"They're not very smart" — comments about US military leadership's failures of mind — and the surge to keep this flaw secret

13 May 2019

With the United States provoking wars all over the place . . .

It might be wise to examine American military leadership's (authoritatively alleged) lack of mind. See below.

And now, there's a "surge" to keep this flaw secret.

The Military Industrial Complex does not want taxpayers know that their money is going to fund a bunch of violently inclined incompetents.

Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson's view

Larry Wilkerson used to be General Colin Powell's chief of staff.

He puts current US military leadership's lack of mental agility this way:

[W]hat we’re doing is we’re fulfilling all the prophecies that people have said . . . that China and the United States will inevitably fight. It is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[W]hen you do this, you have to remember too that there’s another side.

Washington does not have any empathy.

I simply mean they don’t do Sun Tzu [see here]. They don’t do Clausewitz [see here].

They don’t look at the enemy as it were and say, what is the enemy thinking? What is his strategy? What is his objective, and so forth?

I don’t give the leadership in the Pentagon a lot of credit for smarts these days . . . not the chairman, not the Joint Chiefs, not the service chiefs . . . .

They’re just not very smart people; no imagination at all.

Combat-experienced Major Danny Sjursen

The author of Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge (ForeEdge 2015) adds defects of character to Wilkerson's already highlighted military brain-dead-ism:

If America’s generals, now and over the last 18 years, really were strategic thinkers, they’d have spoken out about—and if necessary resigned en masse over—mission sets that were unwinnable, illegal . . . and counterproductive.

It’s all symptomatic of the disease of institutionalized intellectual mediocrity.

Flag officers also rarely seem to recognize that they owe civilian policymakers more than just tactical “how” advice.

They ought to be giving “if” advice—if we invade Iraq, it will take 500,000 troops to occupy the place, and even then we’ll ultimately destabilize the country and region, justify al-Qaeda’s worldview, kick off a nationalist insurgency, and become immersed in an unwinnable war.

Take Afghanistan as exhibit A: 17 or so generals have now commanded U.S. troops in this, America’s longest war.

[A]ll failed to achieve anything close to victory, instead laundering failure into false optimism.

None refused to play the same-old game or question the very possibility of victory in landlocked, historically xenophobic Afghanistan.

That would have taken real courage, which is in short supply among senior officers.

Exhibit B involves Trump’s former cabinet generals—National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, Chief of Staff John Kelley, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis . . . .

“Mad Dog” Mattis was so anti-Iran and bellicose in the Persian Gulf that President Barack Obama removed him from command of CENTCOM.

[T]he supposedly morally untainted, “intellectual” “warrior monk” chose, when he finally resigned, to do so in response to Trump’s altogether reasonable call for a modest troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and Syria.

Helping Saudi Arabia terror bomb Yemen and starve 85,000 children to death?

Mattis rebuked Congress and supported that. He never considered resigning in opposition to that war crime.

And a third opinion — retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich

Bacevich, perhaps the most widely known and published among these three critics, repeatedly condemns American military leadership's inability to think.

For example, in this summarizing blurb:

If the four-stars abandon obfuscation for truth, then and only then will they deserve our respectful attention.

So —what would you do, if you were an American four-star dummy?

Why, you would get Government to keep that shortcoming secret.

I'm not kidding.

Stupidity concealed

The following observations comes from John Sopko. He is the "Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction".

SIGAR is the "U.S. government’s primary oversight authority" for how the Afghanistan War is going.

Toward the end of April (2019), Sopko indicated that, gradually and through succeeding presidential administrations:

[A]lmost every indicia, metric for success or failure is now classified or nonexistent.

Embarrassing things tend to get classified in this town.

The only people who don’t know what’s going on are the people who are paying for all of this and that’s the American taxpayer.

Rich, huh?

In a Reality-based endeavor, we just stop collecting data that reflects anything (at all) about the outcome(s) of whatever we are doing.

That way, we get to keep collecting taxpayer money to act in ways that keep the Military Industrial Complex's gravy train afloat.

Here, I have to laugh that US Government established SIGAR and then let the Deep State take away whatever data it was supposed to examine. Alice in Wonderlandish.

What are American general officers genuinely good at?

Exercising command presence.

Most people will willingly follow orders from such stalwartly authoritative types of people.

This phenomenon is similar to the (unfortunate) gravitas syndrome that I addressed years ago. Meaning that, just because someone is visibly authoritative does not make him and her simultaneously correct and wise.

An illustration of command presence's merits and not — Admiral William McRaven

CBS's Sunday Morning, yesterday, focused on Admiral McRaven's "life lessons and war stories".

If you watch the Admiral, you recognize his ability to effortlessly project "chief of clan" authority.

You also may recognize that McRaven's command presence is more suited to tactical operations and confined missions, than it is to generating strategic insight and sensible geopolitical planning.

For example, McRaven thinks that his life purpose may have been in leading the SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden. And in looking back at his life, he told David CBS's Martin that his inexplicable ("miraculous") escape from the rigging on a capsized SEAL training boat was "divine intervention".

I don't quarrel with McRaven's perception of these life-changing happenings. But I do point out they too personalize strategists' more objectively thought through "what's the other guy thinking and why" analyses.

If you listen McRaven's overview of his life lessons, you have to be inspired. But his framework is too narrowly personal to demonstrate a validly insight-filled, strategic mind.

McRaven's lack of the empathic strategic objectivity (of the kind that Colonel Wilkerson was addressing) shows up when he tells CBS that he spoke with Saddam Hussein just after the latter's capture in 2003.

McRaven describes Hussein as "arrogant and pompous" in having rejected McRaven's (implicitly oh-so-generous) offer "to do something good on his way out".

The tone of the Admiral's delivery regarding this remembrance matches his square-jawed, testosterone-impregnated demeanor throughout the CBS interview.

McRaven is not someone, whom we should want planning effective geopolitical interactions with cultures that think differently than we do.

The Admiral's representatively macho American squad leadership style differs from the impersonal, critically analytical and implicitly (culturally wide-ranging) strategic mind that Sun Tzu's Art of War describes.

Sun Tzu's thinking would exhibit geopolitical effectiveness, even without the cast of admiring onlookers that are necessary to McRaven's kind of authority.

Figuratively speaking, a strategic plan would emerge from Sun Tzu's room, and the nation's tacticians would implement its steps. Those tacticians hopefully exhibiting the inspirational strengths that some flag officers, like McRaven and General Stanley McChrystal, possess.

Confusing these two styles of leading should be avoided. But that, unfortunately, is where Americans fall short.

A telling sign of our failure is the continuing worship of authority-projecting general officers, who have egregiously failed the strategic component of their duties.

This is what the three former military men (quoted above) are saying.

In summary — just 'cause someone looks powerfully virile, does not make them insightful or wise

Being inspiring and in-command-present, does not necessarily make someone Big Picture Smart.

In eagerly letting these power-projecting people lead, we give in to our ape-like, pecking order heritage.

Thus, this may be an argument for putting more women in societal command. Women, of course, who avoid slavishly imitating macho men. (That means no Hillary Clintons or Madeleine Albrights.)

Think matriarchical elephants, instead.

The moral? — Admirable leadership presence, combined with professionally inbred stupidity, is dangerous

As anyone with a powerfully vicious, singularly stupid and unleashed dog knows.

Keeping the dog's doings secret — as we now do by policy — does not change the counter-force generated abroad by our hostile, strategically foolish behaviors.

In evaluating leadership, I avoid too-favorably crediting jawline and concentrate much more on manifestations of insightful command intelligence.

Too bad that there ain't much'a that going on in visible Ah-muhr-i-ka.

PeteFree.com

"They're not very smart" — comments about US military leadership's failures of mind — and the surge to keep this flaw secret