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. I would go even further and argue that the Army needs more, not less, bureaucracy. In future wars the officer corps will be called upon to do many non-standard missions such as civil support and reconstruction, advising and training of allied armies, liaison and training of officials in other government agencies such as State, Justice, Commerce, and Homeland Security. We will need to have a larger body of senior officers so that we can send more of them to advanced civil schooling in order for them to become proficient in foreign languages and learn to thrive in alien cultures. Officers will have to go back to school in order to expand their narrow operational field of view so that they can face new enemies in unfamiliar places. Remember General David Petraeus is a card carrying member of Koehl's bloated bureaucracy because he wasted five years that he could have spent in operational units getting his PhD at Princeton and teaching at West Point. Does anyone today think that his time learning about war was wasted? Koehl's point that the Army somehow consists of two armies, one "small" consisting of special operating forces focused on insurgencies, and one "large" intended to fight big wars, is simply ridiculous. The Army I have seen fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan has become essentially a hybrid force, made up of many fighting capabilities some small and some large but all fighting the same enemy using a doctrine that allows many different units to fight together very well. In fact most of the divisions in Iraq aren't divisions at all but consist of a rich amalgam of light, special forces, aviation, medium and heavy armor brigades, each optimized for a key close combat function. I really take exception to civilians like Koehl, with presumably no combat experience, who conclude that the Army needs to give up "marginally useful programs" like the Future Combat System (FCS). FCS is a program that seeks to replace the Army's tired Cold War tanks and infantry carriers with light, air transportable fighting vehicles suitable for places like Iraq and Afghanistan. The Israelis demonstrated how effective lumbering, gas guzzling Cold War era behemoths are against Hezbollah in Lebanon. If Koehl doesn't like Cold War tanks then presumably he intends for our soldiers to fight insurgents on foot with rifles in a fair fight. That's pretty much how the Army fought in my era and that's why four out of five Americans (not just soldier and Marines but all Americans in uniform) killed by the enemy over the past 50 years have been light infantry. I've fought insurgents in a fair fight and I'll tell you a secret: unfair is better. I'd rather give our young close combat soldiers a system like FCS that will allow them to arrive at the scene of battle protected by armor and with the ability to kill the bad guys with precision safely at a distance. To be fair. Koehl's observation that soldiers returning from combat are exposed to "chickenshit" has an element of truth. I hear the same thing from soldiers of all ranks. But chickenshit does not happen because there are too many officers with too little to do. It happens in large measure because we have an Army with too few soldiers chasing too many missions. The bloated, ticket punching Army he describes is the residue of my generation, not this one. Is there chickenshit in the Army today? Of course there is. The Army, like any other large organization, is made up of people, and some of them are holdovers from the past. But the idea of ripping out half the Army's leadership in order to save it reminds me of the medieval medical practice of bleeding where the patient's greatest danger was in the treatment. Stuart Koehl Responds: I was disappointed by the tone of General Scales's response to my article, "Fighting for the Soul of the Army", and in particular by its implicit assumption that those who have not served in uniform are not qualified to pass judgment or even hold an opinion on military policy issues. I also believe that General Scales misconstrued or misstated the point of my article, in some cases accusing me of saying things I did not in fact say. For instance, Scales writes that I claim "the Army's ills are caused by an excessively high proportion of officers, and that the soul of the Army can be saved by cutting that number in half." In fact, my point was that many of the Army's problems can be attributed to excessive bureaucratization, and that the high officer-to-enlisted ratio is one cause of that problem. In making this point, I am not alone; as I noted in the article, the issue has been coming up repeatedly since the early 1980s, if not earlier. My remarks, therefore, were not exceptional save that, instead of writing them in a professional military journal, I chose to air them in a forum for a general audience. Beyond that, I will note that Scales largely makes my point for me. For instance, he notes that "a very high proportion of officers are not in combat units. Most perform duties unrelated to the Army's core mission of fighting wars." Just so. Scales points to a number of "critical" jobs being performed by officers, including doctors and nurses, lawyers, chaplains, pilots, scientists, technicians, IT professionals, and administrators. Leaving aside doctors, nurses, and lawyers, who are statistically insignificant, and pilots, which is misleading (the majority of Army aviators are warrant officers or NCOs), the remaining roles he identifies are precisely those which can and ought to be civilianized or eliminated altogether. In many other armies around the world, this process is well underway, but those armies do not have the luxury of extra officers beyond those needed for truly essential mission-related duties. Scales, in fact, notes that if you exclude the "non-mission related" roles he identifies, the Army actually has a lower officer-to-enlisted ratio than other armies. Which is my point, exactly.