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In wars then let our great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
No two generals could possibly be more diametrically opposite than George Patton and Stanley McChrystal. Both graduated from West Point and shared a passion for reading military history, but similarities end there. Patton was an acerbic, bombastic, narcissistic self-promoter whose skill as a warrior made him immortal. In contrast, McChrystal’s personal life and active service accentuated the motto of his special warfare clan: the “silent professionals.” As different as they are in time and temperament, both generals symbolize transformational epochs of the U.S. military art. Patton is the past; McChrystal represents the new age. For decades, McChrystal labored in the shadowy corners of Iraq and Afghanistan to evolve, through practical trial and error, a model of war that will shape for generations how America fights.1
Gen. George Patton’s breakout from the Normandy beachhead in July 1944 and his dash across France signaled that the United States had at last mastered mechanized warfare. The “Patton method” subsequently became the doctrine for fighting the Soviet army in Europe throughout the Cold War. The method consisted of a mechanized-war doctrine, stolen from the Germans and melded with the uniquely American skill for applying air- and land-delivered firepower in support of tanks on the move. Some semblance of Patton’s tank-heavy, firepower-intensive dash would be replicated twice against a single enemy: Iraq, once with the “Great Wheel” in Desert Storm and once with the “March to Baghdad” in 2003. Only the Israelis would conduct similar armored maneuvers, against Arab enemies in 1967 and 1973. Otherwise Patton’s method no longer defines modern wars.
Patton’s genius was well fitted to the last war of the European era. McChrystal represents the latest war of the American era. Patton represented the apex of twentieth-century mechanized warfare. McChrystal’s legion of elite warriors is the highest embodiment of the art of warfare in the new age of infantry.
However, Patton’s ghost still haunts the U.S. Army. He is embedded in our Cold War culture of machine-driven ground combat. It is perpetuated by the euphoria that came from twice crushing the incompetent Iraqi Republican Guard in the blowing sands of Iraq. Unfortunately, the utility of big-machine warfare began to fade as soon as U.S. military power took center stage. Patton’s war was a crusade for national survival. Wars in the American era are limited wars. Throughout the American era, most efforts to apply the Patton method have been frustrated by huge shifts in the dynamics of war. One is the loss of the strategic initiative. Patton enjoyed the initiative. The German military danced to his tune. To be sure, Hitler surprised the allies by initiating the Battle of the Bulge, but within days the initiative returned to Eisenhower, not Hitler.
The United States fights its wars today at a disadvantage. The enemy holds the initiative, and we must fight without the ability to anticipate the place, time, duration, and circumstance of war. Loss of the initiative in the American era has led too often to miscalculation on both sides. Harry Truman never imagined that a 2-division commitment in 1950 would result in 38,000 dead Americans. Lyndon Johnson surely would never have sent troops to Vietnam if he had ever thought this act would kill 58,000 Americans and more than a million Vietnamese. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld never anticipated a protracted counterinsurgency when he sent armored forces into Baghdad. The succession of enemies guilty of miscalculating U.S. intent are many, and they include Manuel Noriega, Mohamed Farah Aideed, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein (twice), the Taliban, Muammar Kaddafi, and, missing by just a hair, Bashar al Assad.
Patton fought a complicated war with pyramidal, linear structures. His Third Army was an enormous clockwork mechanism that moved in response to a detailed set of orders. Detailed, exhaustive planning put this giant mechanism on the road and orchestrated all its parts in a form of operatic synergy. The plan fed fuel, food, and ammunition from depots to attacking units at prescribed times and places. Subordinate officers briefed their pieces of the plan to Soldiers before moving out to assembly areas. Planning annexes and precise tables dictated exactly how fires were delivered, beginning with the Army Air Forces and proceeding to artillery, infantry mortars, and finally covering machinegun fire at company and platoon levels. Many moving parts and complicated actions kept the mechanism running on time. This mechanism could only be put together over days or weeks dedicated to intense planning, rehearsal, and execution.
McChrystal fought a complex war. The elusive and ambiguous nature of the enemy and the need for immediate action forbade the old Cold War linear plans and top-down orders of the past. He discovered that complexity demanded shortcuts, anticipation, and the ability to conceptualize, plan, and execute on the move. The enemy had to be found in the creases, hidden in the shadows, and dispersed among the people. McChrystal fought against complex enemy networks whose tribal associations, amorphous connections, and hydra-headed leadership forced him to devise competing networks of his own. A networked force was impossible to create unless the pyramid was crushed and traditional command chains flattened and turned into a networked organization that matched that of the enemy.2
Patton willingly sacrificed his men to maintain the momentum of his armored phalanx. McChrystal’s enemies know that the United States will stop fighting when the butcher’s bill grows too large. Patton rolled across the northern European plain, an expanse of ground that does not rise more than three hundred feet from Brittany to the Urals. McChrystal’s enemies fight in distant places in complex terrain, such as mountains and jungles. McChrystal fights “among the people,” while Patton fought through the people in a rush to conquer Nazism.
Patton was the first to leverage properly U.S. dominance in the air to support troops on the ground. As he advanced across France, swarms of Army Air Forces “Jabos” (a German nickname for ground-support fighter planes) flew overhead, ready to strafe immediately any German target that impeded Patton’s armored advance. McChrystal’s enemies hide from airplanes. Successful avoidance is dependent on the enemy’s ability to disperse, dig in, and hide among the people in order to use our rules of engagement to his own advantage.
The Germans occasionally fought Patton to a standstill, because they possessed superior tanks and antitank weapons. McChrystal’s enemies have few tanks; instead, they employ primitive weapons in imaginative ways. The simple mortar remains the weapon of choice, and it is the most effective killer of Americans. Small arms and roadside bombs come in a dreadful second. As the Israelis learned to their sorrow in Lebanon, a semiskilled enemy Soldier can kill a Pattonera tank at great range using decades-old antitank missiles, supplied by our former Cold War enemies. McChrystal’s wars will continue for generations. Patton’s style of war, with its attendant intensity, mass, and massive application of killing power, is a thing of the past.
THE MCCHRYSTAL METHOD
In the fall of 2008 Lt. Gen. Charles Cleveland, then commander of all Special Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, asked me to visit units under his command and report back on what I observed. I traveled on board the Special Forces “black” fleet of aircraft from Tikrit and Taji in Iraq, then on to Fire Support Base Ripley in Helmand Province, on the southern tip of Afghanistan. Very early one morning, I sat before consoles inside the Group Operations Center and watched flat-screen downlinks from orbiting drones follow one set of friendly black dots as they systematically killed dozens of enemy black dots.
I spent four exhilarating days living with these Soldiers at Fire Base Ripley. We convoyed outside the wire on patrols. I ate really bad goat as I watched Soldiers conduct a jura (an Afghan town hall meeting) with angry- and hostile-looking tribesmen. It took a very special group of Soldiers to play governor, police chief, and counselor to tribesmen who only a few months earlier had been killing Americans. I sat on the stoop of my “hootch” as a Special Forces team returned from a medical mission to a group of mountain villages. An abundance of the villagers had never seen a Western doctor before. On board one Humvee was a young woman with a uterine tumor she had carried since she was thirteen. The medics operated immediately and saved her life. A few days later, her family lifted her on top of a mule to take her home. They begged us never to mention her operation. If her village elders learned that she had been naked on an operating table, they would have her stoned to death.
Juxtapose Patton’s massive phalanx of tanks roaring across France with the shaky solemnity of Fire Base Ripley and you see how far the American art of war has come in seventy years. Patton’s mission was to crush the Wehrmacht; McChrystal’s mission is unclear. Patton’s enemy was a wounded but ferociously evil military with only ten months to live. McChrystal’s enemy is diabolical, driven by an equally evil ideology amplified by the insanity of religious zeal. Patton fought across the north German plain; McChrystal’s battlefield is global.
McChrystal’s enemies have no talent at large-scale industrial age warfare. The 1973 Yom Kippur War was the last instance in which Middle Eastern armies tried with some success to mimic the Western style of machine warfare. Today, the large, mechanized formations that Middle Eastern potentates assembled against Western armies are gone: the Mahdi, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Saddam, and Assad the First and Second. Middle Eastern fighting forces like ISIS are still large but aggregated in small units, built mostly around tribal and clan affiliations. They may be poor at mimicking the Western way of war, but they are very good at applying a countervailing style of war and improving it incrementally as they learn and adapt. The North Vietnamese became adept at using shoulder-fired rockets to knock out U.S. armor. Chechen fighters defeated Russian mechanized advances into Grozny in 1996. Hezbollah’s use of antitank missiles stalled Israeli advances in Lebanon. Al Qaeda’s locally improvised explosives and detonators were the greatest killers of Americans traveling in vehicles. ISIS fighters have given up employing captured U.S. equipment on a large scale and have returned to the distributed style of war that made them successful in 2014.
Patton made corps, McChrystal made teams and, later, teams of teams. To Patton, small teams were merely building blocks to be stacked into very large phalanxes consisting of hundreds of thousands of men. To McChrystal, the team—superbly selected and patiently crafted—is the centerpiece of his method of war. Each team fights autonomously but in concert with others to achieve a greater strategic end. When he took command of Joint Special Operations Command in 2003, McChrystal understood the exquisite competence of his teams and how well they had performed in past wars. JSOC actions in Panama, Somalia, Kosovo, and Desert Storm were legendary. But McChrystal realized that large, dispersed, and long wars demanded more than just teams operating independently.
He knitted together “teams of teams” to achieve a collective strategic end. McChrystal’s task in Iraq and Afghanistan was to destroy the enemy’s network. To take down a huge, complex, adaptive, and sophisticated network like Al Qaeda demanded the creation of an opposing network that shared data and strategic consciousness among all fighting elements. He needed to include in his collective team of teams special operations entities out of his direct control, such as Central Intelligence Agency operatives and Marine special operations units. It took time to remove “tribal” and doctrinal barriers, but he succeeded. By the time he left command of JSOC McChrystal had placed a strategic, coordinating hand on the shoulder of the organization without affecting the initiative and individuality of his teams. The results speak for themselves: no army has ever before produced teams selected and trained well enough to fight such a precise and demanding kind of war—but we have.
The success of the McChrystal method begins with a complex and uniquely human process of preparation for war. Preparing the battlefield requires patience and often takes decades. In the late nineteenth century, the British Army “seconded” bright officers to various corners of the world and immersed them in the cultures of the empire. They became intimates with potentates from Egypt to Malaya. Names like “China” Gordon and T. E. Lawrence testify to the wisdom of such a custom. Even today, the British Army possesses officers with the ability to move comfortably between and within the inner circles of foreign militaries.
The U.S. Army’s version of Lawrence of Arabia lives in McChrystal’s world. Special Forces Soldiers spend time overseas deeply immersed in foreign cultures, particularly those cultures most likely to become engaged in conflicts of strategic importance to the United States. These are global scouts, well educated, with a penchant for languages and comfort with strange and distant places. The Army has given them time to immerse themselves in single cultures and to establish trust with those willing to trust them. They are a national treasure.
Fourteen years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan have taught the recurrent lesson that war is inherently a human rather than a technological enterprise. Patton’s close-combat Soldiers came from the dregs of the recruiting pool. Before they arrived in Europe, they were poorly trained and led by mediocre commissioned and noncommissioned officers. Patton’s massed-produced army had to learn to fight by fighting, and unfortunately their teachers were the Germans. By war’s end, Patton’s army was superb—but the human cost of creating this great army was far too high to be repeated today. Patton’s army became a fearsome fighting force, but not until the weak, cowardly, unlucky, and stupid had been eliminated in the deadly, Darwinian filter of close-combat fighting.
In contrast to Patton, McChrystal’s unique “band of brothers” is recruited and selected from the best and brightest. Incompetence and weakness are discovered and eliminated though harsh, brutal, and uncompromising field-testing that takes months—in some cases, years. Patton’s wastage was so great that Soldiers, rushed into combat, often died alone among strangers. McChrystal’s close-combat teams are collections of individuals made far more lethal through mutual trust and long association. Think of these men as you would a professional sports team, but one where losing means death instead of defeat. They are trained like athletes, their offense, defense, and special teams raised to a level of competence unmatched in our history.
McChrystal’s success proves that small units of superbly selected, trained, educated, led, and bonded Soldiers can kill much larger aggregations of enemy while keeping friendly and innocent deaths to a minimum. Make no mistake, the McChrystal method is about killing, but killing of a different sort. The president at one time joked about “whack-a-mole” tactics in Afghanistan. Whack-a-mole tactics work when the moles are enemies who occupy critical positions within terrorist networks, essentially the middle management of leaders, communicators, transporters, financiers, technicians, and enforcers. In many ways, the McChrystal method is the opposite of shock and awe. It is often painfully deliberate, fed by the patient collection of intelligence wrung from sources as disparate as turned informers and the big ears of the National Security Agency. Nothing happens without repetitive, realistic planning and rehearsals.
McChrystal’s precision replaces Patton’s mass. Over the past twenty years, McChrystal’s teams of special operators have evolved another uniquely American method, one that substitutes exquisite skill, information, and precision for mass, maneuver, and weight of shell. We first watched the McChrystal method at work in Afghanistan immediately after 9/11, when small Special Forces units mounted on horseback and teamed with the Afghan Northern Alliance destroyed the Taliban using precision strikes delivered from aircraft orbiting high overhead.
As we have seen in any number of Hollywood re-creations, these teams execute with precision, violence, and surprise. No operation goes down without involving many layers of “enablers.” Intelligence officers feed information constantly to teams as they move to the fight. Armed and unarmed drones of many sorts follow and feed video pictures of enemy movements below. Some of the killing is done up close, to be sure, but most by aerial precision weapons that obliterate the enemy in the dead of night.
McChrystal’s capabilities match the shape and character of today’s battlefields. Patton’s battlefield was densely packed with masses of men and machines backed by huge logistical tent cities that provided all of the amenities of home. McChrystal’s battlefield appears empty by comparison. His Soldiers operate in small groups, supplied mostly from the air. A ground force reshaped in the McChrystal image dominates in combat through knowledge rather than mass. In tomorrow’s wars a galaxy of armed and reconnaissance drones will orbit overhead 24/7. Soldiers will be connected to each other over a ubiquitous combat Wi-Fi network in which small units rather than generals in command posts are the centerpiece. In such an environment, Soldiers may be dispersed, but the intimacy that comes from electronic “touch” will never allow them to fight alone.
Patton’s army and its enemy fought like two boxers in a darkened room. His tanks and artillery flushed the enemy though contact, often paying in blood to discover the enemy’s location. McChrystal’s Soldiers never go into combat blind. Rather than reacting to the enemy’s initiative, they “see” what is about to happen by way of sensors loitering overhead. During his time as commander of Special Operations Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, McChrystal succeeded in tearing out the “green door” that separated national strategic intelligence from the Soldier in combat. Armed with an open aperture of intelligence linked to an “unblinking eye” overhead, Soldiers will rarely be surprised. They will always be prepared for combat before combat begins, thanks to simulation technologies that will permit them to walk through every maneuver and to kill every target literally hundreds of times bloodlessly, using real-time computer-driven rehearsals.
The McChrystal method will never succeed unless every small unit is capable of killing at a distance with overwhelming force. Drones and Soldier-mounted ground sensors will allow small units to detect the enemy long before the enemy’s ambush is sprung. The Soldier will rely on precision fires delivered from great distances to kill well outside the ranges of the enemy’s small arms, missiles, and artillery.
Patton would never fight at night. McChrystal’s force is best known for its use of night raids in Iraq and Afghanistan. Think for a moment of this same concept applied on an enormous scale. Soldiers in small units move with stealth about the battlefield. They swoop in unseen to strike with discretion and precision, then depart, leaving behind a stunned and demoralized enemy. The mass killing power of such Cold War leftovers as fighter jets, ship missiles, tanks, and artillery will still be present to be sure, but they will be used only sparingly should the enemy be dumb enough to mass.
“Fair fights” occurred in Afghanistan and Iraq too often, when the enemy managed to get too close. On tomorrow’s battlefields, Soldiers will be able to win every “intimate” fight decisively. Technology to achieve dominance in the close fight is cheap: better, lighter, and impenetrable body armor; shoulder-carried precision missiles that can kill tanks and bunkers at long range; and “smart” small arms that can “home” on to individual targets without aiming. These technologies are cheap and available, more Popular Mechanics than Star Wars.
During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln wrote about the sad “arithmetic” of war. Once the first shot is fired, the arithmetic begins the attrition that reduces fighting power even when not in battle. Nothing has changed. Disease, accidents, and psychological stress all contribute to the wearing away of not only numbers but also the physical and emotional sharpness that every close-combat unit needs to survive. Unfortunately, in an all-volunteer force, the rate of replenishment never overcomes the arithmetic. In the American era, combat prowess reaches a peak rather quickly then diminishes slowly over time.
Short of a draft, nothing can be done to reduce the corrosive effects of the arithmetic once war begins. Thus, the greatest shortcoming of the McChrystal method is time . . . and people. The making of dominant small units, like that of fine wines, cannot be hurried. Two years are needed to train and acculturate a team or squad, more for larger close-combat forces. Thus, the force the nation has at the beginning of a conflict cannot be increased substantially during the conflict without risking catastrophic losses. The only alternative is to win quickly and go to war with many more high-quality Soldiers than the nation thinks it needs in peacetime. Lenin is thought to have written, “Quantity has a quality of its own.” In the American context, he meant that wars are won more quickly when overwhelming force is applied. Experience during the early days in Iraq also taught that underwhelming force gives the enemy time to regain momentum and change the dynamics of the battlefield. Get more Soldiers into the fight quickly and win. Take too long and face defeat. It is that simple. The ground services must face the problem of the arithmetic by “overmanning” every close-combat unit by about a third, to ensure that these units do not atrophy though lack of numbers.
The McChrystal method is working against ISIS. However, killing ISIS will require a scaling of the method never attempted before. ISIS is huge. Sadly, the men and machines within SOCOM necessary to do the job are too few and are terribly overused. To succeed over time, the McChrystal method must be cloned and amplified within conventional Army and Marine forces to a degree as yet unimagined within the Department of Defense.
Obstacles to expanding the McChrystal method outside the narrow confines of the U.S. SOCOM clan are many. SOCOM may be the most intractable obstacle to proliferating the McChrystal method. Special operations leaders argue that such elite forces can only be made in small batches. Truth is that there are more than enough men to expand the McChrystal method fully if all Army and Marine close-combat forces are made more “SOF-like.” By no means does this concept mean that SOCOM’s teams will be subsumed in “Big Army” or that their proficiency will be diminished in any way. On the contrary, the purpose of such a reform would be to push all Marine and Army infantrymen up the scale of proficiency toward the Tier I SOF standard as far as resources, availability of skilled manpower, and time will allow.
Think of a conventional infantry selection program that mimics the best of McChrystal’s teams of teams. Imagine a conventional close-combat training program just as tough and eliminative as, say, Army Ranger School is today. Those enlisted infantrymen who pass selection would begin unit buddy-bonding in basic training, where they are met by the same officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) who will lead them for their entire terms of enlistment. Perhaps the Army would change its Cold War personnel policies to allow infantry NCOs and officers to remain in command of these same small units for at least seven years or more. Conventional infantry units should receive exactly the same high-tech equipment as their Special Forces brethren, to include organic drones, dedicated satellites, and first priority for vehicles, weapons, aircraft, and protective equipment. Of course, such a transformation would take time. Building a conventional “elite” force would require a ruthless culling of the ranks to allow only the best and brightest to be selected, trained, and bonded, in a manner proven by decades of past successes in the special operations community. But make no mistake: elevating the fighting power of U.S. Army and Marine small units from superior to dominant is cheap by the standards of contemporary big-ticket programs.
U.S. close-combat forces would require changes in recruiting laws, administrative policies, and budgeting—a small price to pay for a new U.S. force that will be absolutely unbeatable in combat. To ensure that they remain robust, all close-combat Soldiers should be given special treatment by the Department of Defense in proportion to their value to the nation. They should be paid more—much more. There is no reason that a computer programmer in the Pentagon should make the same as an infantryman humping a 120-pound rucksack under fire on his fifth tour in Afghanistan. They should be retired as soon as the physical and emotional toll of close combat makes them no longer effective. They should be exempted from the routine distractions that all too often dull the fighting abilities of garrison Soldiers. Rank and station assignment should be more a function of a Soldier’s skill and experience rather than his place in some unit-manning roster.
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE
Our past, present, and future enemies have a plan proven from a well-thumbed and bloody game book. The U.S. military has the workings of a long-term response, well started by recent experience in war. In fact, our forces today are remarkably well positioned to move into the future with only modest changes in structure, weapons, and operational concepts. To shift from Patton to McChrystal does not imply that the Defense Department must scrap its legacy collection of planes, ships, and tanks. The nation needs a varied toolbox of capabilities to confront enemies we cannot anticipate. Our air and sea forces will continue to provide absolute dominance against any conventional enemy. The McChrystal method simply seeks to achieve the same degree of dominance for ground forces that our sea and air forces now enjoy. A larger and more robust close-combat force will ensure preservation of the one capability that the country seems to use most often to exhaustion. Tomorrow’s close-combat units must be husbanded like the irreplaceable national treasures they are.
Our enemies are watching, and they read history. From the examples of Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban, future enemies are increasingly convinced that the United States can be bested though a strategy that succeeds principally by killing U.S. Soldiers. The road to miscalculation is open for traffic. It is only a matter of time before we collide with another enemy filled with the hubris that comes from past successes. If past is prologue, a thin line of close-combat Marines, Soldiers, and special operators will be called upon to end it. We must have the numbers and the quality to ensure that we do not run out of high-performing ground forces before we run out of time.