On Aug. 1, Gen. Richard Cody, the United States Army’s vice chief of staff, flew to the sprawling base at Fort Knox, Ky., to talk with the officers enrolled in the Captains Career Course. These are the Army’s elite junior officers. Of the 127 captains taking the five-week course, 119 had served one or two tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, mainly as lieutenants. Nearly all would soon be going back as company commanders. A captain named Matt Wignall, who recently spent 16 months in Iraq with a Stryker brigade combat team, asked Cody, the Army’s second-highest-ranking general, what he thought of a recent article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling titled ‘A Failure in Generalship.’ The article, a scathing indictment that circulated far and wide, including in Iraq, accused the Army’s generals of lacking ‘professional character,’ ‘creative intelligence’ and ‘moral courage.’ Yingling’s article - published in the May issue of Armed Forces Journal - noted that a key role of generals is to advise policy makers and the public on the means necessary to win wars. ‘If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means,’ he wrote, ‘he shares culpability for […]