Small Wars Journal
www.smallwarsjournal.com
The U.S. Army General Staff:
Where Is It in the Twenty-first Century?
Louis A. DiMarco
A Myriad of problems plagued the U.S. army in the first few years of operations in Iraq.
At the eleventh hour General Petraeus led a new counterinsurgency doctrine inspired
“surge” campaign that may have saved the entire war effort. However, the question must
be asked –why did the war effort of the most sophisticated army in the world come down
to a final moment “Hail Mary” pass that was reliant on the genius of an individual
commander for victory? The answer is that the U.S. army experienced a crisis of
command. Pundits gradually came to the conclusion that the performance of U.S.
generalship and senior leadership had been mediocre at best and at worst largely
responsible for the problems associated with prosecuting the war in its initial years.
Army Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling wrote: “These debacles are not attributable to
individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America's general officer
corps.”
1
Yingling’s analysis was echoed by military affairs analysts such as Ralph Peters
and Douglas McGregor.
2
Even Chief of Staff of the Army, General George Casey
allowed that “we don’t do as good a job as we need to training our senior leaders to
operate at the national level.”
3
However, mediocre generalship alone does not account
for the initial uninspired reactive prosecution of the war. Also contributing to the
inconsistent and ineffectual prosecution of the war was the absence of a professional
corps of general staff officers operating in support of the senior leadership.
Inspired talented generalship greatly enhances combat effectiveness, however, no army in
history has been able to consistently recognize military genius and ensure that those
individuals of genius rise to the levels of senior command. Instead, military genius
among senior commanders at the critical historical moment is more a matter of luck
rather than design. The great military theorists, Sun Zu and Clausewitz both agreed that
successful battle command depends on the intuition of the military genius. Such intuition
can be improved by education and experience, but only if the commander already
possesses the innate ability.
4
No military system has ever been able to consistently
1
Paul Yingling, “A Failure of Generalship,” Armed Forces Journal (May, 2007).
2
Douglas Macgregor, “Outside View: Where U.S. Generals Failed,” UPI Outside View Commentator, 14
August 2006; Ralph Peters, “General Failure,” USA Today, 24 July 2007.
3
George Casey, interview by Government Executive Magazine, 6 September 2007. On-line. Available
from Internet, at the Small Wars Journal website: http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/10/gen-casey-on-
a-failure-in-gene, accessed 17 March 2008.
4
Michael I. Handel, Masters of War: Classic Strategic Thought (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 31.
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