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Generals Speaking Out

Fred Kaplan has a good column about the recent spate of retired generals calling for Donald Rumsfeld's head. On the one hand, no one wants to see a repeat of the 1960s, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff, against their better judgment, failed to speak up and dissuade Johnson and McNamara from hurtling the country into Vietnam. If military leaders think something has gone badly awry in the Pentagon, the public should probably know.

On the other hand, it's perfect reasonable to get a bit leery when generals suddenly start speaking out against civilian government. During the 1990s the military became quite politicized—a development that Bill Clinton, ironically, helped start when he took the unprecedented step of getting endorsements from 20 retired generals in his 1992 campaign, to counteract his image as a pot-smoking draft-dodger. Just like they do now, Democrats made a fetish of men in uniforms. The flipside was that once in office, Clinton was loathe to challenge his generals—they had more credibility on security issues, after all.

The upshot was that the military enjoyed inordinate influence over a not-insignificant part of foreign policy during the '90s. Partly that was because the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 made the made the military more powerful by making the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff "principal military advisor to the president, the NSC, and the secretary of Defense." Partly that was because, by all accounts, Les Aspin and William Perry were relatively aloof and inattentive Defense Secretaries.

Whatever the cause, the military seemed to have more sway than usual. Colin Powell felt free to write a Foreign Affairs article describing "his" foreign policy in 1993 and the military went into open revolt over lettings gays in the military. Later on, the Joint Chiefs opposed the land-mine treaty because it would hurt our readiness in North Korea; they opposed the International Criminal Court for fear that U.S. soldiers could be prosecuted—an unlikely event, but whatever; they opposed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and pushed for missile defense systems over the objections of the rest of the world; they opposed the ban on child soldiers. And the president caved on all of these issues.

Meanwhile, as Dana Priest reported in her excellent book, The Mission, regional Commanders-in-Chief were essentially handling diplomacy in their little parts of the world, as State Department funding dwindled and no one attempted to rein them in. And, as Andrew Bacevich has noted, during the 1990s there was the odd spectacle of more and more retired generals appearing on television to criticize the president, and the politicization of the officer corps.

Now it's a very large leap from a couple of retired generals speaking out against a disastrous Secretary of Defense after a long reticence to the creation of a full-blown military state. I don't think there will be a coup tomorrow. Certainly many active generals take civilian control of the military very seriously—Kaplan notes that many of them remember what happened when Gen. Douglas MacArthur tried to force a public showdown with Harry Truman. And if a bit of grumbling gets Rumsfeld fire, that would be a good thing—although presumably Bush would just replace him with someone equally disastrous. Still, there's decent reason to worry about the scenario Kaplan sketches here:

Rumsfeld's arrogance, his "casualness and swagger" as Gen. Newbold put it—which have caused so many strategic blunders, so much death and disaster—have started to tip some officers over the edge. They may prove a good influence in the short run. But if Rumsfeld resists their encroachments and fights back, the whole hierarchy of command could implode as officers feel compelled not merely to stay silent but to choose one side or the other. And if the rebel officers win, they might find they like the taste of bureaucratic victory—and feel less constrained to renew the internecine combat when other, less momentous disputes arise in the future.

Maybe he's just worrying too much. It seems like it would be better not to find out.

Posted by Bradford Plumer on 04/13/06 at 11:19 AM | E-mail | Print | Digg this | de.licio.us

Comments

I am disgusted by the facile comments that General Pace made relative to the ease with which other generals could have earlier made known their private disgruntlement with the civilian mishandling of the Iraq war. It is well known that military men, especially high-ranking officers, keep their comments within their cultures and have learned how to keep their heads down in times of danger. It is equally well known how shabbily the civilian leadership of the military treated Gen. Shinseki when he addressed this issue, and it is naive to think that the lesson was not intended to carry weight through the ranks or that it did not.

Following the learning of the lesson that military knowlege and advice should be seriously considered before discarding as we did in Vietnam, the book, "Dereliction of Duty," was made required reading for top officers in order to encourage them to speak up.

However, I don't expect our military commanders to line up and fall on their swords because we need them in the miliary. But it seems that the current civilian leadership of the military is not open to hearing this experienced advice, so more and increasingly more of our prized, intelligent, informed, loyal, and valuable military leaders are opting for early retirement in order to retain their integrity and to be able to speak their truth on behalf of their country.

What I'd like to see is a lineup of all high-ranking officers tendering their resignations because of the debacle brought on by the hubris of our military's civilian leadership. I'd like to think that that would cause even this president to reconsider his position and that their resignations would not be accepted or that the next one would invite them to resume their service to our country.

If I were General Pace's commanding officer, I'd strip him of his honor and valor medals. If I were his mother, I'd wash his mouth with soap and spank him.
If I were his wife, I wouldn't sleep with him. If I were his daughter, I wouldn't speak to him. If I were his pet, I'd hide from him. But I'm only a fellow citizen, and I'm only asking that he have the honor and courage to get as real as his fellow generals.

Posted by: Electric Lady on 04/14/06 at 7:53 PM

Balance: each department strong but unified under a strong, capable, electable leader; that's the way it is supposed to work.
What we have is a puppet regieme (sound familiar?) due to corporate power in government. Congress fails in its constitutional duty due to election battle fears; the Presidential office steps into the void and everybody (except the public) is happy; no more election battles for Congress, the President can't be held accountable because he's out (scot free) in 4-8 years, and the public wonders why the country is going downhill.

Posted by: katesisco on 04/15/06 at 6:26 AM

I am less concerned about "Generals speaking out about civilian government when:
They, for the most part, waited UNTIL they were civilians again, and:
Are primarily speaking out about a narrow facet of the civilian government, and it is one which directly affected them and their ability to fulfill their obligation to their troops and their mission. It isn't that they are speaking out about "civilian government" as a concept, but about the performance of the civilian leadership. This is not about a military in revolt against civilian authority, it is about civilian abrogation of responsibility.

Posted by: Kim Weaver on 04/16/06 at 11:33 AM