Marine General tells it like it is..........

[thedrifter]

THIS IS LONG BUT WELL WORTH THE TIME TO READ!
Gen Zinni lays it out pretty well.

Subject: FW: Subject: General A. C. Zinni, USMC,
CinC Central Command Farewell

I joined the Marines in 1961, so it's been 39 years.
My retirement date is 1 September, but I plan to step
down and go on terminal leave in July.

I'd like to talk about who we were-the military
generations who went through the past four decades,
from the 1960s up to the new millennium. If you looked
at a snapshot taken when I first came into the
service, all the generals looked the same-older white
males with Anglo-Saxon names and Southern
drawls-despite the fact that the troops they led came
from lots of different places. Let's just say that the
generals didn't speak Philadelphia the way I speak
Philadelphia.

But things were changing in the 1960s. Marine Corps
officers were still coming in from the service
academies and military institutes, but more and more
were coming in from Catholic colleges in the Northeast
(like I did), from state colleges and universities
around the nation, and from other schools with strong
NROTC units or other strong military traditions. At
the same time, we were seeing people coming up through
the enlisted ranks to become officers-not just the old
mustangs or limited-duty officers with mid-grade
terminal ranks, but quality people we would send to
school as an investment in the future of the Corps.

Back then, whatever our various backgrounds, we all
came into the service with a code-something imprinted
on each of us by family, school, or church.

In my case, nuns and Augustinian priests had drilled
one into my head. Those who had come from military
schools received the imprint from their officers. One
way or another, all of us were programmed to believe
that what we were doing was not a job; not even a
profession; but a calling.

For me, joining the Marines was the closest thing to
becoming a priest. Certainly, I took a vow of poverty
when I joined the Corps, although I stopped short of
taking a vow of celibacy. Lately, though, it seems as
though we have been driven more and more toward a
"warrior monk" ethic, and I just wish that we'd start
spending as much time on the warrior part as we seem
to be spending on the monk part.

Perhaps part of the move toward monkishness is
prompted by the realization that the young people
today don't seem to be coming into the service with
that code imprinted. It's not necessarily their
fault, but the code is not there. Until recently, our
recruit depots, officer candidate schools, and other
institutions responsible for socializing recruits and
new officers have operated on the assumption that the
code was there, imprinted beforehand. So now we have
to regroup.

A lot of things affected my generation over the years.
In addition to having good genes and DNA, those who
did well also seemed to have come from families that
functioned normally, as opposed to the dysfunctional
ones seen so often today. We also grew up in school
systems that actually taught us something and
imprinted us with that code, which helped move us
along the path toward being useful citizens. And for
most of us, our religious upbringing gave us an
acceptance of a Higher Being in one form or another,
at the core of our beliefs.

We also were shaped by events. Some were our legacy;
some were events we actually lived through. One of the
biggest was World War II, which has proved to be both
a blessing and a curse to my generation. The blessing
was that it preserved our freedoms and our way of life
and lifted us out of a severe depression on a wave of
prosperity and moved us into a role of world
leadership. The curse is that it was the last Good
War-with moral clarity, an easily identified and
demonized enemy, unprecedented national unity in
mobilization and rationing, pride in those who
served in uniform shown by blue-star flags hung by the
families of those who fought and gold-star flags by
the families of those who died, and welcome-home
victory parades for those lucky enough to return home
from overseas. Every war should be fought like that.

Our family military tradition in America started with
my father, who was drafted to fight in World War I-the
War to End all Wars-shortly after he arrived here as
an immigrant from Italy. He got here and he was
drafted. When I looked into it, I found that 12% of
America's infantrymen in World War I were Italian
immigrants. And they were rewarded for their wartime
service to their new homeland. My father loved the
Army for the relatively short time he served in it-and
along with his discharge papers he received his
citizenship papers. He came out of the War as a
full-fledged citizen of the United States. Just
imagine what that meant to him!

During and after World War II, I learned about war at
the knees of my uncles and cousins, who fought at the
Battle of the Bulge in Europe and all over the
Pacific-on the ground and in the air. A few years
later, my older brother was drafted and fought in
Korea. Their war stories were remarkable: sometimes
gory and horrible, but always positive in the end. It
was like winning the Big Game against your arch
rival-always clean and always good.

So this was my generation's legacy: World War II was
the way you fight a war. And all throughout our four
decades of service, this notion kept getting enforced.
Former Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger's famous
statement of doctrine is a recipe for re-fighting
World War II-not for fighting the operations other
than war (OOTW) that we face today. In fact, if you
read the Weinberger Doctrine and adhere to every one
of its tenets, you will be able to fight no war other
than World War II.

I've been attending all the World War II 50th
anniversary and follow-up celebrations in Florida,
where I live and work, and sometimes it is unnerving
to face the old veterans who look at me and seem to be
saying, "How in hell did you screw it up? We had it
right and we did it right and we fought and we
understood and we did all this. . ."

It's hard to escape the feeling: God-I've let them
down, because the second major event that affected us
was the Vietnam War-our nation's longest and least
satisfactory. It was my second-lieutenant experience,
and I wondered at the time just what in hell our
generals-my heroes who fought in World War II-thought
they were doing. Those of us who were platoon
commanders and company commanders fought hard, but
never could understand what our most senior leaders
were doing. The tactics didn't make sense and the
personnel policies-one-year individual rotations
instead of unit rotations in and out of country-were
hard to comprehend. In time, we lost faith in our
senior leadership.

Today, of course, we are seeing a stream of apologetic
books by the policy makers of that era-as though
saying mea culpa enough will absolve them of the
terrible responsibility they still bear. Beyond all
his other shortcomings, I'll remember-as an
infantryman-former Secretary of Defense Robert Strange
McNamara for one indelible thing: He decided that all
services should have a common combat boot. Further,
he decreed that to economize there would be no half
sizes. So I had to wear size 10 boots instead of 9
1/2, my regular size. My feet are still screwed up to
this day, thanks to Robert Strange McNamara. And that
just about symbolizes the leadership we had back then.

The third thing that affected my generation was the
Cold War-which actually was a 40-year attempt to
re-fight World War II, if ever the need arose. Once
again, we were energized to engage in global conflict
against the evil Red Menace. Problem was that we never
could figure just how this particular war would
usually start. After playing a bazillion war games at
the Naval War College and other places, I still could
not come up with a logical or convincing way such a
war would kick off. It was just too hard to show why
the Soviets would want to conquer a burning,
devastated Europe, or how that could possibly benefit
the communists in any way. So we would just gloss over
the way the miserable war got started, jump into the
middle of things, and play on. Deep down inside, I
don't think many of us really believed it ever was
going to happen.

To be sure, there probably were some armor or armored
cavalry folks with not much to do in Vietnam who
sought to patrol the Czech border, in the belief that
World War III would erupt there. But that's not where
my life was focused at the time. The Cold War was
ever-present, and it was great for justifying
programs, systems, and force structure-but no one
seriously believed that it would actually happen.
Still, it drove things. It drove the way we thought;
it drove the way we organized and equipped; and it
drove the way we developed our concepts of fighting.

Then suddenly, at the end of the 1980s, the Berlin
Wall came down, the Evil Empire collapsed, and we
found ourselves in the post-Cold War period. It would
require a major adjustment. I was serving in the
European Command when the Wall came down so quickly
and
unexpectedly-and in turn we drew down too quickly, in
the worst possible way. On the way down, we broke a
lot of china, in the form of contracts with U.S.
soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines-and in
particular the soldiers. We drew down our Army too
far,
almost ripping it apart in the process-ten divisions
is just too low a force level-I'm here to tell you.

In addition, we have let manning levels sink way too
low, not understanding that the post-Cold War would
bring more chaos instead of a smooth transition to
world peace. Not fully understanding the Cold War
force structure we were drawing down-and the kind of
structure we would need for the post-Cold War period,
we have been drawing down to a mini-version of the
Cold War force. Today's high-demand, low-density units
are paying the price for those decisions. Let's admit
it-we've screwed up again.

The next influential event was Desert Storm, which, as
far as I am concerned, was an aberration. It seemed to
work out okay for us, but ultimately it may be an
aberration, because it may have left the impression
that the terrible mess that awaits us abroad-to be
dealt with by peacekeeping or humanitarian
operations-or coercive diplomacy, for some-can somehow
be overcome by good, clean soldiering, just like in
World War II.

In reality, though, the only reason Desert Storm
worked was because we managed to go up against the
only jerk on the planet who actually was stupid enough
to confront us symmetrically-with less of everything,
including the moral right to do what he did to Kuwait.
In the high- and top-level war colleges we still fight
this type of adversary, so we always can win. I
rebelled at this notion, thinking there would be
nowhere out there so stupid to fight us that way. But
then along came Saddam Hussein, and "good soldiering"
was vindicated once again. Worse yet, the end of any
conflict often brings into professional circles the
heartfelt belief that "Now that the war is over, we
can get back to real soldiering." So we merrily
baktrack in that direction. Scary, isn't it?

Still trying to fight our kind of war-be it World War
II or Desert Storm-we ignore the real war fighting
requirements of today. We want to fight the
Navy-Marine Corps Operational Maneuver from the Sea;
we want to fight the Army-Air Force AirLand Battle. We
want to find a real adversarial demon-a composite of
Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini-so we can drive on to his
capital city and crush him there. Unconditional
surrender. Then we'll put in place a Marshall Plan,
embrace the long-suffering vanquished, and help them
regain entry into the community of nations. Everybody
wants to do that. As a retiring CinC, I would love to
do that somewhere before I step down-just find
somebody for me!

But it ain't gonna happen.

Today, I am stuck with the likes of a wiser Saddam
Hussein and a still-elusive Osama Bin Laden-just a
couple of those charmers out there who will no longer
take us on in a symmetric force match-up.

And we're going to be doing things like humanitarian
operations, consequence management, peacekeeping, and
peace enforcement. Somewhere along the line, we'll
have to respond to some kind of environmental
disaster. And somewhere else along the line we may get
stuck with putting a U.S. battalion in place on the
Golan Heights, embedded in a weird, screwed-up chain
of command.

And do you know what? We're going to ***** and moan
about it. We're going to dust off the Weinberger
Doctrine and the Powell Doctrine and throw them
in the face of our civilian leadership. But at the
same time, there's the President, thinking out loud in
a recent meeting and saying, "Why can't we ever drive
a stake through the hearts of any of these guys? I
look at Kim Jung II; I look at Milosovic; I look at
Saddam Hussein. Ever since the end of World War II,
why haven't we been able to find a way to do this?"

The answer, of course, is that you must have the
political will-and that means the will of the
administration, the Congress, and the American people.

All must be united in a desire for action. Instead,
however, we try to get results on the cheap. There are
congressmen today who want to fund the Iraqi
liberation Act, and let some silk-suited,
Rolex-wearing guys in London gin up an expedition.
We'll equip a thousand fighters and arm them with $97
million worth of AK-47s and insert them into Iraq.
And what will we have? A Bay of Goats, most likely.
That's what can happen when we do things on the cheap.

But why can't we muster the necessary political
will to do things right? It goes back to cost-benefit
analysis, especially in terms of potential casualties.
Nobody in his right mind can justify the possible
human cost and the uncertain aftermath of strong
military action. The bombings at Beirut and the Khobar
Towers in Saudi Arabia and the debacle in Mogadishu
have affected us in bad ways-making us gun-shy to an
extreme degree. But every time I testify at
congressional hearings, I try to make the point that
there is no way to guarantee 100% force protection
while accomplishing the variety of missions we
undertake out there. Somewhere, sometime, we are going
to lose people again-to terrorist or other actions
that take advantage of our own less-than-perfect
protective measures.

For example, I have more than 600 security-assistance
people working throughout the Central Command's area
of responsibility. Some of the detachments are quite
small-in twos and threes. They live in hotels and try
to keep low profiles. Their mission is to work with
host-country military organizations and try to improve
them. They travel a lot. They get targeted; they get
stalked; they can get hit. If anyone really wants to
take them out, they can and they will.

And, you know, we are going to see it happen some day.
The only way to stop it from happening is to shut down
all our activities overseas, if we want 100% security
for all our deployed people. But 100% definitely seems

to be what more and more people want these days, as
we send our people into operations other than war.
These OOTW are our future, as far as I am concerned.
But in a sense, it's going to be back to the future,
because today's international landscape has some
strong
similarities to the Caribbean region of the 1920s and
1930s-unstable countries being driven by uncaring
dictators to the point of collapse and total failure.
We are going to see more crippled states and failed
states that look like Somalia and Afghanistan-and are
just as dangerous.

And more and more U.S. military men and women are
going to be involved in vague, confusing military
actions-heavily overlaid with political, humanitarian,
and economic considerations. And representing the
United States-the Big Guy with the most formidable
presence in the area-they will have to deal with each
messy situation and pull everything together. We're
going to see more and more of that.

My generation has not been well prepared for this
future, because we resisted the idea. We even had an
earlier Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who
said, "Real men don't do OOTW." That just about says
it all. Any Army commander worth his salt wanted to
take his unit to the National Training Center and any
Marine commander would want to go to the Marine
Air-Ground Training Center for live-fire maneuver and
combined-arms work, rather than stay on their bases
and confront a bunch of troops in civilian clothes,
throwing water balloons and playing the role of angry
overseas mobs. It just goes against the grain to have
to train our people that way.

Going beyond these events, what other things have
affected my military generation? There have been
trends in law a policy making that have had a profound
effect. The National Security Act of 1947, for
example, set up the most dysfunctional, worst
organizational approach to military affairs I could
possibly imagine. In a near-perfect example of the Law
of Unintended Consequences, it created a situation in
which the biggest rival of any U.S. armed service is
not a foreign adversary but another one of its sister
U.S. services.

We teach our ensigns and second lieutenants to
recognize that sister service as the enemy. It wants
our money; it wants our force structure; it wants our
recruits. So we rope ourselves into a system where we
fight each other for money, programs, and weapon
systems. We try to out-doctrine each other, by putting
pedantic little anal apertures to work in doctrine
centers, trying to find ways to ace out the other
services and become the dominant service in some way.
These people come to me and the other CinCs and ask,
"What's more important to you-air power or ground
power?"

Incredible! Just think about it. My Uncle Guido is a
plumber. If I went to him and asked, "What's more
important to you-a wrench or a screwdriver?" he'd
think I'd lost my marbles.

The real way this stuff gets worked out is not in the
doctrine centers but out in the field. The joint
commands and the component commanders can figure
things out because we're the war fighters. We have to
work things out, so we actually do. We could not
produce a joint fire-support doctrine out of
Washington or the doctrine centers to save our ass.
But we can produce one in the Central Command, or in
the Pacific Command or European Command or any joint
task force we create. They can produce one in a
heartbeat-and they have. We can make a JFACC work. We
can make a land-component command arrangement work.
There will be no more occasions in the Central
Command's area of operations where the Marines fight
one ground war and the Army fights a different ground
war. There will be one ground war and a single land
component commander.

But we've been brutalized in the process. We've
had to be pushed into cooperating with each other by
legislation. And those of us who have seen the light
and actually put on joint "purple" uniforms-we've
never been welcomed back to our parent services. We
have become the Bad Guys. The only thing we are
trusted to do is to take your sons and daughters to
war and figure out ways to bring them back safely.

Virulent inter-service rivalry still exists-and it's
going to kill us if we don't find a better way to do
business.

Goldwater-Nichols is not the panacea everybody thinks
it is. I'm here to tell you that it did not increase
the powers of the CinCs-not one bit. A CinC still owns
nothing. I own no resources and no assigned forces.
All I get is geography and responsibility. And the
CinCs have to go up the chain of command through the
Joint Chiefs of Staff.

For more than a quarter-century, we have been
operating with an All-Volunteer Force-and the American
people tend to forget that until the volunteers stop
showing up and re-enlisting. And that's what is wrong
right now. But the troops are not getting out because
they're deployed too long and too often. I will bet
anyone that the forward-deployed units-the air carrier
battle groups, the Marine expeditionary nits, the air
expeditionary forces and wings-have the highest
retention rates.

So what does that say about the high operations tempo
and personnel deployment rates? The people who deploy
are not the ones getting out. The guy getting out is
the guy who's left back home and has to pick up the
slack with a workload that's been increased by a
factor of eight or ten. We were building an
All-Volunteer Force with professionals, not
mercenaries. The troops certainly don't mind a better
paycheck, but
they find it insulting that we seem to think that's
all they want. Deep inside, there have been negative
reactions to the recent pay raise. They see their
benefits continuing to erode. Their families are
telling them, "Look at what happens to your medical
care when you retire. You can't even pick up a
telephone and get through to someone who might see
you." And despite all the smoke and mirrors around
TriCare and MediCare and other programs-even if they
do
work-the perceptions are bad. To top things off, the
quality of life back at the home base is terrible. We
still have too much infrastructure eating up funds
that should go toward improving quality of life. But
don't count on DoD and the politicians going through
another base-closure drill or anything like it.

So this all-volunteer, highly professional force we
built-to give quality performance with quality
support-has been allowed to erode. That came with the
"peace dividend." The All-Volunteer Force has become
something
else-something less attractive than opportunities on
the outside, in many ways. The troops want to be
caught up in a calling-but they're not. They are
involved in a job.

Over the past 40 years, we also have seen strange
things happen with regard to the media. To be sure,
there are no more Ernie Pyles out there, but there's
nothing inherently wrong with the media, which has the
same percentages of good guys and bad guys as other
fields. But technology has changed things. The media
are on the battlefield; the media are in your
headquarters; the media are everywhere.

And the media report everything-good things, warts,
and all. And everyone knows that the warts tend to
make better stories. As a CinC, I've probably been
chewed out by seniors about five times-and four of the
five were about something I'd said to the media. At
this stage of my life, it doesn't really bother
me-because where in hell do I go from here? But if you
are a lieutenant or a captain and you see another
officer get fried, you react differently. The message
is clear: "Avoid the media." And the message hardens
into a Code: "They are the enemy. Don't be straight
with them." And that is bad.

That is bad because we live in the Information Age.
Battlefield reports are going to come back in real
time, and they are going to be interpreted-with all
sorts of subtle shadings and nuances-by the reporters
and their news editors. And the relationship between
the military and the media, which should be at its
strongest right now, has bottomed out. It has begun to
heal a little, but a lot more must be done. We need to
rebuild a sense of mutual trust.

My uncles in World War II generally experienced a
friendly press-with Willie and Joe cartoons and Ernie
Pyle stories-that was part of the war effort. G.I. Joe
was lionized and bad news was suppressed-if not by the
military then by the media. The relationship generally
remained positive through the Korean War, despite its
ambiguities.

But the relationship soured during and after Vietnam,
for a number of reasons-not the least of which was a
mounting distrust of government by the media and the
American people.

My generation and those who have followed over the
past 40 years are still dealing with social issues
that swept across the nation in the 1960s and 1970s.
The racial and drug problems that peaked during the
Vietnam years and persisted well beyond them are
largely behind us now-but they came close to
destroying the military from within-something no enemy
has ever accomplished on the field of battle. We still
wrestle with problems associated with the massive
infusion of women into the ranks of the military,
seeking a final adjustment that meets the twin
requirements of fairness and common sense. A
final adjustment on the issue of gays in the
military-largely sidestepped up to now-still lies
ahead.

Today, we are suffering through the agony of watching
and waiting for our political masters and the American
people to decide what me U.S. military should look
like in the future. It is especially agonizing because
the political leaders-and the population in
general-have very little association with the armed
forces. Consequently, they have very little awareness
of how we function.

Over this 40-year period, we have made some
significant internal changes. We made a magnificent
recovery from the Vietnam War, and my hat goes off to
the Army, because I think they led the way in making
the needed transformations. In general, we have
professionalized our noncommissioned officer corps,
but still not enough NCOs are doing the jobs that
officers had taken away from them when I first came
in. The rank structure is holding them back, despite
the fact that their educational attainments-bachelors,
masters, and even doctoral degrees-have far
outstripped the structure. This needs to be fixed.

The one thing that makes us a standout among the
world's military services is the quality of our NCOs.
Don't ever believe it's the officers; it's the
noncommissioned officers.

All of the events that have shaped us over the past 40
years have not been negative. Somewhere in the
mid-1980s we began to experience a renaissance in the
operational art. We actually started to take war
fighting more seriously. Once again, I want to credit
the Army for leading the charge, and the other
services for following suit, in one way or another.
Today, we see highly qualified, professionally
competent, operationally sound officers and
noncommissioned officers as a result.

There's also been a technological revolution-the
Revolution in Military Affairs, which already has gone
beyond the point most may think. Whenever I go to my
command center in the basement of my Tampa
headquarters, I can pull up a common operating
picture-every ship and aircraft (commercial, bad guy,
good guy) in real time. With a six-hour delay-which I
could crunch to two hours if I wanted to-I can get a
complete ground picture. That's the good news. The bad
news is that the White House and the Pentagon will
probably be interested in the same picture, and might
be tempted to make decisions on their own, without
input from the folks actually on the scene. That could
be disastrous, as history amply demonstrates.

As we close out this 40 years of service, those of us
who served must ask: "What is our legacy?" My son is a
newly commissioned second lieutenant of Marines. What
have we left for him to look forward to?

We all know that burgeoning technology will widen his
horizons beyond anything we can imagine. It also will
present new questions of ethics and morality that we
barely have begun to fathom.

But he also must live with an organization that I have
had to live with for 40 years. Napoleon could reappear
today and recognize my Central Command staff
organization: J-1, administration stovepipe; J-2,
intelligence stovepipe-you get the idea. This
antiquated organization is oblivious to what everyone
else in the world is doing: flattening organization
structure, with decentralized operations and more
direct communications. This must be fixed.

My son will have to deal with the inevitable
military-civilian rift and drift-which will become
more severe in the future. He also will have to deal
with the remaining social issues. And they will get
tougher, within a national debate over why we still
need a strong military.

In addition to dealing with these social issues-which
will worsen-to shape their potential heritage, my
son's generation must ultimately face the question of
how much the military should be a reflection of U.S.
society. The people of America will get the military
they want, in due course, but it is up to the military
to advise them about the risks and consequences of
their decisions.

My son will face non-traditional missions in messy
places that will make Somalia look like a picnic. He
will see a changed battlefield, with an accelerated
tempo and greatly expanded knowledge base. He will
witness a great drop in the sense of calling. People
entering the military will not be imprinted with his
code. They will not be candidates for priesthood; at
best, they will be part-time lay ministers.

On his watch, my son is likely to see a weapon of mass
destruction (WMD) event. Another Pearl Harbor will
occur in some city, somewhere in the world where
Americans are gathered, when that nasty bug or gas or
nuke is released it will forever change him and his
institutions. At that point, all the lip service paid
to dealing with such an eventuality will be revealed
for what it is-lip service. And he will have to deal
with it for real. In its wake, I hope he gets to deal
with yet another Goldwater-Nichols arrangement.

What will we expect of him as a battlefield commander?
Brains, guts, and determination-nothing new here. But
we would ask for more than battlefield skill from our
future commanders. We want character, sense of moral
responsibility, and an ethical standard that rises
above those of all other professions. We want him to
be a model who accepts the profession of arms as a
calling. We want him to take care of our sons and
daughters and treat their lives as something
precious-putting them in harm's way only if it means
something that truly counts. We'll expect him to stand
up to civilian leadership before thinking of his own
career.

And I hope that we would think enough of him and his
compatriots to show some respect for them along the
way.

Sempers,

Roger