Volume 3   Number 108

President Trump is relying more on his military commanders to make strategic decisions regarding warfare in Syria and the Middle East than President Obama did. It is thought that he feels his predecessor micromanaged the war to a degree where the military couldn’t act quickly and decisively enough.

But he is also quick to blame the military when things don’t go well, blaming the generals for a SEAL’s death in a February 2017 Yemen raid. President Trump also strove to distance himself from what appears to be a botched effort, by highlighting that the raid had been in the works since the Obama administration. What he failed to mention was that President Obama had tabled it as being premature, and Trump decided, over dinner, to go ahead with it.

So what seems to be new in the relationship, is thatthe military will get more of a free hand from the new president, but will also have their feet to the fire if things go wrong. Knowing President Trump, he will also take the lion’s share of credit if things go well.

Is Mr. Trump aware that we have fought in three major debacles since the end of World War II and have not won one of them? There was Korea, Vietnam and Iraq-Afghanistan, and a fourth, the Cuban sideshow, with a major lesson learned from it.

During these encounters the military had been no great planner of military strategy, starting with General Arthur MacArthur. The famous general first brilliantly devised an end run around the North Korean enemy, with the Inchon amphibious landing in July 1950. He then made a major blunder by chasing the North Korean forces too far north, until China felt threatened and attacked us, inflicting grievous losses. The general also wanted to invade China with a nuclear attack. President Truman fortunately nixed that plan, that might have led to World War III, and recalled the general, thereby ending his military career.

It didn’t take long until another major military decision was on the table. This was the early 1960s, and President John F. Kennedy was dealing with Cuba and a new militant Communist government headed by Fidel Castro. Castro was threatening to export Communism to other Latin American countries. President Kennedy accepted his general’s assessment of the need to act against this regime, but doubted the wisdom of an overt United States invasion. Instead, a group of Cuban exiles, backed by us, undertook a beachhead landing at the Bay of Pigs, a miserable failure. Some 100 invaders were killed and another 1200 captured, which meant the whole force was effectively wiped out.

President Kennedy accused himself of naïveté for trusting the military’s judgment that the Cuban operation was likely to be a success. He said, “Those sons of bitches with all the fruit salad just sat there nodding, saying it would work.” He became skeptical of military advisors, and relied on his brother Attorney General Robert F Kennedy. He took control in April 1961, when the Russians threatened to send atomic weapons to Cuba. This time the Kennedys were successful in causing the Russians to back down without military intervention; they did this despite getting bad advice from the Joint Chiefs who wanted a more militant stance.

Then Kennedy dealt with Vietnam. Here the civilian authorities were equally to blame for this failure. Early on, in 1961, General Maxwell Taylor, President Kennedy’s special military ambassador to South Vietnam, recommended we introduce U.S. ground troops into Vietnam, and we slowly added more and more troops. As the war escalated, General Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. troops in Vietnam under President Lyndon Johnson, kept pressuring for even more, in the mistaken belief we were fighting to prevent the spread of Communism. In reality, this was an internal civil war.

The military continued, as opposition to the war grew at home, to bolster their assertions we were winning the war, by feeding optimistic, but clearly overstated figures on enemy kill rates to the media. Also, they sought to put a positive face on the war by carefully trying to guide visiting politicians and reporters to see the most favorable situations. The press was dubious of this and reported more accurate accounts of the war back home, to the distress of the military and political leaders.

The insistence by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Earl Wheeler, and others, that the “essence of the problem is military rather than primarily political and economic” served the Pentagon’s desire to fight a military war. This encouraged aversion to dealing with the more difficult political challenges we faced. It also promoted an underestimation, with a major lesson learned, regarding enemy tenacity and willingness to sacrifice. By refusing to acknowledge that this was a civil war and not a centrally directed international conspiracy, it fostered an atmosphere that led to wrongful strategies on our part. Thereby, the military contributed mightily to underestimating the adversary’s capacity to prevail, while overestimating our own.

The military’s shortcomings were largely abetted by the policies encouraged by two presidents: Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and two of their key aides, Defense Secretary John McNamara and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who essentially looked to save face by not withdrawing from a mistake. The result was over 59,000 war dead after 14 years, an event that forever changed the character of our country and the way we felt about our leaders.

The first Iraqi invasion under the leadership of President George H. W. Bush was a rare success. Under General Schwarzkopf, and using a plan of overwhelming superiority authored by General Colin Powell, we quickly subdued the country. Then President Bush and his key military advisor Brent Scowcroft made the wise decision to get out the hell out of Iraq and not get bogged down there.

The second Iraq Gulf war was largely the result of an inept political climate created by President George W. Bush and his “war hawk” political advisors, all civilians: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Richard Cheney, Deputy Defense Minister Paul Wolfowitz, and Chief of Staff “Scooter” Libby. They created an environment that demanded war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi nation strictly for their own misguided political objectives.

There was no evidence that the military did more than lip service to the need for caution before undertaking war. There was no military outcry about the possibility that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the supposed reason for starting the war. In fact, a leading military man, former General Colin Powell, and now Secretary of State, to his everlasting shame, was used as a “shill” for the war by delivering bogus information to the United Nations as a pretext for our need to go to war.

Before we even went into Iraq there was the botched attempt to capture Osama bin Laden in the eastern sector of Afghanistan. He was cornered in the mountains of Afghanistan in Tora Bora, supposedly holed up in a cave. Rather than mount a major offensive to capture him, General Tommy Franks made a decision to rely on Afghanistan troops to finish off bin Laden. That was one bad choice as the Afghanistan military let bin Laden slip through their fingers. About the only thing they proved themselves able to do was catch a cold. This was the first in a mounting series of bad decisions made at the time by our military.

No better was the terrible battle plan devised by Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld. This was a sad miscalculation, where he underestimated the amount of troops needed to control Iraq. One military man in the administration stood up in protest after the invasion. General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, told a Congressional committee in February, 2003 that more then twice as many ground troops were required then were being utilized. For his prescient observation, he was summarily canned by the head of the Defense Department, Donald Rumsfeld. Of course, General Shinseki was right. The inadequate armed force failed to provide security to the Iraqi citizenry and was unable to instill a sense of trust in our army.

Further, the army spent years scuttling around the Iraqi countryside looking for bogus weapons of mass destruction without sufficiently informing our leaders that there were no such weapons. There were military debacles in Iraq like the inadequate military presence in Iraq museums, leading to looting. Iraqi oil was poorly guarded and much was blown up or stolen. Brig. General Janis Karpinski, an Army Reserve officer, commanded the military police unit at Abu Ghraib. Under her unseeing leadership, inexplicable torture of suspected Iraqi terrorists occurred at the prison, in violation of the Geneva conventions governing the rules of war. Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez was the top military commander in Iraq for one year starting in June 2003. His leadership was judged to be disastrous when the infrastructure of Iraq continued collapsing and lawlessness flourished.

What it gets down to is that the military has mostly been wrong in guiding the major military decisions that politicians have made since the end of World War II. Either that, or they kept their mouths shut when our leaders were about to do something that was horribly wrong.

President Trump is heading for trouble if he is determined to rely on the military for setting national security policy. He should remember that the military is geared toward a war or warrior mentality, and recent history has shown it is a lot easier to start a war than to end one. Our military has shown itself to be very good at fulfilling a military mission, but in ordinary times it should be left to the country’s civilian leadership to determine the courses of action.

The words of President Kennedy are worth remembering. After two major Cuban situations with the military leadership, he was skeptical of the military’s ability to set strategic policy. His advice to his successor was to “watch the generals, and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men, their opinions on military matters are worth a damn.”

But we live in extraordinary times. With an erratic and volatile President like Trump who has his finger on the red button, it doesn’t exactly leave one with warm feelings. It probably gets down to the old flip of the coin in these times whether there should be military or civilian leadership in military matters, Heads you win, tails I lose.

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