Tuesday 26 April 2016

Gen. Martin Dempsey Leaves a Legacy of Caution

Tuesday’s nomination of a new Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman began the formal winding down of Gen. Martin Dempsey’s tenure. Yet Gen. Dempsey’s vision—one of caution about U.S. military engagements and reliance on local partners—is expected to prevail through the end of Barack Obama’s term.

Mr. Obama nominated Marine Corps commandant Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr. to the Joint Chiefs chairmanship that Gen. Dempsey vacates Oct. 1. Gen. Dunford is largely built from the same mold as Gen. Dempsey, U.S. defense officials said.

Like the current chairman, Gen. Dunford has been unconvinced of the utility of many long-term deployments of American troops. A former top international commander in Afghanistan, he arrived there skeptical of the counterinsurgency mission taken on by his predecessors.

He sped up the transition to having American forces focus nearly exclusively on training the Afghan military, a critical part of the U.S. exit strategy. Gen. Dunford, associates say, has long been wary of having U.S. forces carry out missions that could be done by local forces.

All this squares with the approach taken by Gen. Dempsey in his nearly four years as the nation’s most senior uniformed officer—the top military adviser to both the president and the defense secretary. Like most senior generals active today, Gen. Dempsey was shaped by the long Iraq war.

So when the U.S. military returned to Iraq in 2014 to combat Islamic State, he pushed for tight restrictions on how American forces could operate, to make Iraqis do more themselves. These are restrictions that defense officials expect Gen. Dunford to continue.

This caution about the use of force mirrors and reinforces Mr. Obama’s, with the result that Gen. Dempsey has emerged as the most consistent voice inside the administration arguing for a limited role for the U.S. military. Gen. Dempsey often tells policy makers the use of force rarely turns out as predicted.

His critics charge that this view has led to America’s slow withdrawal from the world stage and left the U.S. too timid in the face of crises.

ENLARGE

“One thing Gen. Dempsey has proven,” said Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), who is among his leading critics, “is if you don’t want to intervene anywhere, in any country, you can invent reasons not to get involved. The military always errs on the side of caution, but not to the extent I see with Gen. Dempsey’s advice.”

While long taking a skeptical view of Gen. Dempsey, Sen. McCain has been supportive of Gen. Dunford, admiring how the Marine leader effectively pushed for troops to remain in Afghanistan after 2014.

Gen. Dempsey declined to be interviewed for this article, and Gen. Dunford, who faces Senate confirmation, also wasn’t available for comment. In an interview in December to discuss Iraq, Gen. Dempsey invoked an insight of theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, which, in simplified form, is that scientists observing the world cannot help but alter its path.

“It requires a degree of tactical and strategic patience before you rush in,” Gen. Dempsey said. “It is the Heisenberg problem: When you touch it, you change it.”

Gen. Dempsey is hardly an isolationist or reflexively against intervention, associates say. But neither does he shun the description of him as cautious. Senior officials say he has come to realize his boss is even more so. That difference emerged on the issue of whether to provide some weapons to Ukraine—an idea embraced by Gen. Dempsey but blocked by Mr. Obama.

Much of Gen. Dempsey’s approach stems from his experience in Iraq. In 2005, for instance, he took charge of the training of Iraqi security forces, at a time when the U.S. had intelligence that some Iraqi commanders were leading sectarian death squads. In a room inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, he got into an argument with Robert Ford, a political counselor at the U.S. embassy.

ENLARGE

U.S. Army trainers instruct Iraqi army recruits at a military base in April in Taji, Iraq. Gen. Dempsey is determined both that the Iraqis be well-trained and that they take on the bulk of the work in pushing back Islamic State from territory it captured last year. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

Mr. Ford said the military should fire some of the Iraqi police commanders to set an example. Gen. Dempsey, who former associates say has a temper, turned red-faced, according to participants in the meeting. He later told other officials he knew that bad commanders had to be rooted out, but he was furious that this problem was being laid at his feet when its cause stemmed from the rushed way the forces had been created in the first place.

For Gen. Dempsey, there was a lesson from the mess: Don’t train a large force in a short amount of time.

Today, with the U.S. military again engaged in Iraq, top military officers say the renewed training of Iraqi forces won’t be rushed.

Like Mr. Obama, Gen. Dempsey was reluctant to return the U.S. military to Iraq. Yet when Islamic State forces threatened America’s Kurdish allies and mounted genocidal attacks on Yazidis, Christians and others who weren’t Sunni Muslims, Gen. Dempsey advised that the U.S. should act.

The U.S. had to make sure the Iraqis were taking charge, though, Gen. Dempsey said in the December interview.

He cited the example of an Iraqi government request for a humanitarian aid drop in northern Iraq. U.S. commanders refused, noting the Iraqis had their own cargo planes; the U.S. ended up helping rig the load, but it was the Iraqis who flew the mission.

“At end of the day, that is what has to happen,” Gen. Dempsey said. “Otherwise, we become the 911 service again.”

Gen. Dunford, his chosen successor, takes a similar approach. Although Gen. Dunford argued for the extension of the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan past the scheduled departure date of 2014, he agreed to a strict time limit on those forces.

“Gen. Dunford is very conscious in every way that his decisions will be carried out by a lot of young Americans,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D, R.I.), the senior Democratic member of the Armed Services Committee led by Sen. McCain.

As difficult as Iraq is, Syria has been the U.S.’s most complex national-security crisis in Gen. Dempsey’s time as chairman. Supporters say he helped craft a reasonable approach that has kept the U.S. from involvement in a fight that can’t be won. Critics, for their part, say Gen. Dempsey’s caution helped prevent the U.S. from intervening on behalf of moderate rebels battling Bashar al-Assad’s regime at a time when it could have made a difference.

ENLARGE

President Barack Obama said Tuesday he is nominating Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr. to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press

In early 2012, Gen. David Richards, then the British armed-forces chief, began talking with Gen.

Dempsey about an ambitious proposal to train moderate Syrian rebels on a large scale. Gen. Dempsey expressed initial enthusiasm but later told Gen. Richards that something so large was a nonstarter in Washington.

“Marty is instinctively cautious, and by the way, that is no bad thing,” Gen. Richards said. “Most military men who have seen combat are cautious. If you are going to go to war, do it properly or don’t do it at all.”

In the late summer 2012, the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency began pushing to move forward with aid to the Free Syrian Army, then the leading moderate rebel group. Inside the tank, the room where the Joint Chiefs of Staff meet, the discussion came back to lessons of the U.S. proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Would Syrian rebels turn on the U.S. just as the U.S.-backed Afghan mujahedeen ultimately had done?

The Joint Chiefs realized the rebel force was changing, according to a person present. But they didn’t understand exactly how, so the consensus was to proceed cautiously.

Leon Panetta, then defense secretary, said that in contrast to “the panicked approach” to decision making that can prevail during security crises, Gen. Dempsey’s “instincts are to take that deep breath and think through what you’re going to do and what you’re facing so that you do as much as you can to avoid the kinds of mistakes you are going to regret.”

Military officers close to Gen. Dempsey say his role isn’t to advocate a course of action but to offer advice on options. Advocates of doing more in Syria saw him as a roadblock.

In 2012, Mr. Ford, the diplomat who had squared off against Gen. Dempsey seven years earlier in Iraq, was the U.S. ambassador to Syria and a leading advocate of a more muscular response there.

Mr. Ford, who resigned in 2014 and has become a critic of the administration’s approach to Syria, said Gen. Dempsey and the White House should have better recognized the risk of inaction.

“The problem is they waited and waited and waited for the perfect. And the perfect never came along. We have waited for the perfect for so long that we lost the chance for good,” Mr. Ford said.

The CIA began a training program for moderate rebels in mid-2013. That program was widely seen as a failure, and this year the military began a separate training effort. Officials say it will start later this spring.

Gen. Dempsey is confident the U.S. understands cause and effect when contemplating conflicts with other nation states. But, he said in the December interview, fights with terror groups are “far more complex and require a degree of thinking and caution.”

Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, who has served with both Gen. Dempsey and Gen. Dunford, said both showed during the Iraq war that they were operational virtuosos. He added that both also learned hard lessons about American power, including that to have a lasting impact on the ground, you have to work through allies. “You help the good guys, but you don’t do it all for them,” he said.

Half-facetiously, Gen. Mattis cited another continuity between the current and the newly nominated Joint Chiefs chairman: “We have got one Irishman replacing another Irishman,” he said. “Both of them are comfortable in their own skin.”

0 comments:

Post a Comment