General failure; what the press doesn't tell you about America's military leaders

Washington Monthly, March, 1991 by Scott Shuger

Actually, there was one slightly more significant detail in the story. McFadden refers to how the American experience in Vietnam "heavily influenced the general's perceptions of modem warfare." Since Iraq began heating up, this has been a de rigueur reference in stories about our top military men. McFadden quotes Homer saying, "A war in Iraq should not be dragged out in an effort to achieve some political objective." The "lessons of Vietnam" paragraph is a staple of pieces on the current wave of military commanders. But you can tell by the way they're used that not much thought goes into writing them. (McFadden never probes Homer's statement.) I wouldn't be surprised if there's a special key on the Atex terminals of McFadden and his fellow guild members that's marked "LOV." Hit it and you get passages such as: "Like most of his top officers in the Middle East, Schwarzkopf learned about combat and command in the jungles of Southeast Asia-learned above all what not to do." (Life). " The three-stars and the four-stars have been left alone to do their jobs,' a State Department official says." (The Wall Street Journal). "The massive deployment in Saudi Arabia clearly reflects one lesson of Vietnam. When something starts ... I'm not sure we'd want to deal a lot with measured escalation,' says Lt. General Thomas Kelly, head of operations for the joint staff at the Pentagon." (U.S. News & World Report). "Once you have a clear political objective, you have to make sure that . . . the nation commits enough resources to do the job. Then we must give the commanders enough flexibility to achieve their goals. In Vietnam, it didn't work out that way." Powell, in The Washingtonian). "I can assure you that if we have to go to war, I am going to use every single thing that is available to me to bring as much destruction to the Iraqi forces as rapidly as I possibly can in the hopes of winning victory as quickly as possible." (Schwarzkopf, in The New York Times).

Fact is, lines like these are far too rarely followed by investigations of whether the generals involved are willing to use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons to accomplish their objective," or of how high they think casualty rates can go and still be an acceptable way to do the job," or of how they regard civilian casualties. When you get down to it, what's the difference between this last statement of Schwarzkopf's and the ones by Dugan that got him fired? (The ones that the Times said should have gotten Dugan fired.) And what were the lessons of Vietnam that Powell and Schwarzkopf applied or failed to apply to Grenada? You could read reams of press about these two and never get an answer to that one. During the build-up to war in the Gulf, we were treated to piece after piece on planes and tanks, but here's one that never got written: "The Generals:

How will they do?"

The soft machine

So there you have it-the press stinks at covering generals. Why? The explanation is mostly a combination of ignorance, elitism, and lazy journalism.