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THE CINDERELLA SERVICE

In fact, Washington “makes” very little. Yet there is one industry that Washington can claim as its own: the ideas industry.

—Peter W. Singer, Brookings Institution

America loves its Army, and Washington hates it. Some Americans in the heartland (west of the Blue Ridge and east of the Rockies) think of Washington as a scourge for blue-collar America, a place that receives from and never seems to give back to America’s working stiffs. That is the main reason why many in Washington hate the Army and so much of the heartland loves it: because the Army is America’s service, a blue-collar haven for the likes of Willie and Joe, the venerable Bill Mauldin cartoon characters who always seem to sit in water-filled foxholes waiting to be screwed by clueless bureaucrats, self-serving officers, and, on rare occasion, the enemy. In our modern wars, media images depict sailors, airmen, and Marines as eager volunteers who seek to join war-fighting elites. Soldiers, in contrast, have traditionally been depicted as the drafted poor who found themselves in foxholes due to bad draft numbers, a judge’s order, bad luck, or bad grades in high school. So it comes as no surprise that the hardworking heartland loves Willie and Joe. Virtually every poll taken since the end of the draft highlights the common man’s regard for our Soldiers.

Of course, anything popular to the heartland gets attention from politicians. I am continually amazed at the fecklessness of our congressional leaders in this regard. Too often in the green room at Fox News, I listen to the rants of senior solons who complain that generals are stupid, that they do not understand the inner workings of the “system,” that they too often give false or misleading testimony. Politicians say they are fed up with listening to visiting generals obsessed with PowerPoint slides. They are too often offended when bemedaled colonels and generals fail to worship the wisdom of slick congressional staffers, usually twenty-something “trust fund babies,” who lecture these combat veterans about the world of war as seen through the eyes of their own Georgetown University professors.

Another aspect of Army hatred is that it seems to emanate only from Capitol Hill. An amazing transformation occurs when a politician or administration official (and even some in the media) visits Soldiers in a combat zone. Around reelection time, all politicians will tell anyone who is interested how many trips they have made to the war zone. “What did you think of the troops you saw there?” is my usual question. “They’re incredible!” is the inevitable answer. “What discipline! What patriotism, what a great bunch of guys!” Occasionally I will remind them of their forgotten green-room rants: “Please square with me how such great guys, many with half a dozen years or more in the combat zone, suddenly get so stupid when they come to Washington?” No answer. Yet for some reason, as soon as these great Soldiers go from combat to Washington they become the Jed Clampetts of the Beltway cocktail circuit.

Why? It is complicated. But let’s start with popular perceptions of armies, perceptions that have sprung from historical events that begin with the very foundation of our country. Englishmen came to our shores in the seventeenth century to escape the depredations of Oliver Cromwell and his professional army, raging across England during its protracted civil war. Remember, pre-industrial armies were simply masses of dirty off-scourings of society, scum who Soldiered in predatory machines that needed to move to sustain themselves. While on the march armies took horses and crops and dragooned favorite sons into the ranks. It is this sixteenth-century precedent of a feckless, regicidal band of ravaging Soldiers and officers that today leaves the United Kingdom with a Royal Navy, Royal Marines, and a Royal Air Force but no Royal Army.

The English Civil War experience and the “Glorious Revolution” that followed gave our colonial ancestors an abiding distrust of standing, professional armies. Unfortunately, the colonies were dangerous places, threatened by as yet unbroken Indian tribes and the occasional face-off with the hated French, who occupied an empire beyond the northern and western colonial wildernesses. So our earliest citizens chose to defend their homes by assembling local militias from the citizenry. These pickup crews, like all militia, were terrible Soldiers, but they were usually better Soldiers than the Indians.

Perhaps we would never have become an independent nation had it not been for a badly behaving British Army that forcibly quartered its Soldiers in the homes of Boston’s prickly citizens. Hatred for a professional army increased yearly as the patriots’ propaganda amplified or made up stories about the horrors of lynching of citizens, burning of farms, and looting that accompanied the British Army from 1775 until the war ended at Yorktown in 1781.

The traditional distrust of a professional army extended itself to the colonial side during the Revolution. Washington’s Continentals (read “professionals”) won the war but suffered deadly neglect during the winters of 1777 and 1778, in places like Valley Forge and Morristown. Professionals saved the day and won the war at Yorktown (with massive help from French professionals). But over the centuries, history was rewritten by civilians who kept alive the myth of the minuteman who (like Cincinnatus) left his plowshare to take up his musket upon the approach of the British regulars. Minutemen were useful. Local armed citizens fought as bushwhackers and skirmishers, harassing the British lines of communications, and they occasionally reinforced Washington’s Continental regulars. The mythology of the militiaman, or the “citizen Soldier,” was larger than his contribution, and it would grow after the American Revolution.

The lingering animosity toward professional Soldiers, U.S. or British, was even written into the Constitution by our founding fathers, virtually all of whom served during the Revolution. Article 1, Section 8 of the document states that “the Congress shall have power to . . . raise and support Armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years.” The Navy is treated quite differently: Article 1, Section 8, clause 13 states simply that “the Congress shall have power to . . . provide and maintain a Navy.” The implications are clear. The founding fathers considered land forces temporary, to be raised principally in times of crisis with appropriations subject to termination every two years. Early congressmen, in contrast, considered the Navy to be the service that was to be “maintained.”

The myth of the minuteman grew during the American Civil War, a war fought by amateurs on both sides. The Confederate armies were formed from local community volunteers. Lincoln raised the Union army principally through a system of “volunteer” recruitment, in which leading civilian citizens, usually rich merchants, lawyers, or judges, would raise personal regiments and, after being elected to command by their Soldiers, lead them in battle. Within a few months, many of these untrained and undisciplined rabbles were dead—not of bullets but of disease caused mainly by amateur leaders who did not have a clue about sanitation or camp discipline. To be sure, most of the fighting generals on both sides were West Pointers. But the troops and junior officers they led suffered and died because they entered combat as raw civilians and were forced to learn to fight by fighting, the costliest way to professionalize an army. The price of amateurism was manifested mostly by wastage, something Lincoln called “the deadly arithmetic.” Poor tactical leadership and poor discipline in formations left most of those who remained with the colors dead on battlefields like Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness.

By the end of the war, both armies had become professional through the deadly Darwinian process of wartime self-selection and luck. Amateurism, not the enemy, killed almost three-quarters of a million men, about one in five of those recruited—more dead than in all subsequent American wars combined. Sadly, in U.S. military history, folklore too often trumps truth. Amateurism has cost many more American lives than virtually any other phenomenon. A uniquely American form of amateurism continued to prevail after the Civil War, from the Spanish American War to Vietnam.

The world wars, Korea, and Vietnam were fought with ground forces remarkably similar in composition and competence. While the technical services (the Navy, Air Force, and noncombat ground Soldiers) were manned by skilled volunteers, the infantry—the branch tasked with fighting the enemy up close—came from the dregs of society. As a rule, infantrymen were smaller and less fit than Soldiers in other branches and services. They were drawn from the lowest mental categories, as determined by newly developed military versions of IQ tests.

Thanks to Hollywood, we have a positive view of the “Greatest Generation,” that of the World War II years. Unfortunately, during the opening campaigns amateurism continued to kill U.S. infantry needlessly. The battles of Kasserine Pass in North Africa and Buna in the Pacific were bloody disasters. Later, on the beaches of Normandy, the 90th Division suffered more than 100 percent casualties among enlisted Soldiers and 150 percent among officers in six weeks of combat. Gen. William DePuy, who served as a regimental commander in the 90th, later recalled that his division was the greatest killer on the battlefield. Tragically, it was the Germans who did the killing.

The crushing ineptitude of American close-combat units was eventually overcome by two factors. First, small batches of “elite” infantry stiffened the line. From the moment Airborne and Ranger Soldiers touched enemy soil they became killing machines. The Germans referred to our Airborne infantry as “Devils in Baggy Pants.” Fronts occupied by Airborne regiments were routinely four or five times larger than those held by conventional infantry regiments. The Rangers’ incredible, hand-over-hand climbing assault up the cliffs of Pont du Hoc on the Normandy beachhead is legend. Every tourist who stands at the top of this cliff asks out loud, “How did they do it?” The answer is that Ranger and Airborne units were carefully selected from out of the usual rabble. Officers and Soldiers alike were all volunteers. These units were robust. Unlike in traditional close-combat units, the Army assigned extra Soldiers to each Airborne small unit. As Soldiers died or were evacuated, their buddies—well trained and deeply bonded with their comrades in a way well known to all “band of brothers” units—joined their brothers in the fight without the need for additional training or familiarization.

The second factor that made the Greatest Generation great was lengthy immersion in the harsh crucible of war. As in the Civil War, most Soldiers who joined infantry small units failed to stay on the line very long. In World War II, thanks to the germ theory of disease and vehicular evacuation, more diseased and wounded Soldiers made it to field hospitals and survived. But Lincoln’s arithmetic persisted. Soldiers rotated though foxholes continually until a few survived to become superb close-combat killers. By the end of the war, our infantry had learned to fight, by fighting. Those units that faced surrendering Germans and Japanese in 1945 were superb. However, returning Soldiers made it clear to the American people that their experiences had been horrific, that many of their leaders had been unprepared to lead, that many of their weapons had been inferior, and that battles such as Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the Huertgen Forest had been shameful slaughter pens.

Congress and the American people concluded from the stories of returning loved ones that their military had to find a less lethal way to fight its wars. Immediately after World War II, conventional wisdom inside the Pentagon was that nuclear weapons would make conventional ground warfare obsolete. As the Army and Marine Corps began their terrible slide toward combat ineffectiveness, the technical services began an aircraft-building program that would eventually consume almost 10 percent of the federal budget. Bombers were the answer for defending the American heartland. Even the expansion of the Red Army into Central Europe during the Cold War failed to convince true believers that nuclear deterrence alone was not enough, that the nation needed land forces to add depth and offer conventional strategic choices to our leaders.

Then the Army collapsed, for the first, but not the last, time after World War II. To be sure, all services, except for the strategic arm of the Air Force, suffered draconian reductions after this (like every) war. The Navy lost in its effort to build the first supercarrier. The Marines fought back efforts by senior Army leaders to fold Marine divisions into the Army and its air wings into the naval air arm. Yet, and in keeping with the Anglo-American tradition of neglecting regular Soldiers, Congress and the Truman administration effectively made its once proud and enormously competent Army into a constabulary force for occupying Germany and Japan.

As in virtually all wars in the American era, the Korean War started through miscalculation and misunderstanding, as well as the blatant aggression of the North Korean People’s Army. Our broken Army performed shamefully. Soldiers were out of shape and poorly trained. Equipment was worn or broken. U.S. antitank rockets would bounce off enemy armor. Not until the Korean armistice in 1953 did the Army return to being a competent fighting force. Then President Eisenhower’s postwar “New Look” strategy broke the Army again.

This shameful cycle of institutional death in peacetime and rebirth in combat repeated again after Vietnam. I lived through this era, and it was horrible. The post-Vietnam Army fought to maintain its existence in the midst of growing apathy, decay, and intolerance. Forty percent of Army personnel in Europe in the seventies confessed to drug use. A significant minority was hooked on heroin. Crime and desertion were rife; 12 percent of U.S. Soldiers in Europe were charged with serious offenses. Near-mutiny reigned in the barracks as gangs extorted and brutalized Soldiers. Barracks became battlegrounds between blacks and whites, and officers were frequently “fragged” by Soldiers seeking to kill their leaders. I recall vividly one night entering the barracks with a drawn pistol, expecting to be ambushed and assaulted by my own men.

A few who stayed in the ranks sought to overcome the shame of Vietnam by rebuilding the Army virtually from scratch. We vowed that “never again” would we be part of a broken Army. Sadly, the United States still failed to learn. In the late seventies we suffered through the “hollow Army” era, when President Jimmy Carter’s defense budget cuts left the Army with inadequately manned and trained combat units. This “hollow force” was humiliated in its failed attempt to rescue Americans held hostage by the Iranians in 1980.

President Reagan committed himself to rebuilding, reinforcing, and modernizing a broken and dispirited service. The Reagan years were the golden era for U.S. ground forces. The “Big Five” fighting systems gave the Army a truly dominant capability for the first time in its history. “AirLand Battle,” the Army’s new fighting doctrine, fully exploited the service’s newly modernized divisions. The Army constructed the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, as the first truly objective, force-on-force facility for sharpening the fighting abilities of battalions and brigades.

I remember the spirit and confidence of the Army of the late eighties. My Vietnam-era colleagues were enormously proud of what we had accomplished with the wealth donated to us by the U.S. taxpayer. The nation got its money’s worth in the burning sands of Kuwait and Iraq, as Norman Schwarzkopf ’s legions utterly destroyed Saddam Hussein’s army in less than four days of unrelenting ground combat in Desert Storm.

Then the Army broke again. Gurus in the technical services read from our Desert Storm victory that future wars would be won by technology alone, principally from the air. The popular theorists at the time concluded that air forces would be able to “give the gift of time,” holding off a future foe long enough for a mobilized National Guard and Army Reserve to destroy them. Future enemies would be “shocked and awed” into surrender by aerial systems that would “lift the fog of war” and win solely from the air. By 1999, both presidential candidates had concluded that the Desert Storm Army of sixteen divisions could be reduced exactly in half.

Then came 9/11. The United States had two totally unexpected land wars on its hands and too few Soldiers and Marines to fight them. To this day I will never understand how the Army and Marine Corps fought two wars in the most inhospitable and inhumane circumstances without breaking again. That they did not is a testimony to the fortitude of a generation of ground Soldiers, some of whom served as many as ten back-to-back deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. And yet it was not until America was four years into these wars that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld finally acquiesced to public pressure and allowed the recruitment of a hundred thousand more Soldiers to fight his wars. But by then, too many wars fought for too long by too few Soldiers had left a deep, hidden scar in the soul of the Cinderella service. We may never know the full consequences of this tragic neglect. I have seen and spoken to too many of our young men and women, a force that constitutes less than 1 percent of our nation, not to be repelled by the horrible miscalculation and institutional and political ignorance that have led us to such a shameful state.

Now the Army is breaking again, for the fifth time in my life. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter recently announced that the Army will not have enough money to train above the squad level until 2020. The Army’s new Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, has stated that, regretfully, the Army cannot afford any new systems for at least a decade. In fact, the Army has simply given up on modernizing its antiquated equipment. In the past four years the Army has cancelled 20 major programs, postponed 125, and restructured 124. Put in layman’s terms, the Army will not replace its Reagan-era tanks, infantry carriers, artillery, or aircraft for at least a generation. The number of regular Soldiers will decline from 520,000 to 420,000 in the next 4 years.¹

So, again, the service that sacrificed the most is rewarded the least. Why? Part of the problem is cost. The air and sea services consist of large machines manned by sailors and airmen. The ground forces consist of Soldiers and Marines who man machines. Manpower-intensive services do not appeal to politically connected big-machine makers. It is much quicker and easier for Congress to eliminate Soldiers than it is to cancel big-budget weapons. To many inside the Beltway, the Army represents the seedy side of military reform. After all, until very recently women were banned from joining the infantry. In spite of evidence to the contrary, Washington gurus still regard the Army as the lesser service, made up of losers who cannot get decent jobs in the civilian world. They consider Soldiers to be machine-age survivals in an information age, muscle-powered antiquarians in a techno-centric universe, men (mostly) who are too prone to die and, after fourteen years and two trillion dollars, are still unable to show success in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To be fair, the Army leadership must share in some of the blame for the Army’s fifth breakup in my lifetime. Since World War II, Army leaders have been reluctant to engage in the Beltway food fight for resources. They view themselves as representing “America’s Army,” a force of the people whom the people trust and support. This might have been true in 1945, but it is not now. More than 99 percent of the American people have never served, and many do not know the difference between an F-16 fighter and an M16 rifle. The tradition of avoiding resource fights in Washington too often leaves Soldiers last in priority. Sadly, some of the criticisms of politicians about the Army leadership ring true. For whatever reason, the Army does not do public relations very well. Listen and compare testimonies from the services; the Army seems at times to be intellectually outflanked. Too many congressional briefings are killer exercises in “death by PowerPoint.” When on camera, too many senior Soldiers come across as wooden and humorless. Their speech is heavy with acronyms and Soldier jargon. The Air Force takes congressmen and the media on thrilling fighter rides, and the Navy lands them on aircraft carriers; the Army gives them briefings at Fort Hood.

Next time you see a news video of Americans in action on television, listen to the anchor call them “Marines” although, as those of us who know can tell from their uniforms, they are Soldiers. Even my own network, Fox News, occasionally and inadvertently makes this same mistake.

In strategy as in science, nature abhors a vacuum. Someone always comes along to fill it. Vacuums in warfare are usually filled by people who seek to do harm. We are again creating a global vacuum. Our Soldiers are being given pink slips, and many of the best and brightest are voting with their feet. As our Soldiers disappear, really bad actors like ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Iranian Quds force, and many other Islamic extremists are filling the vacuum. Eventually, “ground truth” will force America to rebuild a ground force to take them on. It will take time, of course, to fix the Cinderella service, and, sadly, the handsome prince holding a glass slipper is nowhere in sight. Soldiers will die needlessly, and when that happens, Washington defense insiders will look for someone to else to blame. “I told you so”s will not count any more. After three hundred years of sordid history, we know who the culprits really are.