On McChrystal

General McChrystal - word is he's coming to his meeting with President Obama resignation-in-hand. That's not surprising. If I were McC I would too. Of course, the buzz of all the inside-the-beltway speculation is whether or not the President will accept it or not, and the pros and cons of both choices.

Also much speculation about riddles wrapped in enigmas surrounded by mysteries - did McC do this on purpose? Is he trying to get fired in order to shift blame away for losing the war? I'm not going to go hunt up all the links - look to the left side of the sphere for that spin as they look to deflect harm from the President. Did McC do this as a forcing function to get the President's head in the game, or something thereby? Look to the right side of the sphere for ghosts of that. Then there's the third way - it just happened. No Machiavellian plotting. It just happened. That's kind of my take at this point, if only by applying Occam's Razor.

Which doesn't sit well for McC and his now-resigned media guy, Duncan Boothby, who apparently was the one who suggested that McC accept the embed with Rolling Stone. Bad decision? Surely. And McC isn't the first to have this happen, either. Reporters are sneeky folk.

1974. Brand-spanking new Rock Bridge High School in Columbia, Missouri has a potential state champion wrestler who is dominating his weight class. The University of Missouri School of Journalism has a newspaper, the Columbia Missourian, that they use to train aspiring Joe Kleins. It's a slow news month in local high school sports, so this wrestler finds himself with what amounts to his very own private reporter. This reporter has nothing to write about except this wrestler. It's the end of the season, with a month of weekends spent at the cascade of tournaments that lead to State. The wrestler and reporter spend a lot of time together.

One morning, after the wrestler qualified for State, he sits down to breakfast, and his father pushes the sports page to him, giggling. Our wrestler reads the paper and is aghast. His pet pre-match superstition (all jocks have them) is laid out there in embarrassing (to a 16 year old) detail. He has been betrayed by the reporter who was just doing his job.

Flash forward to Bosnia, and Task Force Eagle under Colonel Greg Fontenot have crossed the Sava river into Bosnia and are engaged in establishing a Zone of Separation between the combatants. Fontenot has an embedded reporter who has been with them the entire time. To make a long story short, the good Colonel, when talking to his company commanders and battalion staff during a hummer-top briefing about what's coming up makes the entirely historically accurate comment about the Serb's bandit history, and especially so in how they fought in the region during the Second World War. This is typical stuff, and in fact useful to the young Captains commanding the company teams. The reporter reports the conversation. A shite-storm erupts from the pin-striped pants set and the general officers who run scared of soldiers being soldiers. Fontenot comes close to losing his job, and does lose his chance at otherwise well-deserved and earned stars. The reporter was just doing his job.

But once again, his close proximity over time caused the leadership to relax in his presence, consider him a part of the landscape, and forgot what it is that reporters do.  Much like rich people can do with serving staff.  They become furniture.

So too it would appear with McChrystal and his staff. There was nothing said or done in those reported conversations that I haven't heard in similar conversations under every President I ever served under - from Carter through Bush 43 to Obama. While I haven't been wearing the uniform since April 2000, I've been living and working with mostly officers since then, and been in many TOCs and planning sessions. Similar discussions are had about Generals by their underlings, too. The difference, of course, is that they don't end up in Rolling Stone.

Much has been made of the fact that McC was shown the story and didn't object to it being published, a fact that fuels much of the speculation around motives.

Consider this - setting aside the spin, let us assume the quotes are accurate, if chosen for maximum impact. The publication is one known to be hostile to the war, and not one known for a love for things military, either. Objecting was going to accomplish exactly what? The story was going to get published, regardless. The damage was done, and the error was in allowing the long embed and letting your guard down - which is exactly what it looks like happened. Now all you can do is brace for impact.

Not the same thing as standing in front of a CNN camera and saying it out loud.

I asked a retired Colonel whose opinion I respect what he thought.

My first take on reading reports of the Rolling Stone article was to reckon that GEN McChrystal wi­­ll soon be planning his retirement ceremony. He certainly deserved to be fired, not for what he said, but the forum in which it appeared. Serving General Officers are expected to keep such opinions to themselves, or at least among the insider chattering classes. They are not to appear in print or on video.

So, what was he thinking when he allowed this journalist, or whatever he is to shadow him for weeks and speak with large numbers of his staff? Did he authorize/encourage people to speak freely, or did they just do so based on the example set by their boss. What this a deliberate stick in the eye, or an error in judgment brought on by chronic sleep deprivation? This is something you would expect a Captain or Major to do out of ignorance or naiveté; or a Colonel to do because he doesn’t give a damn. Generals are neither ignorant or naïve and they usually give a damn.

As to the outcome, I am not certain that my original prediction, a summary sacking, will come true. If sacked, he can retire and then say what he really thinks. The administration may not want to hear what else he may have to say and may send him back with strict orders to keep his mouth shut.

Jack Jacobs was quoted as saying that he was wrong to have said what he said, but those in the know agree that it was all correct.

Regardless - there is much angst in the ranks over the way forward, both pro and con. There is much angst in the ranks about how things are being reported, too - as soldiers read the news and wonder why what they see is so different from what is being reported.

I asked an multi-tour Afghan vet, who just left Fort Leavenworth to return to Afstan after he was summoned to talk COIN and the COIN Center here because he teaches COIN to units in Afghanistan what he thought of the Washington Post article on war weariness (which you should click-through and read to better understand the response).

Here's his response - and it cuts back at the heart of the matter - including the flap with milbloggers over Mike Yon's reporting - as well as reporting on the war in general - and how much of the reporting suffers from an ADD-like aspect, absent long term context, and is counter-productive:

Personally, I think that they caught the unnamed intel officer in one of the slumps that can happen to people here. People will get down and become very defeatist. Personally, I am shocked at the attitudes coming from home. I made what is for me these days and angry comment at Abu Muquwama last night because of the "war weariness" there (they have NO RIGHT to be weary. They aren't even HERE).

McChrystal knows what he's talking about. The Afghan government is doing some new things, like trying to staff districts and provinces from scratch with administrators and even ANP. Marjah has shown that the governance pieces are slow to form. That's the major reason for the delay. Once you clear, you've got a limited window to begin the next phase of operations before it all starts to wear thin. M4 [McChrystal] sees that and so he's made a wise choice, even knowing that it would bring him heat.

And it has.

Cordesman is well-respected, but he's not been on the ground here much either, has he? Not continuously. He makes the equivalent of day trips over here and then he goes home to his digs in Washington. I'm sorry, but I'm beginning to realize that you cannot judge this war from there, I don't care what level of access you have to intel and whatnot. You literally have to sense it the way that a tank crew senses rather than sees a round that it's fired.

I don't see the overall weariness that the unnamed officer is talking about, but I know that I've gotten weary while I've been here. I had a hell of a time in December, January and February. But I'm here, and I'm actually optimistic. There are some good processes that are starting to bear fruit and starting to spread.

Rahm Emmanuel is a dick. [regarding reasserting the firm date for withdrawal with no "conditions based" caveats] Reinforcing that message is pandering to the left, and it's harmful as mother hell over here. He should shut the f**k up and leave that big, stinking dead horse lie. As the article stated, we've actually seen Afghans begin contingency planning for what they are going to do when we abandon them.

That article wasn't exactly helpful, either. Not now.
 

I would add that I agree with this senior non-com in all his soldierly anger. 

I have access to a lot of information about the war - but it's bereft of much of the needful context to truly integrate it.  Aside from OPSEC and employment issues, it's one of the reasons I don't blog about the war in ways I used to - or at least thought I wanted to - because when I talk to guys who are in the sandboxes or just back from them, I realize that even though I've studied and taught military history, and I work as an analyst, and I've got 20 years experience as a soldier and ten more working on tasks relating to soldiering and the war... I'm missing a lot of context simply because I'm not there.  And not there *doing* the tasks, vice just observing the tasks. 

And I know how that differs.  I know the sense of near omnipotent detachment that can come from being an observer, vice being a participant - something reinforced from my time as a player at the National Training Center and as an Observer-Controller at the NTC - monday morning quarterbacking is the luxury of the observer, not the man in the arena.  Yet, at the same time, the man in the arena has his own larger context issues outside of the immediate challenges he faces.

President Obama is actually facing what is potentially one of the greatest decisions of his first term, and possibly his Presidency. 

Here's hoping he chooses wisely in the middle of a diffcult time in a difficult war.  But remember - regardless of what your personal view on this may be - we aren't going to know if the decision, whichever one is taken, is a good one until *after* we pass through the veil and can look at it from the other side.

Out of all of this, Jim Geraghty may have summed it up best:

That most tired and clichéd collection of half-naked music stars and aging boomers just managed to put together one of the most consequential pieces of journalism in the past decade.

And how proud they'll be. For all the wrong reasons, of course.

Two last things.  Yes, I was the wrestler.  No, I don't think McChrystal should be fired.  But that's easy for me to say.  It's not my decision.

Greyhawk has some thoughts as well.

Update: Grim offers a less verbose variant of my scenario over at Blackfive.