MILITARY REACTION TO LTC YINGLING

I posted about Yingling's stinging criticism of the Iraq War here and there's an article in the WSJ about how the military is reacting to it. Note that Petraeus' counter-insurgency doctrine calls for a minimum of 20 soldiers per 1,000 people. The CIA estimates that the population of Iraq is 27,499,638, so that means we would need 549,993 troops in Iraq.

UPDATE: For some reactions to WSJ article by military folks, go here.

NARRATIVE DISCORD
Critiques of Iraq War Reveal
Rifts Among Army Officers
Colonel's Essay Draws
Rebuttal From General;
Captains Losing Faith
By GREG JAFFE
June 29, 2007; Page A1

(excerpts)

"I think [Col. Yingling] was speaking some truths that most of us talk about over beers," says Col. Matthew Moten, a history professor at West Point who also served in Iraq. "Very few of us have the courage or foolhardiness to put them in print."

The conflicting theories on Iraq reflect growing divisions within the military along generational lines, pitting young officers, exhausted by multiple Iraq tours and eager for change, against more conservative generals. Army and Air Force officers are also developing their own divergent explanations for Iraq. The Air Force narratives typically suggest the military should in the future avoid manpower-intensive guerrilla wars. Army officers counter that such fights are inevitable.

The first of the Army's explanations for Iraq was embedded in its new doctrine for fighting insurgencies. That effort was overseen by Gen. David Petraeus, now the top general in Iraq. Written in 2006 by a bevy of active-duty officers, historians and a human-rights advocate, the doctrine criticized the Army for turning away from guerrilla war after Vietnam.

...other officers have weighed in with competing failure narratives. Earlier this year, Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap, an Air Force officer in the Pentagon with a penchant for stirring up debate, suggested that Gen. Petraeus's narrative missed the point. The U.S. was struggling in Iraq because it had no business using a large ground force to fight a guerrilla war, he argued in Armed Forces Journal. "Absent overwhelming numbers, it is virtually impossible for even well-equipped ground forces to defeat insurgencies in the midst of sullen populations often sympathetic to the enemy," he wrote. He advocated replacing large numbers of U.S. troops with indigenous forces bolstered by American precision bombs and surveillance planes.

Many young officers are frustrated and exhausted by four years of war and don't understand why their small victories in the field aren't adding up to a safer and more stable Iraq.

"There is enormous pride among young officers in their units and in each other," says Lt. Col. Peter Kilner, who recently returned from two months in Iraq interviewing young Army officers for a research project. "But I see strong evidence that they are rapidly losing faith in the Army and the country's political leadership."

At the Army's School for Advanced Military Studies in Kansas, where its brightest majors attend a one-year course on war planning, Col. Kevin Benson dropped lesson plans to let students discuss the article. "Most of the majors' reaction to the article was 'Right on,'" says Col. Benson, who until last month headed the Army school.

At Fort Hood, Maj. Gen. Jeff Hammond, the top general at the sprawling base, summoned all of the captains to hear his response to Col. Yingling's critique. ... The 51-year-old officer told the young captains that Col. Yingling wasn't competent to judge generals because he had never been one. "He has never worn the shoes of a general," Gen. Hammond recalls saying.

The captains' reactions highlighted the growing gap between some junior officers and the generals. "If we are not qualified to judge, who is?" says one Iraq veteran who was at the meeting. Another officer in attendance says that he and his colleagues didn't want to hear a defense of the Army's senior officers. "We want someone at higher levels to take accountability for what went wrong in Iraq," he says.

The right failure narrative, voiced by the top brass and backed up by concrete action, could help rekindle the faith of young officers, who are leaving the service at a worrisome rate. Late last month, Col. J.B. Burton, who commands a 7,000-soldier brigade in Baghdad, warned in a memo to the Army's top generals of a looming crisis in the junior officer corps. Today's officers "have spent the past four years in a continuous cycle of fighting, training, deploying, fighting etc. ...and they see no end in sight. They have seen their closest friends killed and maimed, leaving young spouses and children as widows and single parent kids," he wrote. (Read the memo.)