Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (12 page)

Treating assertions as if they were facts enhances their persuasiveness. In reality, Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait turned out to be less a harbinger than an anomalous throwback—the sort of boneheaded move only someone as imprudent as Saddam Hussein would make. Yet styling the Iraq War as a “preview” of things to come endowed what was in most ways a trivial event with exalted significance. It became a “turning point,” with figures in authority wasting no time in explaining what that turn signified. So, too, with the army’s putative “global strategic mandate,” to which the Persian Gulf War gave birth. The very construction of the phrase—global
=
expansive, strategic
=
weighty, mandate
=
ordered from on high—aimed to silence doubts and deflect skeptical questions. What demanded priority attention was the mandate’s fulfillment.

As for aspirations, bigger is always better. The goal that Sullivan’s army set for itself was positively breathtaking: No more long wars. No more costly wars. No more futile or unsuccessful wars. Just neat, tidy ones, ending in absolute and unquestioned triumph.

Granted, no army in modern history had been able to meet this standard, but as Sullivan and his fellow generals saw it, history no longer bound the troops that they led. The advent of Force XXI, as they imagined it, was going to make the otherwise fanciful eminently doable. Seldom if ever has a group of seasoned, otherwise sober military professionals succumbed more thoroughly or willingly to the seductive sound of their own voices.

In fact, Sullivan’s case was weakest where he and his fellow generals believed it to be strongest—in their depiction of Operation Desert Storm as both validation and precursor. Although the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91 had yielded a victory of sorts—the liberation of Kuwait being the principal fruit—the outcome qualified as
decisive
only by using the very loosest definition of that adjective.

The problem with depicting Operation Desert Storm as a “100-hour war” was not only that it ignored the bombing campaign that preceded the action on the ground. Of equal or greater importance was the fact that the war didn’t really end when President George H. W. Bush ordered coalition forces to cease operations against Iraq’s battered army. Operation Desert Storm settled very little, while leaving much unsettled. Given the strategic and political complications that ensued, the storied campaign of 1991 turned out to be merely the opening phase of a much longer and far more costly struggle.
39

All of this appears blindingly obvious in retrospect. Whether historians ultimately classify U.S. military involvement in Iraq as a stand-alone event (a war for the Persian Gulf) or whether they situate it in a larger context (one part of the so-called Global War on Terrorism), the accompanying dates won’t be those of Operation Desert Storm (January 17, 1991–February 28, 1991). Instead, that campaign signaled the firing of the first shots in a war destined to continue for two decades.
40

However the debate about America’s purposes in Iraq resolves itself—whether the aim was to “get the oil,” deflect challenges to U.S. regional hegemony, liberate an oppressed people, or ensure the security of Israel—historians will be hard-pressed to conclude that U.S. military efforts in Mesopotamia
ever
resulted in anything akin to decisive victory. In 2011—some twenty years after Operation Desert Storm—President Obama spoke of U.S. forces leaving Iraq “with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops.”
41
But
success
in this instance had become hardly more than a euphemism for the avoidance of utter defeat. Apart from a handful of deluded neoconservatives, no one believes that the United States accomplished its objectives in Iraq, unless the main objective was to commit mayhem, apply a tourniquet to staunch the bleeding, and then declare the patient stable while hastily leaving the scene of the crime.
42

Yet even in the immediate wake of Desert Storm, which Sullivan and his colleagues were zealously enshrining as an all but flawless campaign, evidence suggesting otherwise was mounting.
43
Not that contrary evidence was going to dissuade senior army leaders from pursuing their vision of a smaller-but-better power-projection army with a global mandate. Like the naval officers for whom dreadnoughts had once represented the ultimate expression of seapower and the airpower advocates who proclaimed that the strategic bomber would always get through, they shut their eyes to whatever evidence they found inconvenient.

Yet facts evident at the time ought to have warned Pentagon leaders against nursing their utopian expectations. Those facts included not only the Somalia debacle (the true preview of things to come) but also the survival of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad; the failed uprisings by Iraqi Shiites and Kurds after Desert Storm that saddled Washington with unforeseen enforcement and protection responsibilities; the emergence willy-nilly of a “dual containment” policy directed against both Iraq and Iran; and the establishment of a large-scale military presence in the Islamic world, inducing lethal blowback in the form of terrorist attacks directed against U.S. forces and American interests.
44

The actual legacy of Desert Storm was to plunge the United States more deeply into a sea of difficulties for which military power provided no antidote. Yet in post–Cold War Washington, where
global leadership
and
global power projection
had become all but interchangeable terms, senior military officers like Sullivan were less interested in assessing what those difficulties might portend than in claiming a suitably large part of the action. In the buoyant atmosphere of that moment, confidence in the efficacy of American arms left little room for skepticism and doubt. As a result, senior military leaders left unasked questions of fundamental importance. What if the effect of projecting U.S. military power was not to solve problems but to exacerbate them? What if expectations of doing more with less proved hollow? What consequences would then ensue? Who would bear them?

FALSE DAWN

The answers to these questions—their very existence unacknowledged prior to 9/11—became apparent soon after President George W. Bush committed U.S. ground forces to Afghanistan and then Iraq. Granted, the army that deployed into these war zones was not Force XXI come to fruition—a full decade after Desert Storm, that concept was still more PowerPoint presentation than reality. In pursuit of a paradigm that emphasized flexibility and agility, the army had moved at a glacial pace.
45

During the interval between Desert Storm and 9/11, outsized dreams turned out to carry outsized price tags and produced some outsized disappointments. For example, a program to develop a radar-evading helicopter, touted as “the quarterdeck of the digital battlefield,” burned through $6.9 billion before being canceled.
46
The yield: two aircraft suitable for museum display. The army’s Crusader artillery program, intended to produce precise, high-volume cannon fire, consumed another $2 billion prior to its 2002 termination.
47
Fort Sill, Oklahoma, provides a permanent resting place for a prototype of this forty-ton behemoth. Most ambitious of all was the army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) program, conceived in 1995 with an eye to creating a “family” of “weapons, drones, robots, sensors and hybrid-electric combat vehicles connected by a wireless network.”
48
By the time FCS met its demise in 2009, the cost to the American taxpayer exceeded $18 billion.
49

Still, the various imperatives, tenets, thrusts, objectives, and concepts conjured up to describe the army’s future created expectations in the here and now. If Force XXI was missing in action, the thinking behind it—above all, the expectation that a small, nimble, “smart” force could dominate any opponent in any environment—had taken Washington’s national security elite by storm.

No one believed more strongly that information technology was revolutionizing warfare than Donald Rumsfeld. When he became secretary of defense in January 2001, he was fired by the conviction that the armed forces were acting too slowly in capitalizing on this revolution. As the Pentagon’s maximum leader, he aimed to fix that. The word devised to describe this project was
transformation
.
50

The events of 9/11 provided Rumsfeld with a ready-made opportunity to advance his agenda. During the 1990s, the varied, small-scale contingencies of OOTW had kept the services busy. In terms of scope and importance, the Global War on Terrorism promised to be something altogether different. Just days after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the commander in chief issued the military its marching orders. “Be ready,” George W. Bush said. “The hour is coming when America will act, and you will make us proud.”
51
Implicit in that expression of confidence was a challenge: for the all-volunteer force, testing time had arrived.

In its own eyes, the army had been girding for just such a test throughout the previous decade. Yet despite concerted efforts to refashion itself into a war-winning power-projection force, the army did not qualify as Rumsfeld’s favorite service.
52
In the secretary’s eyes, words like
nimble
and
smart
conjured up images of satellite-guided air weapons delivered in support of gizmo-toting commandos. The army might talk the talk, but it didn’t walk the walk. Much like the Crusader artillery system, it still came across as a lumbering behemoth—more yesterday than tomorrow. The problem, in his estimation, began at the top, the secretary of defense telling a subordinate (apparently in jest) that “lining up fifty of its generals in the Pentagon and gunning them down” would be just the thing to get the army moving in the right direction.
53

One of those generals was Eric Shinseki. Army chief of staff in 2001, he believed that the solution to the army’s Rumsfeld problem was to get with Rumsfeld’s program. “If you dislike change,” he warned his fellow officers, “you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more.”
54
But Shinseki could never convince Rumsfeld that the army was committed to transformation—perhaps because it wasn’t, at least not as Rumsfeld understood the term.

Belief carries implications; the more radical the convictions, the more radical the implications. Through several decades of sustained effort, the post-Vietnam/post–Cold War army had accumulated a stock of valued possessions, regaining a sense of self-worth and restoring its standing in the eyes of the American people. As far as the generals were concerned, they had been engaged in transformation for years before Rumsfeld appropriated the term. Now they learned that these past efforts were nowhere near good enough. In effect, the secretary of defense wanted generals like Shinseki to put those achievements at risk, following him blindly down a path toward some vastly greater treasure. This even Shinseki ultimately proved unwilling to do.

His dispute with Rumsfeld (and other proponents of radical transformation) came down to differences of opinion on the role of
quantity
in modern warfare. The army chief of staff fully endorsed the general proposition that advanced technology was making it possible to do ever more with less. Where Shinseki parted company with Rumsfeld was over the question of how much more with how much less.

To appreciate the pervasiveness of this do-more-with-less approach, compare Washington’s response to 9/11 to the way it had reacted to the onset of war in 1861 or 1917 or 1941. In contrast to those other major wars, Washington embarked on the Global War on Terrorism without taking the trouble to expand its armed forces. Why bother? In terms of military capabilities, the adversary was demonstrably weak, with the enemy confronting the United States not even remotely comparable to, say, the Kaiser’s Germany or the Führer’s. Even after the events of 9/11, war was less a necessity than an option, even if in some quarters a welcome one.

So the nation did not mobilize. Congress did not raise taxes, curtail consumption, or otherwise adjust domestic priorities to accommodate wartime requirements. That a state undertaking what it explicitly called
global
war might consider reinstituting conscription was too far-fetched even to contemplate. The implicit assumption—shared in military and civilian quarters alike—was that existing U.S. military capacity was more than ample for the paltry tasks at hand. That the initial U.S. intervention in Afghanistan in October 2001, with a relative handful of troops and CIA agents supported by sophisticated airpower, overthrew the Taliban in a matter of weeks seemed to affirm this assumption. The implications appeared incontrovertible: the unsurpassed quality of U.S. forces made it unnecessary even to consider questions of quantity.

Shinseki, however, began to have second thoughts about this consensus. Yet when he expressed them—thereby confirming Rumsfeld’s view that the army’s top leaders were incorrigible—his concern was not with war’s conduct but with its aftermath. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the general testified before Congress that occupation was almost certain to require more U.S. troops than would conquest. Here, he predicted, was one task where the do-more-better-with-less formula was not going to apply.

Shinseki’s dissent turned out to be a quixotic gesture, although earning him a humiliating rebuke, publicly administered on Rumsfeld’s behalf by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.
55
It did nothing to slow the Bush administration’s rush to invade Iraq, in part because Rumsfeld didn’t need the army chief of staff’s consent and wasn’t about to court his approval. Besides, the secretary of defense had already identified another army general willing to do his bidding. This was Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command, and as such the officer immediately responsible for the ongoing war in Afghanistan and the forthcoming one in Iraq.