One of my work colleagues, a serving officer, noticed something odd last night in General David Petraeus’ turn as Super Bowl coin flipper:  Rather giant-sized stars on his beret:

General David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, looks on from the field prior to Super Bowl XLIII between the Arizona Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Steelers on February 1, 2009 at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida. (Getty Images)

I’ve had difficulty locating similar shots of other 4-stars, since most tend to be photographed either sans headgear or wearing a soft cap or service cap.   But, for example, this 2-year-old photo of Petraeus’ CENTCOM predecessor, John Abizaid, shows four stars fitting almost entirely within the beret’s flash:

Has the Army come up with bigger rank insignia for its general officers?  Or is Petraeus going George Patton on us?

UPDATE: A helpful commenter points out that,

“General officers are authorized three different sizes of stars–5/8″, 3/4″ and full 1″ … Most GO’s choose the smaller insignia because, as you point out, the larger stars look outsized when you get enough of them.  I think it’s more common to see Brigadier Generals and Lieutenant Generals with the full-sized stars.  But General Petraeus is certainly within regulation.

At least it’s easy to know what the man’s rank is at a distance, something that’s not true of senior NCOs with recent uniform iterations.

Ann Dunwoody has been nominated for a fourth star, making her the first woman to achieve that rank in American history.

“This is an historic occasion for the Department of Defense and I am proud to nominate Lt. Gen. Ann Dunwoody for a fourth star,” said Defense Secretary Robert Gates. “Her 33 years of service, highlighted by extraordinary leadership and devotion to duty, make her exceptionally qualified for this senior position.”

[...]

The Army Material Command handles all material readiness for the Army. During her career, Dunwoody has been assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division, 10th Mountain Division and the Defense Logistics Agency. She served with the 82nd Airborne in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Honestly, I didn’t know that AMC was a four-star command. Indeed, while that’s a huge task, it strikes me as odd that it is; it’s part of an overall trend toward rank inflation in the armed forces. Neither George Washington nor Jack Pershing ever wore a fourth star.

Regardless, this is a historic appointment. CNN’s rundown of firsts shows how amazingly recent all of them are:

The first woman to become a general officer in the U.S. armed services was Brig. Gen. Anna Mae Hays, chief of the Army Nurse Corps, who achieved the rank in 1970 and retired the following year. Elizabeth Hoisington, the director of the Women’s Army Corps, was promoted to brigadier general immediately after Hays. She also retired the following year. Maj. Gen. Jeanne M. Holm, the first director of Women in the Air Force, was the first woman to wear two stars, attaining the rank in 1973 and retiring two years later. In 1996, Marine Lt. Gen. Carol A. Mutter became the first woman to wear three stars. Mutter retired in 1999.

Currently, there are 57 active-duty women serving as generals or admirals, five of whom are lieutenant generals or vice admirals, the Navy’s three-star rank, according to the Pentagon.

Truly remarkable.

Photo: Military Logistics Forum

UPDATE: An emailer points out that AMC “has been a four star position since shortly after its creation in 1962, when it was first commanded by LTG Frank Besson, who was promoted to General in 1964. It has been commanded by a four-star general since that time. I believe that among the major commands of the US Army, only three have more personnel than AMC–Forces Command, Training and Doctrine Command, and US Army Europe.”

I’m sure my biases on this matter were formed as an Army lieutenant twenty years ago; I’m not sure I’d ever heard of AMC. Further, my sense has always been that the “real” four-star commands were regional combatant commands like EUCOM and CENTCOM that oversee operational forces. It always struck me as overkill to have a four-star in charge of office workers.

Charles Krauthammer makes a rather odd argument in support of continuing on the present course in Iraq. Essentially, it boils down to: Trust in Petraeus.

It is understandable that Sens. Lugar, Voinovich, Domenici, Snowe and Warner may no longer trust President Bush’s judgment when he tells them to wait until Petraeus reports in September. What is not understandable is the vote of no confidence they are passing on Petraeus. These are the same senators who sent him back to Iraq by an 81 to 0 vote to institute his new counterinsurgency strategy.

A month ago, Petraeus was asked whether we could still win in Iraq. The general, who had recently attended two memorial services for soldiers lost under his command, replied that if he thought he could not succeed he would not be risking the life of a single soldier.

Just this week, Petraeus said that the one thing he needs more than anything else is time. To cut off Petraeus’s plan just as it is beginning — the last surge troops arrived only last month — on the assumption that we cannot succeed is to declare Petraeus either deluded or dishonorable. Deluded in that, as the best-positioned American in Baghdad, he still believes we can succeed. Or dishonorable in pretending to believe in victory and sending soldiers to die in what he really knows is an already failed strategy.

Now, I’m a Petraeus fan. He’s the archetype of the scholar-warrior that T.X. Hammes prescribed in The Sling and The Stone and I recommended in my recent article for The New Individualist on preparing for the next war.

I do think, as I’ve suggested many times, that the proverbial licking of Petraeus’ boots in the media and the halls of Congress has been a bit much. As I noted in passing yesterday and Matt Yglesias and Steven Taylor lay out more directly today, Petraeus was in charge of training a self-sufficient Iraqi security force that could take over for us. He didn’t get that done.

Moreover, he’s given far too much credit for reinventing the Army’s new counterinsurgency doctrine. For one thing, there’s not much new about it; it’s mostly just dusting off age old lessons that we continually learn and then discard as “not what armies do.” And, regardless of whose signature is on the book, general officers don’t write training manuals. If anyone above the rank of major wrote so much as a paragraph, I’d be quite surprised.

That all said, I agree that the politicians should defer to him on matters of tactics and rely on his expert advice in setting policy. They should not, however, as Krauthammer suggests, effectively cede grand strategy to the military, dispensing entirely with the fundamental notion of civilian control.

Yes, a can-do guy like Petraeus believes he’ll get the job done given infinite time. So what? It’s up to the civilian policy-makers to decide whether the nation is willing to continue to devote the blood and treasure necessary to get the job done. His guess is likely better than theirs as to whether we can win; it’s their job to decide whether we’re willing to pay the price of finding out.

Donald Rumsfeld pulled the plug on a 2005 mission that might have taken out several top al Qaeda leaders for fear of alienating Pakistan, Mark Mazzetti reports in today’s NYT.

A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials. The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations.

But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning. Mr. Rumsfeld decided that the operation, which had ballooned from a small number of military personnel and C.I.A. operatives to several hundred, was cumbersome and put too many American lives at risk, the current and former officials said. He was also concerned that it could cause a rift with Pakistan, an often reluctant ally that has barred the American military from operating in its tribal areas, the officials said.

[...]

Pentagon officials familiar with covert operations said that planners had to consider the political and human risks of undertaking a military campaign in a sovereign country, even in an area like Pakistan’s tribal lands, where the government has only tenuous control. Even with its shortcomings, Pakistan has been a vital American ally since the Sept. 11 attacks, and the militaries of the two countries have close ties.

The Pentagon officials said tension was inherent in any decision to approve such a mission: a smaller military footprint allows a better chance of a mission going undetected, but it also exposes the units to greater risk of being killed or captured.

Officials said one reason Mr. Rumsfeld called off the 2005 operation was that the number of troops involved in the mission had grown to several hundred, including Army Rangers, members of the Navy Seals and C.I.A. operatives, and he determined that the United States could no longer carry out the mission without General Musharraf’s permission. It is unlikely that the Pakistani president would have approved an operation of that size, officials said.

Some outside experts said American counterterrorism operations had been hamstrung because of concerns about General Musharraf’s shaky government. “The reluctance to take risk or jeopardize our political relationship with Musharraf may well account for the fact that five and half years after 9/11 we are still trying to run bin Laden and Zawahri to ground,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University.

[...]

In early 2005, after learning about the Qaeda meeting, the military developed a plan for a small Navy Seals unit to parachute into Pakistan to carry out a quick operation, former officials said. But as the operation moved up the military chain of command, officials said, various planners bulked up the force’s size to provide security for the Special Operations forces. “The whole thing turned into the invasion of Pakistan,” said the former senior intelligence official involved in the planning. Still, he said he thought the mission was worth the risk. “We were frustrated because we wanted to take a shot,” he said.

[...]

That criticism has echoes of the risk aversion that the officials said pervaded efforts against Al Qaeda during the Clinton administration, when missions to use American troops to capture or kill Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan were never executed because they were considered too perilous, risked killing civilians or were based on inadequate intelligence. Rather than sending in ground troops, the Clinton White House instead chose to fire cruise missiles in what became failed attempts to kill Mr. bin Laden and his deputies — a tactic Mr. Bush criticized shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Given that the details remain classified and the story is based on leaks from disgruntled “former military and intelligence officials,” we can presume we’re not getting the whole truth. Still, this is a fascinating insight into the bureaucratic decision-making process.

Kevin Drum notes this is “eerily similar to what happened to Bill Clinton whenever he asked the Pentagon about special ops missions. Almost inevitably, what he got back was a battle plan involving hundreds or thousands of troops, which made it politically impossible to consider implementing.” Indeed.

Military planners are, at the end of the day, bureaucrats. They’ve spent a lifetime developing their expertise and are good at what they do. At the same time, however, they face institutional pressures to get everybody a piece of the pie which are reinforced by a strong CYA mentality. The result is that what could be accomplished by a single Special Forces A Team or a SEAL Task Unit winds up bloating into a giant operation involving carrier battle groups, fighter squadrons, and 15 general officers.

All officer cadets are taught Clausewitz’ dicta that war is a continuation of politics by any means and that war has its own language but not its own logic. That wars are fought to achieve political objectives and that “victory” is defined in political, not military, terms is reinforced throughout an officer’s career, from pre-commissioning training to command and staff school to the war colleges. Anyone who wears general’s stars can lead a graduate seminar on the topic.

The trouble is, few of them really believe it. They are much more comfortable with variants of the so-called Powell Doctrine, which demands overwhelming force and missions where total annihilation and the unconditional surrender of the enemy are the only acceptable outcomes. As satisfying as that may be from the standpoint of those asking their troops to risk everything, it seldom comports with the very murky and limited political objectives at hand.

This clash between politicians and their military leadership leads to mixed outcomes. In Desert Storm, we needlessly delayed operations while we massed far, far more troops than were needed for the mission. Fortunately, Saddam allowed it to happen rather than launching a preemptive strike into Saudi Arabia. In Kosovo, we killed far more civilians than necessary because we decided (and it’s not clear yet who “we” was in this case — the politicians, the generals, or both) to eschew ground action for weeks while fighting from the safety of the air.

In Iraq, Rumsfeld rebuffed the advice of the generals who told him that we needed a much larger troop presence to topple the regime. He correctly insisted that our advantages in speed, technology, and training obviated the need for mass. Of course, sometimes the generals are right: We clearly needed a much larger force for the post-war stabilization operation.

Most of the blame for that goes to Rumsfeld’s stubborn insistence on sticking with his theory of modern warfare long after the facts pointed in the other direction. One wonders, though, how much of that was because of the military leadership’s long tradition of overselling the enemy and always pleading that they need more resources.

The current Armed Forces Journal features a devastating critique of America’s generals by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, deputy commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. Thomas Ricks runs down the highlights:

An active-duty Army officer is publishing a blistering attack on U.S. generals, saying they have botched the war in Iraq and misled Congress about the situation there. “America’s generals have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq,” charges Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, an Iraq veteran who is deputy commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. “The intellectual and moral failures . . . constitute a crisis in American generals.”

Yingling’s comments are especially striking because his unit’s performance in securing the northwestern Iraqi city of Tall Afar was cited by President Bush in a March 2006 speech and provided the model for the new security plan underway in Baghdad. He also holds a high profile for a lieutenant colonel: He attended the Army’s elite School for Advanced Military Studies and has written for one of the Army’s top professional journals, Military Review.

The article, “General Failure,” is to be published today in Armed Forces Journal and is posted at http://www.armedforcesjournal.com. Its appearance signals the public emergence of a split inside the military between younger, mid-career officers and the top brass.

Many majors and lieutenant colonels have privately expressed anger and frustration with the performance of Gen. Tommy R. Franks, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno and other top commanders in the war, calling them slow to grasp the realities of the war and overly optimistic in their assessments.

Some younger officers have stated privately that more generals should have been taken to task for their handling of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, news of which broke in 2004. The young officers also note that the Army’s elaborate “lessons learned” process does not criticize generals and that no generals in Iraq have been replaced for poor battlefield performance, a contrast to other U.S. wars.

[...]

“After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America’s general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public,” he writes. “For reasons that are not yet clear, America’s general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq’s government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq.”

[...]

The article has been read by about 30 of his peers, Yingling added. “At the level of lieutenant colonel and below, it received almost universal approval,” he said.

[...]

Yingling advocates overhauling the way generals are picked and calls for more involvement by Congress. To replace today’s “mild-mannered team players,” he writes, Congress should create incentives in the promotion system to “reward adaptation and intellectual achievement.”

He does not criticize officers by name; instead, the article refers repeatedly to “America’s generals.” Yingling said he did this intentionally, in order to focus not on the failings of a few people but rather on systemic problems.

He also recommends that Congress review the performance of senior generals as they retire and exercise its power to retire them at a lower rank if it deems their performance inferior. The threat of such high-profile demotions would restore accountability among top officers, he contends. “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war,” he states.

An interesting critique and one that has a long tradition in modern militaries, which tolerate respectful dissent as part of their constant learning process. Indeed, a young Winston Churchill first came to public attention with a series of essays his wrote as a second lieutenant for the London Daily Telegraph criticizing the tactics used in the India frontiers wars. The resulting 1897 book, Story of the Malakand Field Force, was derided by some as “A Subaltern’s Advice to the Generals” but it was nonetheless read.

That there is a divide between the field grade officers and the generals is not particularly surprising. It is always thus when the nature of warfare is undergoing a radical change. Those who have spent thirty or more years learning to do things one way are much slower to change than the young bucks who have come to professional maturity in that new environment. Majors and lieutenant colonels have enough experience, training, and education to fully grasp the moment, whereas too many generals are holding on to old ways.

I’ll give the piece a looksee and might have more detailed comments later. My neighborhood has a power outage and I’m blogging on the remaining power in my laptop’s battery via a balky Verizon wireless card. Oddly, despite living in a densely populated and relatively affluent area, our cellular coverage is horrendous.

UPDATE: I’ve read the article and overall it’s a pretty good one. It reads a bit like a master’s degree student’s course paper, with far too many references to the classical literature to make points that are otherwise obvious to the intended audience. Interestingly, he doesn’t cite the late Carl Builder, who wrote about this phenomenon in his 1989 classic Masks of War:

The system that produces our generals does little to reward creativity and moral courage. Officers rise to flag rank by following remarkably similar career patterns. Senior generals, both active and retired, are the most important figures in determining an officer’s potential for flag rank. The views of subordinates and peers play no role in an officer’s advancement; to move up he must only please his superiors. In a system in which senior officers select for promotion those like themselves, there are powerful incentives for conformity. It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties.

While that’s absolutely right (indeed, my analysis noted that above before I’d even read the article), Yingling’s proposed solutions are naive.

To improve the creative intelligence of our generals, Congress must change the officer promotion system in ways that reward adaptation and intellectual achievement. Congress should require the armed services to implement 360-degree evaluations for field-grade and flag officers. Junior officers and noncommissioned officers are often the first to adapt because they bear the brunt of failed tactics most directly. They are also less wed to organizational norms and less influenced by organizational taboos. Junior leaders have valuable insights regarding the effectiveness of their leaders, but the current promotion system excludes these judgments. Incorporating subordinate and peer reviews into promotion decisions for senior leaders would produce officers more willing to adapt to changing circumstances, and less likely to conform to outmoded practices.

Congress should also modify the officer promotion system in ways that reward intellectual achievement. The Senate should examine the education and professional writing of nominees for three- and four-star billets as part of the confirmation process. The Senate would never confirm to the Supreme Court a nominee who had neither been to law school nor written legal opinions. However, it routinely confirms four-star generals who possess neither graduate education in the social sciences or humanities nor the capability to speak a foreign language. Senior general officers must have a vision of what future conflicts will look like and what capabilities the U.S. requires to prevail in those conflicts. They must possess the capability to understand and interact with foreign cultures. A solid record of intellectual achievement and fluency in foreign languages are effective indicators of an officer’s potential for senior leadership.

The 360-degree evaluation process has become quite popular in the management literature in recent years and it has some merits. Still, having experience with peer evaluations as an ROTC cadet and student evaluations as a college professor, I’ve seen the dark side of the process. While it’s true that peers and subordinates have unique insights into character unavailable to superiors (let alone the bosses’ boss, who is the most important person in the officer rating chain) they also tend to reward people with a go-along-to-get-along attitude and punish those who push the envelope.

And the idea that the United States Senate is going to read term papers written by hundreds of officers to evaluate their intellectual acumen is patently absurd. Even if they were qualified to perform that task, they surely don’t have the time.

Further, while I’m sympathetic to the desirability of having officers foreign language qualified, I’m not sure we’d have been more successful in Iraq if Ricardo Sanchez were fluent in Arabic (let alone German or Spanish, which are also, after all, foreign languages). Indeed, John Abizaid is a native caliber Arabic speaker and cultural expert and he didn’t fare so well, either. Generaliship isn’t about the mastery of such technical details.

UPDATE: My friend and Iraq War veteran Phil Carter terms this “an incisive and brilliant article.” He laments that the spirit of careerism has kept more of Yingling’s cohorts from speaking out publicly.

The U.S. Army trains tactical leaders very well. You will not find better tactical leadership schools than what the Army runs in places like Fort Benning and Fort Leonard Wood. Its apprenticeship and mentorship system (aka the company-grade ranks) is second-to-none. However, something has broken at the upper echelons of the military. Instead of producing generals today, the Army is producing bureaucrats and managers. America’s private sector is producing visionary leaders like Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Carly Fiorina and Larry Ellison. The military system gave us Tommy Franks and Ricardo Sanchez. Huh?

The problem is that the military system requires people to excel–in the opinion of their senior raters–at varying assignments for twenty-odd years before becoming eligible for selection for general officer. Getting one boss who thinks you’re too intellectual or too much of a maverick can be a career ender.

Plus, the Peter Principle is often at work. I’m sure Franks and Sanchez were superb colonels and did many things right at the one-, two-, and three-star level. One could be a brilliant general and not be able to adapt to the demands of regional command, which requires superb political judgment in addition to strategic competence. Indeed, George Patton would have failed miserably at Dwight Eisenhower’s job of Supreme Allied Commander.

Steve Bainbridge thinks Yingling’s criticism is misdirected:

I gather Col Yingling respected the principle of civilian control of the military so much that he failed to point out that it was Bush and Rumsfeld who bear ultimate responsibility for “going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization,” as well as the other failures he identifies. In any case, you’ll remember that when a group of retired generals criticized the administration over Iraq, the warbloggers viciously attacked the generals. It’ll be interesting to see how the warbloggers respond to Yingling.

While I defended the retired generals’ criticisms of the administration, I had some reservations as well given their influence over recent subordinates. This strikes me as a different animal, though: An active officer offering a respectful call for change in the institution he’s serving in a professional forum. That’s not only permissible, it’s highly desirable.

Yingling criticizes the civilian leadership obliquely in the piece but rightly focuses his attention on the uniformed leadership. That’s absolutely appropriate. Not because President Bush and others don’t deserve a lot of blame for the failures in this war–they do and have been getting it for years–but because it’s not his place. Field grade officers don’t get to speak out against their elected leadership. Four star generals, on the other hand, have a duty to provide their best military advice to the president, JCS chairman, SECDEF, and Congress. Yingling has every right to voice his opinion that they failed in that duty.

UPDATE: Jim Henley takes a few steps back to look at the bigger picture:

I’m sure some version of Yingling’s reforms can give us a better officer corps, even if they’re imperfectly implemented, but the truth is that the Army can only ever get so good because, at bottom it’s a bureaucracy responding to the laws of bureaucracies.

A fair point and one that reform efforts necessarily ignore. It doesn’t, of course, mean we shouldn’t try to gt things as right as possible.

Jim’s second point, though, is more important:

By and large, a country like the United States only needs to commit to an ongoing posture of counterinsurgency if it is also committed to serial military domination of foreign populations. In fact, the United States is currently so committed, on a bipartisan basis. But that’s an unwise and immoral posture that will lead to national ruin in the medium to long term. The Iraq defeat offers one of those rare moments for real national reappraisal, an openness to genuine reform. Rather than work at getting better at executing an unwise and immoral grand strategy, let’s choose a different one.

While we differ at the margins here, we’re in general agreement. Bush came to office promising to eschew nation-building and yet we’ve not only undertaken perhaps the biggest nation building project in history but done it in a completely half-assed way. That’s the worst of both worlds.

First Lieutenant Ehren Watada is being court martialled for making public remarks disparaging his chain of command. His attorneys say he’s covered by the 1st Amendment.

Do military officers have the right to publicly voice dissent about their commander in chief and U.S. war policy? That question highlighted last week’s pretrial hearing at Ft. Lewis Army base near Seattle for 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, the nation’s first commissioned officer to refuse deployment to Iraq. Watada faces a court-martial and six years in prison for failing to deploy with his Stryker Brigade last year and for making four public statements criticizing President Bush and the Iraq war. “This is an important case that will test the limits of dissent within the Army officer corps,” said Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice in Washington, D.C.

Watada, a 28-year-old Honolulu native who enlisted after the Sept. 11 attacks, said he gradually came to the conclusion that the Bush administration had lied about the basis for war and had betrayed the trust of the American people, making Watada ashamed to wear the uniform. In media interviews and in a speech at a peace convention, Watada also said that the Iraq war was “not only morally wrong but a horrible breach of American law,” and that soldiers could stop it by refusing to fight.

Civilians would unquestionably be free to make such remarks under the 1st Amendment, but Army officials argue that soldiers voluntarily surrender some of that freedom when they choose to join the military. Watada’s statements constitute the criminal offense of “conduct unbecoming an officer,” Army officials argue. “While service members do have freedom to speak, what you say must be in keeping with good order and discipline in the military and with national security,” said Ft. Lewis spokesman Joseph Piek.

Watada’s attorney, Eric Seitz, argued last week that even military personnel could voice dissent, particularly on issues of such public importance as war. In motions to dismiss the charges of unbecoming conduct, Seitz argued that Watada’s dissent was respectfully delivered and did not rise to the moral failings the military code was meant to punish, which include “dishonesty, unfair dealings, indecency, indecorum, lawlessness, injustice and cruelty.” “Whether or not one agrees with Lt. Watada’s conclusions, it was no sign of personal degradation or moral unfitness for him to speak his conscience on gravely important issues of war and peace,” Seitz argued.

Seitz also argued that Watada was being selectively prosecuted; he noted that several high-ranking retired military officials had criticized the war effort and not been charged with any offenses. Retired officers who draw a military pension are still subject to military law.

But two of those cited in Seitz’s motion, Army Maj. Gens. John Batiste and Paul D. Eaton, said in interviews that they drew sharp distinctions between Watada’s conduct as a still-active-duty officer and their own remarks after they left the service. “It is totally inappropriate if not unauthorized for an active-duty officer to publicly criticize the chain of command,” said Eaton, a 33-year military veteran who led the Iraqi security forces training program before stepping down last January. He subsequently called then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld “incompetent” and urged Rumsfeld to resign in an op-ed article.

Americans should not let sentiment against the unpopular Iraq war lead them to endorse behavior that undermines the military system and threatens national interests, Eaton said. “The American people have to have absolute faith that when the call to duty goes out, soldiers do precisely what their commander in chief asks them to do,” Eaton said. “What the American people can’t have is an Army of people who on any given day can wake up and say, ‘That’s not what I want to do.’ ”

Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq until March 2005, also said he had been careful not to criticize the war effort until he made what he called a “gut-wrenching decision” to resign from the military after 31 years. Batiste subsequently called for Rumsfeld’s resignation and blasted U.S. policy for failing to commit enough resources to win the war, for watering down Geneva Convention prisoner protections and for promoting democracy over security. “You don’t [criticize] in public — not while you’re wearing the uniform,” Batiste said. “It’s contrary to the culture and norms of the military.”

Eaton and Batiste are exactly right: There’s a magnitude of difference between the speech of retired officers and serving ones. (Although retired general officers, especially those very recently on active duty, are in a somewhat nebulous world in between those categories.) The Uniform Code of Military Justice applies very different standards to military personnel than could Constitutionally be applied to civilians. Soldiers simply do not enjoy the full protection of the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court has upheld that time and time again.

Watada is potentially in violation of several Punitive Articles for his speech, in addition to perhaps more serious ones for refusing a lawful order to deploy:

888. ART. 88. CONTEMPT TOWARD OFFICIALS
Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

889. ART. 89 DISRESPECT TOWARD SUPERIOR COMMISSIONED OFFICER
Any person subject to this chapter who behaves with disrespect toward his superior commissioned officer shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

933. ART. 133. CONDUCT UNBECOMING AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN
Any commissioned officer, cadet, or midshipman who is convicted of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

934. ART. 134. GENERAL ARTICLE
Though not specifically mentioned in this chapter, all disorders and neglects to the prejudice of good order and discipline in the armed forces, all conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces, and crimes and offenses not capital, of which persons subject to this chapter may be guilty, shall be taken cognizance of by a general, special or summary court-martial, according to the nature and degree of the offense, and shall be punished at the discretion of that court.

________

Related articles:

Prosecuting Retired Generals

The preliminary report on the Haditha massacre concludes that Marine officers knowingly filed false reports to superiors who in turn failed to exercise due dilligence.

The U.S. military investigation of how Marine commanders handled the reporting of events last November in the Iraqi town of Haditha, where troops allegedly killed 24 Iraqi civilians, will conclude that some officers gave false information to their superiors, who then failed to adequately scrutinize reports that should have caught their attention, an Army official said yesterday. The three-month probe, led by Army Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell, is also expected to call for changes in how U.S. troops are trained for duty in Iraq, the official said.

Even before the final report is delivered, Army Gen. George W. Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is expected to order today that all U.S. and allied troops in Iraq undergo new “core values” training in how to operate professionally and humanely. Not only will leaders discuss how to treat civilians under the rules of engagement, but small units also will be ordered to go through training scenarios to gauge their understanding of those rules. “It’s going to include everyone in the coalition,” the official said.

[...]

The Bargewell report, which is expected to be delivered to top commanders by the end of the week, is one of two major military investigations into what happened at Haditha on Nov. 19, 2005, and how commanders reacted to the incident. The other is a criminal inquiry by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. That sprawling investigation involves more than 45 agents and is expected to conclude this summer, Pentagon officials and defense lawyers said yesterday. No charges have been filed, but people familiar with the case say they expect charges of homicide, making a false statement and dereliction of duty, among others.

[...]

One of Bargewell’s conclusions is that the training of troops for Iraq has been flawed, the official said, with too much emphasis on traditional war-fighting skills and insufficient focus on how to wage a counterinsurgency campaign. Currently the director of operations for a top headquarters in Iraq, Bargewell is a career Special Operations officer and therefore more familiar than most regular Army officers with the precepts of counterinsurgency, such as using the minimum amount of force necessary to succeed. Also, as an Army staff sergeant in Vietnam in 1971, Bargewell received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest honor, for actions in combat while a member of long-range reconnaissance team operating deep behind enemy lines.

In anticipation of the Bargewell report, the Marine Corps has placed on hold its plan to nominate Maj. Gen. Stephen T. Johnson, who was the top Marine in Iraq when the Haditha incident occurred, for promotion to lieutenant general, a senior Pentagon official said. That decision reflects concern that the report may conclude that leadership failures occurred at senior levels in Iraq. It also stands in sharp contrast to the Army’s handling of the Abu Ghraib scandal, when the Pentagon forged ahead with plans to nominate Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who had been the top commander on the ground in Iraq, for a fourth star. Sanchez’s promotion has been in limbo for more than a year.

[...]

A second and more troubling failure occurred later in the day, this official said, when a Marine human exploitation team, which helped collect the dead, should have observed that the Iraqis were killed by gunshot, not by a bomb. The team’s reporting chain lay outside that of the other Marines — who were members of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines — and went up through military intelligence channels directly to the 1st Marine Division’s intelligence director, he said. Had this second unit reported accurately what it witnessed, he indicated, that would have set off alarms and prodded commanders to investigate, he explained.

Presuming that these preliminary findings stand scrutiny, this is sad news indeed. Rather clearly, the junior officers who filed the initial reports should have been able to readily distinguish gunshot wounds from bomb damage. That they filed erroneous reports therefore certainly seems deliberate. The degree to which Maj. Gen. Johnson is culpable, though, is hardly clear; one does not expect general officers to directly supervise platoon operations.

Casey’s refresher course in military ethics is a good move, although one that should not be necessary. Unless Army training has changed radically since my departure from the service, officers and NCOs receive extensive instruction on the Law of Land Warfare, the UCMJ, rules of engagement, and reporting procedures. That anyone made it past boot camp, let alone The Basic School, without knowing that murdering civilians and then lying about it in official reports is illegal is unfathomable.

________

Related:

Haditha Massacre Coverage
Report: Marines Killed Iraqi Civilians
Murtha: Marines Murdered 15 Unarmed Iraqi Civilians

Commander Kirk Lippold, who skippered the U.S.S. Cole during its October 2000 attack by al Qaeda, could be forced to retire if a bill working its way through the Senate passes.

A U.S. Senate committee is recommending changes in military promotion regulations that could force the former skipper of the Norfolk-based destroyer Cole out of the Navy in 2008. Language quietly inserted into a Pentagon spending bill by the Senate Armed Services Committee early this month would require that Cmdr. Kirk Lippold retire unless President Bush resubmits his nomination for promotion to captain and he is confirmed by the Senate.

The committee declined to act on Lippold’s nomination when Bush originally submitted it in 2002. Lippold’s name was returned to the White House when Congress adjourned at the end of that year, but the Navy still considers him eligible for promotion, and Bush could renominate him at any time. Though the committee’s chairman, Virginia Sen. John Warner, has questioned Lippold’s “qualities of judgment, forehandedness and attention to detail,” a Warner spokesman said Monday that his boss has made no decision about Lippold’s fitness for promotion. John Ullyot, Warner’s press secretary, declined comment on whether Warner authored the provisions recommended by the committee. The language concerning promotions is part of a spending bill unanimously endorsed by the committee, he said.

Lippold is not singled out by name in the committee plan, which would require Bush to act by October 2008 to renominate any officer who has been nominated but whose name has been returned to the White House without a vote by the Senate. Lippold and two other officers are the only Navy personnel in that category, the Navy confirmed Monday. If Lippold and the others are not renominated, they would be required to retire.

[...]

In addition to Lippold, the committee’s new language would directly affect Cmdr. Paul Thompson and Capt. David Mercer, who were selected by the Navy but not acted on by the Senate for promotion to captain and rear admiral, respectively. The Senate’s inaction on Mercer, who was nominated last year, came after a Navy request that the service be given more time to review his case. Thompson, meanwhile, has been stuck at the commander’s rank since 1990, when the Senate failed to vote on his nomination. A lawyer, he worked in the White House as a military assistant in the mid-1980s and was investigated but never charged in a scandal involving the sale of arms to Iran and the transfer of the sale proceeds to “Contra” fighters opposing the then-government of Nicaragua.

The Senate has a constitutional right to weigh in on officer promotions, although that right is seldom exercised for non-flag/general officers. To include language that would effectively kill the careers of three officers in a spending bill strikes me as both cowardly and out of bounds.

That commander Thompson has elected to remain in the Navy all these years at the rank of Commander is a testament to his optimism, love of service, or mental instability. Most men would have retired long, long ago.

After a couple of weeks of spotlighting a handful of retired generals who are unhappy with Donald Rumsfeld’s second stint as Defense Secretary, Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt apparently decided to see what serving officers think. The result is a front page piece in today’s NYT entitled, “Young Officers Join the Debate Over Rumsfeld.” While mostly anecdotal, it reads true based on my own conversations with serving officers.

The revolt by retired generals who publicly criticized Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has opened an extraordinary debate among younger officers, in military academies, in the armed services’ staff colleges and even in command posts and mess halls in Iraq. Junior and midlevel officers are discussing whether the war plans for Iraq reflected unvarnished military advice, whether the retired generals should have spoken out, whether active-duty generals will feel free to state their views in private sessions with the civilian leaders and, most divisive of all, whether Mr. Rumsfeld should resign.

In recent weeks, military correspondents of The Times discussed those issues with dozens of younger officers and cadets in classrooms and with combat units in the field, as well as in informal conversations at the Pentagon and in e-mail exchanges and telephone calls. To protect their careers, the officers were granted anonymity so they could speak frankly about the debates they have had and have heard. The stances that emerged are anything but uniform, although all seem colored by deep concern over the quality of civil-military relations, and the way ahead in Iraq.

This highlights something about the military that most who have never served simply do not understand: There is plenty of free discussion and intellectual reflection. Contrary to the image portrayed in movies and television, military officers are not robots who merely say “Yes sir! Three bags full!” when told to do something. And, while there is undeniably an organizational culture, the “military mind” is anything but uniform.

“This is about the moral bankruptcy of general officers who lived through the Vietnam era yet refused to advise our civilian leadership properly,” said one Army major in the Special Forces who has served two combat tours. “I can only hope that my generation does better someday.”

An Army major who is an intelligence specialist said: “The history I will take away from this is that the current crop of generals failed to stand up and say, ‘We cannot do this mission.’ They confused the cultural can-do attitude with their responsibilities as leaders to delay the start of the war until we had an adequate force. I think the backlash against the general officers will be seen in the resignation of officers” who might otherwise have stayed in uniform.

Regular readers will recall that this was my reaction to the renegade generals as well. Officers are taught from their cadet days to stand up for what they think is right tactically and morally and fight for it until a decision has been made. If the order is legal, the officer then salutes and carries on with the mission or resigns.

One Army colonel enrolled in a Defense Department university said an informal poll among his classmates indicated that about 25 percent believed that Mr. Rumsfeld should resign, and 75 percent believed that he should remain. But of the second group, two-thirds thought he should acknowledge errors that were made and “show that he is not the intolerant and inflexible person some paint him to be,” the colonel said.

That accords with my own experience as well. Most of the officers I talk to, mostly majors and lieutenant colonels, think Rumsfeld is doing the right thing by forcing changes on a resistant brass yet believe he is too brusk and dismissive in style.

This is classic Army officer analysis:

“But this is all academic. Most officers would acknowledge that we cannot leave Iraq, regardless of their thoughts on the invasion. We destroyed the internal security of that state, so now we have to restore it. Otherwise, we will just return later, when it is even more terrible.”

Instead of bitching about things we can’t do anything about, let’s figure out how to get this thing fixed. Thinking about the bigger picture, too, is what they’re trained to do.

________

Related:

Replacing Rumsfeld
Accountability in Iraq
Bush: “I’m the Decider”
Revolt of the Generals?
Outspoken Retired Generals and Civilian Control, Redux
Firing Donald Rumsfeld
Retired Generals Call for Rumsfeld Resignation

That a few retired generals have spoken criticially of SECDEF Donald Rumsfeld continues to gather a surprising amount of attention. The Washington Post’s lead editorial today is entitled “The Generals’ Revolt” and carries the ominous subhead, “There are many reasons for Donald Rumsfeld to leave. Finger-pointing by retired officers shouldn’t be one.” The nut ‘graph:

The president’s signal failure to hold his defense chief accountable no doubt has helped to produce the extraordinary — and troubling — eruption of public discontent from the retired generals. A couple of those who have spoken out, including retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of U.S. Central Command, opposed the war all along, but three others served in top positions in Iraq.

I should note that these are not mutually exclusive options. Soldiers, including general officers, frequently have misgivings about their assigned missions. They nonetheless salute smartly and carry out their orders. Indeed, that’s what the editorial is about, no?

Much of their analysis strikes us as solid — but the rebellion is problematic nonetheless. It threatens the essential democratic principle of military subordination to civilian control — the more so because a couple of the officers claim they are speaking for some still on active duty.

That, I agree, is problematic. Still, people claim to be speaking for groups all the time. See Jesse Jackson, for example.

Anyone who protested the pushback of uniformed military against President Bill Clinton’s attempt to allow gays to serve ought to also object to generals who criticize the decisions of a president and his defense secretary in wartime.

Actually, those are separate issues. Retired generals are, by definition, not “uniformed military.”

If they are successful in forcing Mr. Rumsfeld’s resignation, they will set an ugly precedent. Will future defense secretaries have to worry about potential rebellions by their brass, and will they start to choose commanders according to calculations of political loyalty?

There has been no rebellion of the brass. John Batiste, who seems to have catalyzed this debate with his call for Rumsfeld’s resignation, reportedly turned down a third star rather than continue to serve under Rumsfeld. Perhaps others also left the service earlier than they might otherwise have for similar reasons. But what brass–i.e., still serving officers of high rank–have spoken out on this issue?

Indeed, it strikes me as far more problematic when serving officers and officials issue leaks to the press to air out their disagreements with administration policy. Now, that undermines the trust of policymakers in their bureaucratic subordinates. Let, strangely, the WaPo editorial boards seems to support that practice.

Tony Blankley has a somewhat more nuanced take on the debate, albeit a prospective one, entitled, “Seven Days in April — Generals Prepare to ‘Revolt’ Against Rumsfeld.”

Consider two hypothetical situations. In the first, a United States Army general officer in a theater of war decides by himself that he strongly disagrees with the orders of the secretary of defense. He resigns his commission, returns to private life and speaks out vigorously against both the policy and the secretary of defense. In example two, the top 100 generals in the Army military chain of command secretly agree amongst themselves to retire and speak out — each one day after the other.

In example one, above, unambiguously, the general has behaved lawfully. In example two, an arguable case could be made that something in the nature of a mutinous sedition has occurred in violation of Article 94 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice procedure. When does an expanded version of the simple honesty and legality of the first example cross over into grounds for a court martial? More specifically, can a series of lawful resignations turn into a mutiny? And if they are agreed upon in advance, have the agreeing generals formed a felonious conspiracy to make a mutiny?

The answer, presumably, is Yes. Still, it seems farfetched, Richard Holbrooke or no. Frankly, there just aren’t that many generals willing to sacrifice their careers for their beliefs, even if there were a critical mass against Rumsfeld and/or the war. For that matter, even if there were, there are plenty of others where they came from far more highly competent colonels are qualified to wear stars than can be selected under our present system.

E. J. Dionne entitles his contribution “Roots of the Uprising.” It is, in typically Dionne fashion, nonsensical.

It’s amusing to hear the administration’s supporters worry that these courageous former generals are a threat to civilian control of the military. The claim reflects this administration’s willingness to muster any argument it can put its hands on to silence opposition.

But it’s the press making the argument, not the administration. Indeed, administration officials, including the president and Rumsfeld himself, have gone out of their way to defend the right of these men to speak out.

Some smart and patriotic generals are telling us that a policy is not wise or respectful of our troops just because it is put forward by politicians on the right end of our political spectrum. We may be witnessing the weakening of partisanship in the top echelons of the military. That would be very good for our republic.

If it were true, yes. But, while military officers have been more Republican than the society as a whole over the last quarter century or so, it’s about philosophy rather than partisanship. The GOP has been the party in favor of building up the force, raising military pay, buying more high end weapons systems, and the like. It’s hardly surprising that the warrior class would support those positions.

Bucking the trend against the civilian control conventional wisdom, David Broder says we should “Lesten to the Brass.”

Rumsfeld and President Bush insist that the manpower and strategy have been exactly what the commanders in the field thought best, but now general after general is speaking out to challenge that claim. The situation cries out for serious congressional oversight and examination; hearings are needed as soon as Congress returns. These charges have to be answered convincingly — or Rumsfeld has to go.

The problem is that, while a handful of retired generals have spoken out, those actually in charge have not. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is not only empowered but required by statute to serve as the president’s chief military advisor and give his unvarnished professional opinion, regardless of their harmony with those of the SECDEF. Similarly, all general and flag officers are confirmed by the Senate. When called to testify before Congress, it is their sworn duty to answer truthfully, irrespective of the chain of command.

As Brit Hume implies, some of the pronouncements of the retired generals amounts to good old fashioned CYA.

Former Clinton CENTCOM commander, Anthony Zinni — the most prominent of the retired generals attacking Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — now says that, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, “What bothered me … [was that] I was hearing a depiction of the intelligence that didn’t fit what I knew. There was no solid proof, that I ever saw, that Saddam had WMD.”

But in early 2000, Zinni told Congress “Iraq remains the most significant near-term threat to U.S. interests in the Arabian Gulf region,” adding, “Iraq probably is continuing clandestine nuclear research, [and] retains stocks of chemical and biological munitions … Even if Baghdad reversed its course and surrendered all WMD capabilities, it retains scientific, technical, and industrial infrastructure to replace agents and munitions within weeks or months.”

Further, even if the generals were united and Rumsfeld made decisions that went contrary to their views, so what? We have elections to hold presidents accountable. George W. Bush was re-elected and empowered to decide who he wanted as his SECDEF. As of today, that man is still Rumsfeld. To the extent one thinks Rumsfeld is doing a bad job, the beef is with Bush, not Rumsfeld.

Update: Dean Godson has a scathing piece in the London Times entitled, “Why America’s Generals Are Out For Revenge: The US top brass are ducking their responsibilities – and beleaguered Donald Rumsfeld is just doing his job.”

The generals’ criticisms will certainly strike a chord among critics of the war in Iraq, who contend that neoconservative ideologues at the Pentagon rode roughshod over professional military advice. They particularly alight on the supposed insufficiency of troop numbers sent to Iraq for post-conflict operations and the failure to plan for the insurgency.

What of these charges? Mr Rumsfeld was right in believing that the war itself could be won with a much smaller force than was used in the first Gulf War of 1991, not least because the Iraqi army had halved in size. He was right effectively to send Tommy Franks away with a flea in his ear when the then US commander presented the original war plans, as General Franks has conceded. Pace George Galloway, there was no Stalingrad by the Tigris.

This was no McNamara-style micromanagement of targeting when Pentagon “whiz-kids” constantly encroached upon professional military prerogatives. Rather, Mr Rumsfeld’s big picture approach is exactly what civilian control of the military is supposed to be all about: in other words, asking what would be the price in blood and treasure of a particular plan? Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, did much the same as Defence Secretary in 1990 when he asked Norman Schwarzkopf to revise his plans for a costly frontal assault on the Iraqi forces in Kuwait.

What about the postwar period? General Jack Keane, the Army Vice-Chief of Staff during this critical period, told me that it was just as much the military’s responsibility to anticipate the insurgency, if not more so. “We had no plans for that”, he said. “It was our fault, not Donald Rumsfeld’s.” The point was inadvertently underscored in Franks’s autobiography when he told Pentagon civilians that he would not involve himself in the detailed work on Phase 4 or “stability” operations — that is, after major combat was over. “I’ll do the day of and you’ll do the day after,” he snorted. He also refused to work alongside “Free Iraqis” ready to take up postwar security tasks. All of this cost the US dearly when the looting began in Baghdad. Yet Rumsfeld et al acquiesced.

The real issue in postwar Iraq was less that of numbers than of the mix of forces. The Americans did not need many more GIs who cannot speak Arabic patrolling the streets in heavy body armour; rather, they could have done it with the existing size of force, but with more military policemen, intelligence officers and civil affairs specialists.

[...]

Mr Rumsfeld, by contrast, has had far more success than Kennedy in shaking up the US Army. Until September 11 it was still too much of a garrison force, geared up for Cold War contingencies. Or, in the quip of one of Rumsfeld’s intimates, it was full of “Fulda Gap warriors”, rather than the kind of expeditionary forces required for the War on Terror.

The Defence Secretary has trod on toes in this process. He has insisted on interviewing every appointment to four and three-star rank — something that was more of a pro forma process under his predecessors. He appointed a retired Special Forces general, Peter Schoomaker, as US Army Chief of Staff, thus passing over stacks of serving officers. And with his greater emphasis on high-tech “jointery”, he has forced both the Army and the Marines to depend more on Air Force and Navy supporting fire.

The real criticism of Mr Rumsfeld is not that he “kicked to much butt”, but that he kicked too little. At George Bush’s behest, he sent the US armed forces into a war that they weren’t yet fully ready to fight: they are much more prepared now, but the insurgency genie is out of the bottle. He was part of the Republican consensus that was contemptuous of Clinton-era peacekeeping operations, believing that real soldiers don’t do social workerish stuff. Like so many reformers, his problem is that his changes discomfit existing interest groups before the benefits become fully visible.

This strikes me as largely right. While Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld all deserve their share of blame for things that have gone wrong under their watch, those who are career professionals get far too little criticism. Generals spend their careers learning to plan for and fight wars. Foreign Service and Intelligence Officers likewise spend decades learning to do their jobs. They have a responsibility to do their best to carry out the plans of those elected to direct policy.

________

Related:

Outspoken Retired Generals and Civilian Control, Redux
Firing Donald Rumsfeld
Retired Generals Call for Rumsfeld Resignation

The Army has authorized the Combat Briefing Badge (CBB) for PowerPoint Rangers operating in hostile fire zones.

Army Unveils New Award (StrategyPage)

Combat Briefing Badge (CBB)

Recognizing the need for an award for troops assigned to headquarters units during combat operations, the Army today announced the approval of the Combat Briefing Badge, or CBB. “People don’t realize that being in a major headquarters can be just as stressful as going on patrols or convoys,” said MAJ John Remf. “When you’re briefing that many General Officers, your career can end in a heartbeat. And it can happen to anyone at any time, not just combat arms soldiers.” DOD statistics note that CSS personnel are more likely to suffer career-ending incidents in rear areas than Combat Arms Soldiers. “This just reflects that reality,” said Pentagon spokesman LTC Roger Pogue.

The award ranks in precedence below the CIB and CAB, but above the EIB and PowerPoint Ranger tab.

The criteria for the award is still under discussion, but preliminary guidance authorizes the award for 30 days of continuous briefings of officers at least two grades higher than the briefer without incident while serving in a theater of operations in which the awardee is eligible for hostile fire and hazardous duty pay.

Yes, this is a joke. In reality, one would only get a Bronze Star or possibly a Legion of Merit for this, depending on one’s rank and that of the officer briefed.

via Donald Sensing

Ann E. Dunwoody has been nominated for a third star and head of Army logistics. This would make her the Army’s top-ranking woman and the first three-star female in five years.

Dunwoody tapped for third star; would become Army’s top-ranked woman (Army Times)

Maj. Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody has been nominated to become the senior logistics officer on the Army Staff. If confirmed for appointment to lieutenant general and assignment as deputy chief of staff, G-4, the Quartermaster Corps officer will be the top-ranking woman in the Army.

[...]

Dunwoody is one of 17 women on the Army’s general officer roster — seven major generals, nine brigadier generals and one promotable colonel. If her nomination is confirmed by the Senate, Dunwoody will become the first female soldier to achieve three-star rank since Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy, the former deputy chief of staff for intelligence who retired in 2000.

Seventeen female generals is a lot, given that women are not eligible for the combat arms. Indeed, three star rank is historically quite significant, as this excerpt from the Naval Historical Service makes clear:

General Washington was the first to wear three stars when he became the nation’s first Lieutenant General in 1798. After he died in 1799 there was not another Lieutenant General until 1855. The three stars appeared again, however, by 1832 as the insignia of the Major General who commanded the Army. In 1855 Congress honored Winfield Scott for his service as commanding general since 1841 and for his accomplishments in 1847 during the war with Mexico by making him a Brevet Lieutenant General. He held that rank until he retired in 1861. The next Lieutenant General was Ulysses S. Grant in 1864. Two years later he became the first General of the Army of the United States and chose four stars as his rank insignia. When Grant became President in 1869 he appointed William T. Sherman General of the Army and Phillip H. Sheridan Lieutenant General. Sherman changed the rank insignia in 1872 to a gold embroidered coat of arms of the United States between two silver stars. After Sherman retired in 1884 there was not supposed to be another General of the Army but in 1888 Congress relented and permitted the President to promote Sheridan who died two months later. Congress allowed another Lieutenant General promotion in 1895, one in 1900, five between 1903 and 1906, two in 1918 during World War I, one in 1929 and then no more until 1939. Our Army has been supplied with Lieutenant Generals since, as has the Marine Corps since 1942 and the Air Force since 1947.

There were no more full Generals after Sheridan died in 1884 until 1917 when Tasker H. Bliss, the Army Chief of Staff, and John J. Pershing, the commander of the U.S. forces in France during World War I, went from Major General to General (emergency) so they could have ranks equal to the allied commanders with whom they dealt. They changed the rank insignia back to four stars. In 1918, Peyton C. March also became a General.

In 1919 Congress honored Pershing for his wartime service by permitting the President to promote him to General of the Armies of the United States, which he held until he retired in 1924. He chose his own insignia, which was four stars. Nobody else has received that rank during his lifetime. In 1976 Congress authorized the President to posthumously appoint George Washington General of the Armies of the United States and specified that he would rank first among all officers, of the Army, past or present.

Congress did not allow the promotion of any more full Generals from 1918 to 1929 when the Major General chosen to be Chief of Staff also became a General so he could have a rank equal to the Chief of Naval Operations. Promotions for other Generals did not come until World War II, with the exception of a permanent promotion to General for Generals Bliss and March in June 1930. The Army still has several Generals, the Marines have had at least one General since 1945 and the Air Force, which started with three in 1947, also has several.

During World War II our Army got so big that even full Generals were not enough so in 1944 Congress created the new rank of General of the Army and specified five stars as its insignia. Congress did not revive the General of the Army rank held by Grant, Sherman and Sheridan. The World War II Generals of the Army were in a separate category from the Civil War Generals of the Army. In December 1944 the President appointed George C. Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Henry H. Arnold Generals of the Army. In 1949 Arnold’s title became General of the Air Force. Omar N. Bradley got his fifth star in 1950.

So, there are now seven female generals in the Army alone that have the rank Washington held as commander of the War for Independence. (In 1798, he had already served two terms as president; the third star was entirely ceremonial.)