In Over Their Heads:
Patton, Custer, MacArthur, and the Peter Principle

© Dale Franks, 1993

INTRODUCTION
The Peter Principle was formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter.  It states: "In any hierarchical organization, persons tend to be promoted to their level of incompetence, where they tend to remain."  Simply stated, this means that people who perform competently at lower levels tend to be promoted.  As they are promoted, their jobs tend to become progressively more difficult.  As this difficulty level increases, they are less able to perform the tasks required of them.  At some point they find the demands of their position greater than their personal resources.  In short, they are no longer capable of doing their jobs.  Their superiors notice this, and the person never gets promoted again.

In military affairs, it is important to note that competence does not only relate to professional ability.  Character also plays a vital part in determining a military leader's ability to cope with the demands placed upon him in spheres that are outside the strict level of battlefield competence.  In contrast to business leaders, the military leader has responsibilities that go far beyond competence at command.  The military leader is responsible not only to see that his troops are well trained and capable of carrying out their duties, he must also ensure their physical well-being, housing, medical care, and morale are being taken care of.  Moreover, military leaders are sometimes called upon to take over responsibility for the government of a large civilian population in the aftermath of a conflict.  For these reasons, military leaders must also be concerned with character flaws that may be deleterious to their ability to perform the heavy responsibilities of higher command.

In the case of all three generals discussed here, character flaws eventually betrayed them.  The flaws you will see resided in each one of the subjects discussed here, but did not assert themselves until the generals had reached their levels of incompetence.  Prior to that they were successful--brilliant, in fact.  But at some point, those flaws caused lapses in their good judgment and compromised their ability to command.  It is important to note also that before these character flaws came to the fore, each one of these generals had distinguished themselves by sterling performance.  They were some of the finest battlefield commanders our nation has ever produced.  But, eventually, each of these men reached their level of incompetence.

GENERAL GEORGE SMITH PATTON
George Patton was arguably the finest field general this nation has ever produced.  Certainly he was one of the only Allied generals in World War II for whom the German High Command reserved respect.

Interestingly enough, he was not that well regarded by his own army prior to the war.  He certainly was not well-liked.  Patton was outspoken and blunt.  He possessed strong opinions, and was not afraid of disagreeing with anyone who did not hold the same opinions.  He was also eccentric.  Long before the era of New-Age spiritual thinking, Patton was a firm believer in reincarnation, and believed himself to have been reincarnated as a soldier many times throughout history.    In the 1920s and 1930s these beliefs were regarded with far more skepticism than today.

Patton was also wealthy.  He was well-known to be the richest officer serving in the US Army, and he lived a social life more appropriate to the New York cocktail circuit than dusty army bases.  This caused many of his fellow officers to regard him as a dilettante rather than a serious soldier.

Patton's one claim to fame was that he had once submitted a design for a uniform for tank crewman.  The uniform was made of dark green cloth, and was a rather silly-looking design.  When a picture was distributed that showed him wearing it, his fellow officers began calling him "the Green Hornet."  Many of his fellow officers had the impression that he was strange, and perhaps less than serious in his commitment to the army.

That was a mistaken impression.  He was a forceful advocate for the importance of armored warfare, and was a brilliant commander of armored units.  Patton, along with a small cadre of officers who were equally dedicated to the vision that armor could become the decisive battlefield force, labored in relative obscurity, creating and refining the battlefield tactics that are still used today.  At the time, though, his commitment to the vision of armored warfare was seen as just another one of his many eccentricities.

After the Germans' devastating use of armor in Poland and France, Patton was vindicated.  The tank warfare doctrines over which he had been laboring for twenty years were shown by the Germans to be extraordinarily effective.  Armor came into its own in the US Army.

From the moment he arrived to take command of American armored forces in north Africa, Patton showed extraordinary ability as a field commander.  He began to be regarded as the top field commander in the American army.  Only the British general, Bernard Law Montgomery, rivaled Patton's claim to be the best Allied general.

Patton set out to prove himself even better than the legendary Montgomery.  During the campaign in Sicily, Patton's forces far outstripped Montgomery's advance.  When Montgomery finally made it to Palermo, the main objective of his forces, he was met on the steps of the city hall by the city's mayor, the local archbishop, and George Patton.

But then it all fell apart for Patton.  While visiting a field hospital, he came across a soldier who was suffering from combat fatigue.  Calling the man a coward, Patton slapped him, threatened to shoot him for cowardice, and had to be physically restrained.  Public furor in America was so great that President Roosevelt was forced to fire him.

Patton was not given another field command until after the D-Day invasion of France.  Patton had been begging for a command for over a year.  Finally, his old friend, General Omar Bradley, convinced the Supreme Commander in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, to give Patton Command of the 3rd Army.  Once again, Patton showed unrelieved skill, commanding the 3rd Army for the remainder of the war, ending up as a full general.

Patton's greatest feat of generalship came during this time.  During the Battle of the Bulge, American units of the 101st Airborne Division were trapped by the advancing German army in the small Belgian town of Bastogne.  Patton was ordered to relieve the American forces there.  Patton at the time was already engaged in battle with German forces 200 miles to the south.  In the dead of one of the snowiest and coldest winters in memory, Patton disengaged the Germans, raced two hundred miles over snow-covered roads, and attacked the German army around Bastogne.  He did it in less than two days.  The Germans, their supply lines stretched thin, were unable to hold against the 3rd Army's onslaught.   Patton liberated Bastogne and relieved the 101st Airborne Division.

But Patton could not adapt to being a peacetime garrison commander after the war.  He itched for combat and deeply distrusted the Russians.  Those two feelings were not compatible, especially since his area of responsibility bordered the Russian Occupation Zone.  He constantly exhorted Eisenhower to let him  rearm the German army and attack the Russians.  When the Russians began to get wind of Patton's sentiments, Eisenhower was forced to relieve him.  Patton received a "promotion" to the office of Military Governor of Bavaria.  In that capacity, he commanded no troops, and Eisenhower thought he could cause no trouble.

Eisenhower was wrong.  In his new post, Patton was again unable to accommodate the changed political demands of his post.  He ignored the denazification requirements of his superiors and allowed former Nazis to hold positions in his military government.  He also made unwise public statements, such as equating membership in the Nazi party with being a Republican or Democrat.  Such statements made him unpopular with the administration of President Truman, and with the press.  But, despite the trouble he caused his superiors, he managed to remain in his post until his death in 1946 of injuries sustained in an automobile accident.

While he was a superb field commander, Patton's temperament made him ill-suited to be anything else.  He reached his level of incompetence as a post-war, peacetime general and military governor.  His duties between the wars, and his experience as a wartime commander had taught him how to command the movements of a vast and powerful engine of destruction.  But it left him uninterested in mundane, day-to-day, military administration in a new world filled with political considerations of a type never faced before and which he did not understand.  He ended his life a nostalgic, unhappy man who wished only for one more chance at glory.

GENERAL OF THE ARMY DOUGLAS ARTHUR MACARTHUR
Douglas MacArthur's career is almost Shakespearean in its epic scope and in the conflict which ended it.  Indeed, he did not have just one career, but two.  In both careers, he reached the summit of his profession.

In a sense, MacArthur spent his entire life in the army.  His father, General Arthur MacArthur, was a career officer, and one of young Douglas' earliest childhood memories was of an attack by the Indian chief Geronimo upon one of the forts his father commanded in the American West during the Indian Wars of the 19th century.  It was during his father's career that MacArthur began his association with the country of the Philippines.  His father served there as military governor, and MacArthur fell in love with the country.  He was to return there as often as he was able for the rest of his life.

MacArthur's first career began during the closing years of the 19th century at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he graduated at the top of his class.  By the end of World War I, he was a full colonel, and was already marked for higher command.  (As an interesting historical note, he also had a young major on his staff at that time who was also destined for higher command:  Dwight D. Eisenhower.)  MacArthur was promoted steadily for the next several years, and he eventually became a full general and served as Chief of Staff of the US Army.  After having become the Army's highest ranking officer, he retired in 1936.

As mentioned before, MacArthur spent much time in the Philippines during his career, and it was here to where he retired.
When he returned to Manila, the Philippine government named him Field Marshal of the Philippines.  They gave him a field marshall's baton and a uniform covered with gold braid. His position also made him the commander-in-chief of the Philippine armed forces, such as they were.  MacArthur was happy.  He had a job of sorts, and was living in the island nation he had come to love and where he felt so much at home.

His retirement was not to last.  It ended abruptly--and MacArthur's second career began--on 7 December, 1941.  The Japanese caught the world by surprise by attacking the US fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, as well as launching attacks on the Philippines, and the British colonies in Malaysia.  With the Japanese attack, MacArthur was called back to active duty, his rank of general reactivated.  He was placed in command of all US and Philippine forces.  When MacArthur arrived at the American base to assume command, he chose to wear the uniform for which he became famous.  His simple khaki shirt and pants bore no decoration other than the stars of his rank.  But, instead of a standard US Army service cap, he wore the khaki dress cap from his field marshall's uniform, which was encrusted with gilt laurel leaves on its crown and brim.

President Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to leave the Philippines before they fell to the invading Japanese army, and report to Australia to take command of Allied Forces in the Southern Pacific Theater.  MacArthur was forced to leave with his wife and children in the dead of night aboard a tiny PT boat, and make the treacherous crossing to Australia under the very noses of the Japanese.

Upon arriving in Australia, MacArthur began to set out the "island-hopping" strategy which he used to great effect to defeat the Japanese.  This strategy called for Allied Forces to bypass the most strongly held Japanese bases.  Instead, invasions were launched on smaller, less well-defended bases along the Japanese supply lines.  This cut off the sources of supply to the major Japanese bases, and the allies were able to starve them out, without invading.  This allowed the allies to defeat the Japanese with the smallest possible cost in lives.  It is true that casualty ratios in the  Island-Hopping Campaign were far worse than those of Europe.  It was not unusual for 50% of the allied forces to be killed or wounded during battles with the Japanese.  But in terms of overall numbers, casualties were relatively small.  MacArthur lost fewer men during the entire Island-Hopping Campaign than General Mark Clark lost in the single battle of Anzio and Monte Cassino in Italy.

After Japan's surrender, MacArthur became the military governor of Japan, as well as the Supreme Commander of the Far East Theater.  MacArthur instituted a system in Japan where his very word was law.  He ignored advice from anyone with whom he did not agree, and maintained a position of autonomy and independence which no American military officer had ever exercised before or since.  The Japanese recognized the absolute authority of his position with traditional understatement, calling his headquarters simply Dai Ichi,  which translates as "Number One".

But it should not be inferred that MacArthur's rule, while absolute, was oppressive.  Indeed, his government in Japan was a model of humane administration and efficiency.  His personal involvement in the construction of the new Japanese government is greatly responsible for the strength of that nation today.  MacArthur transformed a sullen, fearful, and defeated militarist society into one of the world's leading democratic and peaceful states.  This was accomplished by an act of personal will, without any but the most cursory oversight of the American government.  MacArthur had truly become an American Caesar, the proconsul of the pax Americana in the Far East.

In a sense, President Truman assented to MacArthur's abrogation of such absolute power by letting him get away with it.  To be fair, though, Truman was absorbed by troubles with the Russians in Greece and Berlin as the Cold War began.  Moreover, the government of Chiang Kai-Shek was  being driven from mainland China to Taiwan as communist forces under Mao Tse-Tung began winning China's civil war.  These events made reigning in the increasingly imperial MacArthur a fairly low item on Truman's list of priorities.  Truman paid for that oversight.  By the time he did try to reign MacArthur in, it was too late.

When the North Koreans attacked South Korea in 1950, the Americans in the Pacific were woefully unprepared and were nearly driven off the Korean Peninsula.  American and South Korean forces were driven back to a small pocket at the southern end of the peninsula, and the North Koreans prepared for a final assault to drive them off completely.  MacArthur instead threw the North Korean army into utter confusion by launching a massive and risky amphibious attack at Inchon, far to the north.  MacArthur's daring invasion there turned the tide, and threatened to cut off the North Korean Army from their own country.  They were forced into wholesale retreat, and MacArthur's forces started pursuing them through North Korea, ever closer to the border of China at the Yalu River.

By this time, the conflict in Korea had become the first test of resolve for the new United Nations.  The UN voted to support South Korea in the conflict, and UN forces from several nations were sent into the country as part of the UN defense force. The addition of UN troops fundamentally changed the nature of MacArthur's role, but he did not seem to realize that fact.  Despite the addition of UN troops, the vast majority of foreign combatants in the south were provided by the United States, so the UN simply made him the commander of all UN forces in the region.  But the addition of a United Nations role changed the very nature of the conflict by inserting into it a political dimension.  As a result, the United States could not act unilaterally in matters related to the conflict, but was now forced to seek international consensus to support its operations.  For example, defeat of the North Koreans was not a UN objective during the war.  The UN's only objective was to preserve the integrity of South Korea.

President Truman understood the complexities of this new dimension.  MacArthur did not.  He saw himself as an American military commander with plenipotentiary power to prosecute the war in whatever way he saw fit, rather than as the commander of a multinational force with the obligation to consider the political position of the United Nations.

Truman became concerned over the possibility of Chinese involvement in the Korean War and asked MacArthur to return to Washington to consult with him.  MacArthur refused, saying he could not leave the theater of operations at such a critical time.  Truman was forced to swallow his pride and go see MacArthur, meeting the general at Wake Island, in the Pacific Ocean.  Truman tried to convince MacArthur of the danger of Chinese involvement by going over the available intelligence information which showed massive troop buildups on the Chinese side of the Yalu River, but MacArthur would have none of it.  He flatly told the president that the Chinese would never enter the war on the side of the North Koreans.

Truman, who feared MacArthur's political clout with the congress, returned home to Washington, humiliated.  On the way home, he told his aides that he desperately hoped MacArthur was correct.   MacArthur returned to Korea, and continued leading his army toward the Chinese border.  In MacArthur's opinion, the war was as good as over.  As he prepared to celebrate Thanksgiving, he stated publicly that he felt sure "the boys will be home by Christmas."

They weren't.  A few days later,  Chinese army "volunteers" poured over the border in huge numbers, overcoming the Americans in attacks of "human waves".  MacArthur was forced to order a retreat into South Korea in order to form a defensive line.  It was a textbook withdrawal.  The Americans made a textbook fighting retreat in horribly cold weather, exacting a huge toll on the Chinese invaders as they withdrew.  There will probably never be an accurate accounting, but tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers are estimated to have died.

MacArthur took the Chinese intervention personally.  He began to make public statements about invading China and overturning the communist government of Mao Tse-Tung.  He made veiled references to using atomic weapons in North Korea, even though only the president could authorize their use.  Truman was furious.  MacArthur's statements were in direct opposition to the policy of his administration and the United Nations.  He gave MacArthur a direct order:  Make no more public statements about the conduct of the war.  MacArthur was incensed by Truman's gag order, and even made comments to his staff that his oath of loyalty was to the constitution, and not to "that temporary occupant of the White House."
For Truman, the final straw came during a visit to MacArthur by Chiang Kai-Shek, who had set up a nationalist Chinese government in Taiwan, on the island of Formosa.  Truman had forbidden MacArthur to allow Chiang to make the visit, but MacArthur ignored him.  At the conclusion of Chiang's visit, MacArthur and Chiang released a joint statement that said Chiang would be reinstalled as the leader of China once the communists were defeated.  Naturally, this joint statement made all the papers in the US.

Truman was livid, and rightly so.  MacArthur's continued disobedience to the president invited a constitutional crisis, and bought into question the military's subordination to civilian control.  Equally importantly, MacArthur's actions violated the policy of the United Nations with regard to both North Korea and China, a policy to which Truman had pledged the support of the United States.

Truman ordered MacArthur relieved of command and recalled to the US.  For MacArthur, this meant his career was over.  Any position except Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would have been a demotion for him, and that position obviously was not open to MacArthur.  He was forced to retire.  Truman paid a political price for cashiering the popular general.  Truman was poorly regarded by most of the members of congress, and they seized upon the opportunity to humiliate him.  MacArthur was requested to address a special Joint Session of Congress, precisely because it was clear that he was out of favor with the administration.  But in the end, it was MacArthur who retired to private life, and Truman who began to exercise direct control over policy on the Korean War.

MacArthur reached his level of incompetence in Korea.  Unlike Patton, MacArthur was far too enthralled by being a military governor and wielding absolute authority.  If, as Lord Acton said, power tends to corrupt, then perhaps it was five years of unquestioned, absolute power that corrupted MacArthur.  He was unable to perform in the complex political atmosphere of a multinational conflict in which the US role was that of an equal partner, rather than a controlling member.  He was unable to subordinate his ego and desire for absolute victory to the political considerations of an international political body for which he had little regard.

The MacArthur of Korea seems to be an almost completely different man than the MacArthur of the Island-Hopping Campaign.  He was always known as a vain and arrogant man, yet in Korea those traits seem hugely magnified.  He willfully ignored quite good intelligence about Chinese intervention, an error that would have been unthinkable to him six years earlier.  Where he was respectful to Roosevelt, he treated Truman with almost unthinking contempt.  He ignored, disobeyed, or flatly refused to carry out orders of the President of the United States.  He contradicted the official foreign policy statements of his government with policy statements of his own.  He paid for these faults with his career.

MacArthur said he owed his allegiance not to some temporary occupant of the White House, but to the Constitution of the United States.  But the Constitution has a name for that temporary occupant of the White House:  Commander-in-Chief.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER
George "Autie" Custer offers a much more simple study of the Peter Principle in action.  He was a far better officer than many of his contemporaries.  But he was entirely self-absorbed and self-promoting, entirely too sure of himself and his abilities while being careless in the execution of his orders.  He was also extremely ambitious.  These can be grievous faults in a military commander, and Autie Custer paid for them.

Custer graduated near the bottom of his West Point class, even though he was highly intelligent.  He was bored by studying, but the more physical attributes of soldiering captivated him completely.  He was undoubtedly brave, and was popular with his classmates for his sense of humor.  He graduated just in time to hold a lieutenant's commission at the beginning of the Civil War.

Custer had a "good war".  He was a competent officer whose stamina and courage under fire were remarkable.  this was especially true at the beginning of the war, when many officers were given high-ranking commissions by their state militias without regard to their qualifications.  In an officer corps populated by rich, young wastrels and older political hacks, his professionalism and ability made him stand out.  His rise during the war was rapid, and by its end, the 25-year old Custer was a brigadier general.  Even in that capacity, he was quite proficient, considering his age.  He was, perhaps, too eager too seek combat, and perhaps too careless in his planning and execution.  But he was a far better general than many of his contemporaries, such as the execrably bad Major General Ambrose Burnside, about whose incompetence entire books have been written.

After the war, however, Custer's career went into permanent twilight.  His rank of brigadier general had been a temporary one, and after the war he reverted to his permanent grade of lieutenant colonel.  Promotions in the post-war army were very slow, and Custer was never promoted again.  He served in a variety of posts for the next several years, ending up as the commander of the 7th Cavalry Regiment in North Dakota.  Once he was given that post, he began to fight two different types of campaign.  The first campaign was against the Indian nation of the Lakota Sioux.  The second--and in Custer's view, far more important---campaign was to be promoted back into the general grades.  Command of the 7th Cavalry gave Custer a command of relative independence and freedom from supervision.  In his mind, it was the perfect platform from which to re-launch his career.

Custer's campaign against the Sioux went fairly well, but that was only to be expected.  Custer was leading a force of well-armed and well-trained soldiers against a poorly armed and disciplined native uprising.  Also, the campaign was not as fairly fought as popular legend has it.  Custer was adept at attacking Indian villages when the warriors were not present, and he had little compunction against killing Indian women and children.  During his campaign, he decimated at least one entire village of non-combatants.  It is distasteful to recount this today, but at the time, such merciless action against the Indians was commonplace.  In Custer's words, the Indians were "a brave people whose time has passed."

In the second campaign, Custer was doing even better.  He had adopted a flamboyant image, dressing himself in white buckskins and refusing to wear the silver oak leaves of his proper rank.  Instead, we wore his brigadier general's rank insignia, and ordered his men to address him as "general".  His shoulder-length blond hair became a trademark, and he was always ready to regale a credulous newspaper reporter with a good yarn about his heroism during the campaign against the Indians.

In 1876, Custer left the Dakotas to engage the plains Indians.  In Montana, he was ordered to await the arrival of a brigade-sized force which he was to join under the command of another officer.  The plan was for this much larger force to engage the Sioux and defeat its warriors.  Instead, Custer ignored his orders and decided to engage the Sioux himself.  As he could not explain his actions later, we can only surmise his reasons for doing so.  Based on what we know about Custer's character and ambition, it is not unlikely that he decided an unassisted victory would help ensure his promotion.

At this point, Custer made several mistakes.  He refused to give credence to his scouts' reports of the size of the awaiting force of Sioux  warriors, feeling that the Sioux could not have mustered more than 500 warriors to oppose him.    He then failed to adequately reconnoiter the opposing force to determine its exact location.  Finally, he split his 280-man force into three groups.  Custer commanded the main force.  The other two forces were sent to protect his flanks, and were commanded by Captain Henry Benteen and Major Marcus Reno, respectively.

With Benteen and Reno on his flanks, Custer proceeded up the valley of the Little Bighorn River.  Contact with the other two elements of his force was lost, yet Custer proceeded without trying to reestablish contact with them.  Unmindful of the possible danger, Custer traveled deeper into the valley, thinking that Benteen and Reno would prevent the Sioux from capturing the high ground on both sides of his force.  What Custer did not know was that Benteen and been engaged by the Sioux and his force was surrounded.  Reno, meanwhile, had gotten lost, delaying his advance.  This meant that both forces were unable to provide the flanking cover that Custer expected.

Under the leadership of their war chiefs, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, the Sioux had gathered over 2,000 warriors.  While a small part of their force stopped the advance of Benteen, the rest converged upon Custer's regiment in the Little Bighorn.  At this point, Custer's force numbered about 200 men, and was outnumbered by nearly 10-1.  Custer's men began a bitter fight to higher ground, where Custer evidently hoped to dig in and make a stand.  Reno had managed to get his bearings by this time, and his force traveled toward the area where the battle was being fought.  He arrived just in time to join Custer for the final defense against the Sioux warriors.  By the end of the afternoon, the main body of the 7th Cavalry had been utterly destroyed.  Not a single man remained alive.

Captain Henry Benteen was fortunate.  His men held off the smaller body of Sioux warriors they were fighting until night fell.  They then escaped and retired from the field.  Benteen's remaining thirty men were  the only survivors of Custer's once-proud regiment.  As an interesting historical note, Captain Benteen was court-martialed for cowardice because of his failure to rejoin the rest of the 7th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn, where he would have surely been killed.

Custer reached his level of incompetence when he was placed in a command where he could not be adequately supervised.
While he was a fine commander in situations where he could be restrained by some higher authority, he was too eager for action to be granted the great degree of autonomy that was his during the campaign of 1876.  His carelessness during previous campaigns was not dangerous since had been under the control of a clear chain of command.  On those occasions where he was granted some degree of autonomy, he was lucky enough to have engaged smaller, less capable forces.  Unfortunately, in 1876 he faced a cohesive, well-armed force and his overconfidence cost him his life and the lives of his entire command.

Custer presents perhaps the most sobering lesson to the modern military commander.  It is not just the commander who pays the price for his own incompetence.  Sometimes the troops pay, too.

CONCLUSION
The Peter Principle is an almost universal axiom that applies to the military just as surely as it applies to business.  But the stakes are far different.  The incompetent businessman will cause earnings to fall.  As a result, share prices will drop and investors will be made unhappy.  Sooner or later, the incompetent businessman will be forced out of his position.

Incompetence in the military commander has far more serious consequences.  The payment for incompetence in the military sphere is counted in lives and blood and grieving families.  The stakes are too high to countenance it.

Top