Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (27 page)

37
. Emily Bazelon, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Rock the Boat,”
Slate
, May 10, 2010.

38
. Palm Center publications are available at the center’s Web site:
http://www.palmcenter.org/publications/all
.

39
. “More Gay Linguists Discharged Than First Thought,”
MSNBC.com
, January 13, 2005,
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6824206/ns/us_news-security/t/report-more-gay-linguistsdischarged-first-thought/
, accessed June 5, 2012.

40
. Karen DeYoung, “Colin Powell Now Says Gays Should Be Allowed to Serve Openly in Military,”
Washington Post,
February 4, 2010.

41
. Thomas E. Ricks, “Petraeus: Gay Soldiers No Biggie,”
ForeignPolicy.com
, February 22, 2010,
http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/02/22/petraeus_gay_soldiers_no_biggie
, accessed June 5, 2012.

42
. Mark Thompson, “Why Is the Military Polling the Troops about Gays?”
Time
, July 12, 2010.

43
. The figure comes from the Web site of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network,
http://www.sldn.org/pages/about-dadt
, accessed June 5, 2012.

44
. Cid Standifer, “Survey: DADT Repeal Has Less Impact Than Expected,”
Marine Corps Times
, March 12, 2012. With the promotion of Colonel Tammy S. Smith to brigadier general in August 2012, the army gained its first openly gay flag officer. A milestone in the eyes of some, the event was devoid of controversy. Matthew Wald, “Woman Becomes First Openly Gay General,”
New York Times
, August 12, 2012.

45
. Phil Stewart, “Pentagon: No Impact from Ending Gay Ban,”
NewsDaily
, May 10, 2012.

46
. “After ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’”
Harvard Magazine
, December 2010.

47
. One wonders how long the Pentagon’s authority even in this arena will last. Take the case of an otherwise able-bodied person who is confined to a wheelchair but aspires to become a drone pilot: on what basis does the air force deny that person his or her right to serve?

6. SEARCHING FOR DRAGONS TO SLAY

1
. The characterization is that of Brian Linn, whose forthcoming book will provide a social and cultural history of the army during the interval between the Korea and Vietnam Wars.

2
. For a more detailed account of the army’s reorientation on the Soviet threat after Vietnam, see Andrew J. Bacevich,
The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War
(New York, updated edition, 2013), chap. 2.

3
. General Gordon R. Sullivan and Michael V. Harper,
Hope Is Not a Method
(New York, 1997), p. 3.

4
. Ibid., p. 5.

5
. General Gordon R. Sullivan, “Moving into the 21st Century,”
Military Review
, July 1993, p. 3. That expectation proved correct. When the Cold War ended, the army had approximately 780,000 active duty troops. Twenty years later, on the eve of 9/11, there were 480,000.

6
. TRADOC Pamphlet 525-5,
Force XXI Operations
(August 1, 1994), chap. 4. This publication by U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command provided the army’s blueprint for post–Cold War reform.

7
. General Gordon R. Sullivan and Colonel James M. Dubik, “Land Warfare in the 21st Century,”
Military Review
, September 1993, p. 18.

8
. General Dennis Reimer, “Soldiers Are Our Credentials,”
Military Review
, September–October 1995, p. 14.

9
. General Fredrick M. Franks Jr., “Full-Dimensional Operations,”
Military Review
, December 1993, p. 8.

10
. Ibid., pp. 5, 8.

11
. Lieutenant General John H. Tilelli Jr., “Force Projection: Essential to Army Doctrine,”
Military Review
, January 1994, p. 21.

12
. Sullivan, “Moving into the 21st Century,” p. 4.

13
. Colonel Herbert F. Harback and Colonel Ulrich H. Keller, “Learning Leader XXI,”
Military Review
, May–June 1995, pp. 31–32.

14
. General J. H. Binford Peay III, “Building America’s Power Projection Army,”
Military Review
, July 1994, p. 14.

15
. General Carl E. Vuono, “National Strategy and the Army of the 1990s,”
Parameters
, Summer 1991, p. 11.

16
. Sullivan and Dubik, “Land Warfare,” p. 14.

17
. General Carl E. Vuono, “Training and the Army of the 1990s,”
Military Review
, January 1991, p. 4.

18
. Warsaw Pact war plans made public after the Cold War make this clear. John O’Sullivan, “Europe’s Nuclear War That Might Have Been,”
San Diego Union-Tribune
, December 25, 2005. The article discusses a 1979 Warsaw Pact planning exercise called “Seven Days to the River Rhine.”

19
. Vuono, “National Strategy,” p. 12.

20
. Sullivan and Dubik, “Land Warfare,” pp. 18–19.

21
. General Carl E. Vuono, “Professionalism and the Army of the 1990s,”
Military Review
, April 1990, p. 2.

22
. Lieutenant General Frederic J. Brown, “The Uncertain Path,”
Military Review
, June 1990, pp. 3–4. Army leaders established the truly stupendous goal of being able to deploy “a five-division corps with support (more than 150,000 soldiers) anywhere in the world within 75 days.” Tilelli, “Force Projection Essential to Army Doctrine,” p. 17.

23
. General Gordon R. Sullivan, “Power Projection and the Challenges of Regionalism,”
Parameters
, Summer 1993, pp. 11, 15.

24
. Peay, “Building America’s Power Projection Army,” p. 6.

25
. General Gordon R. Sullivan, “A Trained and Ready Army: The Way Ahead,”
Military Review
, November 1991, p. 3.

26
. General Gordon R. Sullivan, “Doctrine: A Guide to the Future,”
Military Review
, February 1992, p. 3.

27
. FM 100-5,
Operations
, June 1993, pp. 2–6.

28
. General Gordon R. Sullivan, “Delivering Decisive Victory,”
Military Review
, September 1992, p. 3.

29
. Sullivan, “Trained and Ready,” p. 5.

30
. General Gordon R. Sullivan, “Ulysses S. Grant and America’s Power Projection Army,”
Military Review
, January 1994, p. 8.

31
. General Gordon R. Sullivan, “A Vision for the Future,”
Military Review
, May–June 1995, pp. 8, 13.

32
. Sullivan, “Moving into the 21st Century,” p. 3.

33
. The name of the battle derives from the location where it occurred as expressed by the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) grid system.

34
. For the U.S. commander’s firsthand account, see Captain H. R. McMaster, “The Battle of 73 Easting,” undated, Donovan Research Library, Fort Benning, Georgia.

35
. By studying the battle in granular detail, the army reconstructed it on a minute-by-minute basis and then converted the action into a sophisticated computer simulation. W. M. Christenson and Robert A. Zirkle, “73 Easting Battle Replication—a Janus Combat Simulation,” September 1992. This was a study conducted under the auspices of the Institute for Defense Analyses.

36
. TRADOC Pamphlet 525-5, chap. 3.

37
. Lieutenant General Paul E. Menoher Jr., “Force XXI: Redesigning the Army Through Warfighting Experiments,”
Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin
(undated [1996]).

38
. Regarding Somalia, Sullivan believed, “We did fine tactically. Probably operationally. Strategically, because of what happened in Mogadishu, it clearly wasn’t a loss.… [O]ut in the countryside we made great progress.” Colonel John R. Dabrowski, ed.,
An Oral History of General Gordon R. Sullivan
(Carlisle, Penn., 2002), p. 266.

39
. Andrew J. Bacevich, “The United States in Iraq: Terminating an Interminable War,” in
Between War and Peace: How America Ends Its Wars,
ed. Matthew Moten (New York, 2011), pp. 302–22.

40
. One might argue that the first shots in this conflict were actually fired years before 1990, the War for the Persian Gulf having been touched off in 1980 when Iraq invaded Iran, with the United States becoming a de facto ally of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

41
. David Jackson and Aamer Madhani, “Obama: Full Withdrawal from Iraq by Jan. 1,”
USAToday
, October 21, 2011.

42
. One caveat to this judgment: if, as some critics have charged, Iraq’s oil reserves provided the actual motive for invading that country, the war shows signs of belated, if costly, success. By 2012, Iraqi petroleum production was (finally) increasing, with the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime having enhanced the access and investment opportunities of foreign oil companies. Javier Blas, “Iraq’s Oil Output Overtakes Iran,”
Washington Post
, August 10, 2012.

43
. Rather than obsessing about 73 Easting, the army would have been better served to study the negotiations that terminated Operation Desert Storm, badly botched by army generals in Washington and the field. Here was raw material for an eminently instructive simulation.

44
. I refer here to the 1996 attack on the U.S. Air Force barracks at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing twenty; the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing over two hundred, most of the dead local nationals; and the near sinking of the destroyer USS
Cole
, at Aden in 2000, killing seventeen American sailors.

45
. One army-commissioned study of the service’s weapons development process noted, “To produce nothing takes four years.”
Final Report of the 2010 Army Acquisition Review
, January 2011, p. 19.

46
. The ill-fated helicopter was the RAH-66 Comanche. Loren Thompson, “How the Army Missed Its Chance to Modernize,”
Forbes
, September 27, 2011.

47
. “Rumsfeld Kills Crusader Artillery Program,”
USA Today
, May 8, 2002.

48
. Alec Klein, “The Army’s $200 Billion Makeover,”
Washington Post
, December 7, 2007.

49
. “$46 Billion Worth of Cancelled Programs,”
DefenseTech
, July 19, 2011,
http://defensetech.org/2011/07/19/46-billion-worth-of-cancelled-programs/
, accessed June 25, 2012.

50
. One of Rumsfeld’s first major initiatives during his second tour as secretary of defense was to create the Office of Force Transformation, tasked with engineering “non-consensual revolutionary change.” The phrase comes from a June 1, 2001, memo written by Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, Rumsfeld’s Force Transformation director, available online at the Rumsfeld Papers,
http://www.rumsfeld.com
, accessed June 26, 2012.

51
. George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress,” September 20, 2001.

52
. In his history of the Iraq War, Thomas R. Ricks writes that the relationship between Rumsfeld and the army “had begun badly and deteriorated further with time.” Ricks,
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
(New York, 2006), p. 68.

53
. Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor,
Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq
(New York, 2006), p. 8.

54
. Quoted in Mackubin Owens, “Marines Turned Soldiers,” National Review Online, December 10, 2001.

55
. Wolfowitz dismissed Shinseki’s concerns as “wildly off the mark,” remarking by way of a rebuttal that “it’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.” George Packer, “What Washington Doesn’t See in Iraq,”
New Yorker
, November 24, 2003.

56
. In a memoir published before the scope of the Iraq debacle was fully evident, Franks is adamant in claiming OPLAN 1003V, as it was known, as his own personal handiwork. See Tommy Franks,
American Soldier
(New York, 2004), pp. 333, 337–41, 348–67. Later accounts, appearing after the Iraq insurgency had shredded Rumsfeld’s reputation for genius, tended to tag the secretary of defense with responsibility for 1003V’s defects. See, for example, Gordon and Trainor,
Cobra II
, pp. 4–5, 22–23.

57
. For the provenance of the term, see Harlan K. Ullman et al.,
Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance
(Washington, D.C., 1996).

58
. Phil McCombs, “Blood and Guts and Brains and Spirit,”
Washington Post
, June 23, 2003.

59
. Franks,
American Soldier
, pp. 367, 416.

60
. Sullivan, “Delivering Decisive Victory,” p. 3.

7. COPING WITH CHAOS

1
. Perry Bacon, Jr., “The Revolt of the Generals,”
Time
, April 16, 2006.

2
. Paul D. Eaton, “For His Failures, Rumsfeld Must Go,”
New York Times
, March 19, 2006.

3
. Derek Thompson, “War and Peace in Thirty Seconds,”
theatlantic.com
, January 30, 2012,
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/war-and-peace-in-30-seconds-how-much-does-the-military-spend-on-ads/252222/
, accessed August 12, 2012.

4
. “The 10 Worst Jobs of 2012–2013: 3—Enlisted Military Soldier,”
http://www.careercast.com/content/10-worst-jobs-2012-3-enlisted-military-soldier
, accessed August 31, 2012. Lumberjacks and dairy farmers edged out soldiers atop the list of least attractive jobs.