In Memoriam

Holy Hell. I just saw the In Memoriam segment on This Week.

I knew eleven Americans died in Iraq last week (cast your eyes to the right) but I did not know who it was that was doing the dying.

Of eleven casualties, nine were Staff Sergeants and above. The Officer ranks were heavily represented.

These NCO’s and Officers are exactly the people we can not afford to lose and they are being thrown away in a vanity war launched by a chickenhawk who deserted his National Guard unit in a time of war.

Even if you support it, how do you sustain it?

Folks, the Army is in trouble. It is going to take at minimum two decades to rebuild our Army. Five years of rugged warfare conditions have taken a steep toll on man and materiel alike. It's broken all right, and George Bush is the vandal who broke it.

That the Army missed their recruiting goals for May by 9.27% is just the tip of the iceberg. The real fractures go much deeper. Young officers are leaving the service in higher numbers than at any time since Vietnam. It is unprecedented – but the Army has been hemorrhaging officers and senior NCO’s in leadership positions for at least the last two years. When I started getting up in arms about it was when I read an editorial by Lucian Truscott IV in the New York Times two years ago that confirmed what I had been witnessing.

This compromises the quality of the leadership of the officer corps. Army OCS has a 100% acceptance rate, and Republican members of Congress are having a hard time finding qualified candidates to even apply to West Point. (I know applications have been falling for at least two years, and I am looking for the supporting link for that claim)

Take this data point for instance: 97% of all eligible Captains are being promoted to Major. Traditionally that number has been between 70-80%. The promotion to Major has heretofore been the winnowing point for career officers. Now, if you have Captain’s bars and sufficient time in service, and you haven’t been court-martialed yet, you will get Oak Leaf Clusters.

Now consider that even though we are missing all those officers, qualified applicants are not being informed of the OCS option because their numbers are needed to bolster the enlisted ranks. This is counterproductive recruiting and short-term thinking.

This exodus of seasoned officers has resulted in what can only be classified as promotion by attrition. And that is no way to run an Army.

Now – let’s consider the recruits to the enlisted ranks. Fully 17% of the recruits into service in FY 2006 were admitted to service on waivers. Can anyone imagine a scenario in which that figure would improve when have already recruited everyone who is fit and willing? (Yeah, me neither.)

So lets recap: In our Army, we have a bunch of hinky troops – and not enough of ‘em, by the way – and no one to lead them. Also keep in mind that the Army uses accounting methods in the billet shell game that would make a Hollywood accountant blush. (h/t SPfY for that line).

This is a recipe for disaster and a broken military. It’s time we face the facts and deal with them. I do not believe our military has time to let Bush run out the clock on his failed presidency. Congress needs to get tough, and they need to do so now, while they are writing the Defense Authorization Bill for FY 2008. The way things stand right now, we have at least a 20 year rebuilding process ahead of us. And we can't pay for it with tax cuts. It's time for a gut-check.

A Coming Crisis

I have long been beating the drum about the dearth of officers in our Army. But I overlooked the enlisted ranks. The Christian Science Monitor (one of the best examples of on-the-ground-reporting anywhere) reports that key enlisted personnel are exiting in alarming numbers, and if the trend continues, the Army faces a coming crisis. (I had an 'Oh, Fuck' moment when I read the article)

In 2005, the Army retained 96% of the mid-grade NCO’s whose enlistments were up. The first-quarter numbers for 2007 are in, and that retention number is down to 84%.

The reason for this decline is simple. I can give that answer in one word: Iraq.

Extended tours, repeated deployments, inadequate dwell time with family and friends between those deployments. It is wearing on the Army – which has born the brunt of fighting Bush’s vanity war.

Let’s just cut the crap – if you don’t have an adequate corps of seasoned Sergeants transmitting Officer’s orders and providing leadership – You don’t have a functioning Army. Lest anyone think otherwise, Sergeants run the Army.

So let’s put the state of the military in perspective:

First of all, readiness is suffering. Remember that during Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana National Guard was unable to mount and adequate response, in part because most of their deep-water vehicles were in Iraq. Desert warfare has taken over – Mountain and amphibious training is not being done. Should the United States have to respond to an imminent threat, the engagement would take more time, cost more lives and money and have a lower chance of success because response / readiness has been undermined by the drain of Iraq.

Secondly, we are suffering a dearth of leadership. The Army is losing command level officers and mid-level Sergeants at a rate that is being felt now and represents a potentially catastrophic crisis of leadership in the future.

In the wake of Vietnam, the military had to be rebuilt, and the Honor Code had to be stitched back together bit by tattered bit. The challenge met by my husband and all of the rest who went in between 1976 and 1985 (the decade after the fall of Saigon) was a cakewalk in comparison to the rebuilding that will by necessity have to take place in the wake of Bush and his Iraq adventure.

In order to make recruitment goals, more and more concessions are being made. People who would not have made it in the door of a recruiting station five years ago are being pursued passionately. They keep loosening the rules so more people can meet the minimum standards for acceptance into service. If you still can’t get in, and you really want to serve, well by golly – we probably have a waiver right here with your name on it! Moral, criminal, physical, we got waivers! (Waivers here! Get your waivers!)

Gotta tell ya – I’m not getting a case of the warm fuzzies over here when I stop to consider all those hinky troops – being led by weak officers and NCO’s…The very thought unleashes horrors in my mind.

They are in the kitchen whipping up a recipe for disaster.

Someone turn off the gas.

Taking the Generals to task

George Bush keeps yammering on about how he won’t accept a bill from Congress that “ties the hands of our Generals.”

I’m not so sure that would be such a bad idea. (For the record, I have never thought it would necessarily be a bad idea to rein in the current crop, familiar as I am with some of their past work.)

A sea-change among the officer corps is signaled today with the publication of A Failure of Generalship by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling in the May issue of Armed Forces Journal.

Yingling doesn’t beat around the bush – he makes his charges early – then he lays them out.

America's generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America's generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress.

What Lt. Col. Yingling gives voice to is a largely discontented command-level officer corps. Captains, Majors, and Lt. Colonels are unhappy. This is reflected in the fact that they are resigning commissions at a rate unseen since Vietnam – and entirely unprecedented in an all-volunteer military. "Talk to the junior leaders in the services and ask what they think of their senior leadership, and many will tell you how unhappy they are" asserts retired Marine Col. Jerry Durrant, now working as a contractor in Iraq.

Younger officers have been privately voicing their discontent with the conduct of this war by a feckless president and a general officer corps that has been all-too willing to enable his folly. In so doing, they have betrayed the men and women who are subservient to them in the ranks, the men and women, who must, by UCMJ statute, follow their every order so long as it be legal. (Moral and legal are not synonymous.)

Some younger officers have stated privately that more generals should have been taken to task for their handling of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, news of which broke in 2004. The young officers also note that the Army's elaborate "lessons learned" process does not criticize generals and that no generals in Iraq have been replaced for poor battlefield performance, a contrast to other U.S. wars.

Top Army officials are also worried by the number of captains and majors choosing to leave the service. "We do have attrition in those grade slots above our average," acting Army Secretary Pete Geren noted in congressional testimony this week. In order to curtail the number of captains leaving, he said, the Army is planning a $20,000 bonus for those who agree to stay in, plus choices of where to be posted and other incentives.

And still they resign. In droves. It is to the point that the Army is short 3500 officers and the Army Reserves has 11,000 unfilled billets in the Lieutenant and Captain ranks alone.

Lt. Colonel Yingling (I say bypass the bird and slap stars on his shoulders today – and yes I know that’s not how things are done – I’m just sayin’…) beseeches Congress to review the performance of flag-rank officers as they retire and to exercise its power to retire them at a lower rank if their performance is deemed inferior. The threat of such high-profile demotions would restore accountability among top officers, he contends. "As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war”

[Cross-posted to Watching Those We Chose]