Ukrainian General Valerii Zaluzhny had the second-most-difficult job in the world. His boss has the most difficult one.
On Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that he was removing General Valerii Zaluzhny from command of the military, and promoting General Oleksandr Syrsky, the head of the ground forces, to replace him. Predictably and understandably, there has already been a great deal of hand-wringing about Ukraine’s president cashiering his top general. Such concern is misplaced, not merely because it may be misinformed, but because it bespeaks a misunderstanding of sound civil-military relations.
Begin with what is actually known rather than rumored or surmised about the president and his general: that there has been tension for some time, possibly for as long as a year now. This rules out one possibility, which is that the dismissal reflects a major dispute about manpower, and specifically about conscription. In fact, Ukraine already has male conscription. There are real questions about mobilization and whether to call up those who have already served or who are currently exempt, but this debate seems to be more recent than the tension between Zelensky and Zaluzhny. Moreover, such decisions—involving the delicate balance among military needs, economic and defense-industrial requirements, and domestic political stability—need to rest in the hands of civilians, as was the case in the United States during the world wars, through the Selective Service System.
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That leaves two other possibilities. The first is a personal clash. Differences of personality and style, compounded by minor political intrigues in the president’s inner circle, might have produced a split. Or Zaluzhny might have, or be suspected of having, political aspirations. The other is a substantive disagreement. Zelensky might have lost confidence in Zaluzhny as the commander in chief of the armed forces.
Some historical perspective is helpful here. Only the terminally naive think that politics, including the petty politics of jostling for position and influence, stops in wartime. During the Second World War, Franklin D. Roosevelt worried about General Douglas MacArthur as a potential rival for the American presidency, as did Harry Truman, and General George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff, kept trying, unsuccessfully, to work his way around Admiral William Leahy, FDR’s chief of staff. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s advisers, including some in the military, kept trying to rein him in during Israel’s War of Independence, until he flummoxed them all by resigning shortly before a key truce expired. They caved, and he rescinded the resignation.
There is an inevitable imbalance in the stature of civilian and military leaders during wartime. Democracies fall in love with their generals; they rarely feel the same way about the civilian to whom the general reports. Generals usually look the part, and that is definitely the case with Zaluzhny, a big, calm, warm but tough-looking soldier: exactly the person you want in charge when Kinzhal and Kalibr missiles are raining down and the Russians are approaching the gates of Kyiv. Burly guys with short haircuts in battle dress always look better in this context than slender former actors in T-shirts or pullovers.
By contrast, civilian politicians usually find their real place in people’s hearts after the war is over. During the war itself, their business is not commanding troops but sitting behind a desk and moving paper, chairing interminable meetings, giving speeches, walking around the streets, occasionally ducking shells at the front, and cutting deals. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill faced a no-confidence vote during the summer of 1942 after the fall of Tobruk, and though the vote failed, it was not for lack of trying by his opponents, including some in uniform.
The best historical analogy to contemplate in this case may be the American Civil War. It, too, was an existential crisis; it involved the creation of new, mass armies and tools of warfare that were unfamiliar to older officers. It took place on the threshold of the nation’s capital, which was endangered more than once. And it involved the leadership of a gangly man who did not look particularly good in his awkwardly fitting black suit, Abraham Lincoln.
Those who think it wrong to change horses midstream should consider Lincoln’s repeated firing of the commanders of the Army of the Potomac. The title of one famous book about the period is, appropriately, Lincoln Finds a General. As in the case of Zelensky and Zaluzhny, there was occasionally an outcry, and none greater than when the president dismissed Major General George McClellan, the commander of the Army of the Potomac, not once, but twice—the last time after what was arguably a victory at Antietam in 1862.
That episode is instructive. Lincoln appreciated McClellan’s truly brilliant work as an organizer and a trainer: Indeed, that was his greatest contribution to the ultimate Union victory, the creation of an army that could repeatedly engage the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, which was under the brilliant field leadership of Robert E. Lee. But McClellan could not see the war as Lincoln did, and could not adjust to the strategy that was needed, of pursuing a relentless war of attrition against the numerically inferior Confederates at the cost of the lives of many Union men. Lincoln lost confidence in him and sacked him, as he would others.
In the current case, there is no question that General Zaluzhny was a superb leader in the opening phase of the war. He oversaw military preparations in January and February of 2022 that minimized the impact of Russia’s initial assault. In a display of the common sense that is a characteristic of great military leaders, he gave his subordinates maximum discretion in the opening battles of the war. And in the ensuing counterattacks, particularly in the Kharkiv region, he gave Syrsky, his former superior, the support to conduct a successful attack.
Where it is not clear that Zaluzhny has succeeded is in the ensuing phase of the counteroffensive. Even if some of the fault for the unsatisfactory results lies with the dilatory Western supply of advanced weapons to Ukraine, some of it surely rests on the high command. Moreover, in the past six months, Ukraine’s innovativeness, at least in ground warfare, which far exceeded Russia’s in the first 18 months of the war, seems to have also sputtered. It may be this, and the lack of a convincing plan for victory, that has undermined the relationship between president and general.
Whether Zaluzhny has political aspirations is unclear, although it is odd and at least imprudent that he has now published two articles, one in The Economist and another on CNN’s website, about the future of Ukraine’s strategy. This is not something a commanding general usually does or should do.
Ukraine’s command system is still evolving from the Soviet model; it has a military commander in chief (in the United States, that is the president) rather than a chairman of a joint staff or a chief of the general staff. But no matter: President Zelensky is, and must be, in charge.
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One need not pick sides in a dispute like this. Zaluzhny is a heroic figure who had the second-most-difficult job in the world for the past two years; his boss, however, had the most difficult job, and is continuing to do it. One hopes that if the general were asked to take another position by the president, he would do so, and that, if not, he will not make McClellan’s mistake and enter politics. In 1864, that served neither McClellan nor the country well, and it failed. Other Civil War generals fired by Lincoln—Major General Joseph Hooker, for one—set an example of soldierly discipline by swallowing their pride and taking a lesser position.
Generals invariably get more glory than politicians; they also subordinate themselves to them. That is part of the deal that military service in a wartime democracy entails. In the end, however, the subordination is indispensable, because in a functioning liberal democracy, supreme command is firmly in the hands of civilian authority.
Peter Feaver, a scholar of civil-military relations, likes to remind those who care about these issues that “civilians have the right to be wrong.” That is true, but one may also add that, not infrequently, they instead exercise the right to be correct.
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