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Military Incompetence: Why the American Military Doesn't Win (American Century)

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If you love the American military, don't read this review; just get a copy of the book. Used copies are easily found online. It reads like Tom Clancy, i.e., you won't be able to put it down.

I've heard a lot of people complain about bureaucracy, but this book does an excellent job of painting an exacting picture of the problem. Gabriel argues that 3 issues produce American military failures:
1. Size of the officer corps (it is too big).
2. Rapid reassignment of officers (no one learns their job).
3. Self-promotion ( and self-serving bureaucracies).
4. Amateurism of political leadership.

The result is a lack of force preparedness and competent mission design.

Gabriel quotes a lot of numbers, so it is easy to check them. I was surprised to discover the ratio of enlisted to officers had gotten worse since the books publication in 1985. At publication, the ratio of enlisted to officers was about 7 to 1, it is now a little above 5 to 1.

Chapters on post-Viet Nam military operations make up the bulk of the book. Each chapter represents a detailed look at the planning and execution of the operation. Each operation is described as a failure in fact, if not political representation. The operations are:
1. Sontay Prison rescue attempt
2. The Mayaguez rescue attempt
3. The Iran rescue attempt
4. Peace keeping in Beirut
5. Grenada (rescue of students)

I am not comfortable with the concluding recommendations. I find them little more than tilting at wind-mills. Gabriel recommends fewer officers, fewer promotions, fewer reassignments, and end to the Joint Chiefs of Staff bureaucracy.

Enjoy.

Excellent analysis of the repeated failures of US military operations from the end of the Vietnam war through the assault on Grenada. Many of the lessons learned that are examined in detail were directly applied by the commanders in Operation Desert Storm. I was presented with a copy in 1987 at my commissioning ceremony by a Special Forces LTC. After sharing it with several peers in Army Aviation, I passed my highlighted, dog-eared copy to a friend at Pensacola where several Naval Air professionals got a chance to take a peek. I now require that my junior officers and NCOs read this book as part of their professional development.

Don't be fooled by the titled...this is not a tired tale from a dove. Gabriel's analysis of military failures from the Vietnam era through the early 80's is insightful and full of wisdom that all military planners - hawks and doves - should consider.

Yes, Gabriel's work holds value to military planners and scholars, but the text is also vibrant and exciting. The author looks at five different operations. Gives an overview of their objectives and describes what went wrong. Then pulls the layers back and exposes the lessons learned from each encounter. Its part historical narrative and part analysis.

Powerful stuff. Just as relevant today as it was prior to the Gulf War. Read up on our successes in that theater, then read this and see how we applied the lessons Gabriel taught us (and others, to be sure). Your understanding of military planning will grow significantly. As will your appreciation for our men and women in uniform.

Highly recommended.

Major Richard Gabriel is a distinguished officer, educator, strategist, historian, and scholar. Drawing on his own extensive military experience in addition to tactics and wisdom dating back to Sun Tzu's "Art of War," this work should be required reading at West Point, and for any military -- and especially, our political leaders who are woefully ignorant of world and military history -- responsible for the lives of the brave men and women in our armed forces and the security of our nation.

The first thing to say about Army Reserve Maj. Richard Gabriel's 1985 book is that it had no influence. Since then, the American military has displayed incompetence in Libya, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Haiti and Yugoslavia. Gabriel was on to something.

In "Military Incompetence," Gabriel submits after-action reports on the five military adventures -- I use the word carefully -- the country had embarked upon since cutting and running from Vietnam: raids to rescue prisoners at Sontay, North Vietnam, Cambodia and Iran; "peacekeeping" in Beirut; and the conquest of Grenada.

Using primarily the findings of congressional investigations and Department of Defense commissions empaneled to review these disasters, but also some interviews of participants and bystanders and some very valuable reporting by newspaper and television reporters, Gabriel lays out a history of unbelievable incompetence.

Grenada, the biggest of these pipsqueak operations, was in many ways the worst as well, even though the Joint Chiefs of Staff by then had had the benefit of four straight disasters to learn from (not counting Vietnam) and had even established a new division to fix things, the Joint Special Operations Center.

Gabriel concludes, correctly, that the problem is at the top, although also systemic. He was not the only man saying so. The late David Hackworth was railing against the "no-fault Army" in those days.

Both men complained that the military had changed from a band of warriors into a managerial bureaucracy. This in itself did not require much perspicuity. Military leaders and their civilian superiors bragged about it.

The valuable insight of both men was that armies, navies and air forces do not need to be managed, they need to be led. Gabriel, a professor of politics, presents a more profound understanding than the better-selling Hackworth. His core criticism deserves to be quoted at length:

"The military must relearn what it once knew, namely, that is is a true profession, and not just one more enterprise awash in the sea of a free society. For the last 25 years and most certainly during the last 15 years, since the advent of the All Volunteer Force, members of the military have come to perceive what they do as just one more occupation, a career in which benefits to the individual have come to outweigh the need for selfless service to the Republic. The process began in 1960 with Robert McNamara's attempts to make the military more `modern' by incorporating a number of business practices and techniques designed to make the Pentagon bureaucracy more efficient. Such techniques in themselves are no danger. However, with them came the habits, values and practices of civilian business enterprises, especially the belief that motivation within the military is no different from motivation in the larger business community. That motivation, as in the larger society, is rooted in self-interest rather than self-sacrifice. . . .
"The military . . . began to lose the perception of itself as a true profession comprised of a corps of officers and men whose reason for existence rests in something higher than the pursuit of self-interest; namely, in the task of defending the freedoms of the Republic. . . . Somewhere the military forgot that a true profession is distinguished from a business enterprise by its scope of service. The military serves the common good, not the sum of the individual interests of its members."

Excellent analysis, so far as it goes, but more could be said.

First, it was not only the military that was driving this change. Feminists who openly demanded access to "good careers" were a factor operating against the national interest. Swinging-door munitions makers who valued ex-officers were another. Simple financial corruption was a third.

Without the regular infusion of short-term civilians in uniform, the military began to turn into a caste. Its us-vs-them (that is, us) attitude is growing daily. It is not only becoming a caste, but it is tending to become an hereditary caste. No democracy can survive this in the long run.

Although the military's incompetence is obvious to anyone who opens his daily newspaper, Gabriel does not place sufficient blame on the civilian leadership, which just made a bad situation worse.

Jimmy Carter, a former professional officer, was the last president to follow the historic practice (which had been ignored by Johnson and Nixon) of giving direction to military commanders and then letting them carry out orders without second-guessing. Gabriel says that, contrary to belief, both popular and of Ronald Reagan, Carter did not interfere at any point in the planning or execution of the Iran hostage raid.

The military owned that failure 100 percent.

Reagan, who spent his officer career banging starlets in Culver City, knew nothing about military affairs or the American traditions of civilian control, so he and his band of incompetents interfered at every point in both planning and execution. The results in Grenada were almost beyond belief. It was perhaps the most inept military operation in American history, worse even than the famous failures of the Spanish-American War.

As Gabriel acidly notes, Carter suffered politically for mistakes he did not make, and Reagan profited politically for mistakes that cost American, Lebanese and Grenadian lives to no purpose.

Carter, an honest politician (the last one we have had in the top job), leveled with the public. Reagan and his generals simply lied their way out. Although more than 5,000 Americans were fought to a standstill by fewer than 50 poorly-armed Cubans, Reagan simply crowed and handed out more than 8,000 medals.

Nobody in the military is known to have refused one, and Army officers who wanted to bring charges of cowardice against Air Force and Marine pilots who ran from the battle were "counseled" to stand down. As Gabriel says, "In terms of career advancement, it is far more important to receive a medal for doing nothing than to have done something worthy and not received a medal."

All Gabriel's recommendations for correcting the problem are valid, and none has been adopted despite the inability of the military in the 25 years since he wrote to accomplish any combat missions it has been given: a much smaller officer corps, with slower promotion, fewer flag officers, 30-year retirement obligations, renewal of the draft, putting operational commanders in charge of planning.

His analysis of the Son Tay Operation and of Operation Eagle Claw are full of lies. He used made up people and draws much of his conclusion from those lies. It is impossible to take someone so Incompetant seriously. If you want to see why check out "The Guts to Try" written by USAF Col. James H. Kyle. Just read all of his footnotes and almost everyone is contadicting what Gabriel says. If he actually read the Holloway report which is the government investigation into why Op. Eagle Claw failed he's see it was secrecy and not incompetance that lead to the missions failure.