Clark: military leaders didn't "stand up and fight for what they should have."

From an interview at YearlyKos, Clark discuss the need for military leaders to have "the courage to leave."

Interviewer: You know Shinseki said, if I remember correctly, we needed 400,000 troops just to secure the ground.

Clark: Several hundred thousand.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Clark: But the military started with a plan that called for several hundred thousand and got talked out of it. So they didn’t stand up and fight for what they should have. I’ll tell you one thing I learned out of Vietnam as a junior officer. I spent a lot of time, of course I got shot there and then I taught at West Point and then I went to the Command and Staff College in Leavenworth and then I wrote a thesis and so I had plenty of time to really think about war and policy and strategy. And I’d read all the Pentagon paper books and all the stuff written on Vietnam that was published by 1974 and I realized that if you’re in a position of high authority in the armed forces, you have to have deep professional competence and enough courage to stand on that competence. So that, if your advice isn’t taken and you consider that your advice is critical to the success or failure of the mission, you leave. In 1950, Douglas MacArthur, right after the invasion of… across the 38th parallel, Douglas MacArthur met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I forget where, maybe in Hawaii, but he briefed them on his plan for Inchon. This was like, mid-July of 1950, maybe late July, and, um, Omar Bradley was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Lawton Collins was the Army Chief of Staff. They both said no. NO, can’t do that plan. Too risky! I’ll never work. That was the Inchon invasion. MacArthur explained it, asked for their support, and when they continued to refuse, he picked up his hat and his notebook and I guess his pipe, he walked out of the room. He said you’ll approve the plan or you’ll have a new Commander in Chief in the Far East. And he prevailed. I don’t know how he prevailed but he got the plan approved. For one thing, the Navy didn’t fight it. The Navy said, well, that’s feasible. So the Navy went along with it. But MacArthur laid it down. That’s what was required. And he got what he needed. And of course, Inchon was an incredible military action. That’s an example of a commander who had a deep and abiding military professional skill and the character to stand up and defend it. I’m not defending MacArthur. I don’t want to go into historical analysis on MacArthur but at critical times when you’re a senior officer you might get called on to do those kinds of things. And that’s what we should be teaching our senior leadership.

http://securingamerica.com/ccn/node/12921