[NYTr] Endring Civil-Military Crisis Threatens Amerika's Future

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

In These Times - Aug 3, 2007
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3272/


General Failure:

An enduring crisis in civil-military relations threatens America’s
future 

By Gregory D. Foster

Largely unrecognized by the American public, unacknowledged by those in
power, and denied by professionals in uniform, the United States
suffers today from an enduring crisis in civil-military relations. The
tacit social contract of mutual rights, obligations and expectations
that binds the three parties to this relationship—the military, its
civilian overseers and society—is seriously frayed.

This isn’t a crisis in the popular sense of the term. We need not fear
a coup d’état from a military thoroughly socialized to sublimate such
dramatic recourse. Troops aren’t occupying our homes (even though, as
major newspapers and the American Civil Liberties Union have reported,
they are monitoring our communications and infiltrating our
gatherings). American combat units aren’t disintegrating in combat or
openly defying orders. And regular polls by Harris and Gallup indicate
that, regardless of the performance and behavior of those in uniform,
the public hold the military in higher esteem than most other
institutions of society—though it remains a mystery how we should
interpret these findings.

This crisis is more akin to a lymphoma or termite infestation—its
symptoms hidden and unnoticed—that surreptitiously destroys the
infrastructure of the body or edifice from within. In this case, the
end result could prove to be America’s strategic debilitation.

To grasp this crisis—its existence and its magnitude—we must consider
how far the current state of civil-military relations in this country
deviates from the ideal. A healthy state of civil-military relations
requires: (1) a strategically effective (not just a militarily
effective) military; (2) whose leaders provide strategically (not just
militarily) sound advice to; (3) strategically competent civilian
authorities—executive and legislative—who themselves are representative
of and answerable to; (4) a civically engaged, strategically aware
public; (5) all of which is undergirded by a critical free press, a
vibrant civil society and a properly subordinated military-industrial
complex. Today, we are failing on all these counts. A strategically
ineffective military

Far from strategically effective, today’s military borders on being
strategically dysfunctional, perhaps not even militarily effective. A
strategically effective military would, at a minimum, fulfill its
expected obligations under the social contract of civil-military
relations: operational competence, sound advice, political neutrality
and social responsibility.

Is the military operationally competent? If by that we mean can it
successfully accomplish all it is called upon to perform (from
conventional combat operations to counterinsurgency to peacekeeping to
disaster response)—without being disproportionately destructive,
indiscriminately lethal, exorbitantly expensive or unduly
escalatory—the answer is no. Iraq and Afghanistan are merely the latest
examples of the military’s unyielding preference for a single way of
war—conventional combat operations against conventional foes. These
ongoing campaigns are also emblematic of the military’s resistance to
seriously and permanently adapting to the unconventional operations
(like counterinsurgency) against so-called asymmetric threats that
characterize the global battlefield of today and tomorrow. Yes, there
is a new army counterinsurgency field manual prepared under the hand of
Gen. David Petraeus, the current U.S. commander in Iraq (See
“Counterinsurgency 101,” March 2007). But like numerous such field
manuals during the Vietnam era, it is destined to have little enduring
impact on how the military actually operates and sees itself.

Superimposed on this is the institution’s chest-thumping culture of
machismo, with its incessant talk of “warriors” and “warfighters.” One
need only observe news footage of the heavy-handed, culturally
insensitive, firepower-intensive tactics of U.S. troops in the field,
frequently given to undisciplined individual behavior born of fear,
immaturity and inexperience, to grasp the results.

Does the military provide sound (strategic) advice to civilian
decision-makers? Even traditionalist observers of civil-military
relations who subscribe to the view that the proper preserve of the
military is narrowly circumscribed military advice must answer no.
Whatever Gen. Petraeus may say or eventually accomplish, the desultory
U.S. performance to date in Iraq and Afghanistan is an outgrowth of
failed military advice from senior officers unable to rise above their
tactical and technical conditioning. In fact, deep-seated
anti-intellectualism and an attendant institutional bias for action
have prompted those in uniform to seek comfort in tactical and
technical thinking, and thereby robbed them of the capacity to think
strategically.

Is the military politically neutral? That is, are its personnel
sufficiently divorced from involvement in, or undue influence by,
partisan politics that they do not compromise the objectivity expected
of them? Are they similarly neutral on ideological, religious and
cultural grounds? The answer, in all cases, is no. Consider the
increasing tendency of retired generals and admirals to endorse
political candidates; the outspokenness of the retired generals who
called for the ouster of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (after
they had their pensions safely in hand); the willingness of the
military to let its units and personnel be repeatedly used as political
props by the commander in chief; even the emergence of outspoken
lower-ranking active-duty antiwar groups such as “Appeal for Redress
>From the War in Iraq.” Consider as well the pronounced conservative
bias (and Republican political preferences) of most in uniform; the
increasing religiosity of service personnel (ranging from Lt. Gen.
William G. Boykin, the No. 2 intelligence official in the Pentagon, to
evangelical Christians at the Air Force Academy); the deeply entrenched
institutional bias against and persistent persecution of homosexuals in
uniform, legitimized most recently by the anti-gay remarks of Joint
Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Peter Pace; the disturbing presence of
neo-Nazi skinhead extremists in military units, documented in July 2006
by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Is the military socially responsible? Traditionalists commonly argue
that the military cannot afford to be a test bed for social
experimentation. Nonetheless, as a major institution of society, the
military is obligated to be socially responsible. That means, among
other things, being demographically, experientially and ideologically
representative of society. Today’s military is not representative—at
least in the sense that neither the country’s political, economic and
media elite nor their offspring serve in uniform.

Being socially responsible means being affordable. At a gluttonous cost
of $700 billion a year, more than the gross domestic product of all but
17 of the world’s countries, the U.S. military clearly is not
affordable—especially if the spurious notion that we are embroiled in
an endless “long war” retains political traction.

Being socially responsible means being willing to dissent
responsibly—to speak up and speak out—without open or surreptitious
disobedience to proper military authority. The deeply ingrained ethos
of obedience, the widespread careerist motivation to seek higher rank,
the tendency to promote dutiful followers at the expense of assertive
leaders, and the principle of political neutrality all have nurtured
habits of unquestioning acquiescence among senior officers who should,
but don’t, exercise their responsibility for checking and balancing
civilian strategic shortcomings.

Being socially responsible means being morally superior—walking the
talk of moral propriety. Too many in uniform today are convinced that
they are morally superior to an otherwise decadent society. But such
moral arrogance is undeserved in light of the hundreds of incidents of
aberrant behavior by military personnel each year. Military claims that
episodes such as Abu Ghraib and Haditha are unrepresentative of an
otherwise morally superior military simply do not hold up in the face
of persistent evidence to the contrary.

The rest of the story

Beyond the foregoing, the U.S. military almost invariably precipitates
rather than prevents crisis; feeds perceptions abroad of American
arrogance and hypocrisy, while undermining U.S. credibility and
legitimacy; threatens, in single-mindedly providing for the common
defense, other important dimensions of security (liberty, justice, the
general welfare); and permits itself to be an instrument for the
militarization of U.S. foreign policy. In short, it is strategically
dysfunctional.

Add to this the following, and it is indeed a recipe for crisis:
consistently unsound strategic advice from senior military leaders;
strategically inept civilian officials, executive and legislative, who
have turned the hallowed principle of civilian control into civilian
subjugation; a civically apathetic public that has acceded to
uncompromising military demands for secrecy and failed to responsibly
oversee the military’s overseers; an uncritical press that has declined
to exact transparency and accountability from the military and its
overseers; a weak, fragmented civil society, typified by a largely
moribund anti-war movement; and a military-industrial complex whose
overweening influence on policymakers and policies has fed militarism
and corruption.

Given this state of affairs, no longer can we, the people, give a free
pass to a military institution that expects unconditional appreciation,
unequivocal support, unquestioning trust, unlimited discretionary
license and the absence of “meddling” by “amateurs.” Nor can we blindly
trust those who profess to oversee the military on our behalf. The
strategic price for doing so is one we cannot afford.

[Gregory D. Foster is a professor at the Industrial College of the Armed
Forces, National Defense University, Washington, D.C. The views
expressed here are his own.]