Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (11 page)

Army leaders understood that, with the end of the Cold War, their service was going to be “much smaller.”
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Yet they were intent on investing this smaller force—which was still going to be far larger than any pre–Cold War “peacetime” army—with the capacity to take on “new, expanded and diverse missions.”
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In essence, the post–Cold War army was going to do more with less and was going to do it better than any armed force in history. To demonstrate their service’s continued relevance, army leaders were keen to put soldiers to work, taking on new assignments in unfamiliar places. Sullivan might note “the paradox of declining military resources and increasing military missions,” but neither he nor his general officer colleagues found the implications of that paradox especially troubling.
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In describing and promoting this new agenda, senior officers relied less on empirical evidence and analytical rigor than on attitude. They projected confidence, occasionally laced with bluster. “The ‘World’s Best Army’ is a bumper sticker,” wrote one four-star general, “but it is a bumper sticker we deserve and have earned.”
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Divining the army’s future yielded an abundance of lists: five “tenets” (agility, initiative, depth, synchronization, and versatility) intended to guide doctrine;
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five “warning lights” indicative of fundamental change, which pointed toward five “new concepts” for combat;
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not to mention, five “modernization thrusts,”
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supplemented by five “modernization objectives;”
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and when it came to leadership, five “C’s” (commitment, courage, candor, competence, and compassion).
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Lest all this suggest a fixation on the number five, the authoritative list of “core combat capabilities” consisted of just four items,
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whereas the “beacon” guiding the army toward the future derived its power to illuminate from six “enduring imperatives.”
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Embedded in this mania for enumeration was an argument of sorts. Its aim was to establish the service’s continuing and indeed expanded relevance to U.S. national security policy. If only for reasons of symmetry, we will distill that argument into five essential points.

First, as far as Sullivan and other army leaders were concerned, the demise of the Soviet empire was at best a mixed blessing and perhaps no blessing at all. Rather than paving the way for peace on Earth, the passing of the Cold War had triggered instability, creating a host of new threats. Within two years of the Soviet Union’s demise, Sullivan had discerned that the world was “growing more dangerous.” By way of elaboration, he cited a litany of problems:
“ethnic and religious hostility, weapons proliferation, power struggles created by the disappearance of the Soviet Union, elimination of the fear of regional conflicts escalating to superpower confrontation, radicalisms of a number of varieties, rising expectations of democracy and free markets coupled with the inability of governments to meet those expectations.”
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He did not invent this litany. In 1990s Washington, it was standard fare. So, too, was the conviction that the resulting tumult demanded a concerted response from the sole surviving superpower. Here was a new world disorder to which the U.S. military was going to have to attend.

General Carl Vuono, Sullivan’s predecessor as chief of staff, had already made a similar point. The post–Cold War era, he believed, promised to be one of great “uncertainty and peril.” In 1990, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait had provided “a vivid preview of the nature of the international system in the decade of the 1990s and beyond.”
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For Vuono’s fellow generals, the preview was not only vivid but exceedingly welcome.

For Abe’s army, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq offered an ideal adversary, far more attractive, in crucial respects, than the old Soviet Union. In reconstituting itself after Vietnam, the army had labored mightily to refute the reigning popular impression that war inevitably resulted in little more than pointless destruction. Put another way, making a plausible case that U.S. forces along with their NATO allies could save Europe without having to destroy it (along with the rest of the planet) had become an imperative. Any conflict involving the large-scale use of nuclear weapons—which NATO and the Warsaw Pact both possessed in abundance—would necessarily fail to meet that standard.

To escape this dilemma, planners assumed it away: World War III, they had posited, would begin with a conventional invasion of Western Europe, both sides choosing to refrain from using their nuclear arsenals. That assumption was always improbable. In retrospect, we know it was false. The Warsaw Pact had every intention of employing nuclear weapons at the outset of any showdown with NATO.
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Yet at the time, assuming otherwise was too useful to gainsay.

With Iraq, the poster nation for a new threat category that Washington had dubbed “rogue states,” no such legerdemain was necessary. Rogue states, including Iran and North Korea along with Iraq, might covet nuclear weapons, but they did not (yet) possess them. Indeed, their nuclear aspirations, by definition illegitimate and posing a danger to world peace, confirmed their status as suitable foes. As long as aspirations did not become capabilities, the army could expect to fight on terms of its liking.

Despite the collapse of communism, in short, peace remained an illusion. Abe’s army was going to have plenty of work to do, precisely as he and his collaborators had intended. With exquisite timing, Saddam Hussein made that point eminently clear.

Second, as Washington came to appreciate the significance of these new threats, army leaders foresaw the prospect of greater American activism. With the end of the Cold War, containment had become obsolete. It no longer sufficed. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Vuono predicted, would “be remembered for generations to come as a turning point … the day America announced the end of containment and embarked upon the strategy of power projection.”
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By projecting military power, Washington would nip problems in the bud or at least prevent them from getting out of hand. “The United States no longer has a negative aim,” wrote Sullivan. “It has a positive aim—to promote democracy, regional stability, and economic prosperity.” As far as military policy was concerned, “prevention” was supplanting “deterrence.”
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Third, charged with what Vuono called a “global strategic mandate,” the army was intent on claiming a large part of the Pentagon’s power-projection portfolio.
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Rather than ceding ground to the navy or air force, wrote one general, “we need to arrive with the élan of a confident proven winner moving to an attack position, about to master new horizons.” After all, the static posture to which the army had become accustomed during the latter part of the Cold War—garrisoning Western Europe and South Korea—had been “an aberration in our national military history.” Emerging threats dictated that the army should henceforth maintain “a highly-ready, highly-visible rapid intervention capability.”
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Sullivan believed it incumbent upon the army to serve as the nation’s “principal instrument for the projection of carefully modulated military force.” After all, the United States could not rely on sea power or airpower to bring its wars to a successful conclusion. History had repeatedly shown that “it is the commitment of ground force in the decisive terrain that finally resolves the contest of will that we call war.”
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Or as another four-star put it, “We are now pursuing a power-projection strategy … guided by the view that land combat remains decisive in war.”
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Fourth, armed conflict—whether the large-scale clash of ground forces or any of the lesser contingencies that the Pentagon styled Operations Other Than War (OOTW)—could have but a single acceptable outcome: unambiguous success. In 1991, Sullivan wrote, “we must be a strategic force capable of decisive victory.”
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In 1992, he became more insistent: “[We] will be a strategic force capable of decisive victory.”
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The basic operational manual, revised the following year, removed any lingering ambiguity on the question. “Victory,” it stated categorically, “is the objective no matter what the mission. Nothing short of victory is acceptable.”
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In fact, merely winning was not enough. The requirement was to prevail with speed and economy, achieving “national objectives quickly and with minimal expenditure of national wealth and resources.” America, Sullivan wrote, “does not expect protracted, attrition warfare.”
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This was setting the bar high indeed. Yet to demonstrate the feasibility of this demanding standard, Sullivan pointed to Operation Desert Storm, when America’s army had handily defeated “the fourth largest army in the world in 100 hours.”
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Finally, what endowed this approach with a semblance of plausibility was a belief in the transformative implications of information technology. The onset of the 1990s marked the flowering of the Information Age. Americans were falling in love with the Network. So, too, was the Pentagon. The army, Sullivan asserted, was “on the leading edge of the revolution in military affairs.”
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Information—acquiring it, analyzing it, sharing it—held “the key to a vast improvement in effectiveness.” Information was making it possible to apply force more rapidly and with greater precision. Job one in any conflict was to “win the information war,” thereby enabling army forces “to apply power to the main effort quickly, to attack the enemy simultaneously throughout the battle area, and … to do it over and over again, allowing him no time to react, recover, or regroup.”
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According to Sullivan, “overmatching technology” would provide the means “to apply overwhelming and decisive combat power while minimizing risks to our soldiers.”
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Here, Sullivan’s army parted company with Abe’s, indulging fantasies about the transformative potential of technology that General Abrams would have derided as preposterous.

For Sullivan and other army leaders, one specific episode during Operation Desert Storm sufficed as proof of concept. Late in the afternoon of February 26, 1991, an armored cavalry troop commanded by Captain H. R. McMaster encountered an Iraqi mechanized brigade. In the ensuing fight—subsequently enshrined as the Battle of 73 Easting
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—McMaster’s much smaller company-sized unit destroyed something like thirty Soviet-built T72 tanks along with several dozen trucks and personnel carriers, all in about an hour. Enemy soldiers who weren’t killed just gave up, handing themselves over to captivity. When the fight concluded, it left few loose ends. All but unscratched, the U.S. force sustained
no
casualties.
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Here, army leaders quickly concluded, was an event comparable in its historical significance to the action at Gettysburg’s Little Round Top or the storming of Omaha Beach—a successful engagement validating the recent past while pointing to an even more promising future.
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In fact, the Battle of Omdurman might have provided a more apt comparison. In that 1898 clash between British regulars and a badly overmatched Sudanese army, a technological disparity had indeed proven decisive. The Brits had machine guns and artillery, whereas the Sudanese had none. Yet if British commanders fancied that by slaughtering ten thousand Mahdists they had thereby mastered the art of war, the Boers (not to mention the Germans) would soon demonstrate otherwise. Still, in the wake of Desert Storm, this was ancient history for an American army eager to see in 73 Easting profound lessons of universal applicability. Advanced technology in the hands of well-trained troops offered, it seemed, a recipe for designing forces able to run rings around any opponent.

The challenge was to scale up, creating an entire army capable of doing in any environment and against any opponent what Captain McMaster’s doughty band had accomplished against a not-especially-competent Iraqi adversary. With that goal in mind, army leaders conceived something called Force XXI, a template for converting Sullivan’s vision into reality. This was, in effect, an elaborate experiment intended to corroborate conclusions Sullivan had already reached. The mandate from on high was not “find out what works” but “confirm that this works.”

Needless to say, the characteristics that the army sought to embed in Force XXI were five in number: “doctrinal flexibility; strategic mobility; tailorability and modularity; joint, multinational, and interagency connectivity; and versatility in war and OOTW.”
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These elephantine phrases concealed the full extent of the program’s ambitions, which were little short of utopian. By “pushing the envelope and transforming today’s very good Army into an even better information age, knowledge- and capabilities-based Army,” one three-star enthusiast wrote, the United States would enjoy “land force dominance across the continuum of 21st century military operations.” This, he concluded, “is what Force XXI is all about.”
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LESSONS OVERLOOKED AND IGNORED

Commingling facts, assertions, and aspirations seldom produces clarity. Yet the promoters of Sullivan’s doing-more-with-less-and-doing-it-better-than-ever approach mixed together the known, the assumed, and the hoped for with abandon.

As any car salesman will tell you, careful selection and sculpting determine which facts count—and which don’t. So sustaining the claim, for instance, that in 1991 U.S. ground forces had defeated “the fourth largest army in the world in 100 hours” meant overlooking the several weeks of uncontested aerial bombardment to which Iraqi forces were subjected before the coalition ground attack began. Similarly, to keep the
WORLD’S BEST ARMY
bumper sticker unbesmirched, it helped to ignore the ignominious spanking of a ranger task force administered by a Somali warlord in 1993. Tagging civilian policy makers with the blame for the disastrous “Blackhawk Down” firefight in Mogadishu rendered that episode irrelevant except as a testament to the gallantry of American soldiers.
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