A salvo at the White House

[thedrifter]

US MILITARY BREAKS RANKS, Part 1
A salvo at the White House
By Mark Perry

For military officers in the Pentagon's E-Ring (where the most important defense issues are decided), the shift in the public mood has been nearly miraculous: last September, on the eve of General David Petraeus' Congressional testimony on the George W Bush administration's 'surge' strategy, the American electorate was consumed by the war in Iraq.

Now, just four months later, that same electorate has shifted its attention to the 2008 elections. Public polls reflect the shift. Iraq no longer tops the list of issues of concern to Americans - its place having been usurped over worries about the economy - and is competing for attention with healthcare and immigration. (The "war on terror" is a poor seventh - a stunning turnabout from the two years following September 11, 2001.) But the perceptible fall-off in public attention from foreign policy to domestic issues is hardly a palliative for Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or America's highest-ranking combatant commanders, all of whom continue to deal with the continuing uncertain military situation Iraq.

The fact that the Iraq war has been pushed off the front pages of America's newspapers has given the US military a seeming respite from the almost endless spate of disastrous stories coming out of the Middle East, as well as the almost endless round of embarrassing questions from the press about what they intend to do about it.

But military officers say that the American public should not be fooled: the relative quiet in Iraq - and it is, after all, only a "relative quiet" - does not mean the "surge" has worked, or that the problems facing the US military have somehow magically gone away. Quite the opposite. For while the American public is consumed by the campaign for the presidency, the American military is not. Instead, they are as obsessed now, in January of 2008, with the war in Iraq as they were then, in 2003 - except that now, many military officers admit, the host of problems they face may, in fact, be much more intractable.

First contact
"Don't let the quiet fool you," a senior defense official says. "There's still a huge chasm between how the White House views Iraq and how we [in the Pentagon] view Iraq. The White House would like to have you believe the 'surge' has worked, that we somehow defeated the insurgency. That's just ludicrous. There's increasing quiet in Iraq, but that's happened because of our shift in strategy - the 'surge' had nothing to do with it."

In part, the roots of the disagreement between the Pentagon and White House over what is really happening in Iraq is historical. Senior military officers contend that the seeming fall-off in in-country violence not only has nothing to do with the increase in US force levels, but that the dampening of the insurgency that took hold last summer could have and would have taken place much earlier, within months of America's April 2003 occupation of Baghdad.

Moreover, these officers contend, the insurgency might not have put down roots in the country after the fall of Baghdad if it had not been for the White House and State Department - which undermined military efforts to strike deals with a number of Iraq's most disaffected tribal leaders. These officers point out that the first contact between high-level Pentagon officials and the nascent insurgency took place in Amman, Jordan, in August of 2003 - but senior Bush administration officials killed the talks.

A second round of meetings, this time with leaders of some of al-Anbar province's tribal chiefs, took place in November of 2004, but again senior administration officials refused to build on the contacts that were made. "We made the right contacts, we said the right things, we listened closely, we put a plan in place that would have saved a lot of time and trouble," a senior Pentagon official says. "And every time we were ready to go forward, the White House said 'no'."

At the center of these early talks was a group of Iraqis led by Sheikh Talal al-Gaood, a Sunni businessman with close ties to Anbar's tribal leaders. Gaood, who died of a heart ailment in March of 2006, was a passionate Iraqi patriot who feared growing al-Qaeda influence in his country. Speaking over coffee from his office in Amman in 2005, Gaood was enraged by the "endless mistakes" of the US leadership. "You [Americans] face a Wahhabi threat that you cannot even begin to fathom," he said at the time, and he derided White House "propaganda" about the role of Syria in fueling the insurgency.

Gaood, looking every bit the former Ba'athist - complete with suspenders and Saddam Hussein-like mustache was particularly critical of what he called "the so-called counter-insurgency experts among Washington policymakers who think they know Iraq but don't." As he argued: "The guys who come through here, very educated, come in their brown robes and say they are going to Iraq to kill the Americans. They are not Syrians. They are Wahhabis. They are from Saudi Arabia. But if you talk to American officials, it is like they don't exist."

That might have been true for civilian policymakers, but it wasn't true for the military - who were beginning to take heavy casualties from armed insurgents in Sunni areas. Throughout 2004 and 2005, a group of senior US military officers, including high-ranking US Marine Corps commanders, attempted to expand their ties in western Iraq through Gaood and the network of leaders he provided them.

But these commanders continued to run into opposition to their program from then-National Security Council director Condoleezza Rice, who maintained her opposition to their program after she became secretary of state. L Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, who had suspended the Ba'ath army and was intent to cleanse Iraq of its Ba'athist influence, also opposed the program through all of 2004. "Bremer was just nuts about any meetings with any insurgents, any Ba'athists, anyone he didn't approve," a Pentagon official notes, "and Condi backed him up".

By the end of 2005, Rice's opposition to any opening to the Sunni leadership in Iraq became almost obsessive, according to currently serving senior military officers. In one incident, now notorious in military circles, Rice "just went completely crazy" when she learned that a marine colonel had dispatched combat helicopters to help a "a Sunni sheikh" in Fallujah fight what the sheikh called an "imminent al-Qaeda threat".

As a senior Pentagon official now relates: "The Sunni leader literally picked up the telephone one day and called the ranking colonel at the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF)and pleaded with him, 'I need help and I need it now. Al-Qaeda is killing my tribe'." The marine colonel in question was John Coleman, the chief of staff to the same unit that had gone into Fallujah to fight the insurgency after the killing of four US security contractors in April of 2004.

"Rice was just enraged with Coleman and with the marines," a senior Pentagon officials say. "She said, 'you have to stop all of that right now and you can't do it unless you have State Department permission and the permission of the Iraqi government'. Well, the marines weren't about to do that. They were taking a lot of casualties and they were fed up. And they just concluded that it was their war and not hers," a senior Pentagon civilian recently noted. "So they just ignored her and went ahead anyway."

In the wake of his marines-to-the-rescue efforts, Coleman and the 1st MEF began a program of cooperation with Fallujah's leaders, making a broad range of contacts with local officials who were fearful of al-Qaeda's influence in their city. The marine commanders in the 1st MEF were under no illusions, a Pentagon official now says - they were "engaged in talks with the insurgents, people who had been killing American soldiers since the fall of Baghdad".

The tipping point
Coleman's action might well have ended his career, if it had not been for then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose lack of respect for Rice bordered on the neurotic, and Coleman's commanding officer, Marine Lieutenant General James T Conway. Conway, an oversize Arkansan who sports a carpet of combat ribbons, was not only a Coleman partisan, he had been angered by orders to send his marines into Fallujah in April of 2004 to take on the city's insurgents, a point he made clear to the Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran, five months after the attack: "When we were told to attack Fallujah, I think we certainly increased the level of animosity that existed," Conway said.

Conway told Chandrasekaran he preferred engagement with Fallujah's leaders to confrontation, but that he was bound to follow orders - which had come down to his superior, army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, from the White House. Conway protested to Sanchez that going into Fallujah "with guns blazing" was the worst thing his marines could do, but Sanchez would hear none of it. "I have my orders, and now you have yours," Sanchez pointedly said.

Months later, Conway was still seething: "We felt like we had a method that we wanted to apply to Fallujah: that we ought to probably let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge. Would our system have been better? Would we have been able to bring over the people of Fallujah with our methods? You'll never know that for sure, but at the time we certainly thought so."

The tight circle of Pentagon civilians around Rumsfeld (inherited and largely kept intact by Robert Gates), which had been pushing for an opening to Anbar's tribal leaders (who had been talking to Gaood in Amman, and through him to some of Anbar's tribal leaders) now cite the Coleman incident as perhaps the key "tipping point" in the military's shift in strategy in Iraq.

But it was a group of military commanders, working on the ground, who eventually took the lead, using the Fallujah effort as their model. After dispatching a marine combat team to help Fallujah's tribal leaders fight al-Qaeda, similar efforts sprang up among army units patrolling in Tel Afar and in Ramadi where, five months after Coleman's Fallujah initiative, American military officers began tentative approaches to the Rishawi tribe.

By September, the Americans and Ramadi's Sheikh Abdul Sattar



abu Risha had come to an agreement - and the nascent Anbar Salvation Council, a grouping of 25 tribes, had been formed to fight al-Qaeda. The killing of Risha in a car bomb attack in September of 2007 was a clear setback for the strategy of recruiting tribal leaders to end the insurgency and turn their guns on al-Qaeda, but by then the strategy had spread to enough provinces, Pentagon officials say, that Risha's murder actually solidified the growing anti-al-Qaeda front.

The strategy had even taken hold in Babil province, the heavily fought-over area south of Baghdad - in "the Triangle of Death" - where contacts with the insurgency were put in the hands of the 501st Parachute Regiment. Since at least September of last year, according to published reports, officers of the 501st have been cooperating with Babil's Sunni tribal leaders to drive what American officers describe as "extremist elements" - insurgents affiliated with al-Qaeda - that had become rooted in the province.

In fact, the first contact with the tribal leaders of Babil took place five months before the first payments were made, in May of 2007. At first the leaders were even more hesitant to sign up with the Americans than their co-religionists to the north, in part because of pressures brought against them by the Shi'ite-dominated government - which mistrusted the Awakening Council movement.

Then too, Babil province was in the hands of Shi'ite political leadership, who were even less enamored of the American initiative than the Shi'ite leadership in Baghdad. But the Americans pushed hard for the alliance, telling Babil's Sunni leaders that the Baghdad government was incapable of providing them with local security, or effectively fighting off the al-Qaeda's threat.

Babil's leaders were inevitably convinced - in part because their hatred of al-Qaeda (and their mistrust of the Shi'ite-run government) ran so deep. But for the Americans, the new alliance came with a price. During September of 2007 alone, US military officers dispensed well over US$200,000 to Babil's tribal leaders, including $370 for each provincial policeman hired by Babil's Janabi tribe, a potent and influential force in southern and western Iraq.

The payments were and are a source of unease for American military officers, who fought the Janabis for two years in the province - and who lost American soldiers in attacks led by Janabi insurgents. "They used to want to kill me, now they want to sign a contract with me," a senior officer of the 501st told the Times of London. "It's hard to get your head around, but it is working."

The Mansour bombing
But the price has not only been paid by the Americans. The negotiations between US military officers and insurgents in Babil carried out during the late spring and early summer of 2007 were a source of increasing sensitivity inside the Iraqi government and were denounced both inside Iraqi religious circles and inside the Hawza - the institutions that constitute the centers of learning in the Shi'ite religion - where an expansion of the Anbar strategy war particularly controversial.

"The imams denounced this. They even talked against it during Friday prayers. For them, this was just another American attempt to subdue Iraq. It was one thing for the Americans to recruit Sunnis to the awakening - that's fine. But it is another thing entirely to do this in Shi'ite areas, which are more independent, and have a history of being subverted by outsiders," an Iraq government official said at the time.

Senior American military officers were warned by Iraqi officials that they were playing with fire in the areas south of Baghdad, but the American pleaded that, to prove its worth, the program needed to go forward outside of Anbar. This was particularly true in those areas not dominated by Sunnis. As a part of the effort to highlight the success of the Anbar initiative, the Americans called for a meeting of the Awakening Councils with Iraqi government officials on June 25 at the Mansour Melia Hotel in Baghdad.

But just hours before the meeting was to convene, a suicide bomber penetrated three levels of security and killed 12 Iraqis, including six members of the Anbar Salvation Council. The blast was so powerful that it blew the doors off the Mansour's heavily enforced dining room and caved in the dining room ceiling.

The Mansour bombing was a political catastrophe for the US and its new Sunni allies. Among the dead was Sheik Abdul-Aziz al-Fahdawi of the Fahad tribe, Sheik Tariq Saleh al-Assafi and Colonel Fadil al-Nimrawi, both from the al-Bu Nimr tribe, and Iraqi General Aziz al-Yasari and Sheik Husayn Sha'lan al-Khaza'i of the Khaza'a tribe. Also killed was Sheik Fassal al-Gaood, a former Anbar governor and the successor to Talal al-Gaood - the man who had first approached US military leaders in Amman in 2004.

Gaood's loss was deeply felt at the Pentagon, where civilian officials had been pressing for an opening to the insurgency since the fall of Baghdad. "This was a blow," a Pentagon official confirms. "We knew both men [Talal and Fassal] and admired their courage." Worse yet, while "Muslim extremists" were blamed for the murders, senior US officials suspected a range of suspects, including Iraqi government security officials who had been less than cooperative with the US military in promoting the Anbar initiative.

These suspicions were highlighted by reports that the meeting at the Mansour was called so that the Anbar officials could discuss expanding the "Awakening of the Tribes" into Shi'ite areas. Now that initiative seemed endangered. "The bombing was as clear a message as we could get," a Pentagon official later speculated. "While everyone's attention was focused on how this hurt us in Anbar, the real message was that we should end our efforts in the south."

The coda to the Mansour bombing was a triumphant broadside from US military officers that they would remain undeterred by "these despicable terrorist acts". In fact, senior military strategists began to tread more lightly, particularly in Shi'ite areas. According to a senior Iraqi official with ties into the nation's complex tribal network, in the wake of bombing the US military began to "sketch out and think through" inter-sectarian tribal relationships.

Babil was the key, where the emerging strategy was to focus on recruiting respected Iraqi leaders with close tribal ties to those leading the Awakening movement in Anbar. In Babil, military officers began to refocus their efforts on the Janabi tribe, according to a Janabi family member with access to the tribe's decision-making. The choice of the Janabis was purposeful - even insightful.

The Janabis are nearly ubiquitous in a large crescent of the country running from an area south of Baghdad in an arc to the west and north. For the Americans, the recruitment of the Janabis was crucial - since some Janabis are Sunni and some Shi'ite. Additionally, high-profile Sunni and Shi'ite Janabis served both in Saddam's government and as leaders in the anti-American insurgency.

Recruiting the powerful tribe to the side of the American military, even in the face Iraqi government opposition, became a key not only to "turning Iraqi guns on the real culprits", as one serving officer notes, but to "stitching together a political front that is based on something other than wishful thinking".

A senior Iraqi observer with ties to the tribal network confirms this view: "The Janabis in the south have strong links to those in the north, tribal links, but you should know some are motivated by sectarian concerns and some are simply extremists." The question remains, of course: what happens when the American money dries up? "The answer to that question is simple," this Iraqi says. And then he laughs: "When the money goes, they go."
Tomorrow, Part 2: Military felled by 'trust gap'

Ellie

[thedrifter]

US MILITARY BREAKS RANKS, Part 2
Troops felled by a 'trust gap'
By Mark Perry

How the "surge" succeeded - or even whether it has succeeded - is a source of constant commentary in military circles. In an "after-action report" written for the head of the Department of Social Sciences at West Point by retired four-star General Barry McCaffrey, who traveled to Iraq in mid-December, some of the problems that continue to plague US forces in Iraq were detailed.

McCaffrey, who has often been outspoken in his criticism of the



George W Bush administration's counter-terrorism strategy, admitted that "an active counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq could probably succeed in the coming decade with 25 US Brigade Combat Teams". But that would be more than one-half of the total available in the entire army - a level of commitment that simply cannot be sustained.

With US requirements in Afghanistan - estimated by McCaffrey at four brigades permanently engaged in a campaign that would last 15 years, a continued war on terrorism in Southwest Asia has become nearly impossible. Additionally, McCaffrey says, "The US Army is starting to unravel. Our recruiting campaign is bringing into the army thousands of new soldiers who should not be in uniform" - those with criminal records, who have used drugs, who have been given moral waivers, or who have not graduated from high school. A senior Pentagon official agrees. "We have increased our recruiting totals and tripled the number of our police battalions," he says, bitterly. "We will soon have to build new stockades to handle the influx."

McCaffrey recently summarized his views during testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. Alongside him was General Jack Keane, a celebrated army paratrooper and former vice chief of staff of the army, and the man most responsible for pushing the "surge" strategy with Bush, in December of 2006.

Keane's intervention with Bush to shift American policy was so far outside of military tradition as to be virtually unprecedented. In only one other case - when Maxwell Taylor was named to replace Lyman Lemnitzer by John F Kennedy as Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) chairman in 1962 - has a retired officer intervened so publicly to shift American policy. "Jack Keane was way out of line," a retired four-star army officer who served as a North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander says. "He's a first-class self-promoter, one of the army's real kiss-ups."

In essence, the case against Keane, repeated now by the coterie of retired senior officers, is that "Keane pulled a Taylor" - that, in the words of a retired four-star officer "it looks as if he wanted to get back into the JCS - that he wanted to get his boy [General David] Petraeus a good job".

Keane's pride in his role and in Petraeus' success was on full view during his armed services testimony. But his reading of what went right in Iraq and why is at odds with narrative accounts of on-the-ground American combat officers, and tilted to give himself, Petraeus and the "surge" strategy full credit for what Keane called "a remarkably successful military campaign that will be studied for years".

According to Keane, the violence in Iraq only began to go down "after all the troops were in place" - the implication being that a flood of US soldiers intimidated and scattered insurgent forces, an argument he emphasized by saying that, until he and Petraeus arrived on the scene, and given the Pentagon a dose of backbone, the war was lost. "We had never taken on defeating the insurgency," he said, "we had always left that up to the Iraqis" - a statement that will, no doubt, come as a shock to those marines of the First Marine Expeditionary Force who fought house-to-house in Fallujah in April of 2004, as well as to the families of those soldiers who lost their lives serving under Petraeus' predecessors.

It is such statements that make Keane one of the most reviled figures in the military community, and that does no favors for his protege, Petraeus, who must remain in uniform - and deal with the senior commanders whom Keane regularly insults.

The differences between Keane and McCaffrey are stark: where Keane is proud and ready to declare victory, McCaffrey is analytical, careful and intent to tell anyone who will listen of the obstacles that remain. While "AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] has been defeated," McCaffrey says, "there are still 3,000 attacks per month against US, coalition and Iraq forces. There is still a civil war going on."

Additionally, McCaffrey's reading of why Anbar is now quiet diverges significantly from that given by Keane: "The bottom line is the Sunnis got scared and started to engage, the spin-off of that is these concerned local citizens who are primarily Sunnis, but it's now being extended into the Shi'ite areas, and the areas south of Baghdad" - a reading confirmed by interviews with US commanders in Anbar and Babib provinces, and reflected in information about the inception of the "Awakening of the Tribes" that first began with John Coleman's dispatch of help to a tribal Sheikh in Fallujah.

That is to say, as McCaffrey put it: "The Iraqi people have turned on AQI because it overreached, trying to impose an alien and harsh practice of Islam inconsistent with the more moderate practices of the Sunni minority. The foreign jihadi elements in AQI (with their enormous hatred of what they view as the apostate Shi'ite) have alienated the nationalism of the broader Iraqi population." Or, as a Pentagon official now puts it: "The so-called success of the 'surge' had nothing to do with military victory, this was politics."

Assessing blame
While Keane and McCaffrey's views are listened to with interest among senior military officers, the concerns of current serving commanders are much more immediate. For many among the senior leadership at the Pentagon, for instance, the apparent successful spread of the "Awakening of the Tribes Movement" has been tempered by the realization that the initiative put in place in Fallujah and Ramadi and Babil could have been - and should have been - put into practice five years ago.

Pentagon officials are quick to blame former Iraq czar L Paul Bremer of the US Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) for the failure. "We're reconstituting the Iraqi military, that's all this is" a Pentagon official notes. "A lot of these guys in Babil that we're paying lost their salaries when Bremer disbanded the Republican Guard and broke up the Ba'ath Party. It was a stupid move. So this is a make-good."

Another Pentagon official remembers the opening to Gaood in 2004: "This should have been done then," he says, "and I don't understand why it wasn't. Think of the blood, the enormous loss of life, the lost prestige, the failures." Pentagon officers are also quick to point out that, while Petraeus has taken credit for the shift in strategy in Iraq, the "Awakening of the Tribes Movement" actually began long before he recommended an increase in American troops levels in the country.

In fact, the shift in strategy is more the result of necessity than choice - of decisions made by commanders on the ground who opposed the White House, National Security Council, CPA - and State Department view that all opposition to the Americans must be, ipso facto, evidence of terrorism. "We've not only started to define the real enemy," a senior military office says, "but we've stopped shooting people. We've figured out that protecting Iraq is Iraq's job, not ours."

All of which raises the question of whether the United States should have invaded Iraq in the first place, an issue that is becoming more pertinent to military officers who view the American adventure in Iraq as a political and military failure.

Some of these officers have become outspoken in their condemnation of the Bush administration: which is a rarity, even among retired senior officers. "There's a reason for that," former four-star General Volney Warner says, "and the reason is that every former and currently serving military officer's fear is that we in the military will be left holding the bag, that we will be blamed for this debacle. And that's the last thing that we want to have happen. We didn't make the decision to go into Iraq. We were ordered to do it. So the blame should go where it belongs."

Retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez's public condemnation of the Bush administration's handling of the war last October is only one, if the most public, evidence of these fears. "From a catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan to the administration's latest 'surge' strategy, this administration has failed to employ and synchronize its political, economic and military power," Sanchez told a group of military reporters in Washington. "The latest 'revised strategy' is a desperate attempt by an administration that has not accepted the political and economic realities of this war and they have definitely not communicated that reality to the American people."

Sanchez's comments were welcomed in military circles, even as some retired officers bemoaned the fact that it was Sanchez (who oversaw the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal) who chose to speak out about the administration's Iraq policies. "He's right in what he says about the war, there's no question about that," retired Army Brigadier General John Johns says, "but there's really not much sympathy for him among the services. The order came down from the White House to Rumsfeld to him about torture and he should have said 'no', and he didn't." Volney Warner agrees: "Right message, wrong messenger."

For retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, a close friend of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the problems that have plagued the American effort in Iraq are more than simply political. "There's no way to get a unified approach when you are so polarized," he says. "In many ways, I think the problem is systemic. We need a cleaner command structure and we just don't have it."

Volney Warner agrees. "In Vietnam we had a Robert Komer, a guy at the White House who was just a dictator and he coordinated the war between State and Defense - and he reported to the president. We don't have that kind of guy now, so it's not clear who's in charge or what the overall strategy is."

In military parlance, Inman and Warner's call for a "cleaner command structure" is reflected by complaints of senior military officers that "the interagency process is broken" - code for the view among the staff of the Joint Chiefs that no one is listening to their views. "The JCS has been thumping the table for two years over how we can't sustain our troops levels in Iraq and no one has been listening," a Defense Department official says. "No one is talking to anyone. During Rumsfeld's term you would have thought that we were at war with Condi Rice, not al-Qaeda."

One of the key officers that Defense Secretary Robert Gates picked to begin to try to solve all of this was Navy Admiral Michael Mullen, the new JCS chairman. Mullen, a seemingly soft-spoken Annapolis and Harvard Business School graduate, speaks carefully and slowly of America's "persistent engagement" with "radical jihadis" and in lofty and often indecipherable terms about "global partnership", "globalization", "global interconnectedness" and "strategic imperatives".

But Mullen's broad generalizations, navy officers who know him say, mask his steely intent to become one of the most influential JCS chairman in the institution's history. Even before taking over as chairman, Mullen was asking aides to provide him papers on his powers under the Goldwater-Nichols Act (which details the responsibilities of the JCS and JCS chairman), and querying friends and reporters alike on how he could become "a JCS George Marshall".

The simple answer is that he can't - he's not in the operational



chain of command, which runs from the president to the secretary of defense to the unified commanders - and right around him. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mullen is the primary military advisor to the president and the highest ranking uniformed officer in the US military services.

But, ironically, as far as giving orders that affect the day-to-day combat operations of troops in the field, Mullen is out of it. Mullen's colleagues say that doesn't matter to him - he's dedicated, hard working and will speak his mind. "He wants to shake things up, to have an impact," a Defense Department official says. "He's not afraid to say what he thinks." The question remains - is what Michael Mullen thinks right?

The only vote that counts
Mullen is particularly passionate when it comes to three topics - the state of the military, the care of combat veterans and civilian-military relations. Mullen spoke passionately about the state of the military during his first public address, at a Washington gathering just weeks after being sworn in as JCS chairman. "The troops and their families all sacrifice much to support the pace of operations, but their resilience does have limits, and we need to be mindful of that," he said.

"Are the ground forces broken? Absolutely not. Are they breakable? They are. And I will do everything I can to prevent them from breaking." Mullen went on to say that his primary concern would be with reducing individual combat units deployment times in Iraq. Mullen is also passionate about the increasingly obvious impact the Iraq war has had on individual soldiers. When asked by prominent Vietnam veteran activist Bobby Muller what he would do to resolve the psychological problems being suffered by Iraq war veterans who have served prolonged periods in combat, he issued an unusually personal promise.

"I am old enough to have been in Vietnam and remember what we did and didn't do then," he said, "and we have worked hard to identify the specifics of this right now. I still think there is a great deal we don't know. We have got to continue to address that, and it is a priority for me ... you have my personal pledge."

The pledge is important in the military, whose hospitals are filling up with soldiers whose time in Iraq has gone well beyond what they were told was expected, and promised. Mullen knows the problem the constant strain of combat, particularly in a war of uncertain legitimacy, causes and, his aides say, he ought to know: it gutted a generation of veterans with whom he served.

Mullen's concern about civilian-military relations, however, trumps any of the other issues he faces. The civilian-military divide remains deep and Bush's September drawdown of combat troops deployed in Iraq, by some 30,000, has done little to heal it. Mullen's answer to the question of whether the military would obey civilian orders reflected not only the divisions over whether the Bush administration would order an attack on Iran (a subject of keen interest at the time and of continuing, but lesser, interest now), but also divisions over whether the military should have been more outspoken in objecting to the administration's decision to prosecute the Iraq war in the first place.

"I believe that men and women who serve who disagree with our civilian leaders on a policy, whatever it might be, that their statement for the record, if they are unable to stay or if they get to a point where they disagree so strongly, that their statement for the record is that they vote with their feet and leave, and they should," Mullen said. "And I feel very strongly about both aspects of that and would leave it exactly at that."

But it's hard to "leave it exactly at that". For while Mullen's comments on the treatment of combat veterans was deeply felt, his views on the state of the US Army and on how and when officers should obey orders has raised uncomfortable questions. Large numbers of retired senior officers, for instance, strongly disagree with Mullen's comment that "America's ground forces are not broken".

A group of retired officers has been saying exactly the opposite, in public, for years: retired Brigadier General John Johns, retired air force Colonel Dick Klass, and retired Lieutenant General Robert Gard, who once served as Robert McNamara's military assistant, have been outspoken in their criticism of the Bush administration's abuse of the military's trust - and the enormous pressures placed on the army by the administration's multiple Iraq deployments.

"If the army isn't broken, I don't know what is," Gard says. Mullen's comments on the duty of military officers to obey the orders of the civilians authorities, on the other hand, seemed innocuous and nearly predictable: they are repeated, almost verbatim, by any man or woman who serves in the US military. But they have taken on a special poignancy since the beginnings of the Iraq insurgency, which began within weeks of the fall of Baghdad, in April of 2003.

Ironically, as senior military officers now say, in the months and years that have followed the fall of Baghdad, many of the best men and women in uniform have actually followed Mullen's advice - rather than saluting and saying "yes sir", they have turned their backs on their senior commanders and walked away, a repudiation of trust in the nation's leadership that is nearly unparalleled in American military history.

American military officers in key combat commands (the captains, majors, lieutenant colonels and colonels who are actually responsible for carrying out the orders of their superiors) are leaving the services in record numbers. "The Marine Corps has just ceased to exist," a former marine commander says. "They have been gutted by the insurgency. They are losing their cadre of officers, their majors and captains. They are coming home and they are dedicated and these are fine young men. And Yale and Harvard are offering them positions and the marines are saying, 'Well, we can send you to do recruiting in Minot, North Dakota.' I don't understand that. They are doing nothing to retain them. And the army is just on the ropes - the tours are being extended and then reextended. And they say the recruiting numbers are not down, but the truth is they are lowering the bar. They are letting people in now that they would never have allowed in five years ago. This is a disaster. The army is over-extended and the Marines Corps has just been eviscerated. Iraq has been a catastrophe for the American military."

Former Marine Corps commandant Joe Hoar agrees: "I think there is little doubt that we have a crisis. It is indisputable that there is a direct tie between officer retention rates and the trust that the officers have in their most senior commanders and in the leadership of the country. When you can't answer the most fundamental question - "why are we fighting?" - people lose faith in their leaders. It's just that simple."

More specifically, and in the view of a large number of military professionals, the reason fewer and fewer field grade officers are agreeing to stay with their chosen profession has been a loss of faith in the general officer corps, an officer corps that has consistently failed to stand up to civilian leaders and who have allowed themselves (in the words of one officer) to be "stabbed in the back by the likes of Rumsfeld, [former under secretary of defense for policy Douglas] Feith and [former deputy defense secretary Paul] Wolfowitz".

This lack of faith in the nation's most senior commanders by those who actually have to give the orders that send soldiers to their deaths has created what military professor Don Snider has identified as a "trust gap". It is this "trust gap", and not the Iraqi insurgency, that is killing the American military. This may well be the final judgment: a large and increasing number of field grade officers have come to believe that the wounds suffered by the army and marines have been inflicted by a senior military leadership that simply did not have the courage to stand up to civilian policymakers who were insisting that they order 19-year-old Americans into a war that should not have been fought.

Seen in this light, the question of whether the "surge" is working seems unimportant for many American military officers: for even if it is working in Iraq (and that is still a very big if) it is clearly not working in the US military. In fact, the time for victory may long be past, as thousands of the nation's soldiers have simply lost faith in their commanders and in their government.

In a time when the rest of the nation is consumed with November's vote, America's soldiers are already voting with their feet. They are doing what Michael Mullen says they must do if they have lost faith in their country. They are leaving.

Ellie