The Fight Over How to Fight

Now, however, a younger generation of officers has been bloodied in the city streets of Iraq, fighting against hidden foes. (Some of these same officers were deployed on nation-building missions to the Balkans or Africa or Haiti in the 1990s.) In Iraq, these young captains and majors and lieutenant colonels have had to desperately improvise, to make up tactics as they go along. Naturally, some are furious at their higher-ups for sending them to war so unprepared. In May 2007, one of them, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, wrote a blistering piece in Armed Forces Journal called "A Failure of Generalship." He painted the Army's high command as a bunch of none-too-bright conformists. The promotions system, he wrote, "does little to reward creativity and moral courage." On the contrary, to move up, an officer "must only please his superiors." Yingling pointed out that no one seemed to be taking the fall for failure in Iraq.

He had a point: Gen. George Casey, who presided over the downward spiral between 2004 and 2006, was rewarded by being made Army chief of staff. By contrast, Gen. George Marshall, in his first year as Army chief of staff under FDR in the run-up to World War II, fired 34 generals and 445 colonels from an Army half the size of today's force. After war came in December 1941, he further relieved 17 division commanders. So why no comparable purge during the Iraq War, which has already lasted longer than World War II? More was at stake during 1941 to 1945, of course, but it is also true that the commanders in Iraq were following the policy decreed by Bush and Rumsfeld. The failure of imagination started at the top. True, more officers should have challenged their civilian bosses, but that is rarely the way in a U.S. military obedient to civilian control.

Under the twin pressures of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has dramatically changed its training for officers and soldiers. Now, at its National Training Center at Fort Irwin in California's Mojave Desert, infantry units are plunged into a nightmarish theater in the round: a network of a dozen "Iraqi" villages, complete with several hundred "Iraqis"—the leading roles played by a cast of Arabic-speaking extras supplied by a contractor.

But the real test of the Army's commitment will be whether the military retains and promotes the experienced young officers coming off the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. "One of the challenges we have as senior leaders is that ... we have to change the Army," says Gen. Raymond Odierno, the former No. 2 in Iraq who was recently named vice chief of staff of the Army. "We have to make sure we don't lose this." His boss in Iraq, counterinsurgency guru Gen. David Petraeus, says that the military is beginning to make accommodations for officers who are repeatedly deployed and can't take the war-college courses needed for promotion. Still, young officers were dismayed to see some of Petraeus's own "brain trust" of smart colonels passed over for promotion in recent years. The fact that Petraeus was brought back to Washington, D.C., last fall to oversee the most recent promotions board was taken as a sign that the Pentagon leadership recognized those frustrations.

But simply tipping the balance over to small-war fighting isn't the answer, either. The U.S. Army last week published a critique of the Israeli military's performance in its fight against Hizbullah in Lebanon in 2006. It concluded that the Israelis, preoccupied with counterinsurgency efforts in Gaza and the West Bank, had neglected training for conventional combat and paid a heavy price. Yet if the U.S. Army needs to prepare for both Big War and Small War and nation-building postwar, how can it juggle the competing demands of each?

Counterinsurgency and nation-building in particular are labor-intensive; there is no substitute for boots on the ground. The current U.S. Army is stretched to the limit: after their third or fourth tours in Iraq, young officers are fretting about their stressed families. Partly because the Army has been decentralized to be able to fight in smaller, more-mobile units, there is a serious shortage of captains and majors. The minimum requirements for enlisting are dropping, allowing in more and more teenagers who never finished high school.

Some experts think that the active Army needs to nearly double to 800,000 or more troops. But where will the money come from? Every soldier now costs, on average, roughly $125,000 a year. At the same time, the centerpiece of the Army's current plans for the big war out there sometime is the high-tech "Future Combat System," a $300 billion family of vehicles networked into an all-seeing whole by sensors, UAVs and satellites. It will be up to the nation's political leaders to decide whether to make some hard choices or try to convince the voters that they need to pay for it all. Too bad this is a topic that is rarely discussed during the presidential campaign.

With Babak Dehghanpisheh and Larry Kaplow in Baghdad

© 2008