Sacking the Generals

Recently Ukraine’s President Zelensky caused a stir (rapidly overtaken by other news) when firing his fairly well-regarded Commander of Joint Forces Gen Zaluzhnyi.  Political machinations?  A sign of weakness?  Well, I don’t have any specific insight into what’s going on there.  But I do know that firing generals is a perfectly legitimate option when things are going wrong.  You just need to be sure you’ve picked the right ones for the right reasons, and are not just lashing out in some kind of random scapegoating or personal score-settling.

It immediately brought to mind a recent book on the firing – and non-firing – of US generals: The Generals – American military command from WW2 to today, by Thomas E Ricks.  The author’s twofold thesis is that:

(a) when the chips are down, prompt and adroit dismissals are vital to ensure that failure is not rewarded and that the right talent gets to the top, as fast as possible.  The players need to take over from the gentlemen at the earliest possible juncture;

(b) this used to be the American Way in the good old days when George C. Marshall was Chief of Staff: but the the mighty US Army inexorably became bureaucratised thereafter, so that very bad generals have been left in place to wreak havoc in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Well, the US system wasn’t perfect – Marshall left Mark Clark, a truly awful general, in place.  But evidently he got through a lot of dead wood in pretty short order, as part of the vast expansion of the US Army in a very few years after 1940.  That’s all the more remarkable because, in my experience of ultra-fast-growing organisations (I’ve worked in a couple), there’s a tendency to feel that that hasty firings deplete the numbers just when every more-or-less able-bodied person is needed for the burgeoning task in hand.

Ricks’ critique of several postwar US generals is unsparing.  Read it if this is your thing.  I’ll just say that the book has told me stuff I hadn’t known about the one I worked under (indirectly) – Norman Schwartzkopf – making me think I gave him too much credit in my thread on Desert Storm etc a few years back, which you can find here.  If what Ricks says is correct, I hadn’t realised Stormin’ Norman’s first plan of attack was so lamentably wooden; (I was busy trying to figure out the other side’s plans) nor that he so fundamentally misread what Ricks reckons were the strategic significances of the striking initiatives Saddam launched at the Battle of Khafji and his Scud campaign (posts 3 & 4 in my thread).  Colin Powell doesn’t come out too well from the book, either.  I could offer a bit of a defence for both men, notwithstanding we all know they didn’t manage to decapitate the Iraqi army when with perfect hindsight, we now know it might (possibly) have been achieved in 1991, saving the world a lot of bother twelve years later.  But nonetheless, they did achieve quite a lot.

And firing generals in the UK?  Well, Churchill fired a fair few.  Since WW2 I’m not sure we’ve been put to the test in quite the same way as the USA.  I once personally witnessed that irascible martinet Peter Inge, when a Lt General commanding 1(BR) Corps, publicly destroy an unlucky (and possibly incompetent) Brigadier in front of the whole Corps staff.  That didn’t seem right then, and it still doesn’t – and that’s not to say the man shouldn’t have been fired.  But there are ways and ways.  

I wonder how Zelensky’s move will be seen in the years – or even the months – to come?

ND