America’s flag and general officers (FOGOs) are superb tacticians and technicians, but they are poor strategists and practitioners of the operational art. Iran was a good example. It was clearly President Trump’s intent to use the war as a means to encourage the restive Iranian people to overthrow the regime. Instead of using a mix of information warfare and intimidation of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps — the real power brokers in Iran — our FOGOs chose to treat the whole thing as a targeting exercise concentrating mainly on pure military targets. The Israelis took out leadership individuals, but the real power was in the ability of IRGC units to disperse to their homes and only come out in force to suppress the large gatherings of dissidents intent on storming government buildings as happened in the 1979 revolution.
We need our military to do better than we did in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran.
We should have gone after the IRGC, which is the real center of gravity of the regime. Using a combination of drone-delivered leaflets and radio broadcasts, we could have called for the people to occupy government buildings in key cities such as Tehran, Qom, and Bandar Arras. When IGRC units came out of hiding to disperse the crowds, drone-delivered precision-guided munitions could have targeted them, giving the revolutionaries confidence. This would have taken imagination and initiative that the U.S. military no longer shows. This is not post-war armchair hindsight. I suggested it in this publication shortly after the war began. (READ MORE: What Next After the Bombing Stops?)
As it turns out, the IRGC’s power has been increased by the war. It is reportedly building new bases in Iraq already, and they will use the billions that they gained in the peace agreement to restore their influence with Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen. We are admittedly poor at managing regime change in foreign countries, but we did not really care what happened as long as the IRGC was eliminated as a factor. The best case would be a democratic government; the worst would be a civil war. In any case, the Iranians would not be causing trouble in the region for a long time. Now, we have given the IRGC a new lease on life.
Iran is not the only situation where our FOGOs have failed us. Afghanistan is another example. When it became obvious that the Biden administration was going to leave Afghanistan, the obvious evacuation location was Bagram Air Base. It was defensible and not in a location where crowds of panicked Afghans or the Taliban could interfere with the evacuation. Instead, the generals meekly abdicated their military and moral responsibility to the State Department’s insistence that the indefensible Karzai International Airport be the point of embarkation. Located in downtown Kabul and surrounded by hills dominated by the Taliban, the Karzai location put the evacuation in much the same position that the French faced at Dien Bien Phu in Viet Nam. We were fortunate that the Taliban did not choose to turn the evacuation into a massacre. Instead, it was merely a humiliating rout.
Even when they think they are innovating, the FOGOs get it wrong. The Marine Corps’ senior leadership mistook modernization with innovation when they made the disastrous decision to adopt a Force Design strategy and tried to transform the Corps into a China-centric missile force. In doing so, the Corps’ leadership abandoned its traditional worldwide general force-in-readiness posture. Unfortunately, the short-range, subsonic NEMSIS anti-ship missile system they selected has been rendered obsolete by longer-range hypersonic missiles being procured by the other services as the “transformational” way of the future. To afford the NEMSIS and its associated radars, the Corps divested itself of much of the combat power it would need to contribute to a large-scale regional conflict.
How did our FOGOs go so wrong?
I believe it is a combination of misguided professional education and careerism that leads to a lack of moral courage. Instead of teaching and evaluating real warfighting skills, our officer promotion system discourages risk-taking and original thinking. To become a FOGO, one needs to follow a carefully choreographed routine of command, joint staff, and educational experience which emphasizes going along to get along. Original thinking and nonconformity are discouraged as “rocking the boat.”
Professional military education from the level of major to colonel emphasizes liberal arts rather than a serious study of military history and art. Nowhere is there a challenge to think outside the box and make hard military and moral choices. Our FOGOs generally lack the ability to think outside the box. But when one occasionally gets a really stupid idea, there is not a mechanism to seriously critique it. This is what happened with the Marines who actively suppressed any free discussion of the merits of the disastrous idea of Force Design among active duty personnel.
Somewhere along the line, we need to seriously challenge aspiring flag-level officers both strategically and morally to separate the wheat from the chaff. At the war college level, students should be placed through a series of tough wargaming problems against thinking adversaries that pose challenging military and moral problems. Win or lose, they should be required to justify their decisions to a panel of senior officers. The final exam should be a virtually unsolvable problem that requires both hard decisions and imagination on both a military and moral basis.
In the science fiction Star Trek series, the final exam for students is a problem called the Kobayashi Maru, an apparently “no-win” problem under time-constrained situations. Students who could not or would not make hard decisions and could not justify their decisions failed. The manner in which war college students respond to this kind of pressure would not necessarily exclude them from flag rank, but it would be a way of separating the George Pattons from the George Armstrong Custers and the Admiral Halseys from the Admiral Ghormleys.
We need our military to do better than we did in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. Admittedly, we had flashes of brilliance such as David Petraeus and Jim Mattis, but the depressing progression of careerist military FOGO time servers is too often the case. There has to be a better way of creating competent military leaders in the future.
READ MORE from Gary Anderson:
The Washington Post Occasionally Gets It Right
Gary Anderson retired as Chief of Staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. He served as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and is the author of Beyond Mahan, a Proposed Naval Strategy for the 21st Century.
