North Star Writers Group

The brown stuff is sure to fly over publication in the Armed Forces Journal of a scathing assault by a mid-level officer on the nation’s top military brass.

Lt. Col. Paul Yingling trains his experiential and observational firepower on the nation’s generals and draws blood at the very least. He finds them in dereliction of their military and moral duty in how they waged war in Iraq. The colonel says the generals were not prepared for the Iraq counterinsurgency despite the experience of Vietnam. With only one notable exception (retired Gen. Eric Shinseki, who lost his job as a result of his candor), the generals failed to inform Congress or the American people of the true size of the military force that would have been needed to succeed in Iraq. According to the colonel, the U.S. generals fail repeatedly in leadership, in creative thinking, and in the advanced education (including foreign language skills) that would help them to imagine, prepare for, execute and be successful in the current war or in future combat.

Those who are not military experts will defer to others more knowledgeable as to whether Lt. Col. Yingling’s complete range of criticisms are justified when applied to the military. But the current bloody chaos in Iraq strongly suggests that he is right on target.

Lt. Col. Yingling does not spare the generals’ civilian leadership, either. He castigates Congress for lax oversight of the Pentagon and even takes a stab at President Bush. “The greatest error the statesman can make is to commit his nation to a great conflict without mobilizing popular passions to a level commensurate with the stakes of the conflict.”

The greatest error? Perhaps it is the statesman’s greatest tactical error. The statesman’s greatest strategic error, however, is launching an unjustifiable war in the first place, using manipulated intelligence, half-truths and outright lies as a cover. That calamitous strategy failure is precisely the crumbling foundation for the debacle in Iraq. All the concomitant breakdowns in planning, preparation, execution and oversight certainly contributed to the mess, but the real heart of the problem remains the actual decision to fabricate an ever-changing litany of rationales for an unfounded, unjustified invasion.

By speaking out at great professional and personal risk – obviously in the hope of pressuring for improvement – Lt. Col. Yingling unfortunately perpetuates yet another Vietnam-era myth, that the United States could have won that conflict “if only” the military had somehow executed better, or had gone nuclear, or [insert preferred explanation]. Adolf Hitler devised the “stabbed in the back” legend to explain why the German military lost World War I. The myth wasn’t true in Hitler’s day. It didn’t explain the failure in Vietnam and it doesn’t apply to Iraq today.

Instead, history is a silent, unerring testament to the fallacy of the myth of the military betrayed. No armed force, no military power on Earth has ever been able to withstand opposition from a committed and armed resistance fighting on its home turf. The very notion of sowing democracy with a sword instead of a plowshare is a flawed and arrogant overestimation of just exactly what any nation, however mighty, can accomplish using military means. In the long run, people’s inherent free will always trumps force.

Lt. Col. Yingling cites the Iraq debacle as a warning. If the generals do not finally adapt to fight homegrown insurgencies, the nation will lose what he terms the “Long War,” presumably the U.S. military’s term for the “war on terror” we hear about endlessly on a daily basis.

Not quite, Colonel. If the nation and the country persist in militarizing a situation that, in reality, calls for diplomacy and close international police coordination, the entire world will lose any hope of a long peace.

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