Casey approval to chief faces uphill battle - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Casey approval to chief faces uphill battle

As key senators question the nomination of Gen. George Casey to be the next Army chief of staff, officers also are voicing their concern that if the politicians confirm Casey, they would not be holding him accountable for U.S. failures in Iraq, where he has been the senior coalition military commander for the past 30 months.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on Jan. 23 told Army Times that Casey’s approach of limiting U.S. troop numbers in the war zone “was a failed policy in Iraq that he continued to support and testified before Congress that it was going to be successful. That raises serious concerns.”

McCain’s comments repeated those he made two days earlier on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

He said he might oppose Casey and might not, depending on Casey’s answers during his scheduled Feb. 1 confirmation hearing. Other senators have expressed similar misgivings, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who told Army Times he is not certain Casey is the best person for the job.

“It is nothing personal,” he said. “It’s a question of whether promoting him helps implementing the new strategy in Iraq and what kind of signal it sends.”

Asked if he was leaning for or against Casey’s nomination, Graham said he had not decided.

“The jury is out with regard to that,” he said.

Other legislators, including Sen. John Warner, R-Va., and Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., have voiced support for Casey but indicated the confirmation hearing could sway their positions.

Concerns about Casey’s performance as commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq are finding an echo in the officer corps.

A retired senior Army leader said that field-grade officers had been asking him, “Why are we rewarding somebody who has failed?”

“Why isn’t he being held to the same standards that everyone else is held to in time of war?” the retired senior officer questioned. “Why is he being rewarded when he has failed to perform?”

“What I’m hearing from peers and subordinates, and even some seniors, is that there’s an issue of accountability,” said a colonel who spent more than a year in Iraq during Casey’s time in charge.

In particular, the colonel identified what he said was Casey’s reluctance to increase the size of U.S. forces in Iraq — except for a couple of temporary spikes — even though his subordinates were pleading for more troops.

“He stated that if he needed more troops he’d ask,” the colonel said. “Field commanders have been asking for quite some time for more forces ... The question [for Casey] is: Why not listen to your commanders in the field? What has he seen from his level that the commanders in the field aren’t seeing when they’re asking for more resources?”

Casey’s staff did not respond to requests by Army Times for a response.

An active-duty Army general said it is “fair to say” that Casey becoming chief would leave battalion and brigade commanders, as well as some other generals, “a bit disappointed.”

“There’s a simple little word called ‘accountability,’ and I think that’s the word you’re going to see popping up out of Sen. McCain and Lindsey Graham and others,” the general said.

Another active-duty Army general said that it was “a legitimate question” to ask whether making Casey chief would be consistent with the military concept of accountability.

“For better or for worse, George Casey is the guy that’s been in charge, and it may be unfair, it may be fair, but when in charge, you’re the one that’s ultimately responsible.”

However, he said, “there’s been a growing cry for accountability on the Hill and in the public, but I haven’t heard it from inside the Army.”

Casey’s defenders portray him as a leader who did the best he could under very trying circumstances that were not of his making.

“Casey’s been put into a very, very difficult political situation, and not necessarily given the political support that he needed to do the job,” said a U.S. government official familiar with the situation in Iraq.

“There’s a whole load of things that we need to get done in Iraq in order to succeed, but we’ve surrendered control over those to the Iraqi government, and they’re not planning on doing it,” the U.S. government official said. “Casey understands the environment in Iraq,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any indication that he doesn’t get it, but he’s just got a very limited set of levers to work with.”

Kalev Sepp, a retired Special Forces lieutenant colonel who spent three months in Iraq as a member of Casey’s strategy team, said recent criticism of Casey is unfair.

“There’s more at play there,” said Sepp, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “It wasn’t his war alone. He was a loyal subordinate and didn’t say how much he had to account for other influences in his decisions and conduct of the war.”

The key question in evaluating Casey’s performance in Iraq, Sepp said, was: “To what degree was he really autonomous in Iraq, and to what degree was he really doing what he was told to do, particularly by [former Defense] Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld?”

“I always had a sense that Rumsfeld had much more of a direct voice in what was going on in Iraq than Casey ever let on,” Sepp added. “Casey was being a loyal subordinate and did what he could within those strictures to do the best he could inside Iraq.”

In many instances, Casey was not well-served by his subordinate commanders, Sepp said.

“Some of his subordinate commanders were very slow to comprehend the real nature of the war, to take Gen. Casey’s directives to heart and to apply them, and to accept his vision and then communicate it to their subordinates,” Sepp said.

But the colonel who spent a year in Iraq under Casey said the four-star general brought some of these problems on himself by failing to communicate his thoughts clearly, both to his troops and to the American people.

“The American public needs to see the face of who’s leading them, and they haven’t,” the colonel said. “The American public, in a lot of respects, doesn’t know what’s been going on, what is the commander of their sons and daughters thinking?

“The same thing goes for the troops,” he said. “Troops will do a lot as long as they know what’s going on, what they’re doing and why they’re doing it ... It’s good to hear from the boss periodically.”

As to why Casey reportedly was so resistant to requests from subordinates for increased force levels, despite the fact that conducting a counterinsurgency in an urban environment is a very labor-intensive task, the U.S. government official said that compared with the mission that is being handed to Gen. David Petraeus, who the Senate on Jan. 26 confirmed as Casey’s successor, Casey might not have seen “counterinsurgency,” per se, as his mission.

“Petraeus definitely believes that we’re here to do counterinsurgency,” the official said. “I’m not so sure that was the strategic guidance that Casey was given. I think he was given the guidance of ‘stabilize and get out.’ I think those were his marching orders from the White House. It’s only since the midterms that they’ve started talking about it as if it’s a counterinsurgency fight.”

‘The issue of accountability’

Even Casey’s critics acknowledge that he’s an honest, intelligent, hard-working general.

“He’s solid,” said a retired lieutenant general who served during the [current] Bush administration, and who was not critical of Casey. “My experience with him is he’s very low key, very solid, he was very grounded fundamentally in how he did stuff.”

Asked whether at this point in its history the Army might require a chief of staff who was more than “solid,” the three-star explained that there weren’t many options available to Gates and his predecessor, in part because Rumsfeld opted to move several Army generals from one four-star job to another, rather than letting them retire.

“What’s happened to the bench is that it’s aged out,” he said, adding that this has blocked promising two- and three-star generals from ascending the ranks fast enough to be considered for outgoing Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker’s replacement.

Casey’s nomination was also a product of the support he enjoyed from Rumsfeld and Schoomaker, several active and retired generals said.

Schoomaker’s close friendship with Casey dates back to the late 1970s, when they were two of a very small number of officers to successfully pass through the first Delta Force assessment and selection course, according to several sources. Casey opted not to join the elite special operations unit for personal reasons, but he and Schoomaker stayed close throughout their careers, the sources said. Casey’s last posting before Iraq was as Schoomaker’s vice chief of staff.

The retired senior Army leader said some generals in the Pentagon had told him that Casey’s nomination “presents some problems to them,” even if he is confirmed, because the controversy over his performance in Iraq will linger, affecting the Army’s ability to get things done on Capitol Hill.

“He probably will be confirmed,” said the colonel who served under Casey in Iraq. “But if he is confirmed I think the issue of accountability is going to haunt him from that point forward.”

Staff writer Rick Maze contributed to this report.

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