Words of Wisdom from a Wise Man.




Washington Times
May 2, 2006
Pg. 19
Binding Criticism
The generals' ill-timed revolt
By Robert H. Scales
Today I finished the book "Cobra II," written by retired Marine Gen.
"Mick" Trainer and New York Times correspondent Mike Gordon. The
authors chronicle in great detail the strategic and military missteps
that followed the fall of Baghdad in April 2003. The book is
particularly important because its publication was the catalyst that
launched the "revolt of the generals" a few weeks ago.

Their book appears about three years into this war. As I read, I
couldn't help but imagine (given today's political atmospherics) how a
book like Messrs. Trainer and Gordon's might have read had it appeared
three years after Pearl Harbor.

Such a book would have hit the bookstores at Christmas time in 1944.
Messrs. Gordon and Trainer would most certainly have written about the
unconstitutional arrogance of an administration that violated
international neutrality laws by taking sides with Great Britain
against Germany. They would have recognized that Pearl Harbor was the
greatest intelligence failure in American history. We would have read
the whole horrific story of the humiliating surrender at Corregidor
that signaled the shameful loss of the entire American Army in the
Philippines.

The condemnatory tenor of the book would continue with depictions of
the useless slaughter at "Bloody Buna" in New Guinea, the humiliating
loss to the German Army at Kasserine Pass in North Africa, the failure
of Dwight Eisenhower to trap the retreating Germans in Sicily, the
horrifically wasteful daylight bombing campaign against Germany in
1943. Messrs. Gordon and Trainer would have reserved their worst for
the conduct of George C. Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in their
abortive "Crusade in Europe."

We would have read about an Army unprepared to meet the Germans in the
hedgerows of Normandy. Operation Market Garden would be depicted as a
foolish "bridge too far" that left our bravest soldiers to die for a
few square miles of Dutch territory. The useless slaughter in the dank
wilderness of the Huertgen Forest would have shocked us. And of course
the book would have appeared just at the time the folks back home got
word of Hitler's greatest defeat of the Americans at the Battle of the
Bulge, evidence of another grand failure of intelligence and a
testament to the genius of German arms.

Of course there was no such book written at the time. There were no
calls for impeachment, dismissal or relief. None of this happened
because military men of that age understood war as the most
unpredictable of all human endeavors. Our grandfathers realized that
unlike lawyers or doctors, soldiers practice their craft infrequently
and often get it wrong at first. Thus, even the greatest military men
make mistakes that all too often cost lives.

Sure, soldiers of that era carped about the human shortcomings of
their leaders but they kept their own counsel because they realized
that there was, first and foremost, a war to be won. They forgave the
difficulties experienced by an army that had no choice but to learn to
fight by fighting, the most wasteful form of education in the art of
war. And they came home to a grateful nation sure in the confidence
that they had done their part to destroy a great evil.

The imagination of historians like me can wander and take analogies
too far. Al Qaeda isn't the Wehrmacht. World War II was indeed a great
crusade consuming two thirds of the nation's production and twelve
million of its young. Today the Army and Marine Corps, less than three
quarters of a million, shoulder the burden for this war at a cost of
less than 1 percent of GDP. Perhaps the American population is more
willing to listen to criticism of their wartime leaders because they
fail to accept that the stakes in this war are as great (or perhaps
even greater) than those in World War II.

But before we become too cavalier about events in the Middle East,
remember that Hitler didn't have nuclear weapons and Germany didn't
sit astride most of the world's fossil fuel supply. Hitler never came
to hate the United States with the mindless imbecility of radical
Islamists nor was his anti-Semitic ranting any more threatening than
those spouted by the likes of Zawahiri, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and
Ahmedinejad.

Let's take a page out of the book not written by the greatest
generation. Pull some punches and breathe into a bag for awhile. I
believe that it's OK for commentators to challenge general defense
policies and programs in wartime. I do that quite often. But just as a
book written at Christmas time in 1944 might not have offered a
meaningful picture of the course of World War II, any commentary on
the course of this war might be off the mark just now.

In the interest of winning this war we all must defer judgments about
the efficacy of our wartime leaders to the wisdom of the American
voters and the 20-20 hindsight of historians like me...after our
soldiers and Marines come home.

Retired Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales is a former commander of the Army
War College.


--

Life's tough.
It's tougher if you're stupid.

John Wayne
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Where are all the Democrats?
    ... (And even the army we had in 1945 would have ... ground-attack aircraft in the war, and it was produced in greater ... Totally ignores my point that only the side with air superiority or better ... they're going to get their supplies in Germany? ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Where are all the Democrats?
    ... (And even the army we had in 1945 would have ... was the best tank-destroyer of the war, and we had nothing to match it- ... Soviets had no real strategic air forces. ... Their army was in Germany. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Germany view of the war
    ... since they were soo short of fuel & vehicle production. ... In the middle of a army wide transformation when the war ... began, so to did Germany. ...
    (soc.history.war.world-war-ii)
  • Junk War and Petraeus: I, Robot
    ... and money for the Iraq War, hiding anything at all about the war from them ... The Iraq War is a bungled operation that's now lost. ... In 1955, William Bruckner, the U.S. Secretary of the Army, told us: ... The generals and war-mongering politicians were wrong about Vietnam and ...
    (misc.survivalism)
  • Re: Where are all the Democrats?
    ... (And even the army we had in 1945 ... Germany demanded the Sudetenland, ... World War I...it was just one of the blunders made by the Allies ... was known for beating the hell out of any Jews who wandered in by ...
    (talk.origins)