Civilian-military relations

My goodness, no, I don't care what the public or the Congress or the military think, I run things around here

I wouldn't describe myself as a pessimist when it comes to political affairs, but more as a guarded optimist.

But the recent news that the Military Times newspapers (Army Times, etc.) were coming out with an editorial this Monday calling for Rumsfeld's resignation got me thinking again about the state of military-civilian relations. Those papers are not government-owned or run; they are published by a subsidiary of the Gannett Co. But the editorial bases its argument in part on the claim that "when the nation's current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary, then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads." It's understandably assumed that the editorial reflects a widespread sentiment in the armed forces (Newspapers for troops call for Rumsfeld's ouster by Matthew Stannard San Francisco Chronicle 11/04/06):

The editorial will run in the 250,000 copies of Army Times, Navy Times, Marine Corps Times and Air Force Times. The newspapers are published under the umbrella Military Times Media Group by Gannett Co. Inc., not by the U.S. military, and have been popular among American forces since World War II.

"It is extremely widely read and influential for the professional military," said David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland.

The relationship goes two ways, said Segal. "I think it would be safe to say if the Army Times is saying that, it is something they are hearing from senior officers in the Army," he said.

It has been somewhat counterintuitive during the Cheney-Bush administration that it has been the civilian neocons and nationalists like Dick Cheney who have been the "hawks", while the uniformed military has tended to call for restraint and caution when it comes to adventures like the Iraq War. During the 1950s and 1960s, the situation had been the reverse.


The Democrats have been happy to seize on criticism of Rummy and the Cheney-Bush administration more generally that has come from military figures like retired generals. Party Chairman Howard Dean said on the PBS Newshour on Friday 11/03/04:

But we need to be out of Iraq, and we need a plan to get us out of Iraq. And we expect the president to listen to the military about how we can do that.

It's hard to fault the Democrats for wanting to counter the Republicans' martial and often just plain militaristic rhetoric with a defense of the allegedly pragmatic generals against the bumbling, incompetent Bush Republicans.

But it's also been obvious since early 2005 that the generals were positioning themselves to duck criticism for what was already an obvious failure in the Iraq War. The neoconservatives who were the intellectual godfathers of this disaster are also now bravely scrambling to find excuses for why their ideas put into practice turned out to have created possibly the worst failure in the history of American foreign policy with the Iraq War. And their favored excuse of the moment is that it was the incomptence of the Cheney-Bush administration in executing their preventive war that is to blame.

But our infallible generals shouldn't be allowed to skate on this one, either. They aren't entirely to blame. But they certainly share in the blame, for instance in their counterinsurgency strategy which responds to sniper fire in urban combat by calling in artillery and air strikes. Those tactics have multiplied the civilian casualties and were a major factor in turning Iraqis against the American presence. But we haven't seen a lot of retired generals denouncing those failures on the part of our unassailable generals.

We've also seen and heard throughout the war that the President and Rummy say over and over and over that they're giving our infallible generals everything they say they need to win the Iraq War. And that they're letting the military control the military operations in Iraq without any interference from the civilians. And the serving military officers back them up.

Now, we know they're lying. The military always tries to have it both ways in such situations, publicly endorsing the course of the Executive but laying the groundwork to alibi themselves for possible failure later.

But still, this all raises some important questions. By statute, the Joint Chiefs of Staff are the primary military advisers of the President and the Secretary of Defense. Their role was defined as such in the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 (Part 1 and Part 2).

Paragraph 151 says the following:

... in presenting advice with respect to any matter to the President, the National Security Council, or the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman shall, as he considers appropriate, inform the President, the National Security Council, or the Secretary of Defense, as the case may be, of the range of military advice and opinion with respect to that matter. (my emphasis)

Now that "as he considers appropriate" means that the JCS Chairman would be free to ignore any part of the "range of military advice and opinion" that he chooses. But it was clearly the intent of Cogress that a broad range of options would be presented not just to the Defence Secretary but the President, as well.

The following parts of the same paragraph, though, don't include a loophole for the JCS Chairman:

A member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (other than the Chairman) may submit to the Chairman advice or an opinion in disagreement with, or advice or an opinion in addition to, the advice presented by the Chairman to the President, the National Security Council, or the Secretary of Defense. If a member submits such advice or opinion, the Chairman shall present the advice or opinion of such member at the same time he presents his own advice to the President, the National Security Council, or the Secretary of Defense, as the case may be. ...

After first informing the Secretary of Defense, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff may make such recommendations to Congress relating to the Department of Defense as he considers appropriate. (my emphasis)

So this means that the other members of the JCS - Army Chief of Staff, Chief of Naval Operations, Air Force Chief of Staff, and the CommCommandant of the Marine Corps - all had the statutory option to submit dissenting opinions on military advice to the President and to Congress. And if they had good reason to know that the plans for the Iraq War were excessively risky, did they not have some kind of moral obligation to make their dissents known? If any of them come out after retirement and say they opposed the JCS Chairman's recommendations, then they should also explain why they did not exercise their option to make a dissent known to Congress.

There are a number of actions, laws and precedents that give the military a level of authority in civilian governmental affairs that are not necessarily healthy for a democracy, or other kind of civilian government. Lt. Col. Charles Dunlap, Jr., used a futuristic scenario to look at some of those in The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012 by Lt. Col. Charles Dunlap, Jr. Parameters (US Army War College) Winter 1992-93.

In this fictional scenario, it's 2015, then 20 years in the future. A military junta has taken power by a coup in the United States. And the article is in the form of a letter from a "senior retired officer of the Unified Armed Forces, known here simply as Prisoner 222305759" who "is one of those arrested, having been convicted by court-martial for opposing the coup".

Here are some of his points, keeping in mind that anything after 1992 is imagined:

Congress became their unwitting ally. Because of the popularity of the new military programs - and the growing dependence upon them - Congress passed the Military Plenipotentiary Act of 2005. This legislation was the legacy of the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. Among many revisions, Goldwater-Nichols strengthened the office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and mandated numerous changes intended to increase "jointness" in the armed services. Supporters of the Military Plenipotentiary Act argued that unity of command was critical to the successful management of the numerous activities now considered "military" operations. Moreover, many Congressmen mistakenly believed that Goldwater-Nichols was one of the main reasons for the military's success in the First Gulf War. They viewed the Military Plenipotentiary Act as an enhancement of the strengths of Goldwater-Nichols.

In passing this legislation Congress added greater authority to the military's top leadership position. Lulled by favorable experiences with Chairmen like General Colin Powell, Congress saw little danger in converting the office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff into the even more powerful Military Plenipotentiary. No longer merely an advisor, the Military Plenipotentiary became a true commander of all US services, purportedly because that status could better ameliorate the effects of perceived interservice squabbling. Despite warnings found in the legislative history of Goldwater-Nichols and elsewhere, enormous power was concentrated in the hands of a single, unelected official.

He points to the idolization of the American military that was already well advanced under the Reagan administration and Old Man Bush's administration (though he doesn't emphasize the significant role that the Christian Right played in this process):

America's societal malaise was readily apparent in 1992. Seventy-eight percent of Americans believed the country was on the "wrong track." One researcher declared that social indicators were at their lowest level in 20 years and insisted "something [was] coming loose in the social infrastructure." The nation was frustrated and angry about its problems.

America wanted solutions and democratically elected government wasn't providing them. The country suffered from a "deep pessimism about politicians and government after years of broken promises." David Finkle observed in The Washington Post Magazine that for most Americans "the perception of government is that it has evolved from something that provides democracy's framework into something that provides obstacles, from something to celebrate into something to ignore." Likewise, politicians and their proposals seemed stale and repetitive. Millions of voters gave up hope of finding answers. The "environment of apathy" Janos characterized as a precursor to a coup had arrived.

Unlike the rest of government the military enjoyed a remarkably steady climb in popularity throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. And indeed it had earned the admiration of the public. Debilitated by the Vietnam War, the US military set about reinventing itself. As early as 1988 U.S. News & World Report heralded the result: "In contrast to the dispirited, drug-ravaged, do-your-own-thing armed services of the '70s and early '80s, the US military has been transformed into a fighting force of gung-ho attitude, spit-shined discipline, and ten-hut morale." After the US military dealt Iraq a crushing defeat in the First Gulf War, the ignominy of Vietnam evaporated.

One of the hopeful aspects of the torture scandals at Abu Ghuraib, Guantanamo and other stations in the Bush Gulag is that after seeing the photos of naked, hooded men stacked in human pyramids and various other disgusting acts of sexual sadism being performed by some of "the troops", is that it slapped the public upside the head with the reality that The Troops are human beings, not all of whom practice "spit-shined discipline" and "ten-hut morale". At Abu Ghuraib, it was more like ten-hooding morale.

Dunlap cites the following quote from Atlantic writer James Fallows in 1991:

According to our economic and political theories, most agencies of the government have no special standing to speak about the general national welfare. Each represents a certain constituency; the interest groups fight it out. The military, strangely, is the one government institution that has been assigned legitimacy to act on its notion of the collective good. "National defense" can make us do things - train engineers, build highways - that long-term good of the nation or common sense cannot.

Dunlap notes that injecting the military into the "war on drugs" was an erosion of the long-standing distinction between civilian and military realms of authority. That process has proceeded much further since then, with the warrantless, illegal spying by the Pentagon's National Security Agency (NSA) being the most dramatic recent example. At the same time, he notes various factors that create a sense of isolation between civilians and the uniformed military:

Furthermore, well-meaning attempts at improving service life led to the unintended insularity of military society, representing a return to the cloistered life of the pre-World War II armed forces. Military bases, complete with schools, churches, stores, child care centers, and recreational areas, became never-to-be-left islands of tranquillity removed from the chaotic, crime-ridden environment outside the gates. As one reporter put it in 1991: "Increasingly isolated from mainstream America, today's troops tend to view the civilian world with suspicion and sometimes hostility." Thus, a physically isolated and intellectually alienated officer corps was paired with an enlisted force likewise distanced from the society it was supposed to serve. In short, the military evolved into a force susceptible to manipulation by an authoritarian leader from its own select ranks.

This line turned out to be sadly prophetic: "What made this all the more disheartening was the wretched performance of our forces in the Second Gulf War."

Dunlap's article goes on to cite some things that he saw as threatening to erode the military's central mission of warfighting. And it's pretty clear he had in mind the conventional-war model of warfighting. Ironically, some of the things he complains about being problems in that sense actually would have helped in the Iraq War if the military had been better and more experienced at them. For instance:

Police organizations are understandably oriented toward the studied restraint necessary for the end sought: a judicial conviction. As one Drug Enforcement Administration agent noted: "The military can kill people better than we can [but] when we go to a jungle lab, we're not there to move onto the target by fire and maneuver to destroy the enemy. We're there to arrest suspects and seize evidence." If military forces are inculcated with the same spirit of restraint, combat performance is threatened.

But, in fact, the mission that the Army and the Marines were given in Iraq in the counterinsurgency war involved a big demand for just those kinds of situations that required "studied restraint". And among an Arab-speaking population for whom tribe-and-clan-based "honor systems" are a key element, i.e., you humiliate or injure one member and all his cousins want to come kill you.

And that is one of the things that the generals can be legitimately criticized for. They structured and trained their forces so that they would be prepared for conventional war, like the Gulf War of 1991, and not for a counterinsurgency war like the one in which they are now mired. Yet when they were given a mission that involved massive counterinsurgency operations, apparently none of the service Chiefs who have the statutory authority to send dissenting recommendations to the Defense Secretary, the President and Congress have chosen to do so.

I'm very happy to see Rummy get some of the criticism he deserved for his performance even during the opening months of the Afghanistan War in 2001-2. But we would also make a big mistake to let our infallible generals off the hook for the disaster known as the Iraq War.

Tags: charles dunlap, goldwater-nichols act, howard dean, militarism, iraq war, rummy, rumsfeld