Critical Writing: A Failure in Persuasion Essay Example

and how to make their promotion system better. This in no way supports the argument that our generals have failed in their duty.

He states the imperatives of generals having second languages and educations in the humanities and with the statistics he provides, 25% each, he supports that claim. He argues that the promotion of generals should be performance based and be closely scrutinized by congress.

He defines the problem of the current system, most notably an absence of incentive to innovate and tells the reader how to fix it with peer and subordinate input, performance based criteria, and closer securitization by congress. These however do not address the two essential questions he must answer to support his argument. Which generals failed? How did they fail? Without answering these, they fall under the fallacy “missing the point. ” Much of LTC Yingling’s essay is based on a “false dichotomy”.

It’s the generals’ responsibility to estimate strategic possibilities and explain them to civilian policy makers. Since those policymakers made decisions contrary to what LTC Yingling believes was the correct, the generals must have negated their responsibility. This assertion leaves no room for other possibilities. The generals could have briefed up the same conclusions as he, at which time the policymakers, unconvinced with the argument, made their decisions to the contrary. Some generals, based on the data available to them, may have made an honest estimate and advised accordingly.

To say however that such a complicated outcome is a result of an all or nothing set of conditions, lack of both intellectual and moral faculties in this a case, is a “false dichotomy” and pins the author

into an argument he can never prove. Even the best arguments, detailed or not, true or not, can be ineffective if they are sloppy in their reasoning. “A failure of generalship” falls into that trap with “hasty generalization”, “missing the point”, and “false dichotomy”. By distracting the reader and improperly conditioning the argument’s premises, these fallacies undermine what may have been a potentially sound argument.