Military Review English Edition July-August 2014 | Page 76

that you did not become a gambler against the odds.
You kept me informed. I once commanded an officer
who did not alert me to an initiative that eventually
failed. He explained that it was easier to seek forgiveness than to ask permission, so I did not counsel him
before I fired him. Commanders can only hope not to
be second-guessed by someone with hindsight, as my
boss often does.
You were a barely adequate commander when we
were in garrison and training for deployment. Then,
your mission was to build readiness, and your role was
to be a good coach, teacher, and mentor who would
grow the long-term abilities of your officers. Your
performance then was passable. Your talents and style
are better suited for combat, however, when you have
to execute decisively in the short term. Maybe other
commanders have been no more effective than you, but
leadership practices that work in combat do not always
work in garrison.
I have concerns about your integrity and character.
Your driving ambition to succeed as a commander has
beguiled you into rendering glowing reports in self-assessments, especially in subjective readiness reporting.
You may have been dishonest with yourself, if not
completely delusional. For instance, after your final
predeployment exercise, you reported your command
was ready for the range of military operations even
though some key personnel and equipment were not
yet on hand. If you had reported the quantifiable truth
that your command was only marginally combat ready,
you might have been replaced then for the deficiency,
and we would have been spared this situation now.
You are physically capable of commanding. In fact,
most of your command policies promote the physical
fitness that the Army seems to admire more than technical skills. When the Army has to reduce the force,
soon, it will probably start by cutting the overweight
people regardless of their professional credentials. You
are only marginally technically competent, but you are
at least physically fit. Maybe you preferred extreme exercising to the hard mental work it takes to be a better
officer and commander.
What is expected of a combat commander and by
what metrics is his performance evaluated? There is
very little about this war that can be sensibly quantified. We cannot define the terrain that we control
tactically, and the enemy body count is an irrelevant
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indicator of his combat power. We soldiers are here because we accept the risk inherent in a soldier’s job, but
neither you nor I brought our soldiers here to become
casualties. We protect our soldiers by the quality of our
training and leadership although we cannot protect
them from very, very bad luck. Since we can’t win the
war by hiding behind our compound walls and vehicle
armor, we have to expose our soldiers to greater risk
by taking the offensive. Our friendly casualty rate is
another unhelpful metric here, unless it indicates poor
training, inadequate equipment, or that the commander is having consistent and prolonged bad luck.
If only one of your subordinate units was failing,
I could blame its commander. When two or more
peer units are failing, however, I must look for their
common denominator at their higher headquarters.
Admittedly, you have been able to recover from your
tactical mistakes much better than the last commander
I relieved. He could not fix a bad development, which
eventually cost him the confidence of his troops, peers,
and me. Your setbacks have taught you some valuable
lessons, and pain is a much better teacher than uninterrupted success. To some extent, you have learned
and recovered from defeats. It may have been Marshal
Turenne who said, “Show me a general who has made
no mistakes and I will show you a general who has
seldom waged war.”3 When the political and military
authorities are in the same hand, wrote Field-Marshal
Montgomery, the failed generalissimo does not fear
dismissal.4 Because he was unaccountable to anyone,
Napoleon’s authority survived his defeat in Russia in
1812, and he went on to very nearly win at Waterloo in
1815. Our boss, however, remembers failure better than
comeback successes and holds us accountable for them.
You are energetic. Indeed, you are often