Win Wars? Today’s Generals Must Also Politick and Do P.R.
 

WASHINGTON — After nine years of fighting in the deserts and mountains of the Middle East, the military has concluded that the traditional, hard-earned combat skills that allowed generations of “muddy boots” commanders to protect American interests around the world simply are not enough to assure victory in today’s wars — or career advancement through the top ranks of the armed forces.

Mastery of battlefield tactics and a knack for leadership are only prerequisites. Generals and other top officers are now expected to be city managers, cultural ambassadors, public relations whizzes and politicians as they deal with multiple missions and constituencies in the war zone, in allied capitals — and at home.

The increased demands help to explain how the two most recent American commanders in Afghanistan, among the most respected four-star officers of their generation, lost their jobs. And they are prompting the military to revamp the way it trains and promotes its top officers.

“They must be ‘pentathlete’ leaders,” said Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior commander in Afghanistan. As Iraq and Afghanistan have proved that a commander must stretch to master nuances of international alliance accord, local governance and tribal politicking, the military has revamped its training ranges and its curriculum.

Strong scores in mock battle in the deserts of California or in swampy Louisiana are no longer the lone measurement. Fake villages with irascible, faux tribal leaders and proxies representing the competing agendas of government agencies and nongovernment organizations are all in play to test a commander’s expanding set of required skills.

But senior officers admit it is much harder to figure out how to prepare their most senior commanders for managing relationships with civilian masters in Washington, especially if popular support is waning for both the strategy, and the wars themselves.

In an acknowledgment that the top jobs have become ever more intellectually challenging, physically exhausting and politically bruising, senior officers confirm that the armed services are looking to exactly this broader set of skills as they fit their future four-stars with the mask of command worn by Washington and Grant, Marshall and Eisenhower.

Perhaps no general is in a better position to assess the new challenges of command than General Petraeus, who was sent to Afghanistan by President Obama to replace Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who was relieved as the allied commander there after Rolling Stone magazine reported remarks he and his aides made that were critical or even disparaging of civilian leaders in Washington. And General McChrystal was placed in the job when the Obama administration shifted strategy, and removed Gen. David D. McKiernan.

Just as in Iraq, General Petraeus has been ordered to salvage a war effort, this one having suffered from a shortage of resources after being relegated to a sideshow war for years.

In a telephone interview from his headquarters in Afghanistan, General Petraeus said the shifting demands of counterinsurgency and coalition warfare presented an array of intricate management challenges.

In a previous assignment, General Petraeus ran the Army’s schoolhouses at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., central to the effort to transform the ground force from preparations for what he called “The Clash of the Titans” — heavy armor-on-armor warfare — to better succeed in today’s counterinsurgency fight, which focuses as much on protecting the civilian population and enabling local governments as it does on troops killing enemy fighters.

To that end, he led efforts to write a counterinsurgency manual — a blueprint for the wars today — and also a new guide on Army leadership that “tried to come to grips with all of these attributes needed in leaders in full-spectrum operations,” General Petraeus said.

Those complicated tasks, he acknowledged, also must be conducted under “the magnifying glass that is applied to them by a 24-hour news cycle.”

General Petraeus will be under that magnifying glass as analysts wonder whether historians who lament that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires may have gotten it only partly right — and whether, for the American military, Afghanistan may likewise become the symbolic graveyard for the careers of generals, too.

Which is not to say that past commanders of major theaters of war had it easy.

When Eisenhower was European commander in World War II, he had alliance politics to manage, as well as the enormous egos of his subordinates.

But, said Kori Schake, a Hoover Institution research fellow who has held senior policy positions at the National Security Council and at the Departments of State and Defense, Eisenhower’s mission was far more straightforward.

“His orders were to invade Europe, conquer Germany,” she said. “He was asked to defeat another uniformed, organized national army. In comparison, part of the reason we are struggling with the wars today is that military force cannot so easily achieve the complicated, sophisticated set of second-order effects we are asking it to achieve.”

The speed of war has increased. Not only have the missions and goals in both Iraq and Afghanistan shifted over the years of combat, Ms. Schake said, but in advance of D-Day, the United States government summoned “thousands of economists and captains of industry” to plan the occupation. Today, though, “Responsibilities for things that are not traditional areas of military expertise — reconstruction and economic development — have migrated into the military realm,” Ms. Schake said.

To oversee that broad and expanding portfolio requires a theater commander to establish a wide range of relationships not demanded of previous officers, said David W. Barno, a retired lieutenant general who was ordered to establish a new, three-star headquarters in Kabul in 2003, a command he held for 19 months.

“I no longer could rely just on relationships inside the military,” said General Barno, now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a nonpartisan policy institute. “I had to tremendously expand my network to include other parts of government — the embassy there and senior players at Usaid — and start and then grow relationships with members of the host government to get anything done. And not to forget allies, Capitol Hill, the media.”

Adm. William J. Fallon held two of the military’s most prestigious theater commands, in charge of American forces in the Pacific and then the Middle East, before he retired early after making public statements on Iran, Iraq and other issues that seemed to put him at odds with the Bush administration.

“A key difference from earlier times of command is the available amount of information and the demand on time that presents,” Admiral Fallon said. “With this 24/7, 365 demand cycle, you lose the opportunity to sit back and think, to take stock of what is important and what is distracting — and that is an incredible burden on a senior leader.”

[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/world/13generals.html?_r=1&hp[/url]