Here at the intellectual center of the US Army, two elite officers were deep in debate at lunch on a recent day over who bore more responsibility for mistakes in Iraq -- former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, or the generals who acquiesced to him.
"The secretary of defense is an easy target," argued one of the officers, Major Kareem Montague, 34, a Harvard graduate and a commander in the 3rd Infantry Division that was the first to reach Baghdad in the 2003 invasion.
"It's easy to pick on the political appointee," he said.
"But he's the one that's responsible," retorted Major Michael Zinno, 40, a military planner who worked at the headquarters of the Coalitional Provisional Authority, the former US civilian administration in Iraq.
No, Montague shot back, it was more complicated: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the top commanders were part of the decision to send in a small invasion force and not enough troops for the occupation. Only General Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff who was sidelined after he told Congress that it would take several hundred thousand troops in Iraq, spoke up in public.
"You didn't hear any of them at the time, other than General Shinseki, screaming, saying that this was untenable," Montague said.
As the war grinds through its fifth year, Fort Leavenworth has become a front line in the military's tension and soul-searching over Iraq. Here on the bluffs above the Missouri River, once a frontier outpost that was a starting point for the Oregon Trail, rising young officers are on a different journey -- an outspoken re-examination of their role in Iraq.
SECOND-GUESSING
Discussions between a New York Times reporter and dozens of young majors in five Leavenworth classrooms over two days -- all unusual for their frankness in an Army that has traditionally presented a facade of solidarity to the outside world -- showed a divide in opinion. Officers were split over whether Rumsfeld, the military leaders or both deserved blame for what they said were the major errors in the war: Sending in a small invasion force and failing to plan properly for the occupation.
But the consensus was that not even after Vietnam was the Army's internal criticism as harsh or the second-guessing so painful, and that airing the arguments on the record, as sanctioned by Leavenworth's senior commanders, was part of a concerted effort to force change.
"You spend your whole career worrying about the safety of soldiers -- let's do the training right so no one gets injured, let's make sure no one gets killed, and then you deploy and you're attending memorial services for 19-year-olds," said Major Niave Knell, 37, who worked in Baghdad to set up an Iraqi highway patrol. "And you have to think about what you did."
On one level, second-guessing is institutionalized at Leavenworth, home to the Combined Arms Center, a research center that includes the Command and General Staff College for midcareer officers, the School of Advanced Military Studies for the most elite and the Center for Army Lessons Learned, which collects and disseminates battlefield data.
At Leavenworth, officers study Napoleon's battle plans and Lieutenant William Calley's mistakes in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Last year General David Petraeus, now the top US commander in Iraq, wrote the Army and Marine Corps' new Counterinsurgency Field Manual there. The goal at Leavenworth is to adapt the Army to the changing battlefield without repeating the mistakes of the past.
EMOTIONAL ISSUE
But senior officers say that much of the professional second-guessing has become an emotional exercise for young officers.
"Many of them have been affected by people they know who died over there," said Major General William Caldwell, the Leavenworth commander and the former top spokesman for the US military in Iraq.
Unlike the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the conflicts in the Balkans and even Somalia, Caldwell said, "we just never experienced the loss of life like we have here. And when that happens, it becomes very personal. You want to believe that there's no question your cause is just and that it has the potential to succeed."
Just on Friday, retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the former top commander in Iraq, criticized the administration's handling of the war as "incompetent" and "catastrophically flawed."
Much of the debate at Leavenworth has centered on a scathing article, "A Failure in Generalship," written last May for Armed Forces Journal by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, an Iraq veteran and deputy commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment who holds a master's degree in political science from the University of Chicago.
"If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results," Yingling wrote.
The article has been required class reading at Leavenworth, where young officers debate whether Yingling was right to question senior commanders who sent junior officers into battle with so few troops.
"Where I was standing on the street corner, at the 14th of July Bridge, yeah, another brigade there would have been great," said Major Jeffrey Powell, 37, a company commander who was referring to the bridge in Baghdad he helped secure early in the war.
Powell, who was speaking in a class at the School for Advanced Military Studies, has read many of the Iraq books describing the private disagreements over troop levels between Rumsfeld and the top commanders, who worried that the numbers were too low but went along in the end.
"Sure, I'm a human being, I question the decision-making process," Powell said.
Nonetheless, he said, "we don't get to sit on the top of the turrets of our tanks and complain that nobody planned for this. Our job is to fix it."
DRAWING A LINE
Discussions nonetheless focused on where young officers might draw a "red line," the point at which they would defy a command from the civilians -- the president and the secretary of defense -- who lead the military.
"We have an obligation that if our civilian leaders give us an order, unless it is illegal, immoral or unethical, then we're supposed to execute it, and to not do so would be considered insubordinate," said Major Timothy Jacobsen, another student. "How do you define what is truly illegal, immoral or unethical? At what point do you cross that threshold where this is no longer right, I need to raise my hand or resign or go to the media?"
Caldwell, who was the top military aide from 2002 to 2004 to then deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war, would not talk about the meetings he had with Wolfowitz about the battle plans at the time.
"We did have those discussions, and he would engage me on different things, but I'd feel very uncomfortable talking," Caldwell said.
Colonel Gregory Fontenot, a Leavenworth instructor, said it was typical of young officers to feel that the senior commanders had not spoken up for their interests, and that he had felt the same way when he was their age. But Fontenot, who commanded a battalion in the Persian Gulf War and a brigade in Bosnia and has since retired, said he questioned whether Americans really wanted a four-star general to stand up publicly and say no to the president in a nation where civilians control the armed forces.
For the sake of argument, a question from the reporter was posed: If enough four-star generals had done that, would it have stopped the war?
"Yeah, we'd call it a coup d'etat," Fontenot said. "Do you want to have a coup d'etat? You kind of have to decide what you want. Do you like the Constitution, or are you so upset about the Iraq war that you're willing to dismiss the Constitution in just this one instance and hopefully things will be OK? I don't think so."
TOO LATE
Some of the young officers said they were unimpressed by retired officers who spoke up against Rumsfeld in April last year.
The retired generals did not have much to lose, they argued, and their words would have mattered more had they been on active duty.
"Why didn't you do that while you were still in uniform?" asked Major James Hardaway, 36.
Yet, Hardaway said, Shinseki had shown there was a great cost, at least under Rumsfeld.
"Evidence shows that when you do that in uniform, bad things can happen," he said. "So, it's sort of a dichotomy of, should I do the right thing, even if I get punished?"
Another major said that young officers were engaged in their own revisionist history, and that many had believed the war could be won with Rumsfeld's initial invasion force of about 170,000.
"Everybody now claims, oh, I knew we were going to be there for five years and it was going to take 400,000 people," said Major Patrick Proctor, 36.
"Nobody wants to be the guy who said, `Yeah, I thought we could do it.' But a lot of us did," he said.
One question that silenced many of the officers was a simple one: Should the war have been fought?
"I honestly don't know how I feel about that," Powell said in a telephone conversation last week after the discussions at Leavenworth.
"That's a big, open question," Caldwell said after a long pause.
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