A Warrior's Farewell:
General Zinni's Retirement Remarks

On 12 July 2000 one of the nation's most respected warriors, Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Central Command, General Anthony C, Zinni, USMC, bid farewell after a distinguished career spanning 40 years. His remarks were not directed specifically to FAOs, but they are thought provoking nevertheless and we all can learn something from them. Unfortunately, the transcript ends just prior to the General's closing sentences, but enough is available to get the gist of his sentiments. Although a warfighter of the first magnitude, General Zinni was also a skilled diplomat and he earned the trust of every nation's military leadership in the CENTCOM AOR. I had the privilege of meeting him in Pakistan in 1994 when he was in charge of withdrawing UN peacekeeping forces from Somalia. He immediately established a solid working relationship with the Pakistani military and quickly earned their trust and confidence as he developed a plan to safely withdraw their contingent from Mogadishu. Later, as CINCCENT, he established such a close rapport with the Pakistan military that one of GEN Pervais Musharraf's first phone calls after the October coup that overthrew the civilian government was to his friend, Tony, explaining the reasons for his action. - DOS

I joined the Marines in 1961, so it's been 39 years. My retirement date is 1 September, but I plan to step down and go on terminal leave in July.

I'd like to talk about who we were--the military generations who went through the past four decades, from the 1960s up to the new millennium. If you looked at a snapshot taken when I first came into the service, all the generals looked the same--older white males with Anglo-Saxon names and Southern drawls--despite the fact that the troops they led came from lots of different places. Let's just say that the generals didn't speak Philadelphia the way I speak Philadelphia.

But things were changing in the 1960s. Marine Corps officers were still coming in from the service academies and military institutes, but more and more were coming in from Catholic colleges in the Northeast (like I did), from state colleges and universities around the nation, and from other schools with strong NROTC units or other strong military traditions. At the same time, we were seeing people coming up through the enlisted ranks to become officers--not just the old mustangs or limited-duty officers with mid-grade terminal ranks, but quality people we would send to school as an investment in the future of the Corps.

Back then, whatever our various backgrounds, we all came into the service with a code-- something imprinted on each of us by family, school, or church. In my case, nuns and Augustinian priests had drilled one into my head. Those who had come from military schools received the imprint from their officers. One way or another, all of us were programmed to believe that what we were doing was not a job; not even a profession; but a calling.

For me, joining the Marines was the closest thing to becoming a priest. Certainly, I took a vow of poverty when I joined the Corps, although I stopped short of taking a vow of celibacy. Lately, though, it seems as though we have been driven more and more toward a "warrior monk" ethic, and I just wish that we'd start spending as much time on the warrior part as we seem to be spending on the monk part.

Perhaps part of the move toward monkishness is prompted by the realization that the young people today don't seem to be coming into the service with that code imprinted. It's not necessarily their fault, but the code is not there. Until recently, our recruit depots, officer candidate schools, and other institutions responsible for socializing recruits and new officers have operated on the assumption that the code was there, imprinted beforehand. So now we have to regroup.

A lot of things affected my generation over the years. In addition to having good genes and DNA, those who did well also seemed to have come from families that functioned normally, as opposed to the dysfunctional ones seen so often today. We also grew up in school systems that actually taught us something and imprinted us with that code, which helped move us along the path toward being useful citizens. And for most of us, our religious upbringing gave us an acceptance of a Higher Being in one form or another, at the core of our beliefs.

We also were shaped by events. Some were our legacy; some were events we actually lived through. One of the biggest was World War II, which has proved to be both a blessing and a curse to my generation. The blessing was that it preserved our freedoms and our way of life and lifted us out of a severe depression on a wave of prosperity and moved us into a role of world leadership. The curse is that it was the last Good War--with moral clarity, an easily identified and demonized enemy, unprecedented national unity in mobilization and rationing, pride in those who served in uniform shown by blue-star flags hung by the families of those who fought and gold-star flags by the families of those who died, and welcome-home victory parades for those lucky enough to return home from overseas. Every war should be fought like that.

Our family military tradition in America started with my father, who was drafted to fight in World War I--the War to End all Wars--shortly after he arrived here as an immigrant from Italy. He got here and he was drafted. When I looked into it, I found that 12% of America's infantrymen in World War I were Italian immigrants. And they were rewarded for their wartime service to their new homeland. My father loved the Army for the relatively short time he served in it--and along with his discharge papers he received his citizenship papers. He came out of the War as a full-fledged citizen of the United States. Just imagine what that meant to him!

During and after World War II, I learned about war at the knees of my uncles and cousins, who fought at the Battle of the Bulge in Europe and all over the Pacific-on the ground and in the air. A few years later, my older brother was drafted and fought in Korea. Their war stories were remarkable: sometimes gory and horrible, but always positive in the end. It was like winning the Big Game against your arch rival--always clean and always good.

So this was my generation's legacy: World War II was the way you fight a war. And all throughout our four decades of service, this notion kept getting reinforced. Former Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger's famous statement of doctrine is a recipe for re-fighting World War II- -not for fighting the operations other than war (OOTW) that we face today. In fact, if you read the Weinberger Doctrine and adhere to every one of its tenets, you will be able to fight no war other than World War II.

I've been attending all the World War II 50th anniversary and follow-up celebrations in Florida, where I live and work, and sometimes it is unnerving to face the old veterans who look at me and seem to be saying, "How in hell did you screw it up? We had it right and we did it right and we fought and we understood and we did all this...."

It's hard to escape the feeling: God--I've let them down, because the second major event that affected us was the Vietnam War--our nation's longest and least satisfactory. It was my second- lieutenant experience, and I wondered at the time just what in hell our generals--my heroes who fought in World War II--thought they were doing. Those of us who were platoon commanders and company commanders fought hard, but never could understand what our most senior leaders were doing. The tactics didn't make sense and the personnel policies--one-year individual rotations instead of unit rotations in and out of country--were hard to comprehend. In time, we lost faith in our senior leadership.

Today, of course, we are seeing a stream of apologetic books by the policy makers of that era--as though saying mea culpa enough will absolve them of the terrible responsibility they still bear. Beyond all his other shortcomings, I'll remember--as an infantryman--former Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara for one indelible thing: He decided that all services should have a common combat boot. Further, he decreed that to economize there would be no half sizes. So I had to wear size 10 boots instead of 9 1/2, my regular size. My feet are still screwed up to this day, thanks to Robert Strange McNamara. And that just about symbolizes the leadership we had back then.

The third thing that affected my generation was the Cold War--which actually was a 40- year attempt to re-fight World War II, if ever the need arose. Once again, we were energized to engage in global conflict against the evil Red Menace. Problem was that we never could figure just how this particular war would actually start. After playing a bazillion war games at the Naval War College and other places, I still could not come up with a logical or convincing way such a war would kick off. It was just too hard to show why the Soviets would want to conquer a burning, devastated Europe, or how that could possibly benefit the communists in any way. So we would just gloss over the way the miserable war got started, jump into the middle of things, and play on. Deep down inside, I don't think many of us really believed it ever was going to happen.

To be sure, there probably were some armor or armored cavalry folks with not much to do in Vietnam who sought to patrol the Czech border, in the belief that World War III would erupt there. But that's not where my life was focused at the time. The Cold War was ever-present, and it was great for justifying programs, systems, and force structure--but no one seriously believed that it would actually happen. Still, it drove things. It drove the way we thought; it drove the way we organized and equipped; and it drove the way we developed our concepts of fighting.

Then suddenly, at the end of the 1980s, the Berlin Wall came down, the Evil Empire collapsed, and we found ourselves in the post-Cold War period. It would require a major adjustment. I was serving in the European Command when the Wall came down so quickly and unexpectedly--and in turn we drew down too quickly, in the worst possible way. On the way down, we broke a lot of china, in the form of contracts with U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines--and in particular the soldiers. We drew down our Army too far, almost ripping it apart in the process--ten divisions is just too low a force level--I'm here to tell you.

In addition, we have let manning levels sink way too low, not understanding that the post-Cold War would bring more chaos instead of a smooth transition to world peace. Not fully understanding the Cold War force structure we were drawing down--and the kind of structure we would need for the post-Cold War period, we have been drawing down to a mini-version of the Cold War force. Today's high-demand, low-density units are paying the price for those decisions. Let's admit it--we've screwed up again.

The next influential event was Desert Storm, which, as far as I am concerned, was an aberration. It seemed to work out okay for us, but ultimately it may be an aberration, because it may have left the impression that the terrible mess that awaits us abroad--to be dealt with by peacekeeping or humanitarian operations--or coercive diplomacy, for some--can somehow be overcome by good, clean soldiering, just like in World War II.

In reality, though, the only reason Desert Storm worked was because we managed to go up against the only jerk on the planet who actually was stupid enough to confront us symmetrically- -with less of everything, including the moral right to do what he did to Kuwait. In the high- and top-level war colleges we still fight this type of adversary, so we always can win. I rebelled at this notion, thinking there would be nowhere out there so stupid to fight us that way. But then along came Saddam Hussein, and "good soldiering" was vindicated once again. Worse yet, the end of any conflict often brings into professional circles the heartfelt belief that "Now that the war is over, we can get back to real soldiering." So we merrily backtrack in that direction. Scary, isn't it?

Still trying to fight our kind of war--be it World War II or Desert Storm--we ignore the real warfighting requirements of today. We want to fight the Navy-Marine Corps Operational Maneuver from the Sea; we want to fight the Army-Air Force AirLand Battle. We want to find a real adversarial demon--a composite of Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini--so we can drive on to his capital city and crush him there. Unconditional surrender. Then we'll put in place a Marshall Plan, embrace the long-suffering vanquished, and help them regain entry into the community of nations. Everybody wants to do that. As a retiring CinC, I would love to do that somewhere before I step down--just find somebody for me!

But it ain't gonna happen.

Today, I am stuck with the likes of a wiser Saddam Hussein and a still-elusive Osama Bin Laden--just a couple of those charmers out there who will no longer take us on in a symmetric force match-up.

And we're going to be doing things like humanitarian operations, consequence management, peacekeeping, and peace enforcement. Somewhere along the line, we'll have to respond to some kind of environmental disaster. And somewhere else along the line we may get stuck with putting a U.S. battalion in place on the Golan Heights, embedded in a weird, screwed-up chain of command.

And do you know what? We're going to bitch and moan about it. We're going to dust off the Weinberger Doctrine and the Powell Doctrine and throw them in the face of our civilian leadership. But at the same time, there's the President, thinking out loud in a recent meeting and saying, "Why can't we ever drive a stake through the hearts of any of these guys? I look at Kim Jung II; I look at Milosovic; I look at Saddamn Hussein. Ever since the end of World War II, why haven't we been able to find a way to do this?"

The answer, of course, is that you must have the political will--and that means the will of the administration, the Congress, and the American people. All must be united in a desire for action. Instead, however, we try to get results on the cheap. There are congressmen today who want to fund the Iraqi Liberation Act, and let some silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London gin up an expedition. We'll equip a thousand fighters and arm them with $97 million worth of AK-47s and insert them into Iraq. And what will we have? A Bay of Goats, most likely. That's what can happen when we do things on the cheap.

But why can't we muster the necessary political will to do things right? It goes back to cost-benefit analysis, especially in terms of potential casualties. Nobody in his right mind can justify the possible human cost and the uncertain aftermath of strong military action. The bombings at Beirut and the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and the debacle in Mogadishu have affected us in bad ways--making us gun-shy to an extreme degree. But every time I testify at congressional hearings, I try to make the point that there is no way to guarantee 100% force protection while accomplishing the variety of missions we undertake out there. Somewhere, sometime, we are going to lose people again--to terrorist or other actions that take advantage of our own less-than-perfect protective measures.

For example, I have more than 600 security-assistance people working throughout the Central Command's area of responsibility. Some of the detachments are quite small--in twos and threes. They live in hotels and try to keep low profiles. Their mission is to work with host- country military organizations and try to improve them. They travel a lot. They get targeted; they get stalked; they can get hit. If anyone really wants to take them out, they can and they will.

And, you know, we are going to see it happen some day. The only way to stop it from happening is to shut down all our activities overseas, if we want 100% security for all our deployed people. But 100% definitely seems to be what more and more people want these days, as we send our people into operations other than war. These OOTW are our future, as far as I am concerned. But in a sense, it's going to be back to the future, because today's international landscape has some strong similarities to the Caribbean region of the 1920s and 1930s--unstable countries being driven by uncaring dictators to the point of collapse and total failure. We are going to see more crippled states and failed states that look like Somalia and Afghanistan--and are just as dangerous.

And more and more U.S. military men and women are gong to be involved in vague, confusing military actions--heavily overlaid with political humanitarian, and economic considerations. And representing the United States--the Big Guy with the most formidable presence in the area--they will have to deal with each messy situation and pull everything together. We're going to see more and more of that.

My generation has not been well prepared for this future, because we resisted the idea. We even had an earlier Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who said, "Real men don't do OOTW." That just about says it all. Any Army commander worth his salt wanted to take his unit to the National Training Center and any Marine commander would want to go to the Marine Air- Ground Training Center for live-fire maneuver and combined-arms work, rather than stay on their bases and confront a bunch of troops in civilian clothes, throwing water balloons and playing the role of angry overseas mobs. It just goes against the grain to have to train our people that way.

Going beyond these events, what other things have affected my military generation? There have been trends in law a policy making that have had a profound effect. The National Security Act of 1947, for example, set up the most dysfunctional, worst organizational approach to military affairs I could possibly imagine. In a near-perfect example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, it created a situation in which the biggest rival of any U.S. armed service is not a foreign adversary but another one of its sister U.S. services. We teach our ensigns and second lieutenants to recognize that sister service as the enemy. It wants our money; it wants our force structure; it wants our recruits. So we rope ourselves into a system where we fight each other for money, programs, and weapon systems. We try to out-doctrine each other, by putting pedantic little anal apertures to work in doctrine centers, trying to find ways to ace out the other services and become the dominant service in some way. These people come to me and the other CinCs and ask, "What's more important to you--air power or ground power?"

Incredible! Just think about it. My Uncle Guido is a plumber. If I went to him and asked, "What's more important to you--a wrench or a screwdriver?" he'd think I'd lost my marbles.

The real way this stuff gets worked out is not in the doctrine centers but out in the field. The joint commands and the component commanders can figure things out because we're the warfighters. We have to work things out, so we actually do. We could not produce a joint fire- support doctrine out of Washington or the doctrine centers to save our ass. But we can produce one in the Central Command, or in the Pacific Command or European Command or any joint task force we create. They can produce one in a heartbeat--and they have. We can make a JFACC work. We can make a land-component command arrangement work. There will be no more occasions in the Central Command's area of operations where the Marines fight one ground war and the Army fights a different ground war. There will be one ground war and a single land component commander.

But we've been brutalized in the process. We've had to be pushed into cooperating with each other by legislation. And those of us who have seen the light and actually put on joint "purple" uniforms--we've never been welcomed back to our parent services. We have become the Bad Guys. The only thing we are trusted to do is to take your sons and daughters to war and figure out ways to bring them back safely.

Virulent inter-service rivalry still exists--and it's going to kill us if we don't find a better way to do business. Goldwater-Nichols is not the panacea everybody thinks it is. I'm here to tell you that it did not increase the powers of the CinCs--not one bit. A CinC still owns nothing. I own no resources and no assigned forces. All I get is geography and responsibility. And the CinCs have to go up the chain of command through the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

For more than a quarter-century, we have been operating with an All-Volunteer Force--and the American people tend to forget that until the volunteers stop showing up and reenlisting. And that's what is wrong right now. But the troops are not getting out because they're deployed too long and too often. I will bet anyone that the forward-deployed units--the carrier battlegroups, the Marine expeditionary units, the air expeditionary forces and wings--have the highest retention rates.

So what does that say about the high operations tempo and personnel deployment rates? The people who deploy are not the ones getting out. The guy getting out is the guy who's left back home and has to pick up the slack with a workload that's been increased by a factor of eight or ten. We were building an All-Volunteer Force with professionals, not mercenaries. The troops certainly don't mind a better paycheck, but they find it insulting that we seem to think that's all they want. Deep inside, there have been negative reactions to the recent pay raise. They see their benefits continuing to erode. Their families are telling them, "Look at what happens to your medical care when you retire. You can't even pick up a telephone and get through to someone who might see you." And despite all the smoke and mirrors around TriCare and MediCare and other programs--even if they do work--the perceptions are bad. To top things off, the quality of life back at the home base is terrible. We still have too much infrastructure eating up funds that should go toward improving quality of life. But don't count on DoD and the politicians going through another base-closure drill or anything like it.

So this all-volunteer, highly professional force we built--to give quality performance with quality support--has been allowed to erode. That came with the "peace dividend." The All- Volunteer Force has become something else--something less attractive than opportunities on the outside, in many ways. The troops want to be caught up in a calling--but they're not. They are involved in a job.

Over the past 40 years, we also have seen strange things happen with regard to the media. To be sure, there are no more Ernie Pyles out there, but there's nothing inherently wrong with the media, which has the same percentages of good guys and bad guys as other fields. But technology has changed things. The media are on the battlefield; the media are in your headquarters; the media are everywhere.

And the media report everything--good things, warts, and all. And everyone knows that the warts tend to make better stories. As a CinC, I've probably been chewed out by seniors about five times--and four of the five were about something I'd said to the media. At this stage of my life, it doesn't really bother me--because where in hell do I go from here? But if you are a lieutenant or a captain and you see another officer get fried, you react differently. The message is clear: "Avoid the media." And the message hardens into a Code: "They are the enemy. Don't be straight with them." And that is bad.

That is bad because we live in the Information Age. Battlefield reports are going to come back in real time, and they are going to be interpreted--with all sorts of subtle shadings and nuances--by the reporters and their news editors. And the relationship between the military and the media, which should be at its strongest right now, has bottomed out. It has begun to heal a little, but a lot more must be done. We need to rebuild a sense of mutual trust.

My uncles in World War II generally experienced a friendly press--with Willie and Joe cartoons and Ernie Pyle stories--that was part of the war effort. G.I. Joe was lionized and bad news was suppressed--if not by the military then by the media. The relationship generally remained positive through the Korean War, despite its ambiguities. But the relationship soured during and after Vietnam, for a number of reasons--not the least of which was a mounting distrust of government by the media and the American people.

My generation and those who have followed over the past 40 years are still dealing with social issues that swept across the nation in the 1960s and 1970s. The racial and drug problems that peaked during the Vietnam years and persisted well beyond them are largely behind us now- -but they came close to destroying the military from within--something no enemy has ever accomplished on the field of battle. We still wrestle with problems associated with the massive infusion of women into the ranks of the military, seeking a final adjustment that meets the twin requirements of fairness and common sense. A final adjustment on the issue of gays in the military--largely sidestepped up to now--still lies ahead. Today, we are suffering through the agony of watching and waiting for our political masters and the American people to decide what me U.S. military should look like in the future. It is especially agonizing because the political leaders--and the population in general--have very little association with the armed forces. Consequently, they have very little awareness of how we function. For example, they don't understand the Uniform Code of Military Justice--the UCMJ. If you work for IBM and don't show up for work, you might get fired. If you are in the Marines and don't show up, you might get locked up. Further, the military doesn't hire the handicapped in the same percentages as IBM or other corporations--probably for good reason. The military is different but not enough Americans are aware of that.

Over this 40-year period, we have made some significant internal changes .We made a magnificent recovery from the Vietnam War, and my hat goes off to the Army, because I think they led the way in making the needed transformations. In general, we have professionalized our noncommissioned officer corps, but still not enough NCOs are doing the jobs that officers had taken away from them when I first came in. The rank structure is holding them back, despite the fact that their educational attainments--bachelors, masters, and even doctoral degrees--have far outstripped the structure. This needs to be fixed. The one thing that makes us a standout among the world's military services is the quality of our NCOs. Don't ever believe it's the officers; it's the noncommissioned officers.

All of the events that have shaped us over the past 40 years have not been negative. Somewhere in the mid-1980s we began to experience a renaissance in the operational art. We actually started to take war fighting more seriously. Once again, I want to credit the Army for leading the charge, and the other services for following suit, in one way or another. Today, we see highly qualified, professionally competent, operationally sound officers and noncommissioned officers as a result.

There's also been a technological revolution--the Revolution in Military Affairs, which already has gone beyond the point most may think prudent. Whenever I go to my command center in the basement of my Tampa headquarters, I can pull up a common operating picture-- every ship and aircraft (commercial, bad guy, good guy) in real time. With a six-hour delay-- which I could crunch to two hours if I wanted to--I can get a complete ground picture. That's the good news. The bad news is that the White House and the Pentagon will probably be interested in the same picture, and might be tempted to make decisions on their own, without input from the folks actually on the scene. That could be disastrous, as history amply demonstrates. As we close out 40 years of service, those of us who served must ask: "What is our legacy?" My son is a newly commissioned second lieutenant of Marines. What have we left for him to look forward to?

We all know that burgeoning technology will widen his horizons beyond anything we can imagine. It also will present new questions of ethics and morality that we barely have begun to fathom.

But he also must live with an organization that I have had to live with for 40 years. Napoleon could reappear today and recognize my Central Command staff organization: J-1, administration stovepipe; J-2, intelligence stovepipe--you get the idea. This antiquated organization is oblivious to what everyone else in the world is doing: flattening organization structure, with decentralized operation.

At this point, the transcript ends abruptly. Don't worry, sir, we get the message. -- DOS

2000, Foreign Area Officer Association
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