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Courage in the Service of VirtueThe Case of General Shinseki's Testimony before the Iraq War
Damon Coletta
U.S. Air Force Academy, damon.coletta{at}usafa.af.mil
Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee before Operation Iraqi Freedom that several hundred thousand American Army soldiers were needed to occupy Iraq following a successful completion of the war. In hindsight, after many postwar problems occurred during Army and Marine efforts to stabilize Iraq, General Shinseki's action has been almost universally praised as prescient and courageous. This article counters that, from a civil-military relations perspective, Shinseki's testimony was neither sufficiently accurate nor sufficiently respectful of civilian control to serve as a healthy model for future officers. The U.S. civil-military relationship framed by the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which preserved the power of individual service chiefs to provide independent testimony, is better served when high-ranking officers adopt a notion of courage in light of military authority delegated to regional combatant commands and in consideration of the political vulnerabilities of their civilian masters.
Key Words: civilian control • Iraq Crisis • Goldwater-Nichols • Joint Chiefs of Staff
References
- Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Press, 2006); Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006); James Fallows, Blind into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq (New York: Vintage Books, 2006).
- Military autonomy was crucial to the civil-military arrangement favored by Samuel Huntington in his classic description of "objective" civilian control. Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).
- Some voices on civil-military relations cited the outspoken retired generals of spring 2006 as problematic. Fewer have been willing to coldly analyze the sacrifice of Shinseki. Thomas Owens Mackubin, "Rumsfeld and His Critics: Did the Military Really Have a Better Understanding of Iraq?" The Weekly Standard, May 3, 2006, www.weeklystandard.com; Eliot Cohen, "Honor in Discretion: Conduct Unbecoming from Retired Generals," Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2006, www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008275; Armed Forces Journal, "Rummy and His Generals: An APJ Roundtable on the State of American Civil-Military Relations," June 2006, www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/06/1813589.
- "Even those [West Point cadets] who saw merit in the substance of the generals' outcry tore into them for speaking out publicly, fearful that their words could damage morale in Iraq and questioning why they weren't willing to put careers on the line." Craig Gordon, "The View from West Point: Questioning Rumsfeld," Long Island Newsday, April 30, 2006, 14.
- Peter Feaver, Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003 ), 6, 5862, 65-66.
- Some of the changes for the better are already apparent if one compares the performance of Shinseki in February 2003 with the similarly hard-nosed testimony of commanding general John Abizaid and Joint Chiefs chairman Peter Pace before the same Senate committee on August 3, 2006.
- In The Future of the Army Profession, Marybeth Peterson Ulrich of the Army War College encourages officers to develop military "professional judgment to recognize when the bounds of policy-making process have been breached beyond the limits of their roles in terms of offering advice" and when they have "begun to carry out behaviors that directly challenge the role of political leaders with the responsibility to make policy." Marybeth Peterson Ulrich, " Infusing Civil-Military Relations Norms in the Officer Corps," in The Future of the Army Profession, edited by D. Snider, G. Watkins, and L. Matthews (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 256.
- Francis Fukuyama, "Nation-Building 101," The Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2004, www.theatlantic.com/doc/200101/fukuyama; Ryan Henry, "Defense Transformation and the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review" Parameters 35, 4 (Winter 2005-2006): 5-15.
- Bill Owens with Ed Offley, Lifting the Fog of War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Andrew Krepinevich, " Cavalry to Computer: The Pattern of Military Revolutions," National Interest (Fall 1994): 30-42.
- Thomas Mahnken and James Fitzsimonds, "Revolutionary Ambivalence: Understanding Officer Attitudes toward Transformation," International Security 28, 2 (Fall 2003): 112-48.[CrossRef][Web of Science]
- Peter Feaver, Armed Servants; Richard Kohn, "Out of Control: The Crisis in Civil-Military Relations," The National Interest 35 (Spring 1994): 3-17.
- Deborah Avant, "Are the Reluctant Warriors Out of Control? Why the U.S. Military Is Averse to Responding to Post-Cold War Low-Level Threats," Security Studies 6, 2 (Winter 1996-1997): 5190.[Web of Science]
- Gordon Trowbridge, " Too Many Troops? Some Question the Notion that a Bigger Force Was Needed in Iraq," Army Times, May 1, 2006, 8.
- Vince Crawley, "Wolfowitz Tapped to Head World Bank: Deputy Defense Secretary Had Pivotal Role in Iraq War," Army Times, March 28, 2005, 36. Rumsfeld, for his part, stressed the high degree of uncertainty involved in the question posed to Shinseki but characterized "several hundred thousand" U.S. forces as "far from the mark." United States Department of Defense, " News Transcript: Secretary Rumsfeld Media Availability with Afghan President Karzai," February 27, 2003, www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/t02272003_t0227ap.html
- Vernon Loeb, " Rumsfeld Untracks Crusader," Washington Post, May 9, 2002, A01.
- Robert Novak, "The Army's Civil War," CNN: Inside Politics, March 13, 2003, www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/13/column.novak.opinion.army/
- Tommy Franks' version of war planning for both Afghanistan and Iraq is available through his memoir. Tommy Franks with Malcolm McConnell, American Soldier (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
- Thomas Ricks, " War Could Last Months Officers Say," Washington Post, March 27, 2003, A01.
- Michael O'Hanlon, "History Will Credit Shinseki," Japan Times, June 19, 2003, www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/ohanlon/20030618.htm
- "I made it a point to remind myself that I was first, last, and always a soldier." These words, which easily could have been repeated by CENTCOM four-star Tommy Franks on the other side of the issue, were attributed to Shinseki at a Kennedy School discussion on moral leadership. Jennifer Reingold, " Soldiering On," Fast Company 86 (September 2004): 72.
- "In a democracy, the military is not the one assigned to ensure that civilian politicians are not shirking"; Feaver, Armed Servants, 66.
- Philip Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro, Allies at War: America, Europe, and the Crisis over Iraq (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 148.
- Secretary Rumsfeld did resign after the 2006 midterm elections, but it is difficult to judge how successful the calls were from seven months earlier. As a matter of precedent, few presidents would be eager to accept direction on cabinet appointments from retired generals.
- Conrad Crane and Andrew Terril, Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, 2003), 33.
- Feil's testimony is available at www.foreign.senate.gov/testimony/2003/Feiltestimony030211.pdf
- The claim here is not that Shinseki's words actually encouraged Saddam's resistance. However, in a future crisis, this style of military advice could send a credible signal of faltering confidence on the U.S. side, especially for an adversary predisposed to doubt U.S. resolve, and there is evidence that Saddam's crisis behavior was influenced by his underestimation of U.S. determination. Kevin Woods, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray, "Saddam's Delusions: The View from the Inside," Foreign Affairs 85, 3 (May/June 2006 ): 2-26.
- Major Suzanne Nielsen, former instructor at West Point and contributor to Future of the Army Profession, hit on this point in an article published just before Shinseki's testimony, suggesting that high-ranking officers should reserve information that could help foreign or domestic political rivals. "[O]fficers at the most senior level face the challenge of remaining loyal to their executive branch superiors while also responding to Congress' constitutionally mandated right to exercise oversight. However, this communication should take place behind closed doors as much as possible. When officers attempt to serve as shapers of public opinion, they step out of the role of servant of society and into some other capacity." Suzanne Nielsen, "The Army Officer as Servant," Military Review 3, 1 (January/February 2003): 17.
This version was published on October
1, 2007
Armed Forces & Society, Vol. 34, No. 1,
109-121 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X07304191
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