Abstract
GENERALS PREPARE TO FIGHT THE LAST WAR, the saying goes, especially if that war was a victory. The proverbial case study on this is the way the military trained and structured itself after World War II, with an emphasis on Europe, big weapons systems, and mass mobilization. Instead, the army founded itself in the strange and confusing war in Vietnam starting in the late 1950s and lasting until the early 1970s. If the proverb was true, the United States would have learned its counterinsurgency lessons from Vietnam and applied them effectively in Afghanistan and Iraq.
If leadership depends purely on seniority you are defeated before you start. You give a good leader very little and he will succeed; you give mediocrity a great deal and they will fail.
—George C. Marshall, 1941, to the Truman Committee1
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Notes
Testimony of Gen. George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff, United States Army, Hearings before a Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program, United States Senate, Seventy-Seventh Congress (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office 311932, April 15–25, 1941), http://www.marshallfoundation.org/MarshallonLeadership.htm (accessed on March 13, 2012).
Mark Moyar, A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq (New Have, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 15–16.
James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 223.
John F. Kennedy, “Remarks at West Point to the Graduating Class of the U.S. Military Academy, June 6, 1962,” in The American Presidency Project, edited by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=8695 (accessed July 19, 2012).
These figures come from Fred Kaplan, “Challenging the Generals,” New York Times (August 26, 2007).
Thomas A. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 40.
Alyssa Fetini, “Obama’s White House: Secretary of Veterans Affirs: Eric Shinseki,” Time (December 2, 2008), http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1863062_1863058_1865215,00.html (accessed July 19, 2012).
Department of the Army, Pamphlet 600–3, Commissioned Officer Professional Development and Career Management (Washington, DC: US Army, February 2010), 36–37.
Fred Kaplan, “Annual General Meeting:Finally, the Army Is Promoting the Right Officers,” Slate (August 4, 2008), http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2008/08/annual_general_meeting.html (accessed July 19, 2012).
Andrew Tilghman, “The Army’s Other Crisis: Why the Best and Brightest Young Officers Are Leaving.” Washington Monthly (December 2007), http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2007/0712.tilghman.html (accessed July 19, 2012).
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© 2012 Tim Kane
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Kane, T. (2012). Winning Battles, Losing Wars. In: Bleeding Talent. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-51129-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-51129-4_7
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