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September 10, 2004
Armstead, Kral share stage at 2004 Chautauqua
By PHILLIP GOMEZ
Kral has played Buffalo Bill in previous Pahrump appearances, and his wife Dale has played Wild West show sharpshooter Annie Oakley. Jim Armstead, who played York, Clark's manservant and slave, has performed at Chautauquas elsewhere as well. Recently returned from Smackover, Ark., where he performed in that town, Armstead has at times made himself into mountain man James Beckwith, World War II Tuskegee airman Benjamin O. Davis, frontier "buffalo" soldier and mining engineer Henry O. Flipper and black Texas cowboy Thaddeus Dunkley. Armstead's stage personas belie his real life role in academia and on the world stage of diplomacy and international relations. Holding a Ph.D. and a law degree, Professor Armstead teaches national security decision making to mid-level military officers at the Naval War College in Monterey, Calif. Armstead also lectures on international law at places like the Austrian Institute of Sociology and the National Security Center in Warsaw, Poland. At the latter, he has worked to integrate Poland into the European Union. He also does consulting work on environmental and geopolitical issues for African nations. Chautauquas he does for fun. Armstead's principal work is teaching military strategy at the war college. Like Lewis and Clark setting out on their long journey - knowing they would be soon dealing with hostile Indians - Armstead tries to focus officers on the bigger picture of what they're up against. He says he wants his students to ask big questions: "What should America's role in the world be?" and, "How are we perceived? How do we protect ourselves to get what we want?" International relations, domestic politics, the art of diplomacy, economics and the appropriate use of military force - all enter into planning and decision-making by military commanders, Armstead says. "They need to understand those things to make strategy," he says. Officers are specially selected and invited to come to the Naval War College. Most are majors and lieutenant colonels, selected from all the military services and about 30 foreign countries. Senior defense civilians also attend his courses. "In 10 years or less, they'll be the admirals and generals. They're going to general staff jobs," he says. "So now I want them to be able to look at the big picture. A good military officer has become technically and tactically proficient. You've learned that skill. Now, the next question is, how do you employ that tactical skill? That next level is strategy." Armstead prepares his students for advising future presidents and senior civilians. The main question they will face is, when should you deploy military force? The nation will depend upon them to answer wisely to elected and appointed officials. Questions that often come up are how do we get U.S. forces to the other side of the world in a military operation? What do we take with us? What is the plan? If a planner knows he will need five divisions of soldiers, then it will take three hundred ships for 30 days of supplies, Armstead says. Two hundred tons of supplies are necessary to keep an armored division moving in the field each day, he says. "That's if you don't lose anything." During the combat phase of the Iraq war, "Operation Freedom," three U.S. divisions were on the ground. Around 10-to 12 million tons of supplies have been transported to Iraq in the three years U.S. forces have been there, Armstead says. "You need 60 days of supplies per day for launching an operation," he says. "Fuel, ammunition, food, building equipment, everything it takes to live, water, portable toilets ... "There's a saying, 'Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics.' "It took almost two million men in southern England to launch 'Operation Overlord' in World War II," he said. "It took an armada of 6,000 ships. Planning went on for two years. Maj. Gen. Wesphalenger was Eisenhower's chief logistics officer for Overlord. He worked on that one operation for two years." Lewis and Clark were no amateurs either, Armstead says. "Meriwether Lewis was an absolute genius." Lewis independently designed a 41-ton, 55-foot keelboat with three guns attached for the trip west up the then-unknown Missouri River. The design of the keelboat in Lewis' field notes was not even discovered until the 1950s in somebody's attic trunk. Lewis also came up with an innovative hand-held "air gun" to awe the Indians. Once they arrived in St. Louis, the far western outpost of American civilization then, Lewis spent two months laying in supplies for the trip. He contracted with French engages to move river supplies far upstream to the Mandan villages, Bismark, N.D., today, where the party planned to stay the winter. Lewis designed dehydrated soup for the expedition, like the freeze-dried food carried by today's backpackers. But some heavy necessities were also packed: for example, an anvil and a portable forge. Lewis also came up with the plan to carry sealed lead canisters full of black powder, so the powder would stay dry on the river journey. The leaden canisters would be heated, melted and molded into bullets for the expedition's guns as the powder was portioned out to the 31 men of the expedition. "This was absolutely brilliant because that was one of the biggest problems of the time - how to keep your powder dry." Guns were essential to the expedition, Armstead said, so Lewis got 30 new locks - the triggering mechanism that fires the gun's black powder charge - from newly designed Harper Ferry rifles not yet issued to Army troops. Lewis' men still carried the old standard issue 1796 muskets, but now he had them fitted with the new locks to improve efficiency. The new locking mechanisms contained interchangeable parts, making repairs much easier. "It wasn't just luck that got them through," says Armstead. "Powder and shot were the only things they didn't run out of. Lewis doesn't get credit for this (planning and organization)." The expedition's bullboats could be taken apart in 20 minutes by unfastening the metal straps that held them together. This was critical for portaging around sections of the river that became impassable, due to obstructions or falls, as at the Great Falls of the Missouri - present day Great Falls, Mont. "Lewis designed the boats from scratch," says Armstead. "Clark was the real leader of the expedition, but Lewis was the planner," says Armstead. "Lewis has no peer in American history, including Admiral Perry of North Pole fame and astronaut Neil Armstrong. It took thousands of NASA workers to get Armstrong to be able to walk on the moon." Lewis and Clark's mission from President Thomas Jefferson involved "public diplomacy" - engaging, informing, influencing and persuading foreign publics, meaning the 50 tribes of Indians they encountered en route to the Pacific, to place themselves in the orbit of American trade and commerce. It also meant weaning them away from Spanish and British traders and both nations' influence. In this endeavor, York played a special role because of his skin color. To the Indian nations of the upper Missouri and Columbia tributaries, he was "Big Medicine," sometimes to the chagrin of his master and commander Clark. Training military officers in strategy today is not easily or automatically done, Armstead says. Each military service has its own corporate culture through which it sees the world, making it problematic getting students to see the entire "big picture." The Army and the Navy are the more traditional branches of the military, the Air Force is more like a modern corporation and the Marine Corps is more akin to a religion, Armstead says. Armstead illustrates some of the bureaucratic difficulties he faces in the classroom. The services have different conceptions of "security," he says. "For the Navy, it's when the port is secured and everything is in order. For the Army, it's when the artillery has fired its batteries, pulverized the enemy's position and the hill is flat. For the Air Force, the situation's not secure until the doors are locked, the lights are out, the burglar alarm is on and they're out on the golf course." He didn't say what security meant to the Marines, except that they are part of the Navy. Armstead looks at the war in Iraq as a lesson in poor strategy. "We are never going to have a stable Iraq," he says plainly. "The fault lies with the president and the secretary of defense. It's their strategy that's been executed." He quickly adds, "The war itself was brilliant. "We have yet to conduct the first war crimes trial and the war is three years old. If we were in it for regime change, when are the war trials?" Back before the war began, Armstead wrote a guest editorial for the San Francisco Chronicle arguing just such points. He is a firm believer in the Powell Doctrine, named for Secretary of State Colin Powell, that the U.S. needed to clearly know its goals before going to war - what the endgame entailed, the exit strategy. "They were not happy with me back at the Pentagon," he says of the aftermath of publishing his editorial. Another deficiency, according to the doctrine, was the failure to use overwhelming force, Armstead says. Enough force was used to win the war, but not to police and keep the peace, he says. At least 250,000 troops should have been required, he says, far short of the 137,000 there now. So the U.S. is stuck in Iraq, for to leave now would only invite Osama bin Laden to establish a base of support there and bring on real civil war. The British had the identical problem in Iraq after World War I, when the Treaty of Versailles created the country. From 1919 to 1928 tribal warfare reigned. "History repeats itself," Armstead says. "The Pentagon bought into the belief that if we got rid of Saddam Hussein everything would be fine. 'Post-conflict stability' is always the problem of the endgame." Armstead is looking forward to playing a new character in future s: 19th-century Afro-French author Alexander Dumas. "I think Dumas asks, 'Can the individual make a difference?'" says Armstead. That undoubtedly is the strategic question Armstead asks himself sometimes. |
