Why our generals were more successful in World War II than in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq/Afghanistan

well good evening welcome to the 27th annual nimitz lecture ship thank you so much for coming tonight my name is captain phil rose i am the director of military affairs here at cal and uh also the commanding officer of the naval rotc unit it's the best job in the navy the nimitz lecture series was established by endowment to invite prominent speakers to lecture and educate not only our students but also our community on items of national interest and relevance since the establishment of the program in 1983 we've hosted a wide array of distinguished and nationally recognized public figures who have enriched us with their unique perspectives and expertise on an equally wide array of topics ladies and gentlemen we have all have an obligation to be an informed public and i'm honored that you have come tonight it's an honor and a privilege to welcome mr tom rix as our 27th nimitz lecturer mr rix hale to us from massachusetts originally and has an extensive personal and professional background perfectly suited for this venue he grew up in new york also spent time as a student in the american international school in kabul graduated from yale and after teaching in hong kong for two years and serving as an assistant editor with the wilson quarterly was hired and spent 17 years with the wall street journal ultimately culminating in his position as the pentagon correspondent for that publication in 2000 he became the washington post's military correspondent a post he held until 2008. he's a recipient of two pulitzer prizes the first a team award in 2000 with the wall street journal on a series of articles on how the u.s military might adapt to new demands in the 21st century and the second in 2002 another team award this time with the washington post for reporting about the beginning of the u.s counter-offensive against terrorism mr rix is an accomplished author and expert on military and foreign affairs notable books include making the core a book that chronicles recruit training for the united states marine corps fiasco the american military adventure in iraq and most recently the gamble general petraeus and the american military adventure in iraq 2006-2008 he's a senior fellow with the center of new american security an independent and nonpartisan research institution that leads efforts to help inform and prepare the national security leaders of today and tomorrow he also maintains a very popular foreign policy weblog or blog online i think mr rix is uh perfectly suited to be our nimitz lecturer this week ladies and gentlemen please welcome tom rix our 2011 nimitz lecture good evening it's a real pleasure to be here uh i just wish that i was really in california because he couldn't persuade me it's rained the whole time since i arrived on sunday i just want to begin with a couple of questions would you hold up your hand if you're affiliated with the military here you guys aren't the cadets okay would you hold up your hand if you were affiliated somehow with the university in some other capacity and finally would you hold up your hand if you are just from the general public interesting cross section well i appreciate you're all coming tonight giving the rain out there i'm not sure i would have come to see me final question hold up your hand if you know who this guy is okay i guarantee you if there's one thing you'll all know who he is by the time you walk out of here i want to talk a little bit at the beginning about why i write books i've written four i'm in the middle of my fifth i enjoy it enormously but one thing that writing a book is is consuming it's all consuming it takes up vast amounts of time effort and energy i will occasionally awaken the middle of the night and realize i have been dreaming about something in my book and i'll get up and start writing oh you know you know when westmerlin met with abrams in the spring of 1970 on that issue and make a note to myself on that i don't write books because i have answers at least at the beginning of them i write books because i have questions the process of writing a book i find is just going to so dominate your life that you have to be driven at least i have to be driven by a really compelling interest in figuring out the answer to something for me every book is in some way a mystery story a detector novel why did this happen what is this problem how can i under come to understand this and explain it after writing two books about iraq i came away wondering ultimately how our generals could have been so wrong there and this is a line of thought that actually began for me in 2005 i had left iraq i was on a military staff right of sicily we were studying the campaign of the summer of 1943. the first american landing in europe in the war and the culminating battle was in shroena just north of the town of ana in central sicily and i was standing there on the staff ride and a retired colonel was explaining that day's action in this battle where the first infantry division had ultimately prevailed against the germans in the culminating battle of the campaign the first infantry division was commanded by terry allen a really wonderful character i'll talk about a little bit more about later the most successful this division commander of the army had in europe for the first year of the war at the end of the battle allen having won it he was fired by omar bradley and that really lit a fuse for me how could that be here i was just coming from iraq and o5 we had generals who were screwing it up to a fair the will nobody was firing them why in world war ii would a successful general have been fired when nowadays nobody got fired and that was sort of the beginning question for me that really nagged at me for several years in addition it was clear to me that the problem was not the raw material the generals i knew and i knew many of them were hard-working determined courageous most of them were smart not all of them generally what people would say is a good guy i had i was actually the first reporter ever to go to the army's charm school they called it for new brigadiers it's a week at that time it was at fort leavenworth and all the new active duty reserve and guard generals were sent there to learn how to be a general and i had asked dennis reimer then the army chief of staff if i could attend it and he was trying to work at new forms of transparency and he said okay and it was funny because it was a room about this size filled the capacity and the first day there i'm sitting there and like i'm in the only seat that has an empty seat on either side of it and you can just see these guys so you know 25 years waiting to become a general and there's a reporter sitting there next to me nah well about halfway through that day general reimer showed up and sat down next to me hey tommy says and suddenly it's like alexa hentai if you remember oh you know we go out into for the coffee break and all everybody suddenly wants to talk to me this is the guy the chief of staff is sitting next to so in that in that time in charm school i really came to know a lot of these guys for example one of my classmates was raymond odierno who later went on to command in in iraq under general petraeus and i think is going on even to other four-star positions in the future they were a terrific bunch of people but they didn't strike me as being particularly successful so the more research i did the more i studied this the more puzzled i became and eventually realized okay the only way i'm going to get this out of my head is to write a book about it eventually i find myself reaching back to george c marshall and in the process george c marshall became one of my real heroes george c marshall is almost forgotten today if people know of him it's really only because of the marshall plan which ironically was not something he did while in uniform but something he did well as secretary of state uh it won him the nobel prize for peace the first soldier ever to win the nobel peace prize but he's not remembered particularly for what he did in the previous 10 years george c marshall became army chief of staff on september 1 1939. now you guys are smart berkeley students anybody know what happened that day world war ii really begins germany invades poland what a first day at the office now marshall actually knew this was coming he'd been acting chief of staff for several months so it wasn't like he had to come in and actually figure out where the telephone was nonetheless he actually was sworn in as the army chief of staff on september 1 1939. he later wrote that the military he commanded was quote not even a third-rate military power the army then including the what is now the air force had 190 000 people it had a handful of tanks it had a handful of bombers most of them antiques and it really was not a very effective force it was smaller than the bulgarian military when he stepped down as army chief of staff he presided over an army of nine million people he had presided over the transformation of the us army from what he would call a fourth rape power to the world's preeminent military power he had on his watch seen the development of a modern mechanized mobile military that is very similar to what you have now in fact a lot of the same weapons as i understand it the 50 caliber every infantryman's favorite weapon for the protection it can give you is basically the same weapon they fielded in world war ii marshall focused a lot on generalship one of the real joys i've had in my book research is going back and really delving into these guys papers sitting there and reading maps with that have patents writing on them and pencil tactical maps from tunisia from sicily and one of the things i read was a lot of documents about how he prepared to take office as army chief of staff he knew world war ii was coming he knew we were going to come in on our heels and so the first thing he did in may 1939 was get on the uss nashville a cruiser and go to south america why because he wanted to secure lines of communication across the central atlantic or the south atlantic knowing that we wouldn't be able to get into europe he took with him a smart young colonel he liked named matthew ridgway they sat on the bow of the nashville for 10 days as they steamed towards rio de janeiro with marshall talking through what he intended to do as chief of staff to ridgeway he admired ridgeway's managerial ability leadership ability and what he told ridgeway was i'm going to clean out the general officers i'm going to retire them they are old and in the way and one thing he'd seen in world war one was that pershing the american commander in france had to spend much too much time firing generals in france marshall was determined that he'd fired them before they ever got overseas the first thing he did was retire about 200 senior colonels and generals he called them in and said thank you very much for your interest in national defense we are you are not going to be leading troops in combat you are too old this is a soft looking guy with a real hard edge to inside him the second thing he did was tell a lot of guys you're going to train divisions but you not necessarily take them overseas my overseas commanders could be able to chop off in all division commanders and eisenhower and macarthur ultimately both did reject people that marshall proposed even protests of marshall just got hammered sometimes there was a myth that marshall had a black book that he kept and wrote down the names of i've actually researched this and i've checked this with historians marshall did not keep a black book of people he thought would make good officers i think he really didn't need to he knew them all it wasn't that big an army if you look at who he had on his staff when he was running the infantry school at fort benning well there's joe stillwell he's the tactics expert there's omar bradley he's teaching machine guns you know he knew he knew who these guys were already but there was a list that marshall had and the funny thing is it's almost unknown i came across because i read something a book that almost nobody knows about i don't know why marshall famously refused to write a memoir of world war ii henry luce the owner of time life offered him a million dollars marshall had no money henry luce offered a million dollars which is real cash back then to write his memoirs and marshall said no i would embarrass too many people and refuse to write his memoirs never did but in some idle moments in the 1920s he wrote his memoirs of world war one and in those memoirs and in those letters he kind of sorted out what he'd learned in world war one as a fast rising young staff colonel ultimately as the aid to pershing and what he thought the requirements of generalship were so i found this list and this is marshall's real list not the phony black book thing they talk about he wrote this in november 1920 the essential qualities of a general they are good common sense professionally educated physically strong cheerful and optimistic energetic extreme loyalty and determined what that list is not is klaus wheatsian you'll see nothing that really reflects klauswitz the great prussian philosopher of war in there kloswitz talks about things like the ability to have to sense the battlefield to kind of have a vision of the battlefield to understand it what it is is a very american list and marshall consciously tailored this list to fit the historical and strategic circumstances of the united states he said look a cautious quiet general might serve in other militaries for example the british historically have a small army a stronger navy so a british general probably is strategically wise to conserve his forces to always to not give battle to evade to to preserve your force but for america there were other circumstances first of all he said america will always produ pursue what he called a policy of unpreparedness for war we will never go to war prepared don't complain about it get used to it was his point it's like the weather you know you don't you don't hear you know officers saying oh i can't go out it's raining well at least some most of you didn't what you do is learn to live with it so he said inevitably we will go into war ill-trained poorly equipped that means almost always we will go into demoralizing early battles in our wars so he said the requirement is and i'm quoting here for the dashing optimistic and resourceful type quick to estimate with relentless determination and who possessed in addition a fund of sound common sense which operated to prevent gross errors due to rapidity of decision in action the opposite sort of leader he wrote was the man who was given to pessimism to saying you know we could get our butts kicked here he said that officer needed to be found and cut out of the force like a cancer these officers were he said quote quickly infected with these officers were put in charge of units quickly infected their units with the same spirit and grew ineffective unless a more suitable commander is found and given charge the marshall template worked really well in world war ii it lives on today but it doesn't work as well and this takes me to the key point of what i'm going to talk about here it has lost one essential that element was relief successful commanders were kept in place and promoted unsuccessful commanders were relieved and moved into other jobs this was the way they ran not only the general officer corps but really all the entire officer corps in world war ii without that factor i think the marshall template is somewhat crippled if you don't punish failure you cannot reward success because you're leaving failures in place when you leave fails failures in place you create an atmosphere a culture of mediocrity in your entire officer corps rather than everybody driving to the top people tend to drive toward the middle if you're not punished for failure then why take risk why seek success keep your head down and the policy of rotation of officers that we've had in the from the late korean war on korea vietnam afghanistan iraq just reinforces that tendency to drive to the middle and what you get is an officer corps built for stalemate not for victory it is forgotten by most people though i hope not the people in this room world war ii began with a wave of firings it was a kind of cleaning house cleaning across the military that would astonish people if it occurred today two weeks after pearl harbor the two top commanders in the pacific admiral kimmel and general short were fired kimmel by the way anybody know who replaced him nimitz yeah come on that's a gimme guys uh he was replaced at the end this december 1941 by chester nimitz also gone from honolulu was major general frederick martin who had been the air commander under general short on the european front the americans banging to the germans in north africa not long afterward the senior tactical commander for the americans major general lloyd fredendahl is canned meanwhile back in washington marshall is finished finishing up his winning of the officer corps of all the senior leaders of the army who led the army in the 1930s who did the louisiana maneuvers for example only one in addition to macarthur who was really out of the army during that period he was in the philippines only one got command general kruger none of the other senior commanders survived into combat command during world war ii about 165 men commanded divisions in combat during world war ii under this policy of relief 16 division commanders were relieved and remember these are the people who have already made it through the first two hurdles they weren't winnowed out they trained up units and were allowed to bring them overseas they were in combat and then got relieved these 16 guys plus four or five core commanders depending on how you count it yet and this is the key point what makes swift relief work relief is not a terminal act in world war ii it is not a career render sometimes it hardly even slows down as a speed bump for some guys several generals at least four were relieved from division command in europe and got another division within a year one brigadier general hanging saying williams was not only demoted to colonel he was he was actually fired demoted to colonel and retired many years later as a three-star general another colonel was escorted from the battlefield in normandy under armed escort wound up retiring as a two star so there is hope there what got you relieved by marshall well all those characteristics if you meet them you probably weren't going to get the job in the first place but once you had a general slot under marshall what got you relieved first and foremost not being a team player he was insistent of this this is about the team it's not about george marshall certainly it's not about you early in the war he heard that one of his weirder generals brigadier general simon bolivar buckner a commanding in alaska had rather foolishly written a poem making fun of the navy asserting that it was afraid to operate in the bering sea and then read it aloud to his naval counterpart who then complained to admiral king who went storming into marshall and said what are you going to do about this marshall seriously considered firing buckner ultimately decided not to left him in place and he was promoted to another job after buckner moved on a new admiral repaid the favor by relieving an army general up there eugene landrum who himself i'm sorry he relieved an armed army another army general brown who was replaced by eugene landrum who then gets relieved a year later in normandy buckner goes on meanwhile to the pacific where one of his big jobs is to look into one of the most famous firings of the war when a marine general fired an army general this is really confusing because they have the same name it's marine general h.m howling mad smith fired up an army general ralph smith who commanded the 27th division and buckner led the army investigation which concluded of course that that uh hm smith was wrong actually hm smith was was dead right the unit was slow buckner by the way has two other claims to fame his father was the guy who commanded the fort that u.s grant took in the civil war and it was fortz donaldson and henry and i really like this because it's when grant got the nickname unconditional surrender grant sends in a note to this guy it's like a west point classmate saying um surrender and the guy wrote back what are your terms and grant wrong peck none i propose to move upon your works immediately buckner writes back sir you are no gentleman which is answered by some gunfire buckner went on to become the highest ranking american officer killed by enemy fire in world war ii he was standing on a hillside in okinawa wearing a shiny helmet with his three stars on it a marine officer asked him to take off his helmet because it might attract artillery fire nonsense says buckner and that's his last words because in an artillery shell landed next to him he was replaced by joseph stillwell who himself had been relieved of command in october 1944 in china it is a merry-go-round of reliefs in world war ii it's it's very difficult even to sort it out historically but i hear you guys up there you're historically informed cadets saying but what about eisenhower he made mistakes why wasn't he fired dwight eisenhower was an anomaly and by the way for all you whoever gets stuck in an xo position remember that dwight d eisenhower i think in the spring of 1940 was still a lieutenant colonel who was exo of an infantry regiment in the state of washington so promotions can come along quickly marshall had singled out eisenhower knowing that would we would be going to war we would have to fight overseas and in a coalition he wanted a guy who was a team player who could keep his temper even though he had one and would work relentlessly within a coalition and he knew a lot of officers there was a real anti-british streak in the u.s army he knew a lot of officers wouldn't be able to do that he knew ike would and so he had ike brought along very quickly but eisenhower himself actually thought at one point that he was came close to being fired in late 1943 in algeria there's a very murky affair called the darlan affair uh a kind of fascist uh french admiral that eisenhower kind of put in place the guy was a shiite he'd been playing footsie with the nazis for ike was a matter of expediency but it caused a huge political fuss back here and at one point ike wrote to his son that he might be removed and he said if it happens don't worry about it it's it's it's there's a larger cause here it is true though that the lesson of eisenhower a lot of other four stars and some three stars is the higher you rose in the war the less likely you were to be relieved partly there just weren't a lot of other people who could step into those jobs coalition warfare also increased the likelihood of relief and by this i mean genuine coalitions not the phony things we've had in iraq and afghanistan where basically their window addressing and we're not really operating with them as equals we were working with the british as equals at the beginning of the war really operating with them as inferiors they had a lot of contempt for us including for marshall and eisenhower in coalition warfare not only do you have to operate to the satisfaction of your own chain of command your own leadership but also to that of the coalition several generals were fired at the best of the british during world war ii one was for example orlando ward commanded the first armored division in north africa ike was pretty happy with him the british said we're not the next day ike fired him sent him back and this was a guy who had been secretary of marshall's general staff at the outset of the war this is kind of a martial protege yet again combat relief was not the end of the career by the following year orlando ward commanded another combat division the 20th armored and at the end of the war he briefly commanded the fifth corps meditating on the allied victory in tunisia a couple of months after that firing remember the allied victory in tunisia uh is the in the spring of 43 is is the first allied triumph in the west after a series of defeats in the west and in singapore and so on eisenhower wrote down some of his initial conclusions about what he'd seen as a senior commander this is what eisenhower wrote what works he said immediate and continuous loyalty to the concept of unity into allied commanders is basic to victory the instant such commanders lose the confidence of either government or of the majority of their principal subordinates they must be relieved this is his conclusion from the first campaign he later wrote that swift relief was the price of giving autonomy to battlefield commanders of being led by intent which is what we try to do rather than micromanagement which is what we often fall into why is that why is relief connected to not being like micromanaged ike thought about this and he went on to write the american doctrine has always been to assign a theater commander a mission to provide him with a definite amount of force and then to interfere as little as possible in the execution of his plans if results obtained by the field commander become unsatisfactory the proper procedure is not to advise admonish and harass him but to replace him the bottom line is in world war ii you basically had 60 to 90 days to either be successful be killed or be relieved and frankly your training command really didn't care which one it was you needed to perform but even successful commanders can be booted at the outset i mentioned terry de la mesa allen terry allen terrible terry they called him commander of the first infantry division sicily summer of 1943. you want to talk about old school allen is as old school as they come he was a hard drinking cavalryman from the frontier west famously once raced a cowboy across texas on horses from i think from san antonio to dallas and he did it like two hours faster it was the army against the cowboy and all the newspapers covered this in the 1930s he liked to play craps with his soldiers he was super old school he was actually born in a fort in the old west he did not fit in with the marshall eisenhower bradley template the new corporate type general the coomb calm cheerful team player he was a cavalryman and one place it was dangerous to be a calvary man was in the u.s army in europe in world war ii this was an infantry show they didn't trust calvary men they all remembered the lesson of gettysburg jeb stewart ran away up to carlisle and left lee blind they wanted guys who are tied in on their lines you could lose the war they thought by being too aggressive taking too many risk you couldn't lose it by being too cautious and that's what omar bradley specialized in his middle name was caution so alan does a terrific job in tunisia my favorite moment in tunisia is one day he gets in order to attack at dawn and he said why wait till dawn i'll attack at midnight he attacks at midnight gets to his the uh position he's supposed to be in and um his forces are up ahead of him and george patton shows up and starts screaming at him in his little squeaky voice because patton had a really genuinely squeaky voice what are you doing sitting here you're supposed to be attacking right now allen looks up and says i'm already in my position i took all the all the assigned spots so he kind of out patent patton there at sicily u.s forces came very close to being thrown back onto the beach the day after the landing alan again got his forces together after a hard day of fighting at one point his infantrymen ducking down into holes and letting the panzers roll over their heads they had uh they got the german tanks got as close as a kilometer from the beach that the landings were occurring on the first entry division under terry allen stopped them stopped them again because the germans were marshaling for an attack at dawn and terry said let's attack at 4 am and he caught them as they were marshalling so sicily early august he's had a hard six weeks of fighting he wins at troina and omar bradley fires him just amazing to me and he was replaced by major general clarence yubner who fit the marshall template perfectly yupner also needed a job because he even fired his deputy chief of staff to a british general harold alexander just a few weeks earlier again though terry allen gets another command he's back in combat a year later he trains and commands the 104th division takes it all the way from normandy into germany the real question to me about sicily is not why terry allen was fired it's why patton wasn't and i still haven't quite figured this out the closeness to ike is very important in the case of patton remember at the beginning of the war patton outranks eisenhower ike writes to him and says i hear you getting an armored division can i get a brigade and patton kind of tells them well i'd love to give you a brigade fellow but you're a great staff officer you can be my chief of staff also eisenhower knew the patton had one great skill he was lousy in the defense he was was not good at coordinating but he was great in the pursuit and eisenhower knew by mid-42 that within two or three years they probably would be chasing the germans across germany and that's basically why he preserved patton in his career patton by the way makes fun of bradley and ike for all the relieving they did he said they're very bad about relieving guys too often on the other hand patton didn't pass along the favor in the end of 1944 he fires john wood actually a very well respected and admired division commander come out of the fourth armored division fired him said you're sick go home there were tons of other reliefs in world war ii lucky for you i'm not going to discuss them all but the names briefly dolly lucas milliken the relief of division commanders in normandy is extraordinary mckelvey gets relieved after three days in combat landrum and watson get relief a few weeks later another thing i'm not going to talk about is the generals who should have been relieved but weren't they both have names beginning with m macarthur and marshall at one point at the end of 44 eisenhower drafted a cable asking for the relief of montgomery but didn't send it i suspect he drafted it and showed it around because he knew he really couldn't get montgomery fired the point here though to remember the takeaway is that relief was very common the more common it was the less extreme it seems it becomes a normal management tool hiring and firing are the two basic tools they use both of them a lot relief did not mean you were bad did not mean you were cowardly it could just mean you are out of step with your commander or your allies it most of all was not terminal so what went wrong my hypothesis is that the marshall model the relief which is a tradition in american history marshall didn't invent it reliefs mark the american revolution the civil war lincoln's search for a general world war one and world war ii we even have a bunch of reliefs five division commanders relieved by ridgeway in korea early in 1951. by lake korea though they stopped relieving people and i think there's a couple of reasons here the first is it is more difficult to relieve commanders and unpopular wars the second is if you have rotation which they began in korea in 52 then the sense is why fire the guy by the time you figured out he's just not going to get any better he's going to be going home soon in world war ii there was no rotation home remember the road the road home went through berlin was the saying but rotation started in 50 51 yeah 51. and we've had it in vietnam iraq and afghanistan once you have one year tours relief goes way down in vietnam westmoreland compounds this error by doing six-month command tours an officer will be out for a year six-month command six-month staff and because guys are also getting killed and wounded promoted to other jobs you had churning in the ranks of command the other day i was reading about a guy in the americal division a particularly rough division who had seven company commanders in six months when you have that kind of churning when the officers don't know their subordinates you really increase micromanagement this is one reason i think we saw the hovering of battalion brigade commanders and helicopters in the vietnam war you don't know these people you don't trust them the final nail in the tradition of relief came in the vietnam war the first infantry division terry allen's old division has a commander very much like terry allen and william de pew veteran of normandy he's commanded the first id in 1966 in one year he relieves 11 battalion commanders of battalion equivalents harold k johnson the chief of staff of the army shows up in his hooch at christmas why are you firing all my battalion commanders harold johnson says you're supposed to train them the assistance of division commander pipes up and says funny i thought we were supposed to fight them despite this the pew did not get fired because they didn't fire generals anymore in the entire vietnam war i'm aware of only one division commander who got fired and it was not the division commander who presided over me live by the way he just went on to be superintendent of west point before he was charged so to wind up when you lose the tool of relief you wind up with a lot of hard-working determined loyal cheerful risk-averse conformist i suspect you could draw an intellectual straight line from omar bradley at omaha beach to norman schwarzkopf's initial plan the 99 1991 gulf war to tommy frank's unimaginative plan for iraq iraq in the spring of 2003. in all three cases you could describe their approach in a few short words hate it a little straight up the middle all three generals by the way also focus much too much on the initial assault and much too little on what came after it the detriment of their forces so is the marshall model dead i think we are close to it no one gets fired anymore except for four-star generals why because they don't rotate and they get fired by civilians so my concluding thought is if the army won't fire generals civilians will in fact the korean war is marked now in our memories most for the firing of macarthur that begins really the tradition of the firing of generals it almost comes exactly the same moment that we stopped that the generals were stopping to fire themselves so i think my final thought for you it is time to restore the tradition of relief thank you very much thank you very much mr ricks we actually have some time for questions and answers so if you're interested in asking mr rick some questions we've got some microphones here we'll pass them up the up the aisle so please feel free i also want to remind everybody that upon conclusion of this this evening there will be a reception at the women's faculty club immediately following so with that we'll take your ques questions i'm sorry what was that oh i'm sorry the berkeley sit the faculty okay i want you to fire away with your questions or even just your responses comments and denunciations i've only got one request i used to be a reporter i've got very thick skin so don't try to not hurt my feelings thank you for your comments sir my name is ronald winter hold up your hand i can't see where you are okay and talking in regard to firing and relief in that regard uh in our current situation in afghanistan did mcchrystal put himself in a position to get fired or did was he fired by incompetence or what your opinion please you all heard the question okay um now is your question did mcchrystal want to go or is your question is it crystal's fault he set himself up to go well i don't think he was trying to get out but i always thought that um mcchrystal had all in the warfighting ability than david petraeus and more but none of the political savvy petraeus really knows the reporters he's talking to my impression was mcchrystal didn't didn't know he was talking to my attitude when you're embedded is you got to tell people you know is this on the record or something you can't be around people all the time and expect them to be on the record all the time and what happened was this rolling stone reporter is drinking beers with these guys in paris on the on a diplomatic trip on their flight home and he's just writing everything down and it showed up in print there's never been an allegation that he had violated ground rules that means that mcchrystal and the people around him were indisciplined and additionally the public affairs office failed utterly to brief his commander on who you're dealing with the job of good public affairs officers know who these reporters are know what their reputations are know whether you can trust these people thank you you're welcome if you cadets and middies don't start asking questions i'm going to call on you so um speaking of firing in a nutshell abu ghraib should have been fired and why i'm glad you mentioned that because whenever i say nobody gets fired anymore it's like i was speaking at 411 where somebody is what about janice karpinsky janice karpinsky for those who forgot was the army reserve brigadier who presided over the abu ghraib mess and she was about as outside the club as you can be and still have a general star in your shoulder she was a reservist she was from a non-combat arm and she was a female i thought the guy she was reporting to and i'm blanking out his name wojkowski army general should have been fired and sanchez should have been fired everybody knew sanchez should have been fired sanchez was a big mistake this is actually the joke of donald rumsfeld's memoir is he sort of says hey how did sanchez wind up in iraq well geez you were secretary of defense you might have asked i know for a fact i know of one senior army general who went to john abazad and said don't put sanchez in there he's a lightweight he's the most junior three star in the army he is not capable of this job an opinion by the way i utterly endorse having been embedded with sanchez going into iraq and sitting in his morning brief every morning and thinking geez this guy is a jumped up battalion commander who doesn't understand what he's getting into he prided himself and asked him one day about this he proud of himself chewing out junior officers in the briefings yesterday you said that battalion was missing 24 tires today you said 22. did you find two tires i thought my god this is not the way you take over a country you know he's doing it you know probably the brigade xo's job and so he was just a big mistake so i thought they probably in an alternate universe universe had we had relief quick movement and it wasn't politically embarrassing i could see a scenario in the spring of 04 where they looked around and said you know this is what they would have done in world war ii of all the division commanders who's done a decent job here hey that petraeus guy up north no he can't stand him he's an intellectual he likes reporters you know phd from princeton i mean three strikes man but he's successful this is for example what the army did with joe collins world war ii smart young guy they put him out in guadalcanal does a good job macarthur says he's too young to be promoted to core command collins flies back the united states walks into marshall's office and says get me out of pacific i ain't working for macarthur now marshall and macarthur could stand each other and macarthur marshall understood this perfectly they put collins in europe where he became the best core commander the guy they constantly relied on for example for the breakthrough at san lo and ultimately becomes army chief of staff succeeding whoever the camera is he sees bradley now but yeah i think he must have succeeded bradley eisenhower bradley collins in about 47. um so i thought the whole chain of command could have been different uh had you done that with petraeus i think the war would have been different but you didn't have a structure that was geared to that it would have been seen it would have seemed too turbulent to do that sort of thing yeah i've forgotten his name um well the funny thing was it was sort of like we should do something let's get some gitmo interrogation techniques you know what you needed abu ghraib you needed things like thoughtful oversight the abu grey prison was right on the scene between the 82nd airborne base to the west and some other guys on the east the mps there this junky reserve unit had no heavy firepower they weren't patrolling on their perimeter insurgents were coming right up to them and just mortaring them and shooting at them they were totally out of control of the situation they didn't have a lot of mobility or firepower um general swanick came into the 82nd airborne i've got some problems with him otherwise but to his credit one day he shows up at alba grave and says you know janice what's going on here and she says i just i'm getting hammered and he said fine and he puts out some patrols and he sort of clears out that seam there but um it was just a really lousy situation there's just huge amounts of inattention and a hamahama belief if we pretend if we all hold hands and pretend things are good they'll be good and that's a basic failure in command clausewitz says the first and really only task of the commander is to understand the nature of the conflict in which he was engaged i would argue that we didn't have that understanding on the ground in iraq until about december 2006 which is a long damn time to fight that's longer than we fought world war ii oh good courage from uc davis good evening sir i'm a ledezma from uc davis um i had a question you've talked a lot about the um army especially but the navy had a large number of uh co firings or committing offspring firings i wonder if you could talk about that because it did seem like quite a lot and that maybe if if there's a difference with the way the different forces are handling that situation um i have not followed the navy stuff as closely i mean i do see it and notice it right about in my blog but i haven't done a lot of work looking into it like i've been steeping myself in the situation with army generals for the last three and a half years in really the last 10 years first of all there is a very different naval tradition of command and relief but even that has changed somewhat i always like the fact that in world war ii two members of the joint chiefs have been court-martialed in their youth van de griff and king and i think halsey had as well hadn't he uh it was not a career ender you know you took you took the uh the the lick and kept on moving i generally think relief of commanders is a good thing there's another person you know if you really do care about your enlisted uh more than you care about your the happiness of your officer corps you will get rid of bad people this comes up in world war ii a lot with marshall when somebody comes and like some congressman complains constantly he's getting why why was so and so removed and he writes back again and again this is a democracy and the enlisted count for more in my mind than the officer corps i am not going to let soldiers get killed just to help some officers career along so i think the navy has lost a little bit of that but it's still got a good strong tradition of relief my one asterisk on it is all these reliefs seem to be in surface warfare except maybe recently the carrier the carrier guys and i do worry about this phrase you hear sometimes swoles eat their young and i do worry about a cultural problem with the navy with that time for one more question okay two more we're gonna get an army question here i can't see what so you mentioned you were hoping that the army would start you know bringing in this you know bring kind of firing of generals or other officers if necessary do you feel in general that the army is changing and adapting to the situation that they're facing in iraq or no it's a good question the answer a short answer is no i don't what happened after vietnam as the army had a magnificent rebuilding they really revised the force and how it was trained how it was equipped how it was prepared ethically to think about what it did the one thing they did not do and i blame william deputy for this they did not revise generalship they basically built this powerful new body and slapped a rotten old head on it and they did not revisit the failures of generalship involved in vietnam and really even to this day have not how could we do this differently their argument was we did great um but the media the politicians and the staff vietnamese all screwed screwed us up that is not the case there were a lot there was a lot of bad generalship in vietnam and so i think the army has never really dealt with that the army has adapted a lot in the last 10 years but it has not really changed how it thinks about generalship in fact if anything has gotten i think a bit worse because people are so worn out by constant tours the professional military education at the war college level i think has gotten kind of bad what you would hope is at that level guys would learn clinical thinking instead they're exhausted they come in and they really just all they want to do is kind of try to rehabilitate the marriage take care of the family catch their breath and get ready to go back out again so i've got some real real worries about that okay this is going to be the last question so it's going to be a good one good evening sir mitchum and second class array from uc berkeley uh sir it seems kind of counterintuitive when you were saying that um the americans failure to uh or our current failure to fire our general officers um would lead to a more conservative group of general officers less willing to take risks like my gut reaction was that firing more people would make people less likely to you know go against go against the grain and whatnot could you just elaborate on what you meant by that sure counterintuitive is berkeley talk for wrong you're actually you're right because the proper word is countered it does seem counterintuitive this is the situation when nobody gets fired there's no incentive to take risk if you could basically just get in and get out not cause any waves and if that's going to be just as good as the guy who who goes out and takes huge risk a lot of people are going to veer towards not taking risk uh i had long conversations with petraeus about this when i was writing the gamble and one of the themes he brought to his commander's meetings was take some freaking risk around here stick your head out and everybody has to do it together because otherwise all you get is one nail sticking up and you get defeated in detail you really need everybody to take risks together and that's what you got in the spring of 07 in iraq the so-called surge it really wasn't that many more troops but it was a really different attitude which is we're all going to go out there and we're going to get hit hard and the spring of 007 was the bloodiest phase of the war i remember i think it was may of 07. they lost 215 soldiers which is a lot in that war and especially at that that late in the war umber seeing petraeus and mayo seven he just looked drawn now of course it turns out he had cancer at the time as well but he didn't know that um he really just looked wiped out it was the only time the whole time i was wearing the gamble that he lost his temper with me and basically threw me out of his office and after i went to his schedule and i said look i kind of looked at the schedule and i said please do not schedule my one-hour interviews with petraeus between a one-hour vtc with the president and a one-hour vtc with admiral fallon this is just not a good time slot in his life and so they they didn't do it after that if there's no reward for taking risk people won't why would you so what you want to do is skew your incentive structure towards general risk taking prudential risk-taking not not wildly aggressive risk-taking i would actually say more of the type of patton patton was crazy in a lot of ways but he was not a crazy war fighter except at the end of the war when he did this goofy mission to rescue his son-in-law and got a battalion wiped out he understood his enemy and he took a lot of risk and he understood the enemy is almost always going to be as tired as you if you go the extra mile frequently that's the measure that wins you victory thank you very much

Channel: UC Berkeley Events

Views: 1,297,121

Rating: 4.7877469 out of 5

Keywords: uc, berkeley, ucberkeley, webcast.berkeley, cal

Id: AxZWxxZ2JGE

Length: 58min 49sec (3529 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/Orlando1701]

There’s also just more of them. I the Air Force during Korea there was one General officer for every 7,000 Airmen. Today that number is one for every 3,500.

[u/RedFireAlert]

I'm going to need at least some sort of summary before I dive into a one hour long video.

[u/pawnman99]

"It's long but I liked it" - Title of your sex tape