Galloway Goes for the Throat

One of the nice things about being one of the most repected war cor­re­spon­dents ever is that you get to tell Pentagon big­wigs to shove it where the sun don’t shine. Check out this e-​​mail slugfest between We Were Soldiers Once… And Young author Joe Galloway, and depart­ing Defense Department flack-​​in-​​chief Larry DiRita.
The whole thing started over Galloway’s recent pro­file of Paul Van Riper, the icon­o­clas­tic Marine retired gen­eral. But it wound up hit­ting on just about every major issue fac­ing the Pentagon today, from where to sta­tion forces to what kind of gear to buy. Along the way, DiRita and Galloway call each other lots of nasty things. Here’s an excerpt, from Galloway’s third response to DiRita. Check out the whole thing after the jump.

…this is not an army on the way up but one on the way to a dis­as­ter… so far it is the will­ing­ness of these young men and women to serve, and to deploy mul­ti­ple times, and to work gru­el­ing and dan­ger­ous 18 hour days 7 days a week that is the glue hold­ing things together.
all the cheap fixes have been used; all the one-​​time-​​only gains so beloved of leg­is­la­tors try­ing to bal­ance a bud­get and get out of town.
the ques­tion is what sort of an army are your bosses going to leave behind as their legacy in 2009? one that is trained, ready and well equipped to fight the hundred-​​year war with islam that seems to have begun with a vengeance on your watch? or will they leave town and head into a golden retire­ment as that army col­lapses for lack of man­power, lack of money to repair and replace all the equip­ment chewed up by iraq and afghanistan, lack of money to apply to fix­ing those prob­lems because bil­lions were squan­dered on weapons sys­tems that are a ridicu­lous legacy of a Cold War era long gone (viz. the f/​22, the osprey, the navy’s gold plated destroy­ers and air­craft car­ri­ers and, yes, nuclear sub­marines whose seem­ing future pur­pose is to replace rub­ber zodiac boats as the favorite land­ing craft of Spec Ops teams, at a cost of bil­lions). mean­while, the pen­ta­gon, at the direc­tion of your boss, marches rapidly ahead with deploy­ment of an anti-​​missile sys­tem whose rock­ets have yet to actu­ally get out of the launch tubes. at a cost of yet more mul­ti­ple bil­lions.
you say i blame your boss for things 3 or 4 lev­els below him that he can’t pos­si­bly be con­trol­ling and quote accu­sa­tions from present and for­mer flag offi­cers who he has never eye­balled per­son­ally. well the above items are things that he directly con­trols, or should; things he came into office vow­ing he was going to fix or change dras­ti­cally. and in the lat­est QDR, his last, he made none of the hard choices about wasted money on high dol­lar weapons sys­tems that make no sense in the real world today. the same QDR quite cor­rectly iden­ti­fies an urgent need for MORE psy­ops and civil affairs and mil­i­tary police and far more troops who have for­eign lan­guage train­ing appro­pri­ate to where we fight. and we bud­get a pal­try 191 mil­lion, i say MILLION, bucks to do all that. not even the cost of the periscopes on those oh-​​so-​​necessary sub­marines, or the instru­ments on one of those f22s.
this is what has my atten­tion; this is what has me in a mood to ques­tion over and over and over, wait­ing for answers that never come, change that never comes, course cor­rec­tions that never come. you wanted some specifics. there are some specifics.
joe gal­loway
PS: those [tens of thou­sands of sol­diers in fixed gar­risons in ger­many who could not deploy] were called VII Corps in the Persian Gulf War. they deployed. they formed the armored spear that pen­e­trated kuwait and broke the repub­li­can guard. the gar­risons were guarded, while they were gone, by the ger­man army and police. they would have been so guarded in OIF too had we tried a bit of diplo­macy instead of bitch-​​slapping Old Europe as your boss did at a cru­cial moment.

DaRita No. 1:
From: Di Rita, Larry, CIV, OSD
Sent: Friday, April 28, 2006 6:58 AM
To: Galloway, Joe
Subject:
Your col­umn about gen van riper is just silly, joe. To tag the sec­re­tary of defense with being respon­si­ble for every spar­row that falls out of every tree is just ludi­crous.
General Kernan, who was com­man­der of the Joint Forces Command when van riper’s wargame occurred, had very pointed things to say about van riper when van riper made his first noto­ri­ety on this whole thing.
To tag rums­feld with a wargame when there were about three or four lay­ers of the chain of com­mand between rums­feld and the wargamers just mis­un­der­stands the way the world works.
Let’s at least be hon­est about this: there is a lot of change tak­ing place, and that change forces peo­ple to re-​​examine the way we have always done things. That is bumpy, and that can make peo­ple anx­ious.
I don’t have any idea what might have hap­pened in van riper’s expe­ri­ence with this wargame, but to blame the sec­re­tary of defense for it just sounds crazy.
You talk about “rumsfeld’s fond­est ideas and the­o­ries” as if you have the first clue as to what those are. I have worked with him side-​​by-​​side for five years, and I wouldn’t even try to divine what his fond­est ideas and the­o­ries are.
The debate about defense trans­for­ma­tion was going on long before rums­feld showed up at the pen­ta­gon. I’d wager that the war game van riper was so offended by prob­a­bly began in plan­ning before rums­feld showed up.
Van riper has never even met the sec­re­tary to my knowl­edge. For him to make such sweep­ing com­ments as he did in your piece is just irre­spon­si­ble.
As a jour­nal­ist, don’t you think you owe it to your read­ers to chal­lenge when peo­ple say things like that as though they have first­hand knowl­edge.
Also, you ought to talk with Buck Kernan, who com­manded JFCOM at the time.
You’re just becom­ing a johnny one-​​note and it’s only a cou­ple of steps from that to cur­mud­geon!!
Best.…
]From gal­loway in response to DaRita No. 1:
larry:
i am delighted that folks over in OSD con­tinue to read my columns with great atten­tion. Who knows, it might make a dif­fer­ence one day.
i’ve always under­stood that the guy in charge takes the fall for every­thing that goes wrong on his watch. this is why the u.s. navy court mar­tials the cap­tain of any ship that is involved in an acci­dent or is sunk for what­ever rea­son.
this is why a President, Harry Truman, always kept a sign on his desk in the oval office that said sim­ply: The Buck Stops Here.
trou­ble with this admin­is­tra­tion is the buck never stops any­where, on anybody’s desk.
“vic­tory has many fathers; defeat is an orphan“
–Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-​​in-​​law in 1945
Last I knew Mr. Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense. His is the ulti­mate respon­si­bil­ity. And I am damned if I can under­stand how you could work for the man for as long as you have with­out know­ing what he likes and doesn’t like in the way of strat­egy and tac­tics and fight­ing wars.
In the mean­time, I hope you will take note of the fact that through­out the dis­cus­sion of this and other columns with you I have never once implied that you were “silly” or “crazy” or “ludi­crous” or even a “johnny one-​​note.“
I will be leav­ing this town in three weeks, Larry, and there’s a lot of peo­ple and places I will miss. You aren’t exactly at the top of that list.
Joe Galloway
Darita No. 2:
That’s not what you’re describ­ing, though, in your van riper piece.
I also served long enough to know that offi­cers who hide behind anonymity and com­plain to you and other jour­nal­ists about what they don’t like are caus­ing great harm to the insti­tu­tions they serve and to the coun­try.
Anyway, I think your columns have been rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a school of thought within mil­i­tary cir­cles that I don’t believe is par­tic­u­larly wide­spread.
The army is so much more capa­ble and suit­able for the nation’s needs that it was 5 or 10 years ago. To my mind, the voices your columns rep­re­sent missed the for­est for the trees.
I regret you took offense at our exchanges. Apparently peo­ple can tell a jour­nal­ist the most damnable things about rums­feld or myers or franks or the pres­i­dent and it’s okay, but a lit­tle feisty email exchange in response you find offen­sive!!
Best wishes.
Galloway Response to DaRita No. 2:
Subj: Re:
Date: 5/​3/​2006 4:56:42 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From:
To:
larry:
the army you describe as “so much more capa­ble” than it was 5 or 10 years ago is, in fact, very nearly bro­ken. another three years of the care­ful atten­tion of your boss ought to just about fin­ish it off. this is not the word from your anony­mous offi­cers; this is from my own obser­va­tions in the field in iraq and at home on our bases and in the mil­i­tary schools and col­leges.
you can sit there all day telling me that pigs can fly, with or with­out lip­stick, and i am not going to believe it.
seem­ingly the reverse is also true.
one of us is dead wrong and i have a good hunch that it would be you.
you go fly­ing blind through that for­est and you are going to find those trees for sure. whether or not paul van riper has ever met Secretary Rumsfeld is not at issue. one does not have to be a per­sonal acquain­tance to find that a pub­lic figure’s poli­cies and con­duct of his office are want­ing.
Secretary Rumsfeld spent a good num­ber of years as the CEO of var­i­ous large cor­po­ra­tions. He knows about being respon­si­ble for the bot­tom line in that line of work. So too is he respon­si­ble in his cur­rent line of work; actu­ally even more so given the stakes involved.
So grasp that con­cept harder, friend Larry. Urge your boss to step up to the plate and admit it when he’s got­ten it wrong at least as quickly as he steps up to run those famous vic­tory laps with Gen Meyer back in thes­pring of ’03.
best
joe gal­loway
DaRita No. 3:
Subj: Re:
Date: 5/​3/​2006 5:09:59 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From:
To:
Time will tell. The army is faster, more agile, more deploy­able, more lethals. At least that’s what schoomaker thinks. The army of 2000 could not have sus­tained rota­tional deploy­ments indef­i­nitely.
Retention is above 100 per­cent in units that have fre­quently deployed. Would all those sol­diers be rush­ing to join a “bro­ken” army. Do you really believe we were bet­ter off with tens of thou­sands of sol­diers in fixed gar­risons, essen­tially non-​​deployable, in ger­many and korea?
I appre­ci­ate your depth of feel­ing. What bugs me though is your impli­ca­tion that rums­feld doesn’t care about it as much as you do.
Also, if van riper et al con­fined their “analy­sis” to the issue at hand, your com­ment would be valid. Their com­ments were ad hominem, and that is a neat trick for some­one they never met.
Anyway, time will tell. Best..
————————–
Galloway response to DaRita No. 3:
larry:
[You say][the army of 2000 could not have sus­tained indef­i­nite
deploy­ments]
my response: nei­ther can the army of 2003 or the army of 2005 or 2006. it is grind­ing up the equip­ment and the troops inex­orably. recruit­ing can barely, or hardly, or not, bring in the 80,000 a year needed to main­tain a steady state in the active army enlisted ranks.…and that is WITH the high reten­tion rates in the brigades. and nei­ther fig­ure addresses the hemor­rag­ing of cap­tains and majors who are vot­ing with their feet in order to main­tain some sem­blance of a fam­ily life and a future with­out war in it. and what do we do about a year when aver­age 93 per­cent of majors are selected for Lt Col in all
MOSs.…and 100 plus per­cent in crit­i­cal MOSs.
the army is scrap­ing the bar­rel.
then there is the mat­ter of 14 pc Cat IV recruits admit­ted in Oct 05 and 19pc in Nov.…against an annual ceil­ing of 4 per­cent the return­ing divi­sions, which leave all their equip­ment behind in iraq, come home and almost imme­di­ately lose 2,000 to 3,000 stop-​​loss per­son­nel. then tradoc goes in and cherry picks the best NCOs for DI and school­house jobs. leav­ing a divi­sion with about 65 per­cent of autho­rized strength, no equip­ment to train on, sit­ting around for eight or nine months paint­ing rocks. if they are lucky 90 days before re-​​deploying the army begins to refill them with green kids straight out of AIT or advanced armor train­ing. if they are even luck­ier they have time to get in a rota­tion to JROTC or NTC and get some real­is­tic train­ing for those new arrivals. if not so lucky they just take them off to com­bat and let em sink or swim.
this is not healthy. this is not an army on the way up but one on the way to a dis­as­ter. we need more and smarter sol­diers. not more Cat IVs.
so far it is the will­ing­ness of these young men and women to serve, and to deploy mul­ti­ple times, and to work gru­el­ing and dan­ger­ous 18 hour days 7 days a week that is the glue hold­ing things together.
all the cheap fixes have been used; all the one-​​time-​​only gains so beloved of leg­is­la­tors try­ing to bal­ance a bud­get and get out of town.
the ques­tion is what sort of an army are your bosses going to leave behind as their legacy in 2009? one that is trained, ready and well equipped to fight the hundred-​​year war with islam that seems to have begun with a vengeance on your watch? or will they leave town and head into a golden retire­ment as that army col­lapses for lack of man­power, lack of money to repair and replace all the equip­ment chewed up by iraq and afghanistan, lack of money to apply to fix­ing those prob­lems because bil­lions were squan­dered on weapons sys­tems that are a ridicu­lous legacy of a Cold War era long gone (viz. the f/​22, the osprey, the navy’s gold plated destroy­ers and air­craft car­ri­ers and, yes, nuclear sub­marines whose seem­ing future pur­pose is to replace rub­ber zodiac boats as the favorite land­ing craft of Spec Ops teams, at a cost of bil­lions) mean­while the pen­ta­gon, at the direc­tion of your boss, marches rapidly ahead with deploy­ment of an anti-​​missile sys­tem whose rock­ets have yet to actu­ally get out of the launch tubes. at a cost of yet more mul­ti­ple bil­lions.
you say i blame your boss for things 3 or 4 lev­els below him that he can’t pos­si­bly be con­trol­ling and quote accu­sa­tions from present and for­mer flag offi­cers who he has never eye­balled per­son­ally. well the above items are things that he directly con­trols, or should; things he came into office vow­ing he was going to fix or change dras­ti­cally. and in the lat­est QDR, his last, he made none of the hard choices about wasted money on high dol­lar weapons sys­tems that make no sense in the real world today. the same QDR quite cor­rectly iden­ti­fies an urgent need for MORE psy­ops and civil affairs and mil­i­tary police and far more troops who have for­eign lan­guage train­ing appro­pri­ate to where we fight. and we bud­get a pal­try 191 mil­lion, i say MILLION, bucks to do all that. not even the cost of the periscopes on those oh-​​so-​​necessary sub­marines, or the instru­ments on one of those f22s.
this is what has my atten­tion; this is what has me in a mood to ques­tion over and over and over, wait­ing for answers that never come, change that never comes, course cor­rec­tions that never come. you wanted some specifics. there are some specifics.
joe gal­loway
PS: those [tens of thou­sands of sol­diers in fixed gar­risons in ger­many who could not deploy] were called VII Corps in the Persian Gulf War. they deployed. they formed the armored spear that pen­e­trated kuwait and broke the repub­li­can guard. the gar­risons were guarded, while they were gone, by the ger­man army and police. they would have been so guarded in OIF too had we tried a bit of diplo­macy instead of bitch-​​slapping Old Europe as your boss did at a cru­cial moment.
those bases in ger­many were paid for by ger­many; still are. and they are a good deal closer to the action at present and in the fore­see­able future than fort riley, kansas. now we envi­sion count­ing on rough and crude for­ward bases, occu­pied only occa­sion­ally, in places where we have such good friends and allies like the fel­low who just ordered us to get out because we harumphed when he slaugh­tered a few hun­dred or thou­sand peace­ful demon­stra­tors against his theft of yet another demo­c­ra­tic elec­tion.
you say that by doing this we are posi­tion­ing our­selves bet­ter for the wars of the future. but what if, once again, a cur­tain of iron descends across Europe and once again the Fulda Gap must be guarded against the new Red Army of our good friend and ally Putin.
your boss is fond of say­ing that this or that thing is “unknow­able.” The most unknow­able thing of all is who your enemy is going to be next time and where you are going to need allies and bases from which to attack or defend.
pulling out of europe and south korea may be one of the larger mis­takes charged off against your boss five years from now or ten, if we are lucky enough to have a whole decade to repair some of the dam­age he has done while con­gress turned a blind eye, too busy doing ear­marks for flea cir­cus muse­ums in dubuque and bridges to nowhere, alaska, to do the nec­es­sary over­sight and ques­tion­ing of cocka­mamy ideas with even more
dubi­ous esti­mates of future sav­ings of bil­lions that begin drop­ping like a rock before the ink is even dry on the report.
all i can say is what the hell are you doing ques­tion­ing my columns when you ought to be in there at the elbow of your boss read­ing those columns aloud to him every wednes­day after­noon and urg­ing him to pay atten­tion to them.
best wishes
joe gal­loway
DaRita No. 4:
Thanks for these insights, joe. none of this is easy. Your per­spec­tive seems pretty fixed but I do appre­ci­ate the expe­ri­ence you bring to it.
Again, what both­ers me most about your cov­er­age is your impli­ca­tion that the peo­ple involved in all of this are dumb or have ill-​​intent or are so sure of what they know that they don’t brook dis­cus­sion. That’s the part you’re just way off on, friend.
This is tough stuff, and we’re all hard at it, try­ing to do what’s best for the coun­try.
Best wishes.
Galloway response to DaRita No. 4:
i like to think that is what i am doing also, and it is a strug­gle that grows out of my oblig­a­tion to and love for america’s war­riors going back 41 years as of last month.
there are many things we all could wish had hap­pened.
i can wish that your boss had sur­rounded him­self with close advis­ers who had, once at least, held a dying boy in their arms and watched the life run out of his eyes while they lied to him and told him, over and over, “You are going to be all right. Hang on! Help is com­ing. Don’t quit now…“
Such men in place of those who had never known ser­vice or com­bat or the true cost of war, and who pays that price, and had never sent their chil­dren off to do that hard and unend­ing duty.
i could wish for so much.
i could wish that in jan­u­ary of this year i had not stood in a garbage-​​strewn pit, in deep mud, and watched sol­diers tear apart the wreck­age of a kiowa war­rior shot down just min­utes before and ten­derly remove the barely alive body of WO Kyle Jackson and the life­less body of his fel­low pilot. they died fly­ing over­head cover for a lit­tle three-​​vehicle Stryker patrol with which i was rid­ing at the time.
i could wish that Jackson’s widow Betsy had not found, among the pos­ses­sions of her late hus­band, a copy of my book, care­fully ear­marked at a chap­ter titled Brave Aviators, which Kyle was read­ing at the time of his death. That she had not enclosed a photo of her hus­band, her­self and a 3 year old baby girl.
those things i received in the mail yes­ter­day and they brought back the tears that i wept stand­ing there in that pit, feel­ing the same shards in my heart that i felt the first time i looked into the face of a fallen amer­i­can sol­dier 41 years ago on a bar­ren hill in Quang Ngai Province in another time, another war.
some­one once asked me if i had learned any­thing from going to war so many times. my reply: yes, i learned how to cry.
Jg
DaRita No. 5:
I appre­ci­ate what you are say­ing but your con­tin­ued impli­ca­tion that rums­feld does not under­stand all that is at stake is wrong and offen­sive.
————————–

May 15th, 2006 | Strategery | 322138 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/05/15/galloway-goes-for-the-throat/Galloway+Goes+for+the+Throat2006-05-15+14%3A28%3A12david_axe You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.