COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

Col. David Hackworth (Ret.), America's most decorated living soldier, has some things to say about Abu Ghraib.

Like most military officers, he believes it represents a failure of command more than anything else, and blames it on training and readiness failures within the reserve components going back to the 1980s.


The vast majority of our regular soldiers today are likewise well-trained, well-disciplined and have similar values. And they've conducted themselves during the occupation of Iraq in a manner that aptly reflects what America is all about.

But, unfortunately, this is not always the case with many Army Reserve and National Guard units that have been deployed overseas since 9-11. In fact, I've worn out several drums beating the readiness issue during face-to-face meetings with the top brass. As far back as 1989, I warned Secretary of the Army Mike Stone about the generally sad shape of our Reserve and Guard components. But while he listened up, little was done to correct the systemic problems.

Well, unlike Hack, I spent a full eleven months overseas, and I can tell you now that across the board throughout the 3rd ACR area of operations, reserve and guard units acquited themselves just fine. And in many cases, their performance actually exceeded that of the active duty troops. There are reasons for this: Reserve component troops are a little older at every rank level except privates and specialists. And they come to the battlefield with a wealth of civilian experiences beyond their MOS--experiences which are invaluable when your job transcends fire and maneuver and involves, say, an infantry battalion performing open heart surgery on the municipal structure of an entire city.

That said, though, there were certainly readiness and leadership problems in the Guard and Reserves and they've existed ever since I joined in 1992.

At first it was the outright fraud that was taking place on the personnel side of the house. I had soldiers on my battle roster I had not seen for a year as a platoon leader, and whom we did not expect to see. No one knew how to get hold of them.

But the state headquarters still reported them as available for missions.

Units were reporting in that they were at 90-100% strength when in actuality every company had a "ghost platoon" of soldiers assigned to it that for practical purposes did not exist.

Units were screaming to get these guys off the rolls. They took up promotion slots and held back guys who deserved to get promoted.

But dollars for full time guardsmen and reserve jobs depended on units scoring high on the readiness totem pole, and state headquarters people would take months or even years to transfer people off the books.

I once transferred from the Hawaii guard to the Kentucky guard. It literally took a year of nagging. A year. Until the Hawaii people finally released me.

Finally, reporter Dave Moniz at USA Today blew the whistle on the whole rotten corrupt mess, and things are actually lot better now--at least in Florida-- and now I can get guys discharged in a matter of a few weeks. But that didn't come internally from the guard. It took a front page story from USA Today to shame the 52 different National Guard headquarters into straightening itself out.

But there's another side to that equation: the training side. Remember that post facilities and major weapons projects all have built-in lobbies in congress. Congressmen work hard to secure posts and post construction projects and weapons manufacturing because it means jobs in their districts.

But two vital readiness components do NOT have any such lobbies: training, and spare parts. And congress and the Pentagon, as well as the states, have been neglecting Guard training and vehicle readiness for years.

I cannot speak to the era before 1992. I was not commissioned before then and had not been in a TO and E unit. I joined my first infantry company in October of that year, and being young and motivated and crazy, immediately put in for Ranger school--still the premier combat leadership laboratory in the Army.

Although technically you had to be a volunteer to attend the school, all Active Duty infantry officers who had not gone to Ranger school were expected to enroll immediately upon completing the Infantry Officer Basic Course at Fort Benning, Georgia. It was the unwritten law. If a lieutenant decided he didn't want to go to Ranger School, he had to knock on the general's door and personally explain why he had other priorities than to master his chosen profession of arms at Ranger school.

And for officers assigned Active Duty billets, the federal government was paying for it. It was no problem. Our nation's future Active Duty infantry platoon leaders at IOBC got priority on all the available slots.

But I was attending IOBC on US Army Reserve funding. And the USAR would not pay for Ranger school, even for infantry officers. Even for infantry officers assigned to light infantry units.

I asked Hawaii if they would pay for it. Hawaii told me to get the USAR to pay for it. USAR said nothing doing. No money. They don't budget for that. So, that year, no USAR infantry officers out of my IOBC class could attend Ranger School.

State headquarters were in the same boat, almost across the board. Almost nobody was paying for it.

You can't blame Clinton. This was 1992. Bush Senior was still in office.

But in 1993 and 1994 things went from bad to worse.

Having been turned down for Ranger school multiple times by the Hawaii National Guard due to lack of funding, we soon got the word that the state could no longer afford to send its infantry captains to what was at that time the Infantry Officer Advanced Course, which lasted about four months and introduced Captains to battalion and brigade level operations, logistics, and doctrine.

Now, the training was funded for all Active Duty officers of all branches. But the Guard officers were forced to take an infantry course by correspondence, with the exception of a 2-week residency phase, normally served in lieu of Annual Training--a nutty state of affairs still the case today (although the name and curriculum of the school has evolved somewhat over the years.)

The result is that while Guard and Reserve doctrine is the same as that of the Active Duty units, and our officers are supposed to hold to the same standards, we are not trained to the same standards. We don't go to the same officer education system courses, and we don't compete directly against one another.

Lately, we've had many infantry officers come to the unit who didn't even attend the full 4-month long Infantry Officer's Basic Course with their peers from across the components. In the aim of cost cutting, many younger infantry officers had to take even their basic course by correspondence.

And as a result, the Army is losing the chance to observe weak leaders in a school environment and wash them out before they do damage to themselves and to the Army.

When it comes to officer education in the Army, separate but equal is the order of the day. But the two systems aren't equal. If they were equal, Active and Reserve education systems would receive the same per capita levels of funding.

Alas, the funding levels are not even close.

The problem is even more acute in the noncommissioned officer system--courses required for promotion like the Basic NCO course and the Advanced NCO course. Because while reserve component NCOs also have to attend abbreviated courses compared to those available to active duty troops, the Reserve component NCOES system is further hobbled by a chronic underfunding of available slots.

Our sergeants often wait years for an available slot, which are typically funded at about a third of unit requirements.

As a result, our leaders don't get the training they need and our troops deserve. The military education system has failed--not because the schools themselves aren't good. They are. The education system failed because they were not supported.

I don't think you can hang all of what happened at Abu Ghraib directly on the lack of training at the Law of Land Warfare. Officers and Noncommissioned officers are fully capable of being reasoning, moral agents with or without the Army coursework, and we should expect nothing less of ourselves and each other.

But to the extent we do have a problem in unit level leadership in the reserve components, then we can hang it squarely on the accumulated effect of a chronicly neglected, underfunded, bare minimum, 'check-the-block' leader education system, compounded over many years.

Splash, out

Jason