The son's criticism hurts

ARTICLE: A failure in generalship, By Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, Armed Forces Journal

The actual Yingling article online is well worth reading.

Naturally, I find all the arguments about not adapting in the post-Cold war 1990s to the "lesser includeds" to be very much on-target. Yingling's anger makes me feel glad I stuck to such an aggressive tone in PNM and BFA. I knew the military would catch up in terms of its mid-level officers. The frustration simply had to build and the political moment arrive.

No news to me. I get an earful of this from 04s and 05s after every talk, and I do over a hundred each year.

Difference with this argument is--of course--Yingling's status and career and logical dissatisfaction with all the current gray beards parading their wisdom on cable news nets when they themselves are most responsible for the lack of adaptation across the 1990s. This is a very sore spot for the Bob Scales of this world. They legitimately believe they saved the military after Vietnam (true) and that their solution still holds after Cold War's end (not true).

To say otherwise is to attack their sense of career accomplishment--their very definition of who they are.

And when you do that on-stage, you get guys in their late 50s and early 60s standing up and yelling at you (something that happens to me more and more as the overall mood gets closer and closer to Yingling's level of angry outburst).

Wonder if Scales will call Yingling "crazy" like he routinely refers to me.

I say, God bless him for writing this piece and the journal for publishing it.

And watch Scales more closely the next time he defends Future Combat System as an absolute must.

And then switch him off and listen to Andy Krepenevich instead.

It begins to hurt when the sons turn on the fathers. The civilian pukes can be laughed off for their inherent "cowardice" (i.e., lack of mil service), but how do you dismiss the Yinglings when they finally step up and make the very same arguments?

Thanks to Mike Bowen for sending this.

Comments

[Doron]

The article is superb. As side note, the winograd committee examining the failure of the IDF in Lebanon found some striking problems that bare some similarity to this article. This article may well serve as a reference to other armies as well facing somewhat similar problems.

The main question rising from that examination is not "who is to blame" but if the army is prepared at all for the challenges the future will bring. A critical failure of the army not just estimate its own effective capability, but also an under estimation of the enemies demonstrated capability of adapting.

[Ted O'Connor]

Our tactics after the initial invasion are possibly the worst employed by the US military since the first two years of the American civil war. The generals sit in secure, air conditioned rooms full of laptop computers and big screen TVs. They talk to lawyers and analysts and other generals who are thousands of miles away. They pretend that they are "in charge" and that there actually is some sophisticated strategy at work. In reality, this is a war fought at the squad level. The battles are fought by privates and corporals. The real decisions are made by sergeants and lieutenants. As for the Pentagon....the lights are on....but nobody is home.

[Chris Mewett]

The Scales comments are bewildering to me. Are there two Bob Scaleses?

I've been meaning to write something since last Wednesday linking Scales' ideas to the SysAdmin concept. He testified before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, and the underlying point was that investment in technology is a necessary but not close to sufficient step in developing a more language-capable and culturally aware force. Scales seemed very forward-thinking about the necessity of making significant structural change to the way career progressions are evaluated, giving incentive to FAOs and other officers engaged in that sort of work.

The two other witnesses were Andre Van Tilborg, the science guy (Deputy UnderSec Def for S&T) and Gail McGinn (DepUnderSecDef for Plans), both of whom pontificated about how we're teaching computers to help our troops speak Arabic. Scales had by far the most insightful and pragmatic commentary.

I was unfamiliar with this gentleman's work before last week, but I'm having a hard time reconciling his testimony that day with this picture of a guy who's reliant on future combat systems.

[Tom Barnett]

You know, there really are two Bob Scales. I remember him primarily for the tangling we've had with each other at conferences, where he singled me out for the SysAdmin concept and basically said that any optimized forces in that regard were "crazy."

But reading the testimony you cite, I do see he's moved much more in the direction of accepting the notion of more specialized forces.

The second Bob Scales still believes Army can basically do it all, so it needs all those people PLUS Future Combat System.

Where he and Krepenevich divide, is that Andy buys into the specialized forces (which Scales still ridicules in many instances) but doesn't see the big platform requirements that Scales does.

So Scales is additive (Cold War plus Long War), while Andy, like me, is sequential (Cold War yields to Long War).