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Every special calling in life, if it is to be followed with success, requires peculiar qualifications of understanding and soul. Where these are of a high order, and manifest themselves by extraordinary achievements, the mind to which they belong is termed genius.
—Carl von Clausewitz, Book 111
In recent years, the media has taken particular aim at generals, both in their professional and personal lives. Revelations of extravagant lifestyles fueled by excessive spending on the “care and feeding” of generals at a time of crushing budget deficits have angered many inside and outside the Beltway. Perhaps unfairly, revelations of personal failures and embarrassments have reignited and accelerated the debate about the quality of American generalship.
Western democracies characteristically hold military leaders accountable if wars last too long or cost too much in treasure and human life. The public tends to hold their fire at the beginning of wars, either through uncertainty about the progress of the enterprise or out of respect for those fighting it. Criticisms tend to accelerate in times like these, when unpopular wars wind down into messy or indeterminate conclusions. Unlike past wars in the American era, the public and politicians tend not to criticize the tactical fighting abilities of young privates, sergeants, or lieutenants. They tend to reserve their fire for perceived strategic errors, made by more senior leaders, who are depicted in wartime literature and the media as unable to adapt to the inevitable fog that accompanies all human conflict. The public does not always differentiate between decisions made by generals and those by their civilian masters.
So as we exit from our second war in this new century, many in authority sense that something’s missing in American strategic generalship. This perceived weakness at the strategic level is all the more remarkable when considering how well Army leaders have done at maneuvering large formations at lower (tactical and operational) levels in past wars. U.S. ground forces demonstrated in the 1991 “Great Wheel” and the 2003 “March to Baghdad” that they were brilliant practitioners of conventional operations. This skill was acquired just after Vietnam in the late seventies by a generation of Vietnam-era officers who put a unique American spin on German armored blitzkrieg warfare. The Army called this AirLand Battle and perfected it during the matériel, training, and doctrine revolution that changed the Army’s focus from tactical victories to winning at the operational level. Still, today U.S. ground forces are unbeatable in large-scale conventional mechanized maneuver in open terrain, such as northern Europe and the heartland of the Middle East.
However, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that the services have come up short at the strategic level, the level at which national security and political objectives are translated into war-winning plans and policies. The military was too slow to understand and adapt to an enemy who changed the game from open warfare to insurgency. Likewise, the military was clumsy in its efforts to conduct what Tom Ricks, author of The Generals, termed “civil-military discourse.” As a result, much of the leadership and decision making in Iraq and Afghanistan has gone through tumultuous annual shifts both in leadership and policy.
Before becoming too critical of generals, it is important to put their service in the context of the last decade of conflict. Generals are Soldiers . . . and people. They are personally vulnerable, often uncertain, likely to be very tired from the physical demands of their jobs, and more often than not rightfully distrustful of those around them who are too ambitious or jealous to offer unvarnished counsel. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of serving generals do in fact live “above the common level of life”: patriotic, churchgoing, and family oriented; most are workaholics, at the top of their games at managing one of the world’s most complex organizations, and doing very dangerous things that have great consequences. Virtually all are accomplished linear thinkers, who have proven themselves able to make the global trains of war run on time. Most generals have given virtually a lifetime’s effort to their country. Those in combat jobs have been overseas since Bosnia, involved in the stressful task of winning impossible wars and dealing with the loss of those under their command. Few corporate chief executive officers could possibly understand or endure this level of emotional stress and number of hours on the job.
Today’s generals deal with a conflict environment that is enormously complex and constantly changing. These are not dumb people. Yet since 2001 in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have been confronted with a set of strategic variables that are unique in the history of American wars. They have had to deal with an unprecedented level of ambiguity and uncertainty. Most were educated and acculturated to fight a European-style war on the North German plain; then they were unexpectedly faced with alien conditions of weather, distance, terrain, enemy, and culture. Add to this the pressure of a media that immediately flashes to the world any missteps, either personal or professional. Then add to the challenges that unique personal trauma imposed on them by our longest and most emotionally debilitating wars. From Bosnia to Afghanistan, many of our generals have been at this for almost two decades.
THE REQUIREMENTS OF STRATEGIC GENIUS
Strategic genius is hard to define. Great strategists of the past were not all military men; not all were appreciated in their time, nor did they all achieve great rank and stature. Four categories of generals embrace the collective sum of strategic circumstances and attributes that define strategic genius in war.
COMBAT GENIUS
These are leaders like George Patton and Stanley McChrystal, who fight beyond the plan; they innovate as they fight and stay well ahead of the enemy in imaginative application of combat power. Their demonstrated genius affects the future course of warfare . . . and they become immortal. Exceptional combat excellence, of course, comes with exemplary immersion in the art of war, both in practice and vicariously through the study of military history.
POLITICAL GENIUS
Generals like Colin Powell and David Petraeus are able to swim in the political ocean and survive the sharks. They know how to wield and meld the elements of military power with allies, coalition partners, and politicians. They are masters at “civil-military discourse.” They possess the skill to influence wartime policy while remaining subservient to their civilian masters. Their key trait is the ability to offer meaningful and prophetic advice to civilian leaders while remaining respectful and true to their professional values. Political skill comes from an exposure to war, to be sure. These leaders also develop within the military bureaucracy, by studying the political arts and by serving within civilian institutions that habitually rub shoulders with the military services.
INSTITUTIONAL GENIUS
Gen. Peter Chiarelli, former Army vice chief of staff, was a leader who was brilliant in his ability to manage a very large institution and represent its equities in tune with the needs of the nation. Others, like Gen. Creighton Abrams, former Army chief of staff and commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, were able to showcase their services in a new and creative manner. The legacy of these men is measured by a uniform regard among Soldiers, politicians, and administrations for their selflessness and ability to restructure and shape budgets and legislation to meet the future needs of the service. These Soldiers learn strategic brilliance though a complex career path that includes combat service melded with deep immersion into the internal staff mechanisms that make the Army run. They understand war, certainly, but they are also master manipulators of the bureaucracy that constitutes most of the day-to-day workings of the Army.
ANTICIPATORY GENIUS
These generals possess the unique ability to think in time, to imagine conceptually where the nature and character of war is headed. Anticipatory genius is capable of piercing the fog of war and seeing into the future. Anticipatory thinkers are more intuitive than logical or linear. That is one reason why their ranks, compared to those of other kinds of generals, are so thin. However, those possessing anticipatory genius must also be gifted enough to shape the institution to meet the future a generation ahead. They must be able to meld vision with the practical art of inducing achievable change. These “seers” are not well known, nor are they appreciated during their time of service. Their knack for future-gazing seems to be inherited rather than learned. They study war but view it through a different lens. Anticipatory genius is the most rare and precious of all four attributes and the one least likely to be developed through any predictable pattern. The only single features that seem common to all anticipators are a questioning (often acerbic) mind, lack of patience for those who cannot see beyond today . . . and retirement at an early age.
So what influences the system that nurtures strategic genius? How are generals selected? And what can the institution do to make sure those who lead our Soldiers at the strategic level will lead with a brilliant and refined intellect? As in all large institutions, it begins with culture . . . and culture too often suppresses the ascent of brilliant strategic leaders. Only two categories concern us here: the combat and anticipatory geniuses. The military does revere a few political generals who, like Colin Powell, are able to cross the civil-political divide and prosper in both domains. Likewise, the institutional genius is respected for his or her ability to keep the bureaucracy turning. But the ultimate expectation from the American people is that the military is to win wars. There is an old saying that “tactics wins battles, but good strategy wins wars.” Wars are won by anticipatory geniuses, the seers, who craft the proper force and doctrine to win the next war, and by combat geniuses, the doers, who employ that instrument to achieve victory at a cost acceptable to the American people.
SEERS AND DOERS
The problem with combat generals is that too often in our history the Army has prepared and selected them to fight one war and then suddenly immersed them in a war of a different kind. American armies have paid a high price for this preparatory gap. Great Civil War heroes like U.S. Grant, William T. Sherman, Winfield Scott Hancock, Phil Sheridan, and (of course) George Custer performed badly when faced with a counterguerrilla war against Native Americans. Then, just as the U.S. Army learned how to fight frontier wars, it failed to make the shift back to big wars in 1917. Likewise, the British Army during its heyday in the nineteenth century promoted and rewarded those “colonial” generals who proved adept at defeating tribal enemies. These same generals were responsible for the deaths and maiming of millions in World War I, when they failed to understand that the Germans were a very different and deadly enemy indeed.
The lesson learned is that the gods of war are a perfidious lot. They do not give away where, how, when, or for how long a future war will be fought. Thus anticipating shifts in the nature and character of war is impossible, given that the wavelength of the sine curve of change is often measured in generations. We simply cannot know if a general prepared for one war will be confronted with an entirely different war. The only solution, of course, is to create a very broad (and deep) bench, wide enough to hold every strategic talent, each capable of going to the mound when his or her particular pitching skill is needed at the moment.
Some generals are particularly revered within the intimate confines of the general-officer club today because of their gifts as seers and doers. They are almost exclusively combat-arms officers. Generals like Peter Chiarelli, Martin Dempsey, and such fellow travelers from other services as Gen. James Mattis of the Marines share a common provenance. They all began the serious study of war very early in their careers: Mattis through intensive self-study; Petraeus, Chiarelli, and Dempsey through academic sabbaticals at name graduate schools followed by tours as instructors at West Point.
War makes the Army different from a bureaucracy. The pitiless Darwinian hand of war cleanses the bureaucrats and elevates those previously hidden in the shadows of the bureaucracy who come alive in the crucible of human conflict. Such leaders thrive in the uncertainty and fog of war. They adapt and anticipate actions of the enemy. Failure cannot be hidden for long, particularly in the light of the U.S. media. Much is suddenly expected from those who must lead and make strategic decisions that affect the lives of their Soldiers and often the fate of the nation. Often the time available to shift from business and administration to combat is very short, and since Soldiers’ lives are at stake, the opportunity to learn from failure is very limited.
WHAT TO DO
The U.S. military must develop the means for finding just a few who possess the strategic right stuff to be dominant at the strategic level of war. Today’s structures, policies, and institutions simply fail to find those individuals most gifted to lead at that level. Identifying them will require reform of the way the Army selects, promotes, assigns, rewards, and educates officers, from precommissioning to selection for general.
The most significant problem with the system today is that the Army’s method for officer advancement selects out those due for stardom at a point in their careers when their potential strategic genius has yet to be observed or tested. In effect, the Army promotes young captains early who have proven their bravery on the battlefield. A tactician gets the job done. He is the officer whom senior leaders admire for his abilities to get the formation to the parade on time and in the proper uniform. He leads a unit he can see immediately before him, a platoon or a company of perhaps no more than a hundred men. A gifted tactician fills holes in the battle line when it is threatened and makes immediate decisions based less on information from above than on “gut feel.”
The Army’s system of paper evaluation finds tactically proficient young captains and promotes them early, or “below the zone.” While not all selected below the zone make general, it is safe to say that most selected for general were at one time in their lives selected below the zone, mostly very young. This would be a fine system if tactical genius and strategic genius were related, but experience has shown that great tactical skill does not equal great strategic skill.
In fact, tactical and strategic genius are unrelated. Officers with potential for strategic leadership are morally as well as physically brave. They may not be able to make the convoys run on time, but they have a special talent for seeing the future, for conjuring a battlefield that has yet to appear. These are young men and women who are intellectually gifted. They can think critically. They are more interested in studying warfare than practicing it. Tactically talented officers can move hundreds. Strategically talented officers can maneuver hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Tactically talented officers know how to fight enemies they know. Strategically talented officers are prepared to fight enemies as yet unforeseen. The tactically talented read the manuals and put existing doctrine into practice. Strategically talented officers continually question doctrine and eventually seek to change it. Tacticians see what is; strategists conjure what might be.
SELECT THE BEST AND BRIGHTEST VERY YOUNG
To solve this conundrum, the Army must consider how it manages officers. First, the Army must begin by deepening the bench for early selection to major in order to increase the odds of netting the most promising strategists in the midst of their tactically competent brethren. Second, the promotion selection board must have some objective insight into an officer’s intellectual merit. This intellectual component could take many forms. Best would be an intellectual résumé that highlights the officer’s academic standing, performance in graduate school, and skill as an instructor, supplemented by candid comments by commanders and mentors concerning the officer’s capacity for strategic leadership.
LEARN EARLY, LEARN FOR LIFE
I believe that strategic excellence can be detected among the very young. Creativity, cognitive acuity, imagination, and the ability to “see” and anticipate the future can be discovered though observation and, most importantly, examination. Strategic talent as demonstrated by moral courage, vision, cognitive ability, and cultural awareness appear early in an officer’s career. Most behavioral scientists conclude that inquisitive learning begins at about twenty and substantively ends at around forty.
Civilian graduate study is the surest means for elevating tactically competent junior officers into strategically brilliant generals, but a degree alone is not sufficient. It is more important that those who complete graduate studies be rewarded for the experience. Officers are ambitious by nature. They will do those things that they think will get them promoted. By the same token, today’s young officers are natural learners. They learn differently from my generation, in that they learn principally for a purpose, usually for career advancement. They tend to learn in increments—just the right information, just in time. Much of what they learn comes from nontraditional, virtual means, eschewing traditional brick-and-mortar institutions. They are more comfortable with learning online, often as members of informal communities of bloggers and social media.
Many of the most successful commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan actively pursued learning opportunities very early in their careers, often at great professional risk. Of course, the public is well aware of David Petraeus’ PhD and dissertation at Princeton. However, as we have seen, many others, such as Peter Chiarelli and Martin Dempsey, followed the Petraeus model by gaining an advanced degree from a name university, followed by an instructorship at West Point. As also mentioned above, an intellectual propensity for success at the strategic level appears early in an officer’s career, in the late twenties and early thirties. Most gain their strategic footing at a top-tier graduate school. As a young major on his way to teach at West Point, Andrew Krepinevich wrote a dissertation, The Army and Vietnam, later published commercially, that synthesized perfectly the strategic failures in Vietnam. In a similar vein, then-captain H. R. McMaster’s dissertation, Dereliction of Duty, revealed the Joint Chiefs’ complicity in supporting the war in Vietnam. David Petraeus’ dissertation on the impact of the Vietnam War was followed by Capt. John Nagl’s Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, a case study of past counterinsurgencies. All of these works were done by very junior officers, all writing with the passion and imagination of youth and unfettered by the political reticence of more senior officers. These works proved to be highly influential, not only to inform future generations but to sharpen and deepen the capacity of their authors for original thinking and rigorous analysis.
All four authors have gone on to positions of great responsibility in the community of strategists. The point is that these men, along with a generation of others, clearly demonstrate the proven value of the Petraeus model: early attendance at a challenging graduate program, followed by time to complete a dissertation on a relevant strategic subject. Yet the Army command culture still continues to discourage bright young scholars from pursuing higher education early in their careers. This phenomenon has been a part of the Army’s personnel theology since the program for advanced civil schooling was created after Vietnam. Too often, officers who earn a terminal degree, such as a doctorate, are sent into early “active retirement” at a service- or joint-school instructorship. This must change, and change can only occur if it is forced on the institution.
STRATEGIC EXCELLENCE IN SERVICE SCHOOLS
Service schools are the crown jewels of Army learning. A different system exists for each level of warfare: tacticians, usually captains, are finished at Army branch schools; majors learn operational art at service staff colleges; and colonels are taught strategy at the war colleges. Staff and war colleges are competitive, with fewer than half the Army’s majors and slightly more than half of colonels selected to attend. Formal preparation for a strategist begins at the staff-school level. Today, staff schools teach a wide variety of students: Army, of course, but also foreign officers, civilians from other federal agencies, and officers from all the other services. Accordingly, however, while the curriculum is thorough, it teaches to the lowest common denominator and thus lacks the focus and rigor for challenging the most gifted and motivated.
Since the eighties, the Army and other services have understood that strategic genius can only be discovered and cultivated by stressing the best and brightest in an “honors” program—for the Army, the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS). SAMS graduates make up a disproportionate number of successful strategists. Many have been promoted to the highest ranks in the service. The concept of a military “honors” course came to maturity when Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf selected a small group of young SAMS graduates, the “Jedi Knights,” to do his strategic war planning for Desert Storm.
The Gulf War taught the Army leadership that intense study of war cannot be a gentlemen’s course. Those who do the intellectual heavy lifting must be found, rewarded, and promoted to general. The Army must find strategic and anticipatory genius by an intellectually ruthless strategic “honors program” at the war colleges, as well as the staff colleges. A strategic SAMS course should be reserved only for those who pass a very rigorous screening and formal entrance examination. Matriculation would be conditioned on the basis of proven intellectual ability and educational achievement. The course should last at least a year; all segments of this strategic SAMS should be rigorously graded, with termination a consequence for those who fail to make the grade. Reward for completion should be selection for higher command and staff positions and a fast track to general. Oversight should be exercised by the Army Chief or Vice Chief of Staff. Instruction to the brigadier general’s board should include a strict quota for the “strategic SAMS” graduates with the intent that they will fill particularly sensitive strategic general-officer billets.
SELECTION TO COLONEL
Good strategic generals come from a very large and varied assortment of very good colonels. The bench can best be broadened by preparing enough colonels from all strategic backgrounds, so there is enough talent and promise to fit the times and circumstances of the moment. A deep strategic bench would include members of every experiential skill: from big maneuver warfare to counterinsurgency and nation building. It would offer colonels for consideration to general who are well educated and experienced as thinkers and teachers. These strategic colonels can fill the vital general-officer positions, not only in combatant commands but also in the national security apparatus, and in joint and international billets as well. The goal of creating strategic exceptionalism should be the principal task of service chiefs and secretaries. The point at which these leaders can have the most immediate and lasting impact on the process for finding strategic generals is the “board.”
THE BRIGADIER GENERAL BOARD
Once a year at Fort Knox, Kentucky, a team of about eighteen generals consecrate the “inner temple, the holy of holies”: the brigadier general board. In a period when the press and pundits rail against the bloated number of generals, it is instructive to note how small the product of the board actually is: only about thirty-one for the active Army. Most of these selectees will eventually serve in positions that demand talent in strategic decision making. The debate among board members as they choose from perhaps two thousand colonels is often heated, and the voting very close. It is a timeless truism that board members tend to select men and women in their own images. On occasion, the four-stars have the upper hand in the voting. Secretary Robert Gates knew this in 2007 when he changed the membership of the board from big-war to counterinsurgency generals (headed by David Petraeus) to ensure that those who performed well in Iraq and Afghanistan would make the cut.
If it did its work properly, a board would be able to choose in each selectee both a quality officer and one who is particularly gifted in a needed strategic skill. For example, the brigadier general board might be required to select three strategic colonels for a two-star opening at the National Security Council two years hence. The Army will continue to select generals who are both good bureaucrats and skilled operational artists. It is important to note that such a fully functional “strategic general” effort would yield a relatively small cadre of very talented men and women, perhaps no more than a third of the Army’s three hundred active-duty generals.
THE LONG-TERM INTENT
The career pattern that leads to general officer must reward intellectual over operational skill. No officer should be presented before a general-officer board who has not served at least two years as an instructor in the Army’s professional military education system. After selection for advanced promotion to major, the most promising must be sent to advanced civil schooling in subjects related to the military and strategic arts. Matriculation in military schools must be contingent on rigorous examinations. Though it seems trite to say, no officer should be promoted who cannot read, write, speak, and think at the strategic level. Thus all military colleges must institute graded curricula. Senior educators must have the authority to sideline professionally any officer who cannot meet the intellectual standards of an advanced strategic position.
Some might conclude that such a program is elitist. It is not. All large organizations, the Army included, want the most capable to reach the top. This program merely seeks to guarantee that only those gifted with strategic genius become strategic decision makers and commanders. Likewise, the accountability embedded in such a system will provide an objective and fair barrier that will keep from responsibility those who do not have the necessary depth of intellect. Harsh? Perhaps. But war is harsh. And as we have seen throughout our history, mediocre generals get Soldiers needlessly killed and put the nation at risk.