US MILITARY BREAKS RANKS, Part 2: Troops felled by a 'trust gap'

Former Marine Corps commandant Joe Hoar agrees: "I think there is little doubt that we have a crisis. It is indisputable that there is a direct tie between officer retention rates and the trust that the officers have in their most senior commanders and in the leadership of the country. When you can't answer the most fundamental question - "why are we fighting?" - people lose faith in their leaders. It's just that simple."

More specifically, and in the view of a large number of military professionals, the reason fewer and fewer field grade officers are agreeing to stay with their chosen profession has been a loss of faith in the general officer corps, an officer corps that has consistently failed to stand up to civilian leaders and who have allowed themselves (in the words of one officer) to be "stabbed in the back by the likes of Rumsfeld, Feith and Wolfowitz".

This lack of faith in the nation's most senior commanders by those who actually have to give the orders that send soldiers to their deaths has created what military professor Don Snider has identified as a "trust gap". It is this "trust gap", and not the Iraqi insurgency, that is killing the American military. This may well be the final judgment: a large and increasing number of field grade officers have come to believe that the wounds suffered by the army and marines have been inflicted by a senior military leadership that simply did not have the courage to stand up to civilian policymakers who were insisting that they order 19-year-old Americans into a war that should not have been fought.

Seen in this light, the question of whether the "surge" is working seems unimportant for many American military officers: for even if it is working in Iraq (and that is still a very big if) it is clearly not working in the US military. In fact, the time for victory may long be past, as thousands of the nation's soldiers have simply lost faith in their commanders and in their government.

Let me just add that this is a replay of what happened in Vietnam, and is just exactly what various parties have predicted.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JA24Ak01.html