Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

Yesterday morning I received an email inquiry from Noah Shachtman of Wired magazine’s Danger Room.  Noah mentioned that President Obama was taking flak in some circles for having spoken only once with GEN Stanley McChrystal during McChrystal’s tenure as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.  He wanted some historical perspective on the matter; specifically, how often did commanders-in-chief speak to field commanders in the era of modern communications.  I sent him some telegram-like observations laboriously pecked out on my BlackBerry.  He replied that the info was what he was looking for, but could I write it up in a form that would allow him to quote me.  So when I got back to my PC I sent him the following:

It’s by no means obvious why critics would fault President Obama for conferring directly with GEN. McChrystal just once.  McChrystal is still new to the job.  He has enough on his hands without intrusions from the Commander in Chief.  Obama can and does confer regularly with McChrystal’s boss, CENTCOM commander GEN David Petraeus, and that’s as it should be.  As a rule, presidents utilize their Secretaries of Defense — they exist for a reason — and for the most part confine their direct consultations to their regional combatant commanders (CENTCOM, SOUTHCOM, etc.), or in older times to their chiefs of staff; e.g., FDR and George C. Marshall.

Obama’s practice is thus the rule, not the exception.  Bill Clinton consulted with GEN Wesley Clark, commander of  EUCOM (European Command), about once a week, but beyond that left matters up to his Secretary of Defense and senior national security aides.  During  Desert Shield/Desert Storm George H. W. Bush dealt exclusively with GEN Colin S. Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was his conduit to CENTCOM commander GEN Norman Schwartzkopf.

A decided departure from the norm was George W. Bush,  who dealt regularly with McChrystal’s predecessor, GEN David McKiernan, as well as GEN Petraeus during Petraeus’s tenure as top commander in Iraq.  (He also conferred with Petraeus’s superior, CENTCOM commander ADM William J. Fallon.)

Modern communications have tempted some presidents to micromanage.  During the disastrous Desert One rescue mission in 1980, Jimmy Carter famously (and problematically) dealt directly with COL Charles Beckwith, the commander on the scene. But the ultimate micro-manager was also the first to have easy access to ground commanders:  President Abraham Lincoln, thanks to the telegraph.  Lincoln constantly bypassed his secretary of war and general in chief to deal directly with army commanders.  Although some historians seem to believe that everything Lincoln did was correct by definition, Lincoln’s interventions were often to ill effect.

In any event, Obama already knows what McChrystal thinks.  At this point McChrystal, in effect, needs to know what Obama thinks.  That is to say, the president needs to give McChrystal a clearly defined national security objective that is the prerequisite for any coherent military strategy.

Noah made liberal use of my quote in a post entitled “Obama and McChrystal Don’t Talk? Good, Says Army Historian,” and sent me the link.  Only then did I grasp the full context of the story he was following.  Apparently in an interview on CBS’s Sixty Minutes, McChrystal mentioned that he and the president had spoken only once during his tenure in command.  Approached for comment by the New York Times, Michael E. O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution responded,  “I don’t think I can defend him for being out of touch with his commander. He has other people who advise him. But there’s no one else with the feel on the ground that McChrystal has.”  Andrew Exum of Abu Muqawama called the president’s failure to connect so little with McChrystal “indefensible.”  And John Noonan of The Weekly Standard — not the most politically dispassionate magazine I’ve ever seen — asked his readers rhetorically, “What does it say about your Commander-in-Chief when he’s spoken with David Letterman more than his key guy in Afghanistan?”

Which got me to thinking:  What does this state of affairs say about GEN McChrystal if he thinks he needs to consult more often with the president?  Is he in the position of Vicki Carr in her 1967 hit, “It Must Be Him,” which finds the singer waiting desperately by the phone?

Oh, hello, hello, my dear God
It must be him
But it’s not him
And then I die
That’s when I die
Let it please be him
My dear God, it must be him
Or I shall die
Or I shall die

So I asked someone in a position to know.  Which at the Army War College is a pretty easy thing to do.

You’ll probably be as relieved as I was to discover that modern communications work both ways, and that if GEN McChrystal felt the need to hear Obama’s voice — or more precisely, see his visage on the VTC (video teleconferencing) screen — he has no fewer than three conduits by which to make his desire known.  He could go to GEN Petraeus, his boss at CENTCOM.  He could go to ADM James G. Stavridis, his boss at SACEUR / EUCOM by dint of McChrystal’s status as commander of  ISAF (International Security Assistance Force), which includes NATO as well as U.S. forces.  And in a pinch he apparently has direct access to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

Bottom line:  If McChrystal thought he and the president needed to talk more often, he could ask for that to happen.  And as busy as the president is with health care reform, the economy, and the desperate maintenance of the facade that he was born in Hawaii, not Kenya, one imagines that Obama would find time to chat.

Basically, my informant told me, it’s a non-issue.

UPDATE, 2:30 p.m.:  A couple of readers have messaged me to the effect that they are not entirely sure that the facade comment was in jest.  A sign of the times, I guess.  So for the record:  President Barack Hussein Obama was born at Kapi’olani Maternity and  Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, the United States of America, on August 4, 1961.  His first words were “Da-da” or, by some accounts, “Death Panel.”

SECOND UPDATE, 2:57 p.m.:  Responding to the Danger Room post, Galrahn at Information Dissemination takes exception to my appraisal.  I’m unpersuaded; in fact the logic of his argument is not entirely clear to me.  But I very much like the fact that he makes his argument that Obama should have had more contact with McChrystal in a reasoned way,  and not as a mere cheap shot at the president.  Go have a look.