Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (13 page)

Whether Franks personally devised the plan for invading Iraq or whether Rumsfeld coached, cajoled, and bullied his field commander into accepting an approach incorporating his own predilections—accounts differ on how to apportion the credit (or blame) for what ensued
56
—one thing is certain. Conceptually, the operation dubbed Iraqi Freedom reflected both the ideas of those intent on refashioning the armed forces into something never before seen and the vision of a high-tech power-projection army that Sullivan and his colleagues had laid out a decade before. The media termed the result—put on vivid display as U.S. forces dashed toward Baghdad in March 2003—“shock and awe.”
57

In the wake of Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, Sullivan himself wasted no time in tracing the origins of “shock and awe” back to the early 1990s. An effusive profile of Franks appearing in the
Washington Post
soon after the fall of Baghdad cited the post–Desert Storm period as a turning point in his career. At the time, the
Post
reported, General Sullivan “was eager to move the Army fully into computerized, technological warfare.” But as army chief of staff, he needed help. “I was looking for an imaginative and creative guy,” Sullivan recalled. “Tommy was the guy I went to.” Sullivan paid tribute to the victorious Franks as “one of the architects” of a revolutionary new American way of war.
58

In his own account, Franks went considerably farther. Not content to be one architect among several, he claimed exclusive credit for engineering “a true revolution in warfare.” That quality trumped quantity in modern combat rated as his own personal discovery. “We would not apply overwhelming force,” he wrote in describing his thinking about how to attack Iraq. “Rather, we would apply the overwhelming ‘mass effect’ of a smaller force. Speed would represent a mass all its own.” Information technology—better intelligence, more flexible command and control, precision weapons, and just-in-time logistics—made such greater speed possible. Franks was adamant in insisting that his thinking represented “a revolutionary concept, way outside the box of conventional doctrine.”
59
The implications were self-evident: you didn’t need a big army to do big things.

Yet Franks erred on two counts. His lesser error was to claim more credit than was his due. In fact, his “revolutionary concept” recycled the very same clichés that generals had been reciting ever since Operation Desert Storm. His greater error was to insist that his revolutionary concept had, indeed, yielded a historic triumph, satisfying the standard that Sullivan had set a decade earlier: decisive victory achieved with a “minimal expenditure of national wealth and resources.”

The first error—unseemly braggadocio—spoke ill of the man. The second error, which ultimately proved fatal to Franks’s reputation (and Rumsfeld’s), had far more significant implications for the army and the United States. Rather than marking the end of a short war, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein inaugurated a long one. In contrast to 73 Easting, when
this
fight appeared over, it had barely begun. Faced with challenges that Franks had failed to anticipate and for which his soldiers were ill-prepared, the power-projection army sent to “liberate” Iraq became perforce an army of occupation engaged in imperial policing. The ensuing struggle consumed wealth (increasingly borrowed from abroad) and resources (lives lost and damaged) on an epic scale. America, Sullivan had written in 1992, “does not expect protracted, attrition warfare.”
60
Barely more than a decade later, that’s precisely what it got.

Or more precisely still, that’s what the army (and Marine Corps) got. Who exactly U.S. troops were fighting in Iraq was never entirely clear. The enemy manifested about as much political cohesion and unity of effort as the Native American tribes that the United States Army had labored to pacify through much of the nineteenth century. Yet the absence of apparent unity did not make the various Sunni and Shiite factions, reinforced by “foreign fighters,” any less formidable. Indeed, the insurgents provided U.S. troops with an object lesson in how combatants actually
could
do more with less: relying on crude, locally fabricated mines—Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), the Americans called them—they gave expensively equipped, high-tech U.S. forces fits. The Pentagon had confused sophistication with cost. Iraq’s insurgents did not make the same mistake.

As the war dragged on, it prompted division on the home front without fully engaging the attention and energy of the American people. Many millions supported the war, while suppressing any urge to deliver their military-age offspring into the waiting hands of the nearest recruiter. Millions more reviled the war, yet expressions of opposition were muted. Protests occurred, but in scope and intensity antiwar activism paled in comparison to what had occurred during the Vietnam War. On one point only the war’s supporters and the war’s opponents agreed with near unanimity: whatever the course of events in Iraq, professing support for America’s “warriors” remained a categorical imperative.

7

COPING WITH CHAOS

The victory to which Franks laid claim proved to be a chimera. If technology was changing the nature of warfare in ways that conferred advantages on U.S. forces, someone had forgotten to tell the insurgents. In Iraq, the enemy (or enemies) recovered, regrouped, continued to fight. According to army doctrine, winning the first battle held the key to winning any war. This chestnut to which the post–Cold War officer corps was deeply devoted turned out to be false. Iraq soon descended into chaos, with soldiers left holding the bag.

As it became apparent that nothing remotely like victory was in the offing, army leaders found themselves facing an uncomfortable question: what exactly had gone wrong? With striking alacrity, they let themselves off the hook. Training their guns on Rumsfeld, they saddled him with the blame, while for whatever reason giving his boss a pass. A veritable “revolt of the generals” erupted as just-retired senior officers took turns lambasting the secretary of defense in print and on the airwaves.
1
A
New York Times
op-ed by retired Major General Paul Eaton was typical, blasting Rumsfeld as “not competent to lead our armed forces.” In ticking off Rumsfeld’s failings, Eaton singled out “his unrealistic confidence in technology to replace manpower,” along with his failure to “understand the nature of protracted counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq and the demands it places on ground forces.”
2

Yet the post–Cold War army in which Eaton had served fully shared in the expectation that technology could indeed replace manpower. Similarly, that army had paid little if any attention to the problems posed by counterinsurgency. An army confident that it had discovered a surefire formula all but guaranteeing outright victory was no more inclined to worry about irregular warfare than to practice conducting a retreat.

In lieu of decisive victory, committing the power-projection military to Iraq (and Afghanistan) triggered a cascade of ill effects. The active duty force turned out to be not only smaller than it had been during the Cold War but much too small for the tasks at hand. The quality differential—highly trained, extravagantly equipped troops—did not fully compensate for the shortage of numbers.

Given the reliance on volunteers—more broadly, given the fact that military service had become a matter of choice rather than obligation—there existed no easy way to convert a too-small force into a sufficiently large one. Material inducements (pay raises and enlistment bonuses) came with a hefty price tag. So, too, did marketing, with the Pentagon’s promotional budget for 2012 reaching a cool $667 million.
3
Although some potential recruits responded to psychic inducements—patriotism or a yearning to “be part of something bigger than yourself”—the appeal of military service during wartime remained limited. In a 2012 survey of America’s “ten worst jobs,” for example, respondents rated soldiering number three.
4

For career regulars, all this translated into recurring combat tours. A year in the war zone followed by a year at home followed by orders back to war—for active duty soldiers, this became the new normal. Sullivan’s vision of an army that would “do it over and over again, allowing him no time to react, recover, or regroup,” had achieved an ironic fulfillment. Yet the
him
subjected to recurring punishment turned out to be not the enemy but the individual American soldier. In contrast to Vietnam, the army as a whole did not disintegrate, nor did troops in the ranks protest or revolt. They kept going back again and again to wars they could not win. As it turned out, the hallmark of Abe’s army was not that it excelled at achieving victory, but that it possessed an astonishing capacity just to keep at it.

Yet the effects of multiple combat tours ranged from troubling to downright horrifying. Troops beset with demons turned increasingly to alcohol and drugs.
5
Official policy all but endorsed this tendency. In 2011, the year the Iraq War ended, one out of every five active duty soldiers was on antidepressants, sedatives, or other prescription drugs.
6
The incidence of spousal abuse spiked, as did the divorce rate among military couples.
7
Debilitating combat stress reached epidemic proportions.
8
So did brain injuries.
9
Soldier suicides skyrocketed.
10

In an effort to narrow the gap between too much war and too few soldiers—itself rooted in the gap separating the military from society—army leaders called increasingly upon reservists and members of the National Guard, many of whom were activated for multiple combat tours. The military thereby voided the implicit contract that had defined the terms of service for these part-time soldiers—that the nation would call upon them only in extreme emergencies—and converted them in effect into an adjunct of the active-duty force.
11
Here, too, pathologies stemming from exposure to combat—compounded by recurrent disruptions of personal life—exacted their toll.

The conversion of reservists into quasi professionals was not without irony. After the Vietnam War, Creighton Abrams had counted on the reserves—the last remnant of the citizen-soldier tradition—to shield the regular army from misuse by feckless policy makers. By making the active-duty army dependent on the reserves for certain essential support functions, he sought to preclude Washington from waging large-scale war without first making the politically difficult decision to mobilize. He meant, in other words, to give decision makers pause.
12
It hadn’t worked out that way, however. Instead, in the wake of 9/11, the reserves took their place in a rotation scheme devised to sustain just the sort of protracted conflict Abrams had been intent on avoiding.

In addition, fielding an army of professionals in wartime turned out to be an exceedingly expensive proposition. Initially justified in part to save money—“the cost of a volunteer army, properly calculated, [will] almost surely be less than of a conscripted army,” the economist Milton Friedman had promised back in 1966—the all-volunteer force actually turned out to be a dubious bargain.
13
By 2012, the monthly salary of a private first class had risen to a hardly munificent $1,757. Yet to maintain each and every soldier that the United States deployed to war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan, the army was spending a million dollars per year.
14

Then there were the downstream costs. Although not easily calculated, the expenses associated with caring for veterans of Iraq, Afghanistan, and other lesser contingencies promised to be off the charts. Among the leading indicators: since 2000, disability benefits paid to U.S. veterans have nearly quadrupled, from $15 billion to $57 billion per year. Already a quarter of the approximately 2.3 million Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans have claimed a service-connected disability—a figure sure to grow as the population ages.
15
Given that veterans’ claims do not reach their peak until thirty to forty years after a conflict, costs will surely rise further. One analyst estimates that when the last bill comes due decades from now, total veterans’ disability claims stemming from the “long wars” of the early twenty-first century will approach $1 trillion.
16

THE REDEEMER COMETH

For soldiers deploying on repetitive combat tours, service in Iraq became a recurring Golgotha, events there laying bare the shortcomings of Sullivan’s formula for “land power dominance.” (As long as the Iraq War claimed priority attention, Afghanistan barely qualified as an afterthought.) With the passage of time, civilian and military leaders ratcheted down expectations of what U.S. forces could achieve in Iraq. Whatever the actual aim, it wasn’t victory. In late 2006, President George W. Bush made this official, firing Rumsfeld and handing responsibility for the war’s conduct to a new field commander, General David Petraeus, who prudently avoided rash promises of defeating the insurgency outright. His stated aim was considerably more modest: “to achieve sufficient security to provide the space and time for the Iraqi government to come to grips with the tough decisions its members must make to enable Iraq to move forward.”
17
To turn things around, Petraeus proposed to apply the precepts of counterinsurgency, or COIN, as it was known among enthusiasts.
18

During the year prior to Petraeus’s appointment, this new approach—which in U.S. military circles wasn’t so much new as forgotten—had received a preliminary test run. In the city of Tal Afar, H. R. McMaster, the hero of 73 Easting, now a colonel commanding an armored cavalry regiment, had implemented the methods that Petraeus proposed to apply across Iraq.
19
Patience and careful calculation—not speed and technology—enabled a very astute commander to restore a semblance of security and of normalcy to one Iraqi city. Now another astute—and politically savvy—commander set out to replicate that achievement on a far broader scale.