This New York Times article gives a much needed glimpse into the internal conversations going on at Ft. Leavenworth:
“home to the Combined Arms Center, a sprawling Army research center that includes the Command and General Staff College for midcareer officers, the School of Advanced Military Studies for the most elite and the Center for Army Lessons Learned, which collects and disseminates battlefield data.”
It’s far too short of an article (I’d loved to have seen a New Yorker-length treatment of the matter) and I don’t doubt for a minute that availability of the officers was carefully managed. But even with those limitations, it’s a good read. Take, for example:
[H]e questioned whether Americans really wanted a four-star general to stand up publicly and say no to the president in a nation where civilians control the armed forces.
For the sake of argument, a question from the reporter was posed: If enough four-star generals had done that, would it have stopped the war?
“Yeah, we’d call it a coup d’etat,†Colonel Fontenot said. “Do you want to have a coup d’etat? You kind of have to decide what you want. Do you like the Constitution, or are you so upset about the Iraq war that you’re willing to dismiss the Constitution in just this one instance and hopefully things will be O.K.? I don’t think so.â€