So it is no shock that the criticisms of one Army lieutenant colonel is receiving adoring press coverage. The press just loves a dissenter in uniform! They fairly swoon in their presence.
Look, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling has done more to defend our country than I ever have or will. He has served our country in two tours in Iraq, in Bosnia, and the Persian Gulf War. I thank him for that. But he is just plain wrong in his criticisms of the campaign in Iraq.
He thinks the military focused on a high-tech conventional conflict and had too few troops to fight an insurgency that the military underestimated. And the generals failed to tell the American people of the intensity of the fight, he says. This is all a failure of leadership and imagination, he says. Yingling speaks approvingly of General Shinseki's warning that we'd need several hundred thousand troops to pacify Iraq after the fighting. And his concluding call to Congress to fix the officer corps is laughable.
In his sweeping condemnation of our senior officer corps from Vietnam to today, LTC Yingling begins with such an error in his starting point that it is difficult to see how all that follows isn't built on this crumbled foundation. Yingling writes:
For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq's grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war.
These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America's general officer corps. America's generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America's generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress.
The first sentence is wrong and in the second sentence Yingling corrects the first sentence, but doesn't seem to even realize this. The Viet Cong were defeated by 1975. Even the North Vietnamese who replaced southern recruits for the Viet Cong after the Tet Offensive was beaten (to maintain the illusion of an insurgency) were knocked down. South Vietnam was pacified. Our supposedly unprepared armed forces defeated this Soviet- and Chinese-supported insurgency and built a South Vietnamese military capable of holding off the North Vietnamese. The second sentence, where Yingling concedes that the North Vietnamese conquered South Vietnam, should have been a big clue about how wrong Yingling is in his analysis about our defeat by insurgents. Good grief, he surely knows that a conventional North Vietnames mechanized army conquered South Vietnam. How can he possibly claim we were defeated by an insurgency?
Having wrongly identified the problem in 1975, one would think that YIngling's conclusion about the responsiblity of the officer corps would be one of crediting them with winning that difficult war rather than condemning them.
So, with a foundation based on a bad assumption and an incomprehsible condemnation, LTC Yingling moves on to Iraq. We'll skip over the same officer corps that provided victories in Panama and Kuwait, I guess.
The core of his criticism is here:
Having spent a decade preparing to fight the wrong war, America's generals then miscalculated both the means and ways necessary to succeed in Iraq. The most fundamental military miscalculation in Iraq has been the failure to commit sufficient forces to provide security to Iraq's population. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) estimated in its 1998 war plan that 380,000 troops would be necessary for an invasion of Iraq. Using operations in Bosnia and Kosovo as a model for predicting troop requirements, one Army study estimated a need for 470,000 troops. Alone among America's generals, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki publicly stated that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Prior to the war, President Bush promised to give field commanders everything necessary for victory. Privately, many senior general officers both active and retired expressed serious misgivings about the insufficiency of forces for Iraq. These leaders would later express their concerns in tell-all books such as "Fiasco" and "Cobra II." However, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq with less than half the strength required to win, these leaders did not make their objections public.
Given the lack of troop strength, not even the most brilliant general could have devised the ways necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. However, inept planning for postwar Iraq took the crisis caused by a lack of troops and quickly transformed it into a debacle. In 1997, the U.S. Central Command exercise "Desert Crossing" demonstrated that many postwar stabilization tasks would fall to the military. The other branches of the U.S. government lacked sufficient capability to do such work on the scale required in Iraq. Despite these results, CENTCOM accepted the assumption that the State Department would administer postwar Iraq. The military never explained to the president the magnitude of the challenges inherent in stabilizing postwar Iraq.
After failing to visualize the conditions of combat in Iraq, America's generals failed to adapt to the demands of counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency theory prescribes providing continuous security to the population. However, for most of the war American forces in Iraq have been concentrated on large forward-operating bases, isolated from the Iraqi people and focused on capturing or killing insurgents. Counterinsurgency theory requires strengthening the capability of host-nation institutions to provide security and other essential services to the population. America's generals treated efforts to create transition teams to develop local security forces and provincial reconstruction teams to improve essential services as afterthoughts, never providing the quantity or quality of personnel necessary for success.
After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America's general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public. The Iraq Study Group concluded that "there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq." The ISG noted that "on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence.
Let me dig in. You might want to review our numbers of troops to fight the enemy here as an interlude. Too few troops, indeed.
The idea that it was a mistake to focus on high tech warfare when we invaded is laughable. Far from facing a stalemate and some mythical Stalingrad on the Tigris, we took apart Saddam's military in record time with amazingly low casualties. With a conventional enemy controlling Iraq and defending Saddam, just how were we supposed to take them on? Honestly, this criticism is just foolish.
I already addressed the Desert Crossing study. The numbers Yingling cites were probably just boiler plate language and not based on rigorous analysis. Heck, Desert Crossing said we'd fail even with 400,000. And the boiler plate assumptions of 2% of population in security troops may not be as accurate as the conventional wisdom says. And if it is dueling studies you want to get into, let me cite a post where I refer to studies that said we'd need 300,000 to pacify Afghanistan and 100,000 to pacify Iraq. We had enough troops to invade, and we've had enough troops to fight the terrorists and insurgents.
As for hiding the intensity of combat, that is ridiculous. Our press is all over every bit of violence. And if adding in crime violence as Yingling clearly must be doing (otherwise we'd face far higher casualties than we do now) is the correct way to measure stability, then lots of countries are failed right now. I imagine a lot of mayors over here wouldn't want this level of scrutiny. The attacks we track are military attacks and encounters. That is what we are trying to fight. Let the Iraqi police combat crime after we've defeated the Baathists, death squads, and jihadis supplied by Syria, Iran, and foreign Sunnis. Is Yingling really saying that we have to defeat crime in Iraq to succeed? Hell, we can't do that here at home! The criminal violence certainly adds to the mayhem but it is not our military's problem.
Look, I'd never claim we've made no mistakes in Iraq. But I am steadfast in claiming this has been a well-fought war. It is a war we are winning. Mistakes are made in war all the time. yet one side or the other wins.
Iraq is no Valmy no matter what Yingling writes. I'm impressed he knows of the fairly obscure Valmy, but just having some history knowledge doesn't mean he's applied its lessons to today with any accuracy. We face the same old type of insurgency and terrorism that have plagued many other places on the planet over history. Weapons may change but the basics of fighting them endure. We are not faced with some epoch-breaking new foe that makes old styles of fighting obsolete. If not, comparisons to Vietnam would be pointless even on Yingling's terms of the debate since that war presumably lies before whatever Valmy-like change we face today in warfare in Iraq.
So LTC Yingling is certainly free to think we are wrong, losing, and doomed. Yet in a time when war opponents are doing their best to cause our defeat in Iraq, I would have hoped that a responsibility to his Army and nation would have led him to phrase whatever critiques he has in terms of how to fight better and win. Instead he feeds the anti-war defeatists who have always opposed this war and who don't care what the consequences are to us or the Iraqi people for forcing a loss there.
We are winning this war despite mistakes that are minor compared to the mistakes that have routinely been made by armies throughout history. I would think that a combat veteran would have a better appreciation of this friction of war than he displays in this article.
If we have had too few troops in Iraq, explain how we have overcome problems and progressed since March 2003 to the point we are at now with an elected Iraqi government and increasingly effective security forces? I'm not sure whether we need 380,000 or 470,000 to win, but I am certain we have well over 600,000 fighting the enemy. And we are clearly winning, holding off threat after threat as the non-military means of winning progress.
And if we have too few troops, where is the evidence that the enemy has taken advantage of this so-called deficiency? Four years after the invasion and the enemy fights in smaller groups than they did in summer 2003. Far from building up larger and larger units as time goes on to actually control land and contest us in large forces as the enemy did in Vietnam, in Iraq the enemy is largely reduced to suicide bombers and IEDs. There are no regiments and divisions laying siege to provincial capitals or attacking major cities and bases. The enemy is atomized and doomed.
In the end, the freedom to dissent does not automatically mean the dissenter is correct. LTC Yingling is wrong in his critique. I won't say he is wrong from A to Z. That is far too sweeping. But he is wrong from Iraq to Vietnam.
And God help us all, but his conclusion that Congress would have a clue about how to fix whatever military problems do exist is a product of thinking from the echelon above reality. I don't know what idealized Congress he thinks would have a clue, but the Congress that we have couldn't pour an effective officer corps out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel.
LTC Yingling's critique will be used by the advocates of defeat to try and ensure our defeat. I wish LTC Yingling has considered the effects of his ill-chosen words before penning them. He just undermind and nullified all the good that he has done in two tours in Iraq. We shall see if he has gone into negative territory in terms of serving or hurting his country. Remember, there is a price to be paid for exercising the right of dissent.
Never be confused about that. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword.
