Despite all the hyperbole of generals overstepping their constitutional role, no one has asked how such a blatant mistake by one of the U.S’s top generals, Stanley McChrystal, came to pass.
Irishman Patrick Bury has served on operations in Afghanistan. He is the Trust Medal winner for academic performance at The Royal Military College, Sandhurst and delivered a dissertation on Military – Media Relations for his Masters from King’s College, London. His book ‘Callsign Hades’ will be published in September.
Washington’s bloggers went into overdrive yesterday about the political and military implications of General Stanley McChrystal’s disparaging remarks about certain personnel in the Obama administration. Despite all the hyperbole of generals overstepping their constitutional role, no one has asked how such a blatant mistake by one of the U.S’s top generals came to pass.
General McChrystal is an extremely intelligent and dedicated professional soldier. He is a fellow at both Harvard University and on the U.S’s Council of Foreign Relations. As a former Special Forces officer, he has almost 35 years of experience leading elite soldiers in hostile environments around the world.
Furthermore, he has commanded the Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 – 2008, where he was largely credited with master minding the killing of Al Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, and the subsequent attrition of Al Qaeda’s capabilities in Iraq.
As a 4 star general who has commanded Special Forces, McChrystal has an acute understanding of the political implications of military action from the tactical to the strategic level. Although shielded from the media’s glare through much of his Special Forces career, McChrystal would have an innate understanding of how the media can affect military operations.
Indeed, his background should have made him more media wary than most of his non-special operations peers in the military.
As NATO’s force commander in Afghanistan, General McChrystal also consistently displayed that he understood that communications technologies and the media represented a battle space in which he could potentially lose the war, whatever the military situation on the ground. His interviews represented those of a media savvy general who understood implicitly how the media worked.
Added to this, McChrystal had a team of civilian media experts advising him on the day to day lines to take when dealing with the media.
This is not the kind of man that makes unintentional mistakes – mistakes such as the recent Rolling Stone article – ‘The Runaway General’.
It is, perhaps, the actions of a man who feels unsupported (both politically and logistically) by his political masters and their draw down dates, who is at odds with many of the U.S’s civilian Afghanistan team, who is seeing his operations in Marjah and Kandahar struggle and who is losing the support of many of his own soldiers.
He may also have truly seen the writing on the wall in Afghanistan.
The facts seem to suggest that he did not control their reporters’ access and didn’t check what they were writing down, basic practice for most officers in the military – taught to all media-conscious staff officers during their many command courses.
Nor, it seems – having been given the transcript of the article by Rolling Stone’s editors – did McChrystal attempt to clarify his position, or that of his team, or stop it from being published.
He then issued an apology before the article was even published.
And when it was, he immediately offered his resignation.
No man of McCrystal’s rank, intellect and calibre, and especially of his extensive Special Forces background, fails to understand the political and communications media factors associated with their job.
I wonder did General Stanley McChrystal want his?
Not since Korea in April 1951, with Truman’s dismissal of General MacArthur, has a U.S. president fired such a high ranking military official in the middle of a war.
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