Martin Dempsey’s World Is Falling Apart

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.”

Page 2:

Remarkably, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein chose that moment to swim against the liberalizing tide of history by invading Kuwait in the summer of 1990. As part of the 3rd Armored Division, Dempsey took part in Operation Desert Storm, which in a matter of days in January 1991 expelled the Iraqi Army from Kuwait. As part of a Cavalry unit, Dempsey helped spearhead a “left hook” maneuver that sealed off the path of retreat for vaunted Republican Guard units, which were methodically annihilated in the desert. At the time it was tempting to believe that unprecedented power might end the 20th century scourge of state-on-state aggression.

“There was a moment when the fighting was over when those of us who thought about war, and the future of warfare, kind of realized that we had become so good at that form of high-intensity maneuver that it was almost inconceivable that anyone would try and fight us that way again [on a conventional battlefield], or attempt to match that capability,” Dempsey recalled. “I mean, why would you? So I felt at the time that we had better start thinking about how others might interpret that overwhelming victory, and make adjustments in their own approach to warfighting.”

A decade later, then-Maj. Gen. Dempsey witnessed the realization of those fears, once again in Iraq. He was commanding the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad in April 2004. Just a year earlier the Air-Land Battle doctrine and American style of high-intensity maneuver warfare that proved so devastating in the 1991 Persian Gulf War had found its purest expression in the “shock and awe” campaign of Operation Iraqi Freedom, which toppled the Saddam Hussein regime and captured Baghdad in just three weeks.

The problem for Dempsey and other division commanders was that the swift victory had left U.S. forces as strangers in a strange land, stranded in the murky ground between all-out combat and a shaky peace. Civilian bosses had failed to give them a clear concept of what political outcome constituted success, and they lacked the cultural understanding to reliably discern friend from foe. Nor did the U.S. military have a doctrine to guide them to an exit from what was fast developing into a counter-insurgency quagmire.

Dempsey’s 1st Armored Division and the roughly 35,000 troops under his command were trying to keep a lid on the largely ungoverned megatropolis of Baghdad, with its population of roughly 7 million people, when the pot boiled over in April 2004. Seemingly spontaneous uprisings began to ignite across Iraq, first in the Sunni stronghold of Falluja, west of Baghdad, and then in the southern Shiite cities of Najaf and Karbala. The rapidly escalating violence threatened to spark a country-wide uprising. At the same time, al Qaeda in Iraq terrorist bombings were rattling a shaky coalition that was a mile wide in partner countries and an inch deep in commitment.

“April 2004 in Iraq is when the lightbulb really went off for me,” Dempsey recalled. “Here we were, an Army that prided itself on being on the absolute leading edge of technology, of being able to see first, understand first, and if necessary shoot first; and suddenly we were facing these simultaneous uprisings. … We all had this moment like, ‘Wow, I just didn’t see that coming!’ That suggested that relying too heavily on technology in this era was dangerous. In April 2004 in Iraq, technology was less important than understanding anthropology and sociology and what was on the minds of Iraqis on the street.”

The select group of U.S. division and task force commanders who stared into the abyss in Iraq in 2003-4, and shared that epiphany, would form one of the most influential cliques of officers in modern U.S. history, one that would ultimately shape the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the future of their respective services. Besides Dempsey, other members of that unique class of wartime field commanders that went on to attain four-star status included future Central Command commander and counterinsurgency guru David Petraeus; Afghanistan commander and counterterrorism pioneer Stanley McChrystal; Army Chief Ray Odierno; Central Command commander Gen. James Mattis (Marine Corps); and Southern Command commander Gen. John Kelly (USMC).

Most of them returned to Iraq during the “surge” of George W. Bush’s second term and played influential roles in the holistic counterinsurgency and nation-building campaign that ultimately pulled Iraq back from the brink. None would forget the danger inherent in a military campaign that exceeds national will or is divorced from achievable political ends.

As one of the last of that unique group of officers to retire, Dempsey has been the keeper of those memories and lessons. As his plane took off from Berlin, he noted that the refugee crisis was causing an “awakening” in European political circles. “In that sense the current crisis harkens back to the refugee crisis of 1994, which galvanized the political leadership in Europe to accept that besides treating the symptom of refugees, they also had to address the source of the instability in the Balkans,” he said. “Today’s terrible human suffering represented by millions of refugees—which has the potential to change the politics, demographics and even cultural norms of Europe for a very long time—may convince Europe to become more involved in finding a solution to the Syrian conflict.”

Of course the Balkans wars ended in the political settlement spelled out in the 1995 Dayton Accords, and the uneasy peace it established has required the continued presence of NATO troops more than two decades after it was signed. The primary question posed at the next stop in Dempsey’s final official journey—a meeting of NATO chiefs of defense in Istanbul, Turkey—was whether, after an unsatisfactory decade in Afghanistan, the alliance has the political will and military wherewithal to contemplate a long-term commitment in the Middle East.

***

In Istanbul low-hanging clouds obscured the tops of skyscrapers on the hillsides overlooking the Bosphorus, the slate gray surface of the waterway disappearing into a misty horizon to form a blurry dividing line between Europe and Asia. The haunting cadences of a Muezzin’s call to prayer sounded from a nearby mosque, reminding all within earshot that they were in the only Muslim-majority country in the alliance. Meanwhile, a surprise visit and blunt speech by Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who spoke to the NATO chiefs of defense as they dined on the banks of the Bosphorus, drove home the point that the alliance’s southern border was besieged.

As a result of Syria’s long civil war, Turkey alone had absorbed an estimated 2 million refugees, costing the country roughly $6 billion to house and care for them. Foreign fighters, many of them from Europe, continue to travel to Turkey in order to cross its porous southern border and join the ranks of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) representing an acute terrorist threat on their return to Western homelands. The fighting and instability had also shattered a fragile truce between Turkish military forces and the Kurdish terrorist group the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), based in northern Iraq, with a subsequent increase in Turkish air strikes and PKK terrorist attacks along the southeastern border. News that Russia has been deploying fighter aircraft and other military forces into Syria in recent weeks to bolster the regime of Bashar al-Assad further clouded an already murky conflict, with myriad competing players working at cross-purposes.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.