Lesson One: don't talk to Rolling Stone

Rico says that a good (if clueless) officer, General Stanley McCrystal, paid the price for failing to obey that lesson, as evidenced in the Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings:

'How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?" demands General Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all US and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies; to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany's president, and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than forty soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.
"The dinner comes with the position, sir," says his chief of staff, Colonel Charlie Flynn.
McChrystal turns sharply in his chair. "Hey, Charlie," he asks, "does this come with the position?" McChrystal gives him the middle finger. The general stands and looks around the suite that his traveling staff of ten has converted into a full-scale operations center. The tables are crowded with silver Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the hotel's thick carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to provide encrypted phone and email communications. Dressed in off-the-rack civilian casual– blue tie, button-down shirt, dress slacks– McChrystal is way out of his comfort zone. Paris, as one of his advisers says, is the "most anti-McChrystal city you can imagine". The general hates fancy restaurants, rejecting any place with candles on the tables as too "Gucci". He prefers Bud Light Lime (his favorite beer) to Bordeaux and Talladega Nights (his favorite movie) to Jean-Luc Godard. Besides, the public eye has never been a place where McChrystal felt comfortable: before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the Pentagon's most secretive black ops.
"What's the update on the Kandahar bombing?" McChrystal asks Flynn. The city has been rocked by two massive car bombs in the past day alone, calling into question the general's assurances that he can wrest it from the Taliban.
"We have two KIAs, but that hasn't been confirmed," Flynn says.
McChrystal takes a final look around the suite. At 55, he is gaunt and lean, not unlike an older version of Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you've fucked up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice. "I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner," McChrystal says. He pauses a beat. "Unfortunately," he adds, "no one in this room could do it." With that, he's out the door.
"Who's he going to dinner with?" I ask one of his aides.
"Some French minister," the aide tells me. "It's fucking gay."
The next morning, McChrystal and his team gather to prepare for a speech he is giving at the École Militaire, the French military academy. The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the conflict. Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as "shortsighted", saying it would lead to a state of "Chaos-istan". The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: shut the fuck up and keep a lower profile.
Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner: "Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"
"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"
When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. "I want the American people to understand," he announced in March of 2009. "We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan." He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired General David McKiernan– then the US and NATO commander in Afghanistan– and replaced him with a man he didn't know and had met only briefly: General Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than fifty years, since Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.
Even though he voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a ten-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."

There's a lot more here.

Mark Landler & Lucian Truscott IV & Thomas Ricks & Gail Collins have articles in The New York Times:
Mark Landler on Short, Tense Deliveration, Then a General Is Gone:

By the time he woke up Wednesday morning, President Obama had made up his mind. During the 36 frenetic hours since he had been handed an article from the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone ominously headlined The Runaway General, the president weighed the consequences of cashiering General Stanley A. McChrystal, whose contemptuous comments about senior officials had ignited a firestorm.
Mr. Obama, aides say, consulted with advisers; some, like Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who warned of the dangers of replacing General McChrystal, and others, like his political advisers, who thought he had to go. He reached out for advice to a soldier-statesman, Colin L. Powell. He identified a possible successor to lead the war in Afghanistan. And then, finally, the president ended General McChrystal’s command in a meeting that lasted only twenty minutes. According to one aide, the general apologized, offered his resignation and did not lobby for his job.
After a seesaw debate among White House officials, “there was a basic meeting of the minds,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff and a major player in the deliberations. “This was not good for the mission, the military, or morale,” Mr. Emanuel said.
Mr. Obama has forced out officials before, including the director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair; the White House counsel, Gregory Craig; and even General McChrystal’s predecessor, General David D. McKiernan.
But this is the highest profile sacking of his presidency. The time between Mr. Obama’s first reading of the Rolling Stone article and his decision to accept General McChrystal’s resignation offers an insight into the president’s decision-making process under intense stress: he appears deliberative and open to debate, but in the end, is coldly decisive.
In a subsequent meeting with his Afghan war council, Mr. Obama delivered a tongue-lashing, instructing his advisers to stop bickering among themselves. “The president said he didn’t want to see pettiness; that this was not about personalities or reputations, it’s about our men and women in uniform,” said a senior administration official, who like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity in offering an account of the last two days.
The drama began on Monday afternoon, when Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was flying home from Illinois to Andrews Air Force Base, took an unsettling call from General McChrystal. The phone connection was scratchy, and the conversation lasted barely two minutes. General McChrystal told the vice president there was an article coming out that he would not like. Baffled, Mr. Biden asked his staff to investigate, and when he landed, aides handed him the article. After digesting it back at his residence in Washington, Mr. Biden put in a call to President Obama at 7:30 that evening. Hours earlier, the White House had itself gotten wind of the article, and a young press aide named Tommy Vietor distributed copies to all the top officials in Mr. Obama’s national security circle.
The press secretary, Robert Gibbs, walked a copy of it to the president in the private quarters. After scanning the first few paragraphs— a sarcastic, profanity-laced description of General McChrystal’s disgust at having to dine with a French minister to brief him about the war— Mr. Obama had read enough, a senior administration official said. He ordered his political and national security aides to convene immediately in the Oval Office. It was already clear then, this official said, that General McChrystal might not survive. Mr. Obama was leaning toward dismissing him, another administration official said, though he said the president was willing to wait until the general explained his actions, and those of his aides.
At the Oval Office meeting on Monday, Mr. Obama asked that General McChrystal be summoned home from Kabul. Before leaving Afghanistan, the general held an already scheduled meeting with Susan E. Rice, the United Nations ambassador, who was visiting with other United Nations diplomats.
In a one-on-one meeting on Tuesday, Mr. Gates, who had pushed to make General McChrystal the commander in Afghanistan, pleaded with Mr. Obama to hear him out, an official said. Mr. Gates warned that removing the commander would be hugely disruptive. He worried in particular about “continuity, momentum, and relations with allies,” said a senior official who was involved in the meetings. Still, even as Mr. Gates advocated for General McChrystal, the Pentagon began drawing up a list of potential replacements. Mr. Obama, this official said, was immediately drawn to the idea of turning to General David H. Petraeus: an architect of the counterinsurgency strategy, a politically skilled commander, and a replacement who would address Mr. Gates’s concerns.
As it happened, General Petraeus was close at hand. That very day he had traveled to a secret site in Northern Virginia to convene a meeting of the Counterterrorism Executive Council, a group of military and intelligence officials who gather regularly to discuss operations. But General Petraeus was not offered the job until he walked into the White House on Wednesday, soon after the president’s meeting with General McChrystal, a senior aide said.
On Tuesday, while General McChrystal was making the fourteen-hour flight to Washington, the White House was involved in a whirl of meetings about his fate. Along with Mr. Gates, aides say, four other senior officials were influential: Vice President Biden; the national security adviser, General James L. Jones; Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff; and Mr. Emanuel. Mr. Emanuel’s opinion and that of other advisers swung back and forth, a senior official said. Mr. Obama seemed inclined toward dismissing the general, but heard out the debate. By Tuesday night, officials said, they ended up hoping that the general would simply resign.
Meanwhile, General McChrystal was busy placing calls to apologize to people who were belittled in the article. One of those he called was Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “He was very respectful and apologetic, and I think, obviously understood he’d made a mistake and he wasn’t making any excuses,” Mr. Kerry said in an interview, noting that General McChrystal made no case for keeping his job. “He was being pretty direct and upfront.”
The general had some high-profile defenders, including President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. But, in the end, President Obama decided that he had to go. After meeting with General McChrystal, he held a forty-minute meeting with General Petraeus and a broader session with his war council, and then stepped into the Rose Garden to explain his decision to the American public.
“He likes Stan and thinks Stan is a good man, a good general, and a good soldier,” Mr. Emanuel said. “But as he said in his statement, this is bigger than any one person.”

Lucian Truscott IV on The Unsentimental Warrior:

There's one moment in the Rolling Stone article that led to General Stanley McChrystal’s dismissal on Thursday that truly concerned me, and it’s not one of the reproachful comments about administration officials that have been clucked over by pundits and politicians. No, what stood out for me was the scene in which General McChrystal points to the members of his staff and says: “All these men, I’d die for them. And they’d die for me.”
General McChrystal got it entirely backward: generals definitely don’t die for their soldiers, and soldiers don’t die for generals. They die because generals order them into battle to accomplish a mission, and some are killed carrying out those orders. General McChrystal’s statement is that of a man who is sentimental about his job, and who has confused sentimentality with command.
For too long, the Army has been led by sentimental men, by peacocks in starched fatigues and strutting ascetics surrounded by public relations teams. But the Army doesn’t need sentimental generals; it needs generals who can give the kind of difficult and deadly orders that win wars.
I’ll tell you how I know this. In 1967, when I was a cadet at West Point, I met, entirely by chance, the journalist Will Lang, who had written a Life magazine cover story about my grandfather, General Lucian K. Truscott Jr., during World War Two. Grandpa didn’t like having a gaggle of correspondents following him around, because you had to feed them and house them and otherwise take care of their needs, including giving them interviews, and that took away from the mission, which he described in his memoirs as killing German soldiers. But the Army wanted him on the cover of Life, so he allowed Will Lang to follow him around while he commanded the VI Corps in its invasion of southeastern France in 1944.
After more than a few drinks that night, Will Lang told me a story. Grandpa had once allowed him to attend his early morning meeting with his division commanders. Lang watched, a little bewildered, as Grandpa moved pins on a map and ordered his commanders to advance up this road, or take this town, or destroy that German brigade. When the commanders eventually left, Lang and Grandpa sat down to breakfast at a field table just outside his command trailer. Lang proceeded to ask Grandpa a series of questions about what, precisely, had gone on in that meeting.
Grandpa apparently grew frustrated with these questions, so he grabbed Lang by the arm and hauled him back into the trailer. He pointed to a pin on the map and asked Lang if he knew what it meant when he moved that pin an inch or two forward. Lang admitted that he didn’t. “It means by nine o’clock, two dozen of my men will be dead, and a few hours later, two dozen more of them will die, and more of them will die until that unit accomplishes the mission I gave them,” Grandpa said. “That’s what it means.” Then Grandpa led Lang back to the table and they finished their breakfast.
After more than thirty years of nearly continuous war, every Afghan— whether Taliban or friendly— knows the lesson that Grandpa taught Lang that day. Unless we put generals in command who aren’t sentimental, generals who are willing and able to give the deadly serious orders to accomplish the mission they are given, who know that men die for a cause and not for them, we will get no respect from friend or foe in Afghanistan, and we may as well pack up our stuff and go home.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a journalist, is the author of Dress Gray.

Thomas Ricks on Lose a General, Win a War:

For most of our nation’s history, the armed services have had a strong and worthy tradition of firing generals who get out of line. So, for most of our presidents, there would have been no question about whether to oust General Stanley McChrystal for making public his differences with the White House over policy in Afghanistan. If President Obama had not fired General McChrystal, it would have been like President Truman keeping Douglas MacArthur after his insubordination during the Korean War.
Some analysts fret that losing General McChrystal will mean sacrificing the relationship he had developed with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. But the general’s dysfunctional relationship with the other senior American officials in Kabul, painfully laid out this week in Rolling Stone, is more significant. If President Obama is to be faulted, it is for leaving that group in position after it became apparent last fall that the men could not work well together.
No policy can be successful if those sent to put it in place undermine one another with snide comments to reporters and leaked memorandums, like the cable disparaging Mr. Karzai written by Ambassador Karl Eikenberry last year. For this reason, the president should finish cleaning house and fire Ambassador Eikenberry and the special envoy, Richard Holbrooke.
Mr. Obama should then replace them with a team that has a single person clearly in control, with the power to hire and fire the others. And he should send that new group to Kabul with clear orders that they should get along, or expect to be relieved.
In the longer term, the Army has to return to its tradition of getting rid of leaders who are failing. The Navy has shown more fortitude; in the first two months of this year alone it fired six commanders of ships and installations. On Tuesday, it fired the skipper of the frigate John L. Hall, two months after it collided with a pier at a Black Sea port in Georgia. The Navy stated simply, as it usually does in such cases, that the officer’s superior had lost confidence in him. That is all that is needed.
The Marine Corps has also largely kept the tradition of relieving officers, most notably during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 when its top ground officer, Major General James Mattis, fired the commander of the First Marine Regiment. During his tenure, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has fired secretaries of the Army and the Air Force and an Air Force chief of staff.
Back in World War Two, the Army had no qualms about letting officers go; at least sixteen of the 155 generals who commanded divisions in combat during the war were relieved while in combat. George Marshall, the nation’s top general, felt that a willingness to fire subordinates was a requirement of leadership. He once described General Hap Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, as a fine man, but one who “didn’t have the nerve to get rid of men not worth a damn”.
Marshall had plenty of nerve: in 1940 and 1941, as war loomed, he forced into retirement several hundred officers he deemed too old and slow to be effective. When the commandant at Leavenworth, Brigadier General Charles Bundel, told him that updating the complete set of Army training manuals would take eighteen months, Marshall offered him three months, and then four months, to do the job. It can’t be done, Bundel twice responded.
“You be very careful about that,” Marshall told him in a telephone conversation.
“No, it can’t be done,” Bundel repeated.
“I’m sorry, then you are relieved,” Marshall said.
We tend to remember those who were nearly relieved but ultimately weren’t, most notably General George Patton, who came closest to being fired during the war after slapping two American soldiers suffering from combat fatigue. But that sort of exception illustrates another aspect of the lost tradition of relieving commanders: the military had some flexibility in enforcing it. Patton was seen by his superiors as having unusual weaknesses but equally rare strengths, so he was kept on.
One advantage of having a more flexible attitude toward removal from combat command was that it did not necessarily mean the end of one’s career. During World War Two, three Army division commanders— Orlando Ward, Terry de la Mesa Allen, and Leroy Watson— were relieved of command of divisions in combat, but went on to lead different divisions later in the war.
The old system may seem harsh in today’s light, and certainly some men were treated unfairly. But keep in mind that job losses were dwarfed by combat losses: In the summer of 1944, fifteen of the twenty battalion and regimental commanders in the 82nd Airborne were either killed or wounded. In World War Two, a front-line officer either succeeded, became a casualty, or was relieved within a few months; or in some cases, within days.
The tradition of swift relief provided two benefits that we have lost in today’s Army: It punished failure and it gave an opportunity to younger, more energetic officers who were better equipped to adapt to the quickening pace of the war. When George Marshall heard of a major who really was doing a general’s work, he stepped in to make the man a brigadier general overnight. Under this audacious system, a generation of brilliant young commanders emerged, men like James Gavin, an innovator in airborne warfare who became the Army’s youngest three-star general.
But that tradition was somehow lost in the Korean War and buried conclusively in Vietnam. Nowadays, dynamic young leaders can’t emerge as quickly, because almost no one is fired. In a much-discussed 2007 article in Armed Forces Journal, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling wrote that “a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”
In Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, most of our commanders have “rotated in” for a year, led their units, and gone home. This skews incentives away from risk-taking and toward not making waves. Consequently, the only generals who are fired are those at the very top, who do not serve one-year tours of duty, and so must be removed by firing or forced resignation.
Had Army officers been managed during the Afghan War as they were during World War Two, we would be seeing a new generation of leaders emerge. Instead, a beleaguered president once again is sending David Petraeus to the rescue, making it appear as though he is the only competent general we have.

Thomas E. Ricks, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and the author of The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, is writing a history of American generalship since World War Two. 

Gail Collins on McCrystal's putative Twitter life:
Day One
• In Paris with my Kabul posse: Bluto, Otter, Boon, Pinto, Flounder. Plus some newbie. Guys call him Scribbles.
• Suite’s getting pretty crowded. Good thing I sleep standing up.
• Three hours of shuteye and back to work. Have to read every report — check the details! Like I told Scribbles. The little fellow’s a fan. :)
Day Two
• Stuck going to dinner w/ some damned French minister. Gang riding me big. Bluto says they will make me eat snails. Hell of a funny guy, Bluto.
• Restaurant — ultra-Gucci. No Bud Light Lime. Damn. Wish I was on foot patrol in Kandahar. :(
• Minister yammering diplomatic bull. I’d rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people. As if they could. lol.
• Still talking. Better at this diplomatic stuff than I used to be. Learned a lot in last few years. Like, don’t mention “mission failure”.
• Whoops. Mentioned “mission failure”. Don’t think the minister noticed.
• Steak comes, covered in some goop. Miss my gruel.
• Dinner’s over. Ran twelve miles.
Day Three
• Missus is here! Hell of a surprise. Turns out it’s our 33rd wedding anniversary.
• Wife wants the gang out of the hotel room. Women. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them for more than eleven months at a time.
• Time for anniversary dinner. Does this country never stop eating?
• Night starts on a bad note; McDonald’s won’t let Pinto and Otter bring in the Tequiza. Damn. Wanted to show Missus a good time. :(
• Comeback kids found a bar next to the hotel. Wiped the Gucci drink specials off the chalkboard and we are diagramming up a storm. :)
• Team America is partying! Bluto’s doing his impression of Joe Biden. Scribbles taped whole thing; get ready for laughs when we get home.
Day Four
• Spent the morning emailing back and forth with Kabul. They can’t get Karzai to come out of his room again.
• Hanging out at a cafe. We’re shooting the breeze about the dingbat diplomatic corps. Except Hillary.
• Pinto reminds me how intimidated Obama looked around the generals. Yeah, but the guy really trusts my judgment. :)
• Found Scribbles sitting in potted plant next to our table. Kid must like nature.
Day Five
• Said goodbye to the Missus. Great gal. Can’t wait to see her again once the war is over.
• Berlin’s the next stop, but that damn Iceland volcano has everything grounded. Can’t believe Europeans are afraid to fly in a little ash.
• Got another email from Holbrooke. :(
• Bluto does his riff about Holbrooke as a crippled impala & I’m the lion. Scribbles really digging it.
• Great news: we’ve got a bus to take us to Berlin. Nothing but Team America and a luggage rack crammed with Bud Light Lime.
• Scribbles wants to come, too. Told him okay, but only if he buys the next two cases.
• Road trip!

Frank James has an opinion column at NPR.org:

During a discussion of the McChrystal affair on NPR's Diane Rehm Show, James Kitfield, a senior correspondent for the National Journal, made a point that no doubt has crossed the mind of many reporters who cover the military: the fallout from the infamous Rolling Stone piece has just made their jobs harder.
The takeaway for many senior military officers is likely to be that there's only a downside to talking with the media so why bother?

Kitfield: There will be no embeds in Afghanistan in higher headquarters for quite a while. This has probably set back the reporting quite a ways because the trust between the military and the media has just been shot out of the water.

Kitfield is probably right. It took decades following the Vietnam War for the mutual distrust between the military and media to be broken down. Many in the military blamed the media for losing the war.
While the wariness was never completely gone, and there were good reasons for at least some suspicion to remain, reporters embedded with units in Iraq and Afghanistan have often reported back approvingly to colleagues back home about the access they've received. The ice had melted.
But many generals and other senior officers will now likely think twice about giving reporters the kind of access Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings had.
The fear from a reporters' perspective is that officers will conclude it's already tough enough to fight a difficult war without risking a public relations disaster if they should, like McChrystal, make the mistake of saying something impolitic to a reporter while on the record.

Rico says any guy named Stanley, especially one who drinks Bud Light Lime and who likes Talladega Nights and doesn't like Paris or French food, is doomed...