Re: Fighting for the Soul of the Army

A letter from Major General Robert H. Scales (Ret.):

Stuart Koehl's piece "Fighting for the Army's Soul" if left unanswered may cause harm to those of us who can claim to have an Army soul and who are deeply offended by his ill informed and cruel indictment of the Army officer corps.

Readers of defense literature know that I'm not an apologist for the Army. Over the past five years I've been very critical of many of the same policies and conditions that Mr. Koehl criticizes. But my criticisms are based on almost four decades of real experience rather than the apparent sole source of Mr. Koehl's information: the dissatisfied soldier son of a friend who served in Afghanistan.

Koehl claims that the Army's ills are caused by an excessively high proportion of officers to enlisted men and that the soul of the Army can be saved by cutting that number in half. First, let's clear the air about proportions of officers. The ratio of officer to enlisted he cites is misleading. A very high percentage of the Army's officers are not in combat units. Most perform duties unrelated to the Army's core mission of fighting wars. If you take away the doctors, nurses, lawyers, chaplains, pilots, scientists, technicians, IT professionals, and administrators, the proportion of officer to enlisted in combat units is actually a bit less than in other Western armies.

He suggests that the experiential pyramid is inverted, that a combat experienced junior officer and enlisted force is being led by a group of inexperienced senior officers. Again, if you look at officers in the combat arms you will see that this is not true, that in fact senior officers, at least the ones that I know well from my visits to the combat zone are enormously well credentialed in combat. Many battalion and brigade commanders I've met in my travels have not only served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan but have accumulated combat time in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, Panama, Somalia and Desert Storm. If Mr. Koehl thinks the Army's senior ranks are staying at home he should talk to some of their spouses and children.

Koehl wants to cut the officer corps in half presumably thinking that junior officers will appreciate the subsequent reduction in "chickenshit," a euphemism for interference in their lives by senior officers who have no other purpose but to harass them. But is that what younger officers really want? After all, in a few years junior officers become senior officers. How would you tell them that their reward for service in Iraq is to be discharged because there are no places for them at the top? Young men and women in the Army are no different from those in other professions. They want some day to lead. They want to spend time with their families. They want to be rewarded for their service. Reducing the Army's leadership by half would remove any prospect of promotion or hope that they will be able some time in their careers to get off the deadly treadmill of repeated deployments.

But that leads to Koehl's core issue that the Army is a bloated bureaucracy. If that's true I sure don't see it. Mr. Koehl should go though any joint operational headquarters and look at the uniforms. The Army is carrying an overwhelmingly heavy load in Iraq and Afghanistan yet the first thing you notice when you look around one of these places is the dearth of Army uniforms. The Army is so short of colonels that instruction at its staff colleges is done overwhelmingly by civilians. Most ROTC instructors are contracted civilians because there are no majors and colonels to fill these key positions. Visit any of the Army's training posts today like Ft. Sill Oklahoma, home of the Field Artillery, or Ft. Benning, home of the infantry, and they look deserted. If the Army is bloated with officers then the Army is doing a terrific job of hiding them.

The truth is that the Army has too few officers. We need more officers particularly in the fighting branches so that those who have had repeated combat tours can get a break. These men and women have been subjected to so many trips to Iraq that they have lost the opportunity to reflect on their profession and go to school to study the art of war. It's interesting to note that 31 of the Army's 36 corps commanders in World War II had taught at a service school. Today very few have had the opportunity because there are none available for these critical billets.