This week, the U.S. Army celebrates its 226th birthday. And while it’s an institution that’s served our country well, it’s sure showing its age.
Like most organizations that have grown long in the tooth, the Army has become a massive, top-heavy bureaucracy that’s thin on fighters and heavy on memo-writers and brass. Chances are it no longer has the right stuff to storm the beaches like Col. Jim Van Fleet’s regiment did at Normandy or smash a powerful Chinese Red foe the way Col. Paul Freeman’s regiment did at Chipyong-ni.
Feats like those are the Army’s reason for being – defending America – and we can’t afford to take chances with our national security and risk our warriors’ lives in the interests of social experiments that run against the grain of soldiering.
Instead of protecting us in the 21st century by maintaining the high and hard kill-or-be-killed standards key to surviving the Normandys and Chipyong-nis, the U.S. Army has become a flabby, politically correct corporation that no longer has the kind of senior leadership the Van Fleets and Freemans provided.
For the past 50 years, I’ve watched the Army slowly disintegrate. It’s gone from an Army where sergeants were sergeants and captains were captains and where no one above them would dare do their jobs, to generals micromanaging squads and companies – and where trust in any rank above major seldom exists. Unless, that is, a soldier is fortunate enough to be in a Ranger battalion or in a unit with a CO who’s somehow escaped the corporate mentality that’s been strangling our Army since it started copying Big Business’ management techniques.
Back in the Van Fleet-Freeman Army, commanders didn’t flit into command, punch their corporate card and flit out. They stayed with their soldiers year after year, gaining their trust by their own example – and along the way they learned how to fight and lead.
Recently retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, who’s now busy bad-mouthing the Pentagon for his screwing up the Serbian War, is one of the new corporate-general types. Clark, with a total of seven years with troops out of 33 years of service, spent the other 26 years punching his corporate ticket in “career essential assignments” such as getting a graduate degree, serving in the White House, being a general’s aide and doing time on high staffs. All were critical punches for him if he wanted to wear stars in our modern Army.
Freeman and Van Fleet didn’t go to Harvard Business School, nor did they have graduate degrees from fancy universities. But they had degrees in their soldiering trade earned at the University of Hard Knocks, where they learned to lead troops well and win battles by doing.
The corporate copycatting and ticket-punching started during the Korean War; by the time we got into Vietnam, it had so accelerated that few at the top understood that guerrilla war. Battalion and brigade COs were rotated out every six months, and the average company CO’s time with troops was three months. Officers were too busy playing musical chairs, advancing their careers, to learn their trade, and the grunts quickly – and survival-smartly – lost all trust for their officer leadership.
The lion’s share of our Army’s serving generals’ resumes are frighteningly similar to Clark’s. Few have a clue about what’s going down with the troops. Most are a reflection of their gurus. A corporate general mentors a bright captain – who reminds him of himself way back when – and guides his career, then the captain eventually becomes a general – an exact clone of his mentor – and the institutionalized sickness is passed on.
Five years ago, I told the Army Chief of Staff that hundreds of disheartened sergeants and captains were telling me they were quitting because the Army had lost its way. He said I was wrong: “My staff assures me that Army attrition is well below average.”
The general was into big-time denial. Tens of thousands of our best and brightest have since quit, and the hemorrhage continues.
The black beret that our soldiers will slap on their heads this week as “An Army of One” birthday present won’t fix the problem. Only leadership can do that. Sadly, I see few serving generals made of the same stuff as Freeman or Van Fleet.
