Yesterday Benjamin Runkle posted a short essay on the leadership lessons of George Marshall in War on the Rocks. The essay is worth reading, as is just about anything regarding Marshall, for those interested in military leadership in strategy. What stuck with me, however, was the dissonance of the framing device–the initial meeting between Marshall and his mentor General John J. Pershing in 1917–and both my own experience as an officer and much of the literature that the Army uses to teach leadership.
For those who have not read the story before, Marshall first met Pershing in 1917 when Marshall was the acting chief of staff of the First Division and Pershing was the commander of the American Expeditionary Force. Pershing was under enormous pressure to provide U.S. soldiers as individual replacements to the overstretched allies, and he correctly assessed that the best way to resist such a disastrous and irreversible course of action was to get U.S. units into the fight. His previous inspection of the First Division had not gone well, and following his second, he lit into the division commander, Major General William L. Sibert in front of the assembled division staff officers. As Runkle puts it:
The division showed little for the time it had spent in training, Pershing snapped. They had not made good use of the time, and had not followed instructions from AEF headquarters at Chaumont regarding open warfare formations. Pershing excoriated Sibert, questioning his leadership, his attention to details in training, and his acceptance of such poor professionalism.
Marshall stepped forward and challenged Pershing, even grabbing his arm to prevent him from leaving before Marshall had enumerated to him all the shortcomings in training and logistical support from Pershing’s own headquarters. Rather than crush him, Pershing admired his forthrightness and courage and proceeded to elevate him to positions of greater responsibility and authority throughout the war and beyond.
It is a great story, illustrating the importance of A. having your facts straight, B. speaking the truth to superiors, even–or especially–when they are angry, and C. valuing tough feedback from subordinates. It all worked out brilliantly as Marshall–as close to the indispensable man as it is possible to imagine–rose to be the Army Chief of Staff at exactly the moment when his talents were required to save the free world.
The problem with the story is A Message to Garcia. Written in 1899 by Elbert Hubbard, it briefly refers to Lieutenant Andrew Rowan and his mission, during the Spanish-American War, to carry a message to a Cuban insurrecto leader. It has been a perennial favorite on military reading lists at least since I put on a uniform and, I’m sure, long before then. The author’s apparent intent was to extol the virtues of initiative and determination, with which nobody could quibble. Unfortunately, the essay as written extols Rowan’s failure to ask any questions about the mission and his devotion to completion of the task regardless of the purpose, difficulties, or encompassing situation. In short, it is the opposite of the story of Marshall meeting Pershing. If Major Rowan had been the chief of staff of the First Division, he would simply have turned back to his training schedules, redoubled his efforts, and quite likely driven the men of the division to achieve Pershing’s desires regardless of,
the promised platoon manuals that never arrived and had set back training; the inadequate supplies that left men walking around with gunnysacks on their feet; the inadequate quarters that left troops scattered throughout the countryside, sleeping in barns for a penny a night; the lack of motor transport that forced troops to walk miles to the training grounds.
So which is it? Is our ideal officer the one who accepts the task with its attendant unreasonable expectations and accomplishes it without questioning the purpose or the cost? Or his he the truth-teller who challenges the general in the bubble and confronts him with the very real material challenges that his units face? It is possible, of course, that he is both. Leadership is situational. The man who sends another man to his near-certain death may be a monster or a hero depending on the time and place, but the basic premises of the two stories are diametrically opposed. In one, the subordinate accepts the mission without question and sets out to accomplish it at any cost. In the other, the subordinate challenges the leader’s expectations and insists that the general provide as much as he is demanding of his juniors.
My own experience leads me to believe that A Message to Garcia has had a far greater impact on our current Army than the story of Marshall and Pershing or the near-contemporary story of the young Dwight Eisenhower antagonizing the Chief of Infantry with his advocacy of an independent tank arm. In the mid-1990s I commanded an MLRS battery at Fort Bragg. To reduce costs, the Army decided to arbitrarily cut the number of spare parts units could keep on hand. The initiative stemmed from the Army’s periodic infatuation with commercial best practices untethered from the realities of the military. Just in time logistics was all the rage, and the Army was onboard. Units had radically different spare parts requirements–I commanded a mechanized unit surrounded by light units–and different opportunities for cross-leveling if they were stationed by themselves versus with a number of like units. Predictably, our readiness plummeted as our launchers steadily died. When I addressed the issues with my commander, he assured me that the Army knew what it was doing, and my battery–along with the other batteries–was just failing to execute proper maintenance.
A few years later new generals came along and denounced the completely unworkable spare parts policy. They changed it back to the prior method, and readiness increased. My commander had imitated Lieutenant Rowan–the Army gave him a mission and he was determined to succeed without question. I took the Marshall route and laid out the impediments to and requirements for success. Let us just say it did not enhance my career prospects.
Lest we come down entirely on the side of reasonableness, there is something to be said for unreasonable expectations. Steve Jobs was notorious for imposing ridiculous requirements on his team and refusing to accept less than perfection. There is a good chance you are reading this on an iPhone or an iMac as a result. In war, the requirements may not always be reasonable. Sometimes military leaders must order subordinates to do the seemingly impossible, and sometimes, under the stress of unreasonableness, those determined young leaders succeed. Then we write books about them. Other times they fail, and we mourn their loss or excoriate them for not speaking up in an environment where their voices were not wanted. Either way, war is not fair, and we should not expect every order given to be perfectly informed, carefully considered, and completely reasonable.
We should, however, decide what stories we will use to mold our young officers. Should they grab the general by the arm and force him to listen to their shortfalls, or should they say “yes sir” with a crisp salute and head off into the jungle? It seems only reasonable to pick one or the other.
James W. Vizzard 