Martin Dempsey’s World Is Falling Apart

Politico ^ | 9/26/2015 | James Kitfield

[Elderberry]

BERLIN—As his convoy sliced lights flashing through the busy streets of Berlin on a recent morning, Gen. Martin Dempsey could see a good part of his own career. He could see through the tinted windows of his limousine the bombed out ruins of the World War II-era Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, and the Brandenburg Gate where the Iron Curtain once placed Germany on the front lines of the Cold War—and where as a young Army lieutenant Dempsey helped guard the border against massed Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces. Soon the convoy would arrive at the German Ministry of Defense where Dempsey would be awarded the Knight Commander’s Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany, and lay a wreath to the war dead of Germany’s modern army next to the same building where Adolf Hitler and his Nazi minions once plotted the conquest of Europe.

At the end of a long and storied career in uniform Dempsey was in a reflective mood, and the one reality he could not escape was just how much war and conflict there still was to be fought, and how many memorials to the fallen had yet to be erected. This was his final trip as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the last act of a Zelig-like military career that began over here more than 40 years earlier in a small German village, then proceeded to his personal involvement in every major war since, starting with the famed “left hook” in the first Iraq War and then command of the 1st Armored Division in the second. Forty long years of effort—and yet now at the end Dempsey is blunt in admitting that some things are actually worse than when he started his unusually long four-year tenure as a member of the Joint Chiefs.

By Dempsey’s reckoning today’s complex array of threats presents NATO with its greatest challenge since the end of the Cold War, and a refugee exodus from war zones the like of which hasn’t been seen in Europe since World War II. “As recently as four years ago, most of the strategic white papers and plans within the alliance began with some version of the following sentence: `Europe is experiencing an age of prosperity and peace unlike any in its history,’” Dempsey said in an interview on his aircraft. “My challenge to my NATO colleagues now is, ‘If you can still write that sentence with candor and a straight face, please give me a call. Because I just don’t see it that way.” The crises are mounting perilously even as Dempsey formally leaves office on Friday. During his trip to Berlin in mid-September, German leaders opened the country’s doors to a tsunami of refugees flooding into Europe from war-ravaged countries Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, only to reverse itself days later by shutting its borders, throwing the European response to the refugee crisis into disarray. In Istanbul, Dempsey and other NATO military chiefs would hear impassioned entreaties from Turkish officials struggling to cope with the instability and Islamic State terrorism along their southern border with Syria and Iraq—even as back in Washington U.S. military officials were admitting the utter failure of the meager training program for free Syrian rebels.

Then, during his final stop in Estonia, Dempsey would visit a NATO ally that lives in the shadow of a revanchist Russia, its leaders ever fearful they might be next after Moscow has finished dismembering Georgia, forcefully annexing Crimea and redrawing the borders of eastern Ukraine by force. Meanwhile, the entire alliance anxiously awaits a U.S. decision on whether to remove all NATO troops from Afghanistan next year as planned, keeping faith with war-weary publics on both sides of the Atlantic, but risking creating yet another wellspring of instability, mass migration and terrorism. To an outside observer the NATO alliance that revealed itself during Dempsey’s last trip looked rattled at best—and weak-willed at worst.

Dempsey’s last official trip was not supposed to go this way. He had participated in the historic victories in the Cold War and 1991’s Persian Gulf War, successes that left the United States that most exceptional of all nations, the lone superpower in a unipolar world. Rapid NATO expansion in the 1990s to secure those gains had very nearly realized the dream of a Europe “whole and free.” More recently, during the longest period of war in U.S. history, Dempsey was the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs to actually come of age as a senior officer on the battlefields of that conflict.

And yet now, coming out of those wars, Dempsey sees yet more escalating crises while Washington and other Western capitals slash defense budgets, still vainly searching for a “peace dividend” when there is little real peace to be leveraged. “The elephant in the room among NATO military leaders is declining resources, and increasing commitments,” Dempsey says. His own struggles to break through the political dysfunction in Washington have been well documented. The Army general with a master’s in literature was ultimately unable to find the words to convey a simple truth to Washington politicians: The continued subtraction of seemingly abstract numbers in a budget document would one day translate into blood spilt and American lives unnecessarily lost on a future battlefield.

During his long career, Martin Dempsey’s lack of ego among four-star officers where that baggage often weighs heavily has been a defining characteristic of the man, as is his penchant for wearing an Irish-American heritage on his sleeve, and raising a fine tenor voice in song at the drop of a hint.

Indeed, the young Martin Dempsey never for a moment saw himself here. He came out of Catholic grammar and high school in Goshen, New York, followed by four years at the U.S. Military Academy. But he had never really wanted to go to West Point, let alone make a career in the U.S. Army. The application to the U.S. Military Academy had been the idea of his high school track coach, and when the surprise acceptance letter arrived at their home his mother had burst into tears. That’s when the young Marty Dempsey first realized his life was taking an unexpected turn: Oh my God, he thought at the time, I’m going to West Point!

The Cold War Army he joined in 1974 was trying hard to forget the bitter memories of counterinsurgency warfare in Vietnam, and single-mindedly focused on the monolithic threat of the Soviet Army, with its masses of armored tank divisions. The U.S. military’s answer to the threat, developed over two decades, was a smaller but more agile force that honed its synchronized air and ground forces at high-tech training centers, and embraced an “Air-Land Battle” doctrine or rapid maneuver. They became the undisputed masters of high-intensity maneuver warfare. Like many Army officers, Dempsey spent much of his career in Germany studying and training in the Fulda Gap, a natural funnel of flat plains bounded by mountains where it was anticipated the Soviets would launch World War III with an armored invasion of Western Europe. And then in 1990 the Soviet Union collapsed without a shot being fired, and Dempsey and other officers of his generation recognized the wisdom of a strategy of patient “deterrence” and “containment.”

[Ax]

It is my most sincere hope that, should the situation arise, a new generation of Minutemen will arise to face the challenge. We’ve done pretty well so far.