I would frame it another way–the concept of the “citizen soldier.”
I think the tension as to the appropriate societal “role” for the military, and in particular the officers, to which you allude is a reflection of the, in my view inherent, problem of on the one hand a nation that has “evolved” to the point that the idea of national service (draft or otherwise) is unacceptable since it unduly interferes with their increasing self-absorption and the other a concern that our “professional” military not become too insular or “elitist.”
This divide becomes more acute over time of one considers the diverging “trajectories” of the population at large and the military in particular. This phenomenon is reflected in many ways including for example the recent concerns expressed by military leaders about the shrinking pool of qualified candidates for military service due to the worsening rates of obesity and related chronic health problems and, I would argue, markedly differing views of such apparently pre-modern notions of “honor,” “duty,” “honesty,” “commitment” and the like.
It is not surprising therefore that the professional military will increasingly be seen as discrete “class” when compared to the society at large. I am not at all certain that there is much that can be done about this, other than to ensure that the Constitution remains our lodestar as to what “role” the military properly plays in our system. This in turn becomes more difficult as we see the very same Constitution at times disregarded (directly or indirectly through deft re-defining of terms and then principles through post-modern legal and moral relativism) by the civilian officials in our government.
All this makes for very bad “ju ju” IMHO.
CORRECTED since not fixed by the edit function for some reason:
To the extent your comment was directed toward mine, I can but say that I do not see anything in my previous posts that suggest I have any contrary view as to the Constitutional norm of civilian control of the military. At the same time, however, and as a bit of an aside, I would note that the Constitution is not a “cafeteria” such that neither politicians in the Executive and Legislative branches nor judges in the Judicial branch, can pick and choose those bits they like and dislike over time. If course this does not also suggest that observance of one norm (civilian control for example) is dependent on the similar observance of others, although I suppose it can raise nice philosophical questions as to the application of the oath of office (…”all enemies foreign AND domestic”…) in terms of your “WHO” question–that is WHO (and by what standards) determines such “domestic enemies?” This is especially troubling in view of the evident application of Alinksy’s wonderful rules by many senior officials in our current administration in demonizing wide swaths of the American citzenry for crass political reasons.
As to your point about the “warrior class,” without parsing what you mean by “warrior,” (for purposes of this post, suffice it to say I do not attribute the pejorative “Attila the Hun” connotations that some, especially our European cousins, seem to read into this term) I would frame it another way–the concept of the “citizen soldier.”
I think the tension as to the appropriate societal “role” for the military as “citizen soldiers,” and in particular the officers, to which you allude, is a reflection of the, in my view inherent, problem of on the one hand a nation that has “evolved” (some might say deteriorated) to the point that the idea of national service (draft or otherwise) is unacceptable since it unduly interferes with their increasing self-absorption and on the other hand a concern that our “professional” military not become too insular or “elitist.”
This divide becomes more acute over time if one considers the diverging “trajectories” of the population at large and the military in particular. This phenomenon is reflected in many ways including for example the recent concerns expressed by military leaders about the shrinking pool of qualified candidates for military service due to the worsening rates of obesity and related chronic health problems and, I would argue, markedly differing views of such apparently pre-modern notions of “honor,” “duty,” “honesty,” “commitment” and the like.
It is not surprising therefore that the professional military will increasingly be seen as discrete “class” when compared to the society at large. I am not at all certain that there is much that can be done about this, other than to ensure that the Constitution remains our lodestar as to what “role” the military properly plays in our system. This in turn becomes more difficult as we see the very same Constitution at times disregarded (directly or indirectly through deft re-defining of terms and then principles through post-modern legal and moral relativism) by the civilian officials in our government.
All this makes for very bad “ju ju” IMHO.
Very well said, on all counts.