Obama must replace JCS mechanics into engineers, as did JFK

[danielet]

How President-elect Obama gets along with the Pentagon brass, it seems to me, depends on whether his generals will be strategic innovators or tactical tuner-uppers.



One recalls JFK's reverberating vibes with SecDef McNamara-- the former on ideological grounds (en grand) and the latter empirically (en particles)-- both considering the brass "stars" to be "morons" who operated by only two principles: a)" never again" on foot and b) "the bigger the better" (all the way to the Big Bang). LBJ, we now know, considered the JCS to be a Barry Goldwater retinue. He was sure that his JSC's goal was to start a nuclear war with China. He thus hobbled the JCS, in the words of one of its members, "as if a one legged man in an ass-kicking contest" vis-a-vis the Soviet proxy, Hanoi. I recall LBJ's obsession that it was his job in the Vietnam War was to keep the JCS from achieving what he erroneously assumed to be its goal: to spread the Vietnam War to China, even though most in the Pentagon saw Hanoi as a finger on Moscow's hand. Until 1967 McNamara felt so of one mind with LBJ that he could be a hawk with his beak pecking at the Ho Chi Minh Trail while a dove with his talons, squeezing the generals into a hopeless tactical war that gave the NVA the initiative with US forces operating at the end instead of at the beginning of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.



While JFK retired the mechanics of the Never Again Club, LBJ forced their engineer replacements into useless half-measures of which they disapproved but remained mute in their "dereliction of duty," not protesting politically-oriented considerations that the public would never have approved as limits on war fighting. I know for sure that, contrary to what LBJ's dovish civilian advisers claim, LBJ correctly read McCarthy's 1968 results in the New Hampshire primary as a public statement: if you're not going to go all out for victory, then let's get the hell out!



GW Bush entered the White House determined to end what the WashPost's brilliant military analyst, Dana Priest, called in her THE MISSION, "mission creep," struggling with a "pissy" peacekeeping mission in the Balkans. Yet to cover the airlines' and his dereliction of duty that made 9/11 possible, he succumbed to a "dead or alive" hunt for binLaden from the air and with CIA operatives on the ground, only to abandon that task for Rumsfeld's "regime change" preemption in Iraq. On thinks of Eisenhower's personal promise to his JCS, all obsessed with Korea's bad ending, to use black-ops as our action arm in the Cold War while the Pentagon tooled up to play the nuclear MAD game with the Soviets. After Sputnik, Ike started and JFK implemented the transition of the JCS from a bunch of cigar chomping mechanics, eager to try out their nuclear hot rods on the NATO drag strip, to a sophisticated crew of engineers, developing a deterrent strategic mechanism credible to the Soviets. But the physical engineers in the Pentagon were soon joined by COIN social engineers, under JFK, to make the Pentagon seem academic. I found it odd to be introduced to Pentagon stars by their PhD credentials instead of by their military rank. I came to learn that Red Wars of National Liberations were opposed by desk-combatants rising through the ranks rather than battle hardened soldiers.



Today we are still deep in "Rumsfeld's War" in Iraq-- one that, I would argue based on my research-- he sought to use as the war horse he rides to the presidency in 2004. For Rummy, Afghanistan was a mere sparkler; only Iraq would be the cherry bomb he needed to gain public attention so he could be a hero in presidential contention. Rummy, Cheney and the neocons felt sure that, like his father, GW would be a one-termer-- but in GW's case, they assumed he would have petered out voluntarily by 2004. Alas for Rummy, Iraq proved to be not one cockroach to stomp on but innumerable ones for which he never had enough boots on the ground to do the stomping.



For Bush-- who initially nixed a war in Iraq while still at war in Afghanistan-- 9/11 became a political sign that he, unlike his dad, was deemed by fate to run for a second term and win. How political, rather than military, Iraq had become for Bush was made clear by Linda Robinson's book TELL ME HOW IT ENDS. Quoting the then CIA Middle East Division Chief, Rob Richer, probably the Bush Administration's most "kiss-and-tell" blabber who fed the substance of many a book, at a Nov. 11, 2003 NSC meeting to discuss the Baghdad Station's AARDWOLF cable on the growingly dangerous insurgency, Rumsfeld went ballistic insisting that no insurgency existed and a miffed GW Bush commanded: "I don't want to see anyone commenting to the press about insurgency. We have an election to win." Considering then SecTreasury O'Neill's characterization of Bush otherwise "disengaged" at NSC meetings on Iraq, one can appreciate Richer's bitter statement: "We finally got an NSC session to talk about the insurgency and instead it was all about spin."



To insure his domination of the Iraq War, Rumsfeld put in charge of it a "mechanic" with a mail order "management" Bachelor degree. But in the jaws of Vietnam-like defeat, Bush removed Rumsfeld and put a COIN scholar with a social science PhD from Princeton in command of Iraq. Dr.-Gen. Petraeus, reporting to Congress, dutifully read out-- with academic caveats of his own-- White House spin on Iraq. But, the tactical achievements of his surge-- whatever its strategic ambiguities-- showed the able touch of engineers rather than mechanics.



The question now is whether Obama will bend to the scholar-soldier's will or will use Petraeus's social engineering skills to his own ends. Will Petraeus "academize" Obama into submission to endless war? It remains to be seen; but since Obama has made clear his desire to get us the hell out-- much as Bush in the beginning was determined to get us the hell out of the Balkans-- one would hope that Obama reads Spencer Ackerman’s article in THE COLORADO INDEPENDENT (11/14/08) on how to avoid being bamboozled by CENTCOM, quoting Peter Feaver's apt advice: "Don't substitute military judgment for strategic judgment."



Also, hopefully Col. McMasters, author of DERELICTION OF DUTY, will break his dereliction of duty in silence, bringing together the very social and physical engineer colonels-- from the famous " Pentagon Tank Meeting" with Bush and Cheney that made the case for an exit strategy in vain-- to make the incoming NSC more deliberative rather than drunk on Pentagon spin. For it is at that level that the neocon-dominated "Mr. Good Wrench" military mechanics sold Bush on the neocon call for a "World War IV" crusade against Islam. Working with Gates, Obama can bring forth the combat field experienced and intellectually gifted colonel engineers, promoting them so that Petraeus can be surrounded by men of like intellect. Only then can Obama succeed in finding common ground with the Joint Chiefs. But if Obama sticks to the mechanics, he has no case to make blaming the Pentagon for his failure to gather the light of engineers rather than curse the darkness of mechanics.