Dept. of Military History “A US Army officer is taught to do the best he can with what he is given. To recognize the possibility of failure is never to concede it but rather to persevere all the harder on the assumption that if one does persevere with imagination, failure will not occur.” From A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan. I copied out this passage because it sounded so perfect. But, obviously, minus good judgment, and the intellectual honesty to face facts, persevering all the harder is as likely to lead to a catastrophe as to success. Which was Sheehan’s point. I wondered where this approach came from. Now I’m reading Thomas Ricks’ The Generals (thanks for the reminder, Jon). It goes right back to George Marshall, FDR’s Army chief of staff, the architect of America’s modern Army, and, post-war, the Marshall Plan. Describing Marshall’s criteria for choosing commanders, Ricks says: “The quiet pessimist might be effective in other militaries, [George Marshall] argued, but not in a democratic nation that, protected by the world’s two great oceans, tended always to pursue a ‘policy of unpreparedness’ for war… the American military needed the ‘optimistic and resourceful type, quick to estimate, with relentless determination, and who possessed in addition a fund of sound common sense, which operated to prevent gross errors due to rapidity of decision and action.’” Marshall is careful to recognize “a fund of sound common sense.” And his policy also was to replace unsuccessful commanders quickly—a discontinued practice by the time of Vietnam, and since, and according to Ricks’, a reason for a lot of America’s military, and national, headaches.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Sep 2013 13:56:48 +0000
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