The General Choice - Shinseki returns.

National Review Online ^ | December 08, 2008 | Mackubin Thomas Owens

[neverdem]

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December 08, 2008, 0:00 a.m.

The General Choice
Shinseki returns.

By Mackubin Thomas Owens

The report that President-Elect Barack Obama will name retired Army general and former Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki as secretary of veterans affairs has led to the recycling of a popular falsehood — that, in the words of the New York Times, General Shinseki had been “vilified by the Bush administration on the eve of the Iraq war for his warning that far more troops would be needed than the Pentagon had committed.”

In fact, Shinseki’s February 2003 statement before Congress suggesting that “several hundred thousand” troops might be necessary in postwar Iraq was far from the example of prescience that Bush’s critics have claimed. As my Naval War College colleague John Garofano wrote in an article for the spring 2008 issue of Orbis, “no extensive analysis has surfaced as supporting Shinseki’s figures, which were dragged out of him by Senator Carl Levin only after repeated questioning.”

Shinseki’s claim was based on a “straight-line extrapolation from very different environments” — an analysis by the Army’s Center for Military History that based its figure of 470,000 troops for Iraq on the service’s experience in Bosnia and Kosovo. But as Tom Ricks pointed out in an article for the Washington Post, this effort was criticized as naïve, unrealistic, and “like a war college exercise” rather than serious planning.

 

The best that can be claimed on Shinseki’s behalf is that he was right for the wrong reasons. His claim that more troops would be needed in Iraq was based on his incorrect assumption that humanitarian operations rather than counterinsurgency would be the main driver of U.S. force requirements.

 

But misleading claims about Shinseki do not stop there. On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Tom Brokaw identified Shinseki as “the man who lost his job in the Bush administration because he said we [would] need more troops in Iraq than Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld thought . . . at that time.” But this oft-made charge is simply false. Service chiefs are appointed for a maximum of two two-year terms. It is true that Rumsfeld named Shinseki’s successor a year before the end of his second term, but Shinseki finished that term before leaving — he served for the entire time permitted by law. Shinseki was never “forced into early retirement.”

 

The fact that most politicians have accepted the need for a larger Army and Marine Corps seems to vindicate Shinseki’s broader — and correct — warning about the danger of trying to implement a “12 division strategy” with a “10 division army.” But numbers aside, the Army’s experience in Iraq indicate a more serious failing of that service’s leadership — including Gen. Shinseki: a failure of vision.

 

In a blistering critique of U.S. Army leadership in the April 2007 issue of Armed Forces Journal, Army Lt. Col. Paul Yingling wrote:

For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq’s grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war.

These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America’s general officer corps. America’s generals have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq. First, throughout the 1990s our generals failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly. Second, America’s generals failed to estimate correctly both the means and the ways necessary to achieve the aims of policy prior to beginning the war in Iraq. Finally, America’s generals did not provide Congress and the public with an accurate assessment of the conflict in Iraq.

The fact is that Gen. Shinseki failed to prepare his service for the kind of war that emerged in Iraq in 2003: an insurgency. The “surge” implemented in 2007 by Gen. David Petraeus was successful not only because of an increase troop strength. It was successful because of the application of a new counterinsurgency doctrine that Gen. Shinseki and most other Army generals had rejected. As Garofano observes, the situation in Iraq “comes down, as it did in Vietnam, to analysis, getting it right, and providing clear alternatives that address or confront policy goals.” In the final instance, this Shinseki failed to do.

— Mackubin Thomas Owens is a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He served 30 years in the Marine Corps and Marine Corps Reserve, including service in Vietnam as an infantry platoon commander in 1968-69. He is the editor of Orbis.

[Chet 99]

Forget the Iraq War for a moment... Is there anything in his background to suggest he’s qualified to cleanup the mess at the VA?

[Bahbah]

Is there anything in his background to suggest he’s qualified to cleanup the mess at the VA?

That is really the important question, given the situation. It appears he was not imaginative previously. I thinks this may be payoff for being one who helped with the story line that the media and the dems wanted to push, and that is not a good indicator.

[OCC]

His comments have been blown out of proportion, even he admits that.

Gen Shinseki * No Right Answer On Iraq *

[ilgipper]

These lies of the left/MSM have become ‘fact’ just like the lie that Scooter Libby leaked a CIA operative’s name. He did not. Now, we see how easy it is for history to be revised. We have seem lies become fact before our very eyes in these past few years...and no one in a position of authority ever came to the defense of the truth.

As far as this General, the truth is that he was wrong about needing 400,000+ troops. We beat back the worst of the insurgency with well less than half of his proposed troop levels.

[OCC]

He said “several” hundred thousand troops. I guess it depends on what you mean by “several”. We did not have the luxury of deploying 400,000 troops in 2003 like we did in 1990, let alone keeping them in place for over 12 months.

[neverdem]

http://www.fpri.org/orbis/

That's a link to Orbis.

[JCG]

Shinseki's a joke. His greatest accomplishment was to put our soldiers in black (Frog) berets. As far as necessary troop strength in Iraq is concerned, he was just as wrong on the high side as Rumsfeld was on the low side.

As Army Chief of Staff, General Shinseki testified to the U.S.
Senate Armed Services committee that "something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would probably be required for postwar Iraq.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Shinseki

"Several hundred thousand" my arse. Peak strength has been 168,000. Why does this joker get a pass?

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Send treats to the troops...
Great because you did it!
www.AnySoldier.com

[centurion316]

As Mackubin Thomas Owens knows quite well, the United States was not defeated by an insurgency in Vietnam. The United States Army and Marine Corps had soundly defeated the insurgency and were doing quite well with the conventional North Vietnamese Army. They were, by their own accounts on the brink of defeat when our politicians decided to turn everything over to them.

South Vietnam fell to a conventional attack led by armored and mechanized forces in much the same way that the Allied defeated Germany. The U.S. sat on the sidelines and did nothing.

No doubt, both the Army and Marine Corps neglected counterinsurgency warfare during the intervening years when we focused on the defeat of the Russian Bear. But, what both services did was to train their soliders and Marines to a standard that had never been seen on these shores. They were tough, well prepared, and well equipped. They were quite capable to adapting to a different enemy and did it well.

Where we fell short in Iraq was in political will, political clarity on objectives, and political support for the task at hand. Once Peteraus was able to overcome these political obstacles, our great soldiers and Marines were able to do what we pay them to do - defeat the enemy.

We have won in Iraq. We will also win in Afghanistan, unless the politicians surrender as they did in 1973-1975.

[Carley]

Brokaw lied??????? Who’d a thunk it!!!!

[BamaDi]

No

[OCC]

BTW.. Carl Levin is a troll. Shinseki's comments sound like Obamas.. trying to take both sides without committing to either.

Gen. Eric Shinseki from 02.25.03

[dsc]

“Is there anything in his background to suggest he’s qualified to cleanup the mess at the VA?”

Maybe he’ll give all the vets black berets.

Made in China, of course.

[OL Hickory]

I will try to think outside the box...(Just for a moment)

168,000 troops + 5 years service = somewhat control over insurgency

wouldn’t 400,000 troops accomplished the same thing only sooner?

And yes...black berets (stolen from the U.S. Rangers) massed produced in china WAS, and still is a bad idea

[Chet 99]

I would have preferred that a career military doctor had been picked, or someone similarly situated.

Cheap political payoff? That’s what ambassador positions are for...

[Bahbah]

would have preferred that a career military doctor had been picked

That would have made too much sense.

[dsc]

“wouldn’t 400,000 troops accomplished the same thing only sooner?”

You don’t have to be Patton to figure that out. But why send 400k when 168k is plenty?

[OL Hickory]

get in,get done,get out...

I went to Iraq in 2004-4005
6 months training + 1 year in Iraq
18 months total away from family,home,job etc.

Way too long...Then 12 months later..
Guess who got ASKED to VOLUNTEER for another tour?
(I didn’t go, enough people had already signed up )

[Fee]

I think we have too many arm chair generals to make such a comment. Rule one in war, it is better to have it and not need it then need it and not have it. If you ever served in the military, you will learn that very quickly. Yes Shinseki assumed humanitarian over insurgency for the 400,000 troops needed, but the US forces are flexible enough to go from humanitarian ops to combat ops because there are boots on the ground to hold the ground. Rumsfeld did not expect an insurgency either because he thought the Iraqis would see us as liberators and will immediately cooperate with us. He went in with less troops and when the insurgency broke out, he had no boots on the ground to cover everything. The only thing that saved our butts is AQ decided to act like the Japanese Imperial Army instead of peoples insurgency. The insurgents had many advantages over the US in terms of knowledge of local terrain, can speak the local language, common cultural affinity while the US is the foreignor, but luckily for the US, AQ wiped out all these advantages with their neanderthal cruelty. BTW I do agree with you on the damn berets. Shinseki is a globalist and he wanted the US to be more like the world then being distinct.

[ga medic]

I disagree. This guy made some mistakes, and possibly his troop strength comment was one of them. (I don’t really know if it would have been better with a much larger initial force because it never happened) I am sure that he honestly believed the numbers he recommended, and he did not supply them willingly.

Calling him a joker and treating an American general with such disrespect is wrong. You may not agree with him, but he is a 4-star general that has served his country admirably, beginning with his combat in Vietnam. His honors:

Defense Distinguished Service Medal (with Oak Leaf Cluster)
Army Distinguished Service Medal (with Oak Leaf Cluster)
Navy Distinguished Service Medal
Air Force Distinguished Service Medal
Coast Guard Distinguished Service Medal
Legion of Merit (with Oak Leaf Cluster)
Bronze Star with “V” Device (with two Oak Leaf Clusters)
Purple Heart (with Oak Leaf Cluster)
Meritorious Service Medal (with two Oak Leaf Clusters)
Air Medal
Army Commendation Medal (with Oak Leaf Cluster)
Army Achievement Medal
Parachutist Badge
Ranger Tab
Office of the Secretary of Defense Identification Badge
Joint Chiefs of Staff Identification Badge
Army Staff Identification Badge

I truly can’t believe how many here are perfectly willing to disrespect anyone who doesn’t agree with their political world view, without any regard for other factors. Our military men and women fight for our freedom to express whatever our opinions may be, without fear of legal persecution. That includes what we post here at FR. We owe them the respect to allow them their own opinions as well.