What’s a good general to do? (Conservatives, Obama, Afghanistan #4)

posted at 1:44 pm on September 21, 2009 by CK MacLeod
[ National Defense ]   

Yesterday, regarding the President and Afghanistan, I asked, “If he rejects the Petraeus-McChrystal strategy, what do Petraeus and/or McChrystal do…?”

One answer: Leak.

Not that Gen. Petraeus or Gen. McChrystal or Admiral Mullen personally leaked the August 30 strategy document – but, gosh darn it, you can’t expect a general officer busy with a deteriorating military situation personally to police every subordinate’s and consultant’s in- and outboxes. And not that the President has rejected the strategy yet – although, with troops in the field and any battle always either improving or worsening, every day that he “deliberates” amounts to one day of effective rejection. Right now, he seems content to feign ignorance of it.

In this situation, smoke signals from frustrated military and DoD types won’t likely consist only of document drops – even of documents whose content, whose very existence, embarrasses the Commander-in-Chief. We may start hearing more statements like this one:

“Either accept the assessment or correct it, or let’s have a discussion,” one Pentagon official said. “Will you read it and tell us what you think?” Within the military, this official said, “there is a frustration. A significant frustration. A serious frustration.”

Looking at this last tidbit – the final paragraph of the particular WaPo article – Rich Lowry predicts that “[t]he next few weeks will be a fraught period for civil-military relations.”

There are a lot of other things an unhappy commander, or set of commanders can do short of resigning – which is the ultimate option, but not a box anyone wants to check (or open). If the President refrains from making a decision – whether it’s because he’s focused on other priorities or because he’s still catching up on his von Clausewitz and skipping to the end would ruin the suprise – or if the President makes what the military believes is the wrong decision, the WaPo leak may stand not as the end of the beginning, but as the beginning of the beginning of a struggle, a clash of cultures and concepts, that neither side should want, but which for a long time, since well before last November, has seemed inevitable.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

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