The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (40 page)

After only a year, without the envisioned calm in Afghanistan, Petraeus gave up his command on July 18, 2011, to assume a new civilian post as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Rumors had spread that Petraeus was growing dissatisfied with the Obama administration’s policies over troop levels in Afghanistan, but had, after some discussion, decided neither to resign nor to go public with his unhappiness. At one point, Petraeus was supposedly said to have warned of the Obama administration’s efforts to muzzle his military assessments of Afghanistan and relations with Pakistan, “They’re fucking with the wrong guy.” Yet, in some sense, the political handlers in the administration may have surmised that the reputation of General David Petraeus by mid-2011 was
not what it had been at the end of 2008. The CIA appointment was often interpreted by the media as a way to ease the popular but frustrated Petraeus into a position of power and reputation befitting his status—but without providing him the means to embarrass the president over the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan or to launch a political career, given that he was working inside rather than parallel to the Obama administration.
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The penultimate years of the brilliant career of David Petraeus bore an uncanny resemblance to Belisarius’ final ceremonial offices—close to but without ultimate power. In vain he had privately opposed the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from a quiet Iraq in December 2011 and the continual announcements of a planned complete drawdown from Afghanistan. Petraeus was no doubt still largely seen by some in the Obama administration as a “Bush general,” even while conservatives saw him as a newly reformulated Obama appointee. Bob Woodward, the widely read Washington insider journalist, echoed the old charge of Petraeus’s supposedly “endless campaign of self-promotion” that led to ever more appointments and press coverage.
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Although in theory he could have served as CIA chief while in uniform, Petraeus instead either was advised to leave the military, or chose to retire from the Army on August 31, 2011. He was only fifty-eight years old. It was rumored that Petraeus, after leaving Iraq, had preferred a post on the Joint Chiefs—in the fashion of laurels given to earlier generals of similar stature such as General Colin Powell. With the appointment of General Martin Dempsey as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Petraeus was passed over—again, amid rumors that the CIA post was considered the proper cul-de-sac for generals with possible political ambitions. In any case, the Obama administration had given Petraeus a key post on its own team and simultaneously denied him more prestigious military assignments. Of his desire to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, retiring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had warned Petraeus, “Forget about it.” The public was never apprised why its most successful living general should not warrant the military’s highest post.
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The frantic twenty months to save Iraq had taken a toll not just on the country, but perhaps on the person of David Petraeus as well. In February 2009, just four months after returning from Iraq, CENTCOM commander Petraeus was diagnosed with prostate cancer and underwent a two-month regimen of radiation treatments. Questions arose again about his health the following June when he momentarily collapsed during a
hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee—a fainting spell he attributed to dehydration. Petraeus now appeared in photos without his customary camouflage of a soldier in the ranks; in formal military dress, the general seemed almost encumbered by his vast array of medals. That effect of seeming out of place and uncomfortable was only magnified when he was photographed in a civilian suit and tie. Many remarked of his wearied appearance.
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Within a brief three-year period, a relatively young David Petraeus had ended his illustrious military career in a stalemated Afghanistan and switched jobs without leaving an impression of singular success at either. He was assuming control of a CIA infamous for tarnishing the reputations of many who had tried to harness it—an agency whose failures surface in the media, but whose successes usually remain classified, and whose director during scandal and catastrophe is usually first to be blamed and last to be exonerated. In that regard, the stunning and unexpected resignation of David Petraeus from his CIA post on November 9, 2012, after an admission of an extramarital affair, and right after the U.S. presidential election, shocked the nation—and at the time when this manuscript went to press remained a mystery that may involve far more than issues of adultery. Ostensibly he had helped save Iraq under the auspices of an unpopular Bush administration, and then was put into nearly the same situation in Afghanistan as the war worsened and President Obama’s poll numbers dipped. The mess of Afghanistan had overwhelmed every American general sent to quiet the country since the upsurge in violence in 2008. In truth, the wars abroad, and the so-called war on terror at home, were no longer daily issues of national concern. Success earned generals neglect in the media, failure only occasional accusations.

If the fates of other controversial savior generals—and in particular, the scandals that forced David Petraeus from the CIA—are any indication, it is likely that our modern Ridgway’s fortunes peaked in the darkest hours of 2007–2008, when one rare American—along with his brilliant cadre of civilian and military advisers—was able to save a war deemed lost by almost everyone around him. Or, to paraphrase the Roman poet Ennius of Quintus Fabius Maximus, “The Delayer” (Cunctator)—another savior general who in the late third century B.C. kept the Roman Republic alive after its four losses to Hannibal at the disastrous battles at Tricinius, the River Trebia, Lake Trasimene, and Cannae and who was equally criticized for not waging war in terms of just trying to kill enemy
soldiers—
unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem:
“one man by delaying restored the state to us.”

We shall see whether Iraq shall stay won, as the United States, in a somewhat surprising decision, could not agree with the Iraqi government on establishing a small permanent American presence and so abruptly pulled out all its remaining troops from the country at the end of 2011. Nonetheless, in the final month of the American occupation—December 2011—not a single American soldier died, and the nascent Iraqi democracy was relatively free of violence as its oil production and revenues soared. Iraq’s relative stability was David Petraeus’s legacy and remained in sharp contrast to the Arab dictatorships throughout the Middle East that tottered and fell during the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, followed by general chaos and violence—all against a backdrop of hopes that some sort of constitutional government would survive in Iraq.

For now, we know only that without David Petraeus, the American effort in Iraq—along with the reputation of the U.S. military in the Middle East—would have been lost long ago.

What common traits helped these diverse generals to save lost wars? Were their profiles any different from the generally agreed-upon criteria of command excellence that are so often attributed to brilliant generals like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Hannibal, Napoleon, Wellington, or Grant?

There is certainly no typical profile of shared age, class, or political view of a savior general. Ridgway came to Korea at fifty-five, an age at which Alexander the Great was long dead. Sherman cut no figure like the Duke of Wellington on a horse. David Petraeus first saw combat in Iraq in his early fifties, at an age when a declining Napoleon was in exile and dying. Themistocles was of birth as low as Caesar’s was aristocratic.

By definition, a savior general like a Themistocles, Ridgway, and Petraeus started on the defensive. If they were to take the initiative to the enemy, it was often in a wider landscape of pessimism and near hopelessness, as Belisarius learned when he went both east and west, and Sherman did when he kept heading south amid the gloomy spring and summer of 1864. The ability to envision a great new offensive campaign or to plan a dramatic opening invasion to a war may well require different talent from salvaging an entire conflict.

The best-known Great Captains are like grand medieval architects
and master builders who out of nothing raise majestic spires. Yet the savior generals resemble more closely the unsung engineers who were called in to fix a poorly built and now cracked dome, or an ill-designed buttress before the resplendent but unsound edifice crashed down in ruin.

The savior generals display commonalities of character and disposition that encouraged contrarianism of all sorts—professional, political, and social. When Ridgway arrived in Korea, he quickly discovered—against the consensus that an invincible Chinese enemy had crushed outnumbered and outgunned Americans led by the brilliant Douglas MacArthur—that the American army was not so much beaten militarily by Chinese and Korean forces as it was poorly equipped for winter weather, panicked, terribly led in the field, and without confidence in the nature of its mission. Uncertain American strategy, tactics, and operations, not Chinese supermen, had led to the horrific losses. In less than one hundred days, Ridgway rectified those lapses. He soon ended up back across the 38th Parallel, with the Chinese invaders even more exhausted and overextended than the Americans had been in the north during November 1950. Where the Joint Chiefs and soon even General MacArthur saw hopelessness, Ridgway instinctively sensed opportunity, but worried that he alone embraced such optimism.

Less than a third of the American public by late 2006 thought a surge of troops could salvage the Iraq War when David Petraeus was being considered for promotion to command of all ground forces in Iraq. Petraeus, and his small circle, understood that after four years of warring, Islamic terrorists and ex-Baathists were vulnerable to the strategies of counterinsurgency. They had suffered far more casualties than had the Americans. Even as the media suggested Americans had lost the support of the Iraqi people, Petraeus sensed that the insurgents, not the U.S. military, had alienated their base Sunni population and so were now vulnerable to new counterinsurgency tactics. To obtain for Petraeus supreme command in Iraq, his supporters had to outflank the bureaucracy and chain of command on the premise that Petraeus was right and most others wrong.

This natural independence of mind and need to reject past conventional thinking were critical, and were probably innate rather than merely acquired characteristics. There had to be unusual self-regard in the wily half-Athenian scrapper Themistocles or the once unstable Sherman to assume that most others were unable to save a nearly stalemated
or lost war. Belisarius apparently thought that his name alone might make up for chronic shortages in manpower and matériel. “King David” Petraeus and Matthew Ridgway arrived in theater as if their entire prior lives had been requisites for their few months of salvation. Neither shied away from publicity.

Hollywood created the genre of the Western on the premise of the tragic hero, the loner or misfit in times of peace whose singular fighting qualities alone can save the town when called upon by its beleaguered community. The foundation of great American Western films—
The Searchers, Shane, High Noon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Magnificent Seven
—is the willingness of bothersome outsiders to save frontier civilization, fully cognizant that their efforts will be less than fully appreciated, and that their controversial presence will no longer be appreciated, or perhaps even useful, in the calmer times that they had delivered. Riding off into the sunset does not only express the consensus of the saved town that such outsiders are no longer needed. It is an acknowledgment, too, on the part of the saviors of a sort of detached superiority that they can do in war’s darkest hours what most others either could not or would not—or a tacit admission that they have less to offer in times of accustomed peace. Note here that I do not suggest nihilism is in the DNA of savior generals; by all accounts, they functioned within their respective military systems and were contrarian rather than renegades and bomb throwers.

Assuming responsibility for a lost rather than uncertain war requires a different magnitude of physical stamina, and one that usually cannot be sustained for more than a year or two under such grueling pressures. Sherman may have eschewed postwar political life because his great marches had left him numb and wearied after 1865. He certainly sounded far more skeptical and tired than did Grant, who had ended the war’s final months with far less success.

Perhaps Themistocles could never quite recapture the singular mental concentration and effort that were needed to rally the Greeks to win at Salamis. He played no part in the subsequent great Hellenic victory at Plataea a year later and probably enjoyed a reduced role in naval operations after Salamis. At some point, David Petraeus realized that his tenure of endless nights without sleep in a collapsing Iraq was not sustainable in the long term. That Belisarius did not foment unrest against Justinian between his frequent recalls might suggest that all those breakneck marches and endless voyages to collapsing fronts had left him exhausted.
He certainly disappeared from the historical record for a decade after his last recall from Italy.

Savior generals are not mere cowboys. Most were keen students, even scholars, of war. If while in the shadows they garnered little notice, they nevertheless used their time in obscurity to systematically review contemporary tactics and strategy of an ongoing losing war. In their prior tenures, they were open to innovation and experimentation without the burdens of supreme military command. As outsiders in their ideas about sea power, logistics, total war, or counterinsurgency, they were largely left alone when the war went well—only to receive a sudden call to arms at a time of near defeat, when more conventional choices were long exhausted.

Long before Themistocles took control of the Athenian fleet in 480, he had been the architect of Athenian naval supremacy—a strategist before he was a heralded admiral. David Petraeus literally helped to write the book on counterinsurgency before applying those principles as supreme ground commander in Iraq. Most of what Sherman accomplished in Georgia and the Carolinas had its roots in earlier, smaller raids during his successful advance to Meridian, Mississippi, in 1863. He had learned a far different lesson from his ordeal at Shiloh in 1862 than had his superior Ulysses S. Grant. If Sherman’s peculiar views about total war in the modern era were rarely known or irrelevant during the ascendancy of Grant in 1863, then they were deemed vital to the Union by late 1864, when Grant’s alternate preference for shock battles had almost destroyed the Army of the Potomac. The emperor Justinian called forth Belisarius to end the Vandal Empire in North Africa only because of the general’s prior success in restoring the eastern Byzantine front and crushing insurrectionists during the Nika riots at Constantinople. Belisarius had proven to his emperor that he knew how to do much with little. When most strategists were deprecating conventional forces in the new age of nuclear superiority, Ridgway not only saw that new limited ground wars would be more, not less, frequent, but also thought deeply about how to win them without resort to the bomb. If he once wrote mostly ignored memos about conducting conventional wars at the Pentagon, he suddenly was asked to put theory to practice in December 1950.