Perhaps IRONCAPT (whose point of view I always enjoy reading and take seriously) protests a little too much? Attacking the messenger for delivering an unhappy message is as old as Methuselah. However, the question should not be whether Hasting is a self-promoting jerk but if he is correct in his accusations. If Hastings reporting is accurate then HUNTER’s comments below hit the nail squarely on its head. There is nothing more damaging to the reputation and veracity of the U. S. Armed Forces than well-meaning but stupidly misguided officers who go a ‘bridge too far’ in their enthusiasm.

Thanks JPWEL. I’m glad this little slice of the internet allows for sensible and civil discourse

So Hastings said this:

"Caldwell seemed more eager to advance his own career than to defeat the Taliban."

This is Hastings providing his assessment of LTG Caldwell's efforts in Afghanistan. Had one of the other officers involved in this thing said that, I'd be fine with Hastings quoting him. Had Hastings been writing a book about Caldwell, and spent months in Afghanistan following the ANA training command, I'd be OK with him writing that. If he did a week of interviews on one side of the story, he's scalp hunting.

I wouldn't know Caldwell if I ran into him at Starbucks, but if a reporter who had read some unflattering reports about me from a disgruntled subordinate had accused me of such things in the middle of a war, I'd be inclined to beat that dude down.

Had Hastings been a bit more objective, instead of making asides about "the increasingly unpopular war," I'd have given him a B. Its an interesting story and I think the facts are on the side of the IO cell leader (nearing retirement and probably in no danger of making O-6, if he's already discussing his post retirement business ideas). Had this story been better written by someone other than Hastings, I wouldn't have said anything.

Also, what does a foreign military training command need an IO cell for, anyway? Were they supposed to be training the ANA to do IO? I don't get it.

Let's face the hard truth here. Both the enemy and the friendly's have centers of gravity. Our center of gravity is most likely "public opinion of the war." Immediately tied to that is our elected officials opinion of the war.

It's foolish to neglect that, but we do. To our great detriment. In WWII there were film reels designed to inform the public and influence them to support the war effort "Buy Bonds, etc." This could be rightly construed as propaganda. Today we have a public affairs organization that ought to be telling the story of these wars to the American populace. That organization is and has been failing since the beginning. (Were I king for a day there would be a Sunday night major network reality TV show that documents what real soldiers do in Iraq and Afghanistan everyday. I bet it would be a ratings winner, and it would also bridge that civil-military divide we always talk about.) Our center of gravity is largely uneducated and uncaring about what is going on in the warzones. With a bad economy any interest previously demonstrated is largely gone, and there is American Idol to be paid attention to fer chrissakes. Bread and circuses.

But the IO force's purpose is intended to be directed elsewhere, and if Caldwell or his underlings ordered them to research and divine how best to 'target' visiting Congressmen then they overstepped their bounds big time. The fact that they cover things up by accusing the guy who tried to highlight their bad decisions just shows the real malfeasance here.

(All necessary disclaimers about other side of the story yet to be heard.)

Given that there is always another side of the story, let's visit the Cartwright issue. Here's a guy who dodged a bullet. His aide made all the mistakes but he should have and could have ensured there was no air of impropriety. I know this won't set well with the equality bunch but General's pick their aides and I sure as hell wouldn't pick one of an opposite gender. Absolutely no good can come from that. All that said, the circumstance was investigated and he was cleared....likely rightfully so.

There's a reason for due process. And the Cartwright matter is demonstrative of the need.

Propaganda worked in WW2 largely because our allies and we were demonstrably the good guys fighting a necessary war. Even a demonic Stalin and his Red Army were given a temporary pass in the realm of public relations. Also, almost every family in the country had some kind of human stake in that war and sacrificed one way or another for victory even if it was only a war bond or higher taxes and rationing. None of those conditions exist in the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The American public as of today remains un-committed and in fact is becoming more unsold on the war every passing day. And while the war hawks in their sales pitches would have us believe that these wars are crucially important to our nation they have never had the guts to ask the American public for the order.

Center of gravity (CoG) indeed.

Yep, information makes its rounds quick these days, and we'll have to see how this plays out. Regardless, it was inappropriate and it should have been left in the hands of public affairs. . .period!

In my day, I had to wait for my monthly subscription of "Readers Digest" to catch-up to me in the bush, so I could read about some general or admiral talking about light at the end of the tunnel.

Incidentally, the Digest made a great little platoon leader's portable desk top for writing-up elegant patrol orders, that went to hell-in-a-hand basket shortly thereafter.

"Lack of Judgement" on a fitrep is a kiss-of-death (career stopper anyway) for a Marine Officer.
However, I don't believe that General Officers get traditional fitreps and JO's don't usually get "due process". Chalk this one up to the "needs of the service".

...but perhaps you'll appreciate it nonetheless.
RE: Nam

I think it was 1969 (year may be wrong) when my Dad got the letter indicating that he was no longer eligible for the draft. Of course he was a lone MACV adviser standing in a rice paddy in Vietnam at the time.

RE: Readers Digest

In 1996, I wrote a letter to Reader's Digest intended for "Humor in uniform." I told them the story of how my second grade teacher (Fort Knox in the 70s) asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. I told her "I want to be a civilian." She asked me why? I said "because my Dad says they make more money." Of course I was writing that letter to RD from Bosnia. I liked the irony of it. Sadly, they never published my story...and I'm still not a civilian...completely.

Back in the dark ages, when rifles were kept racked in the barracks, we had an ancient mess hall chief, a Gunnery Sergeant, who was said to have fought with Chesty in Nicaragua. I noted whether the stars were out or not, he would come to work in a rain coat at 0’dark thirty in the morning, and continue to wear said rain coat even if the sun was shinning later.

In retrospect, I now believe the old gunny wasn’t so crazy, and knew at some point in the day, someone in authority was going to pee down his backside, telling him it was raining outside.

I think there's a point here?

...gots to win all three sides of Clausewitz's sacred triangle?

There was an interesting story regarding Churchill and his head of propaganda. I've forever failed to find an online source for it (perhaps someone could help with that, if they know of one) but it related to a conversation in which WSC wanted to suppress the information about the quantity of shipping being lost to U-boats in the battle of the Atlantic. His propaganda chief demurred on the basis that if they did so and the population discovered that they had been lied to, he was certain the war would be lost. Revealing the information, he felt, would buttress an innate British stubbornness that would at least give an opportunity to survive the onslaught.

The information was released.

The problem with really effective PR is that we too often come to believe our own big lie. This happened in 1942, when Army planners discovered that massive ongoing E. Coast shipping losses would preclude a European campaign, if not dealt with asap.

My mother was living in Coronado (SD, Ca.) at that time, where there were no sub losses, and civilian lighting was under blackout regs. Wartime censorship on the E. coast was focussed on not panicking folks about the bodies and oil washing up daily on every beach between Florida and NYC.

When the ugly truth got pushed into the puzzle palace by inter-service enemies, it forced the senior service to face facts about its ineffective use of ASW assets, and the lack of ANY E. Coast blackout program. The embarrassing truth was decisive, eventually neutralizing the murderously destructive 'nothing to see here' propaganda blowback.
---
If it's true that the General's staff was doing the visiting congressman's job for him, using scarce IO warfighting assets to individually exploit political pain, to force a 'favorable' vote on funding this war, then Team Caldwell advanced his own career demise.

My question is, if a confidential source fed this kind of 'general killing' story to the WaPo, would they run with it? Secondly, is someone besides disgruntled underlings helping to throw a rival 3-star under the bus? Tom?

Finally, 'waning domestic support for the war' is a measurable fact, not an aside, or a cheap-shot opinion. It informs the context for the rest of the story in Afghanistan, however questions of fairness on this reportage fall out. It must suck to serve under that conditional support, but that's the nature of war at the far edge of empire.

Navy public affairs is well known for its ability to deal with "bad stories" and "bad news" as you describe it. Who do you think made sure the investigation into the VCJCS was released. Unit level ground pounding MPADs are good for photo ops and hometowners but the real PA is done at the COCOM level and above and those positions are dominated by USN and USAF public affairs for a reason. They know what they're doing.

When we did Operation Swarmer in '06, FOX News had a former Air Force Colonel come on and describe what kind of assets we were using. He told them a Blackhawk was an ISR asset and that he was certain the SR-71 was orbiting the area as he spoke.

They decommissioned the SR-71 in 2002.

If our IO guys could do Jedi mind tricks, we'd have been out of Iraq and Afghanistan long ago. And Gates would have them working on the budget.

For amusement, look up what happened to George Romney, Mitt's father, when he reversed his support for VN in 1967. Alleging that his earlier enthusiasm for 'escallation' was the result of being 'brainwashed' by the generals terminated his political career. I'll hazard a guess that Sen. Levins will find himself to be an ongoing target in this Caldwell kerfuffle.

"Sen, why did you have to be brainwashed into supporting the troops?"

"Men Who Stare At Goats" (the book) is a serious survey of the breadth of psyops theory since VN. Really getting inside an opponents head starts with a realistic assessment of players and position. Most of us aren't willing to get that truthy, even when the immersion opportunity presents.

On Operation Swarmer...this operation demonstrated how the tactical level was not in line with the operational or strategic levels when it came to Strategic Comms, or as we are discussing on this thread, PA/IO.
Swarmer was in March 2006, the same time that Iraq's new parliament met for the first time since its election in December 2005. So while the focus of the media should have been the Iraqi parliament, the focus was on Swarmer.
Not knocking the Rakkasans on this Ghourly, but it is an interesting demonstration on the lack of synergy (yes, I said synergy) within Iraq at the time.

"When kids ask me about joining these days, I tell them not to. "It's not the enemy or even the lieutenants that'll get you killed these days," I tell them. "It's the colonels and generals, and there ain't squat you can do about those."

That's scary. Sad, true, but scary.

I got in a major war with some fellow peers on a different forum a few months ago...I saw in their comments the same kind of status quo stuff we derided only a few years ago as CPTs or MAJs. I'm not perfect by any means, but I often try to look through the lens of what a JO officer or soldier would say about my policies or decisions. In other words, as a middle manager LTC I TRY not to be part of the problem.

This situation with Caldwell is, as the kids like to say, FULL OF FAIL.

(As always a great post JG)

Damn it Jim, don't leave us hanging. Did you fly those little airplanes for your boss or find some clever way around it?

I liked how movement control would hold my convoys for hours and hours when conditions were RED and could not be supported with MEDEVAC. If they turned AMBER as many convoys would be pushed out as possible, even though it was entirely possible that conditions would be back to RED in a matter of minutes.

Never mind the actual intent was to be ready to assist soldiers in the event of attack or emergency. Logic be damned.

[Note: My troops would much prefer travelling under RED than waiting endlessly. They just wanted to get on with it]

All that said, I must admit I've bent a rule or two along the way. Not sure I would risk an aircraft though. Very pricey, and I imagine flying a bird in a sandstorm wouldn't result in very good pictures anyway. Logic be damned?

Many years ago, I was aircrew on a 4-seater tactical jet that cost Uncle Sam many million$. Once I and 3 others were tasked to fly from MCAS East Coast to NAS West Coast for some simulator training. We accomplished that and set off to return to East Coast.

Upon landing at NAS Denver for some Texaco, we sprang a serious hydraulic leak that precluded us from taking off again until a replacement part arrived. The Maintenance Officer at East Coast twice UPS'd the wrong little hydraulic pipe that we need to replace. We wallowed our time away at the Coors brewery, something unique at the time with free beer at the end of the tour.

Finally after 6 days of SNAFU, low on money, and long on SpouseSep we decided to trapse over to the old Stapleton Airport. It was a Sunday morning and we headed to the first commercial airline hanger we came to--Continental Airlines. We found a mechanic who happened to be a pipefitter. We showed him the hydraulic pipe (a bit shorter than one's arm with several angles and bends) that was cracked that we took out of our aircraft and asked if he could help us. He took the article, scratched his chin, walked over to a discard barrel, pulled out the same diameter pipe and proceeded to machine bend a new piece. We thanked the kind man profusely, ventured back to our multi-million grounded bird, put in the new part, recharged the hydraulic juice and gas tanks and flew back to MCAS East Coast.

We broke every rule possible in the scenario (including flying half way across the USA without an operable transponder). But we did that "mission complete" thing. The skipper , I believe, was too shocked upon seeing the plane on the flight line Monday morning to be too pissed at our discretions. We pleaded ingenuity and intuition.

Rules are meant to be broken.

GSF,

By your logic, a PFC can dress up like a different Village Person every day of the week, smoke dope at his desk, and flip the bird to anyone who tells him otherwise. Uniform & drug policies and customs & courtesies all come out of reg books.

And who gives a damn? They're just regs, right?

Yes, you improvised, adapted, and overcame. But which rules are okay to break? And, more importantly, who gets to decide which rules are okay? It's a slippery slope, and it leads back to that whole "god of your own religion" thing.

Incidentally, my whole "spelunking" adventure started when a LTC redirected one of my planes without asking permission to change a BDE-level mission. Convoy hit an IED right on the spot we were watching about three hours later. A kid died because an O-5 wanted to change the channel.

I owe it to the W.O.L.F., who decided I was a rare RLO worthy of their assistance. "Use the risk assessment," the old 64-driver told me. And so I did.

I handed the LTC an "extremely high" assessment and told him he'd have to sign it if he wanted the plane to fly, since it was over my pay grade. Amazing how the regs suddenly mattered again once it was his keester on the line.

It's all about accountability. Somehow, we've gone towards a model where people aren't accountable. They need to be brought back... or thrown out.

I think you've gone a bit tangental on me Jim. Forget about the antics of our down time part of my story. The point was we did what we had to do to get an asset back to base for further tasking. Many of our missions were JCS tasked (at a time when JCS did that sort of thing). Your LTC acted out of personal choice it sounds like.
I think this boils down to exercise of leadership and decision making.

Don't get me wrong, GSF. I'm only talking about the maintenance issue. The beer and such is a non-issue to me, so long as you were 12 hours. I'm not a strict constructionist by any means, either. However, the fact remains you bet your multi-million dollar aircraft's safety on Bubba the Continental guy's ability to eyeball you a pipe. You wrote a check your body couldn't cash. But what you're saying is that it doesn't count because you kept it below the hard deck.

I feel like this is a "no harm, no foul" argument. It's okay because you got away with it. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but look at it the other way-- what if your JCS-tasked aircraft had sprung a hydraulic leak and you had to put it down in an Iowa corn field? Did you still do the right thing in those circumstances? My LTC was a UAV cowboy until I told him I wasn't going to be his rodeo clown. In that regard, I don't see the difference between the situations.

You also didn't tell the commander you were going to do it ahead of time. One of those "better to ask forgiveness than permission" moments. But why would we need to ask for permission if we're doing the right thing?

These aren't attacks. I'm simply exploring that slippery slope. Steven Pressfield (author of Gates of Fire) started a new blog series this week that's exploring "The Warrior Ethos." I know that's a contentious subject here, and I've taken much of what I've learned from people's perspectives and used it on the forum there. One thing jumped out at me on his post last week, though. He asserted that the US military is a "shame-based culture." I laid into him for that. It shocked me that a former Marine (and I think after saying something like that, Marines will agree that he's "former") would say that. If the honor and integrity of our services is based on nothing more than our ability to maintain a facade of propriety, then what's it really worth?

Again, I'm no stranger to the principle that rules do not mean as much once the bullets start flying, but there has to be some kind of dominant authority. If I can't expect the man to my right and left to uphold a basic and universal standard of conduct, then it's every man for himself. I would argue that the reason we have the best military in the world is that we hold it to the highest standards. If the Generals believe they can ignore that standard, then it won't take long for Privates to begin acting the same way. Take a look at the list of Battalion Commanders (or ship captains) whov'e been relieved in the last ten years and tell me where they took their cues from. Sure, all those guys had 15+ years in service, but they all wore butter bars at some point, and they all had mentors.

It's kind of like Star Wars. You can clipp Darth Maul and Count Dooku, but if you don't get the big man teaching 'em, he's eventually going to train one that really screws the pooch.

McChrystal, Caldwell, Breazile... where's the prune-faced dude making these clowns? Anyone wanna play Yoda?

The Greeks had a concept they called Metis-- and the son of Metis was Poros. Metis is the concept of skill and the wisdom you get from the actual application of your trade. Poros is an ingenious creativity. The was a 20th century anthropologist named James Scott that said "Metis" is what was missing link from so many ideological failures of the state--that whenever you had people obeying dictums and structural mandates from a very high level--the result was austerity and a people entirely disconnected from reality. You can see this very well in the failures of agrarian societies under Leninism. Basically, in order to have a well-functioning, well-run institution of any sort, there has to be feedback loops of learning within the lowest levels of that organization. I see this in the military structure. Men and women in uniform aren't just "cogs" in the wheel--each individual organization is a functioning group -- and in order to accomplish the mission, they have got to do it "their way...micro-managerial mandates from the "top" just don't work. Its gotten worse over the past 20 - 30 years because now there is all this oversight and scrutiny by taxpayers. But, there has to be a middle-ground somewhere. You can't expect the military to function like a socialist machine. Anyway, I digress because in later years James Scott becomes an anarchist.

That's why Not Applicable To Our Present Situation is my all-time favorite acronym.

In the civilian world aboard ships and aircraft we have "bridge management" and "cockpit management". Some smarter guys figured out that enough groundings, collisions, spills and crashes were the results of human error when captains made poor decisions and their mates and first officers were too afraid to call out the Old Man when he was about to make a bad decision. Those principles are now required SOP within IMO and ICAO rules.

As a Marine E-3 I never would have dared question the eltee or even the gunny, let alone the skipper. But at management level (O-4 and up), are there acceptable situations to quietly say, "Sir, bad idea" and get away with it? Is that sort of respectful disagreement acceptable when informed by something the more senior officer isn't seeing or understanding? I suppose special units, flight crews, nuclear engineering departments aboard ships and perhaps nuclear weapons guys have some special leeway. But what about the bridge team on a DDG or a tank company or a rifle battalion? Can a subordinate privately and sincerely question the commander without endangering the principle of unity of command, the notion of chain of command, and his or her own ass?

for that NATOPS interpretation. What we did was in conjunction with the squadron maintenance officer at home plate. We also had 2 maintenance officers on that trip as well as the S-3. I was the lone S-1 weaney, albeit the legal officer. We knew our way around the guts of the aircraft that we flew.
My point is that one must do what one must do under certain circumstances and parameters. I guess I should have said: "Rules are meant to be broken when they need to be broken". Applies to wartime and peacetime operations, as necessary. Of course I don't advocate everyone running around doing willy nilly whenever thay have the urge. But, to steal a line from a previous campaign: "Its the Mission, Stupid".

Hey man, don't tell me a story in parts like that! I would say two maintenance guys and an S-3 makes for a group carrying enough responsibility that a healthy dialogue takes place. Hard to have groupthink when there are ops and support guys of relatively equivalent rank in the room.

Then again, you'd think a whole squadron of guys would stage an intervention before an O-4 crashes a B-52 by trying to go inverted over Fairchild. Fifteen year later, they were still using that one as a textbook example of a failure of leadership at USAFA.

You seem like you know a bit about IO. Since the FA30 site on HRC is useless, can you elaborate a little more on what IO cats actually do on a daily basis? I've been trying to figure it out for a while now, to no avail.

Mainstream media are, as a rule, terrified of losing access to sources, but that may be a moot point here. There just aren't that many other media covering Hastings' beat. He can get his questions answered because -- compared to, say, a reporter covering Congress or trying to get a quote out of Sarah Palin -- he doesn't have that much competition.

I wonder what we might learn if we had more journalists covering those beats.

Not my observations, but those of critics of the system, which includes leftist and conservative critics:

First, what news is fit to print is often up to the editors.

Second, mainstream media are owned by multinationals, the same multinationals who dominate government via lobbies. It wouldn't make sense for them to utterly discredit the same system that they seek to control.

Third, the antagonistic relationship between muckrakers and the powers that be is a thing of the past. One could right a book on why that is, I suspect part of it involves the changing nature of US elites. The muckrakers these days are confined to the margins, i.e. the blogosphere fever swamps. If a story is too big to ignore then the MSM will start to pay attention. Losing access to players is a concern, but there is also identification. Journalists identify with those in power, particularly bigtime journalists. How far back this goes is another book-length topic, with much ink spilt on it.

identification isn't always with those at the top, one can always identify with middling management or with specific factions within the policy-making community. It's really a familial type dynamic, you might hate Uncle Ted, but he's still your uncle.

probably goes both ways

Divad was the #1 Xeroxed article at the Pentagon circa 1982

--- Easterbrook, Gregg "DIVAD", Atlantic Monthly, October 1982, pp. 29–39

A great example of non-MSM highlighting enormous Army failures.

Hastings outing of McCrystal might be on the same order of magnitude as Divad, but this latest article is rubbish.