Petraeus to Langley: An Opportunity Lost
Perhaps the most eventful news of the Obama administration’s shuffling of its national security deck chairs is the fact that General David Petraeus—commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, architect of the Iraq surge, and the driving force behind the Army’s willingness to adapt to the persistent irregular wars it’s been asked to fight rather than wait for the conventional conflict it would prefer to fight—will not become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but be asked to run the CIA. As my AEI colleague Arthur Herman neatly put it, this is like pulling Ulysses S. Grant away from Richmond to run the Pinkerton Agency.
That is, Petraeus has not only been the most successful post-9/11 field commander, but a symbol of innovative and adaptive military leadership. And, as the Libya campaign indicates, the American role in building a decent and durable order across the greater Middle East is very much a work in progress. Neither of the likely alternatives—Marine General James “Hoss” Cartwright (who would inevitably carry the weight of having been designated “Obama’s favorite general” by Bob Woodward) or NATO chief Admiral James Stavridis—has the experience or the credibility. Tucking Petraeus away at the CIA won’t really explain away the failure to reward success in war with the ultimate mission of remaking the U.S. armed forces as an institution.
The American military will be under enormous strain over the four years that would comprise the likely tenure of the next Joint Chiefs chairman. The wars and crises will continue across the Middle East and the military balance with China will continue to erode. Iran is very likely to acquire a nuclear capability. The White House and Congress are a hair’s breadth away from a race to the bottom to cut future military budgets; in the course of three years, the Obama administration has trimmed about $800 billion from its defense plans, and it’s unclear whether congressional Republicans will want to hold the line or slash more deeply. It will be a Herculean task to preserve sufficient strength and maintain troop morale in the coming do-even-more-with-ever-less years.
Passing Petraeus over does no favor to Leon Panetta, the incoming defense secretary, either. Robert Gates has been extremely lucky in having not only Petraeus but Generals Raymond Odierno in Iraq and Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan, but it was also a luxury that enabled him selectively to dismiss a number of officers who didn’t meet his standards. While Gates also had the advantage of being a Bush holdover, having a stable of successful commanders gave him both latitude and leverage in running the Pentagon. It’s likely that one of the first questions Panetta will have to answer as SecDef is, “Why not Petraeus?”
This all makes the president and the administration look weak. To all appearances, the White House has found a too-clever-by-half solution to its own self-inflicted “Petraeus Problem,” stemming from its over-hyped worries about the general’s supposed political ambitions. A more confident commander-in-chief would have made Petraeus the chairman to execute and explain the coming cuts. The CIA job keeps the general “inside the tent” but still hidden away in the CIA closet.
Finally, putting a serving general in what is essentially a political and policy job muddies the line between what should be a civilian responsibility and appropriate military professionalism. As younger generations of politicians come into the White House, they are increasingly turning to serving or recently retired officers to be intelligence chiefs and even national security advisers. While this again reflects an intellectual, political, and even moral weakness on the civilian side of the equation, it is dangerous for those on the uniformed side as well—George Marshall was the exception that is increasingly becoming the rule. Few, if any, of Marshall’s successors proved equal to the task, and the result is not just personal embarrassment but a reflection on the shortcomings of American generalship. To oversimplify, battle and tactics are the trade of the professional officer, war and strategy the trade of the politician.
Cross-posted from the Enterprise Blog.
