[NYTr] At a US Army Base, officers split over war

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

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International Herald Tribune - Oct 13, 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/13/america/13army.php


At a U.S. Army Base, officers split over war

By Elisabeth Bumiller

FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kansas: Here in this Western outpost that serves as
the intellectual center of the U.S. Army, two elite officers were deep
in debate at lunch on a recent day over who bore more responsibility for
mistakes in Iraq - the former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, or the
generals who acquiesced to him.

"The secretary of defense is an easy target," argued one of the
officers, Major Kareem Montague, 34, a Harvard graduate and a commander
in the Third Infantry Division that was the first to reach Baghdad in
the 2003 invasion. "It's easy to pick on the political appointee."

"But he's the one that's responsible," retorted Major Michael J. Zinno,
40, a military planner who worked at the headquarters of the Coalitional
Provisional Authority, the former American civilian administration in
Iraq.

No, Montague shot back, it was more complicated: the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and the top commanders were part of the decision to send in a
small invasion force and not enough troops for the occupation. Only
General Eric Shinseki, the army chief of staff who was sidelined after
he told Congress that it would take several hundred thousand troops in
Iraq, spoke up in public.

"You didn't hear any of them at the time, other than General Shinseki,
screaming, saying that this was untenable," Montague said.

As the war grinds through its fifth year, Fort Leavenworth has become a
front line in the military's tension and soul-searching over Iraq. Here
on the bluffs above the Missouri River rising young officers are on a
different kind of journey - an outspoken re-examination of their role in
Iraq.

Discussions between a New York Times reporter and dozens of young majors
in five Leavenworth classrooms over two days - all unusual for their
frankness in an army that has traditionally presented a facade of
solidarity to the outside world - showed a divide in opinion. Officers
were split over whether Rumsfeld, the military leaders or both deserved
blame for what they said were the major errors in the war: sending in a
small invasion force and failing to plan properly for the occupation.

But the consensus was that not even after Vietnam was the Army's
internal criticism as harsh or the second-guessing so painful, and that
airing the arguments on the record, as sanctioned by Leavenworth's
senior commanders, was part of a concerted effort to force change.

"You spend your whole career worrying about the safety of soldiers -
let's do the training right so no one gets injured, let's make sure no
one gets killed, and then you deploy and you're attending memorial
services for 19-year-olds," said Major Niave Knell, 37, who worked in
Baghdad to set up an Iraqi highway patrol. "And you have to think about
what you did."

On one level, second-guessing is institutionalized at Leavenworth, home
to the Combined Arms Center, a sprawling Army research center that
includes the Command and General Staff College for midcareer officers,
the School of Advanced Military Studies for the most elite and the
Center for Army Lessons Learned, which collects and disseminates
battlefield data. (The center publishes a handbook for soldiers with
strategies to help keep them alive for their first 100 days in combat,
a response to the high percentage who died in their early months in
Iraq.)

At Leavenworth, officers study Napoleon's battle plans and Lieutenant's
William Calley's mistakes in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Last year
General David Petraeus, now the top American commander in Iraq, wrote
the Army and Marine Corps' new Counterinsurgency Field Manual there.
The goal at Leavenworth is to adapt the army to the changing
battlefield without repeating the mistakes of the past.

But senior officers say that much of the professional second-guessing
has become an emotional exercise for young officers. "Many of them have
been affected by people they know who died over there," said Major
General William B. Caldwell IV, the Leavenworth commander and the
former top spokesman for the American military in Iraq. Unlike the 1991
Persian Gulf war and the conflicts in the Balkans and even Somalia,
Caldwell said, "we just never experienced the loss of life like we have
here. And when that happens, it becomes very personal. You want to
believe that there's no question your cause is just and that it has the
potential to succeed."

Much of the debate at the school has centered on a scathing article, "A
Failure in Generalship," written last May for Armed Forces Journal by
Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, an Iraq veteran and deputy commander
of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment who holds a master's degree in
political science from the University of Chicago. "If the general
remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with
insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results," Yingling
wrote.

The article has been required class reading at Leavenworth, where young
officers debate whether Colonel Yingling was right to question senior
commanders who sent junior officers into battle with so few troops.

"Where I was standing on the street corner, at the 14th of July Bridge,
yeah, another brigade there would have been great," said Major Jeffrey
Powell, 37, a company commander who was referring to the bridge in
Baghdad he helped secure during the early days of the war. Powell, who
was speaking in a class at the School for Advanced Military Studies,
has read many of the Iraq books describing the private disagreements
over troop levels between Rumsfeld and the top commanders, who worried
that the numbers were too low but went along in the end.

"Sure, I'm a human being, I question the decision-making process," Major
Powell said. Nonetheless, he said, "we don't get to sit on the top of
the turrets of our tanks and complain that nobody planned for this. Our
job is to fix it."

Discussions nonetheless focused on where young officers might draw a
"red line," the point at which they would defy a command from the
civilians - the president and the defense secretary - who lead the
military.

"We have an obligation that if our civilian leaders give us an order,
unless it is illegal, immoral or unethical, then we're supposed to
execute it, and to not do so would be considered insubordinate," said
Major Timothy Jacobsen, another student. "How do you define what is
truly illegal, immoral or unethical? At what point do you cross that
threshold where this is no longer right, I need to raise my hand or
resign or go to the media?"

Caldwell, who was the top military aide from 2002 to 2004 to the deputy
defense secretary at the time, Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq
war, would not talk about the meetings he had with Wolfowitz about the
battle plans at the time. "We did have those discussions, and he would
engage me on different things, but I'd feel very uncomfortable talking,"
Caldwell said.

Colonel Gregory Fontenot, a Leavenworth instructor, said it was typical
of young officers to feel that the senior commanders had not spoken up
for their interests, and that he had felt the same way when he was
their age. But Fontenot, who commanded a battalion in the Persian Gulf
war and a brigade in Bosnia and has since retired, said he questioned
whether Americans really wanted a four-star general to stand up
publicly and say no to the president in a nation where civilians
control the armed forces.

For the sake of argument, a question from the reporter was posed: If
enough four-star generals had done that, would it have stopped the war?
"Yeah, we'd call it a coup d'etat," Fontenot said. "Do you want to have
a coup d'etat? You kind of have to decide what you want. Do you like the
Constitution, or are you so upset about the Iraq war that you're willing
to dismiss the Constitution in just this one instance and hopefully
things will be O.K.? I don't think so."

Some of the young officers were unimpressed by retired officers who
spoke up against Rumsfeld in April 2006. The retired generals had
little to lose, they argued, and their words would have mattered more
had they been on active duty. "Why didn't you do that while you were
still in uniform?" Major James Hardaway, 36, asked.

On the other hand, Hardaway said, Shinseki had shown there was a great
cost, at least under Rumsfeld. "Evidence shows that when you do do that
in uniform, bad things can happen," he said. "So, it's sort of a
dichotomy of, should I do the right thing, even if I get punished?"

Another major said that young officers were engaged in their own
revisionist history, and that many had believed the war could be won
with Rumsfeld's initial invasion force of about 170,000. "Everybody now
claims, oh, I knew we were going to be there for five years and it was
going to take 400,000 people," said Major Patrick Proctor, 36. "Nobody
wants to be the guy who said, 'Yeah, I thought we could do it.' But a
lot of us did."

One question that silenced many of the officers was a simple one: Should
the war have been fought?

"I honestly don't know how I feel about that," Powell said in a
telephone conversation last week after the discussions at Leavenworth.

"That's a big, open question," Caldwell said after a long pause.