Win the War, Lose the Battle
How flexing authority can sometimes ripple through history
Every year, dozens of military commanders get fired from their roles.
When this happens, the reason given is always “loss of confidence in their ability to command” or a similar formulation. No real information is disclosed.
I’ve argued over the years that military commands should be required to share the reason why an officer selected for a position of public trust has been removed. Even if it’s no more than a generality indicating performance or misconduct, disclosure is important in these instances.
People have been asking me lately why I’m so passionate about this.
My answer is not about the public interest served by greater transparency. That would be an incidental benefit, but “what the public deserves” is not a hill I’m gonna die on.
My answer is only a little bit about keeping officers interested in the prospect of command. While I believe unexplained firings do turn some people away from it, the intertwining of command and promotion creates a powerful incentive likely to overcome this or that disincentive.
My answer is about the responsible exercise of authority, and how that relates to what is best for military organizations.
Hasten to add here this is not just a military discussion, but given the total stakes nature of military command and war readiness, we can’t be sanguine about pathologies in this arena.
Now, it’s not just that I believe the best organizations are self-limiting, and build mechanisms to keep themselves that way.
And it’s not just that I view military life in an “infinite game” context, where false moves can create future echoes louder than current noises.
It’s that I believe firing commanders for the wrong reasons can have a strategically debiliating impact.
To explain why, I need to discuss a fella by the name of William Kirk.
Gen. William Kirk enlisted in the Air Force in 1951, earned his wings via the aviation cadet program a few years later, and went on to an impeccable career dotted with superlative successes.
As a major flying F-4s, Kirk recorded two MiG kills over Vietnam. He was awarded the Distinguish Flying Cross five times enroute to a 6,000-hour career as one of the service’s premier fighter pilots.
Kirk was a top 1% operator and accomplished leader whose career was defined by tactical acumen. A weapons school graduate with galactic credibility, he was a prototype Cold War fighter pilot; laser focused on perfect readiness and crisp execution.
But Kirk was not an innovator. Not a strategist.
As a 4-star, he saw his duty as answering the call and executing existing plans, not re-thinking those plans or adjusting the methods they contemplated.
Kirk was also not an intellectual. He didn’t go to college. The Air Force was his university, and professional military education was his higher education.
This made him a perfect fit for his era.
But now let’s collide him with an approaching future.
In his last assignment, Kirk commanded United States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE), placing him at the tip of the Cold War spear.
And in that time, he came to supervise Col. John Warden, who commanded Kirk’s flagship F-15 fighter wing at Bitburg, Germany.
Warden and Kirk were from different parts of the jungle.
Warden had also flown in Vietnam, but had a different response.
Rather than double-clicking on tactical employment, he zoomed out, focusing on operational art and theater-level integration.
Spending years absorbing the works of classical war theorists, he wrestled tirelessly with the nature and character of conflict.
Warden was a highly educated officer attracted to complexity and willing to question things.
Prior to Bitburg, he’d researched and published a thesis calling into the question the military’s prevailing doctrines, which he argued gave airpower too subordinate a role and oversimplified the strategic questions commanders were likely to face.
That thesis later became a book which has stood the test of time.
Warden’s capacity to think differently created an interesting situation at Bitburg.
As Wing Commander, he rolled out numerous change initiatives to deepen trust, create empowerement, and decentralize authority.
He openly challenged the thickness of the wing’s bureaucracy and pointed a flamethrower at regulations, vowing to reduce friction for airmen.
His leadership was effective.
The wing performed well under his command, and Warden was credited with pioneering the employment of squadron-sized air superiority formations. This patched a hole in pre-existing plans for dealing with large-scale Soviet aggression.
But Warden’s renegade style unnerved the conservative Kirk.
During a visit to the base, Kirk noticed Warden had removed designated parking spots adjacent to key facilities for high-ranking officers. He queried.
Warden explained. The base had a parking problem, and he couldn’t rationalize airmen circling for a parking space while a senior officer’s reserved spot sat empty. More than that, he saw rank as responsibility, not privilege.
Kirk didn’t like that explanation.
He told Warden to “fix it.”
Warden opted to placate with a half-measure rather than genuinely roll back the change.
But the half-measure didn’t placate.
Kirk sent spies to monitor Warden, and they gave Kirk the impression Warden’s style was substantially misaligned from Kirk’s intent across a broader base of issues.
Basically, the two men were in a clash of style driven by an underlying clash of philosophy and worldview.
So, they sat down and hashed out their differences, right?
Nope. Kirk removed Warden from his command position.
He sent Warden to a staff role at the Pentagon, reassuring him that his career would be fine, and brought in someone with a jib whose cut Kirk preferred.
Kirk was entirely unaccountable for this decision. He wasn’t required to explain it publicly.
Privately, he whispered to others that Warden was better suited to planning than leading. This was a professional kiss of death.
No finding of cause. No investigation. No statement. Just as things remain to this day, a senior officer exercised his individual power to undo an organizational decision to place an officer in a position of public trust.
And there was no discussion or means to question, much less assail, that decision.
Warden’s new role directing an obscure concepts team on the Air Staff started as a form of purgatory, but he parlayed it into more. Indeed, into historical significance.
By the time Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait in 1990, Warden had grown his team into a strategy engine churning out cutting-edge warfighting concepts.
He envisioned new and determinant roles for airpower, and was intent on embedding them in the Air Force’s plans and methods. He and his merry band gained a reputation for brilliant insight.
Then came Desert Storm.
Called upon to develop an option for the approaching campaign, Warden proposed an airpower-centric plan to deal with Iraq’s occupation. It leveraged velocity, stealth, and simultaneity to overwhelm Hussein’s command and control systems and isolate his ground forces, where they could be systematically destroyed.
The Pentagon loved Warden’s plan.
It was sponsored by the joint chiefs and soon adopted by operational commanders.
It became known as “Instant Thunder” and powered a decisive and rapid victory over the world’s fourth largest army.
Warden had ruffled a few political feathers by virtue of being a guy from the Pentagon suggesting how warfighters should do their business.
But no one, not then and never since, has dared challenge that John Warden masterminded America’s victory in the First Gulf War, nor that in doing so he revolutionized military strategy and modernization for generations to come.
After the war came a promotion board.
Most everyone assumed the architect of the Air Force’s glory in Desert Storm and the influential theorist behind its ascendant ideas on operational employment would be promoted to Brigadier General.
They were wrong. Warden was passed over. His career was ended.
Because Kirk had removed him from Wing Command without explaining why.
The absence of an affirmative rationale for Warden’s removal created a vacuum filled by negative presumptions. He received no credit for the command tour.
Few things are universally true in the Air Force’s promotion system, but the fact you cannot become a general officer without successfully commanding a wing is as close to a commandment as we will find.
By the operation of this rule, Warden won the war but lost the battle.
Kirk’s removal of Warden for stylistic reasons starved the USAF’s senior echelon of the most gifted airpower mind it had produced in a generation.
And this happened just as the Cold War ended, ushering in an era of heightened uncertainty where having minds like Warden’s in the mix would be important.
We can’t know what an Air Force with John Warden as a general would have looked like. But we can theorize.
I tend to believe that had he been there, using his position and reputation to influence officers on the framing of conflict, operational art, and the appreciation of history to see around corners, the next couple decades might have worked out differently.
Without Warden’s influence, the Air Force extracted an oversimplified lesson from Desert Storm: that it needed to modernize faster.
The service became fixated on technology at the expense of focus on the many other elements required to build an effective strategy.
The Air Force’s imagination found itself in a contraction cycle when the nation came under attack.
As the post-9/11 period unfolded, the lack of intellectual heft and sophistication atop the service became strategically costly.
Successive chiefs of staff dug the service into a deepening trench of dysfunction.
First, there was too much focus on modernization and too little focus on the wars right in front of them.
Then, there was a violent over-correction to unsustainable over-focus on current wars at the expense of even threadbare readiness, morale, or retention.
Then, there were years of pretending to do the latter while doing the former, which when coupled with a gross internal propaganda effort and backbreaking tempo, fractured the collective psyche of the service. Morale and retention plummeted.
Soon, no one wanted the coolest job in the world anymore. The Air Force ended up 2,500 pilots short and is now clawing its way back, or trying anyway.
What emerges from that pattern of oscillation is the absence of a core identity; a shared set of propositions, clear within a shared mindframe, about what airpower brings to conflict and what limitations it obeys.
This is exactly the sort of strategic clarity Warden could have helped create.
The 15 years from 2001-2016 put the USAF on an institutional precipice. Something important to national defense was allowed to atrophy.
The collective distraction and chaos of the American political environment prevents clarity about this, which is the only reason Americans are not up in arms about the weary state of their air service.
I’m not certain we’d be in the position we are if the USAF had chosen to embrace rather than excommunicate its intellectual class at the height of the Cold War.
Warden was just one of many whose careers stalled while intellectually meek compliance officers with spotless pedigrees sailed to the top.
William Kirk flexed his authority based on personal whimsy.
The Air Force paid a strategic price which hasn’t been fully calculated yet.
One of the great ironies of this story is that Kirk served with and was mentored by the legendary Robin Olds, who lamented throughout the 1970s and 1980s that the service needed to better tolerate the provocations and agitations of its brightest innovators. Of people who are effective with different methods and are not afraid to take risk.
For whatever reason, the influence did not rub off.
Now let’s imagine a world where William Kirk would have had to square up in front of a camera and deliver a statement about why he fired John Warden.
Maybe he would have been comfortable publicly stating “I fired him because we have very different styles and it’s not working out.”
Or maybe he’d have elided into something like “John’s best talents lay in strategy and planning. Now that he’s delivered in command, we’re moving him to where he can make his best contribution.”
Each of these would have opened avenues of inquiry and presented Kirk with uncomfortable questions to answer.
More importantly, he would have likely thought twice before making the decision if he knew he’d have to explain it.
And that is exactly what we should want.
Unwarranted firings can have strategic consequences.
We don’t need to have the whole story or gory details shared every time.
But we need commanders to know they’ll have to explain themselves to a review board and will have to issue a public statement.
We want them to believe their decision will be visible and reviewable.
Only then will they learn to think twice before killing off a career to enforce personal style, whimsy, or worldview.
Usually, the impact will be limited to wrecking the career and often the family of the individual they’ve abused.
But sometimes, the impact can alter the course of the entire organization, and indeed the course of history.
TC is an independent writer, speaker, coach, and consultant on organizational leadership. He holds graduate degrees in law, strategy, and organization science and has three decades of leadership experience in military and commercial environments.
Great piece TC. Enjoying the Stack, keep them coming!