Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld in 2004 poses for pictures with soldiers, marines and airman outside the Abu Ghraib Detention Center, in Iraq. Wikicommons/ US Air force. Some rights reserved. General Lloyd Austin, the outgoing head
of US Central Command (CENTCOM), recently testified before Congress, suggesting
that Washington needed to up its troop levels in Iraq and Syria.
Meanwhile, in his own congressional
testimony, still-to-be-confirmed incoming CENTCOM chief General Joseph Votel,
formerly head of US Special Operations Command, seconded that recommendation
and said he would reevaluate the American stance across the Greater Middle East
with an eye, as the Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman put it,
to launching “a more aggressive fight against the Islamic State.”
In this light, both generals called for
reviving a dismally failed
$500 million program to train “moderate” Syrian rebels to support the US fight
against the Islamic State (IS). They both swear, of course, that they'll
do it differently
this time, and what could possibly go wrong?
Meanwhile, General David Rodriguez, head
of US Africa Command (AFRICOM), pressed by Senator John McCain in congressional
testimony, called on the US to “do more” to deal with IS supporters
in Libya. And lo and behold, the New York Times reported
that Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter had only recently presented an AFRICOM
and Joint Special Operations Command plan to the president’s “top national
security advisers.” They were evidently “surprised” to discover that it
involved potentially wide-ranging air strikes against 30 to 40 IS targets
across that country. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan -– US Special Operations
units and regular troops having recently been rushed
once again into embattled Helmand Province in the heartland of that
country’s opium poppy
trade – General Austen and others are calling
for a reconsideration of future American drawdowns and possibly the dispatch of
more troops
to that country.
Do you sense a trend here? In the
war against the Islamic State, the Obama administration and the Pentagon have
been engaged in the drip, drip, drip of what, in classic Vietnam terms, might
be called “mission creep.” They have been upping American troop levels a
few hundred at a time in Iraq and Syria, along with air power, and loosing
Special Operations forces in combat-like operations in both countries. Now,
it looks like top military commanders are calling for mission speed-up across
the region. (In Libya,
Somalia,
Iraq, and Afghanistan, it already seems to have begun.)
And keep in mind, watching campaign
2016, that however militaristic the solutions of the Pentagon and our generals,
they are regularly put in the shade by civilians, especially the Republican
candidates for president, who can barely restrain their eagerness to let
mission leap loose. As Donald Trump put it in the last Republican
debate, calling for up to 30,000 US boots on the ground in Syria and
Iraq, “I would listen to the generals.” That might now be the refrain all
American politicians are obliged to sing. Similarly, John Kasich called
for a new “shock and awe” campaign in the Middle East to “wipe them
out.” And that’s the way it’s been in debate season – including proposals
to put boots on the ground big time from Libya and possibly even the Sinai
peninsula to Afghanistan, bomb
the region back to the stone age, and torture
terror suspects in a fashion that would have embarrassed Stone Age
peoples.
Put another way, almost 15 years after
America’s global war on terror was launched, we face a deeply embedded (and
remarkably unsuccessful) American version of militarism and, as Gregory Foster
writes today, a massive crisis in civil-military relations that is seldom
recognized, no less discussed or debated. Gregory Foster, who teaches at National Defense University and is a decorated
Vietnam veteran, suggests that it’s time we finally ask: Whatever happened to
old-fashioned civilian control over the US military? Implicitly, he also
asks a second question: These days, who controls the civilians? Tom
Engelhardt
How civilian control
of the US military has become a fantasy
By Gregory D. Foster
Item:
Two US Navy patrol boats, with 10 sailors aboard, “stray” into Iranian
territorial waters, and are apprehended and held by Iranian revolutionary
guards, precipitating a 24-hour international incident involving negotiations
at the highest levels of government to secure their release. The Pentagon
offers conflicting reports on why this happened: navigational error, mechanical
breakdown, fuel depletion – but not intelligence-gathering, intentional
provocation, or hormonally induced hot-dogging.
Item:
The Pentagon, according to a Reuters exposé, has been consciously and
systematically engaged in thwarting White House efforts to close the Guantanamo
Bay detention facility and release cleared detainees. Pentagon officials have
repeatedly refused to provide basic documentation to foreign governments
willing to take those detainees and have made it increasingly difficult for
foreign delegations to visit Guantanamo to assess them. Ninety-one of the 779 detainees held there
over the years remain, 34 of whom have been cleared for release.
Item:
The Pentagon elects not to reduce General David Petraeus in rank, thereby
ensuring that he receives full, four-star retirement pay, after previously
being sentenced on misdemeanor charges to two years’ probation and a $100,000
fine for illegally passing highly classified material (a criminal offense) to
his mistress (adultery, ordinarily punishable under the Uniform Code of
Military Justice) and lying to FBI officials (a criminal offense). Meanwhile,
Private Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning continues to serve
a 35-year prison sentence, having been reduced to the Army’s lowest rank and
given a dishonorable discharge for providing classified documents to WikiLeaks
that included incriminating on-board videos of a 2007 Apache
helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed up to 18 civilians,
including two Reuters journalists, and wounded two children, and of a 2009 massacre in Afghanistan in
which a B-1 bomber killed as many as 147 civilians, reportedly including some
93 children.
What do these episodes have in common?
In their own way, they’re all symptomatic of an enduring crisis in
civil-military relations that afflicts the United States.
Hyperbolic though it may sound, it is
a crisis, though not like the Flint water crisis, or the international refugee
crisis, or the ISIS crisis, or the Zika crisis. It’s more like the climate
crisis, or a lymphoma or termite infestation that destroys from within,
unrecognized and unattended. And yes, it’s an enduring crisis, a state of
affairs that has been with us, unbeknownst to the public and barely
acknowledged by purported experts on the subject of civil-military relations,
for the past two decades or more. It’s
an enduring crisis, a state of affairs that has been with us, unbeknownst to
the public and barely acknowledged by purported experts on the subject of
civil-military relations, for the past two decades or more.
The essence of the situation begins, but
doesn’t end, with civilian control of the military, where direction, oversight,
and final decision-making authority reside with duly elected and appointed
civil officials. That’s a minimalist precondition for democracy. A more ideal version
of the relationship would be civilian supremacy, where there is civically
engaged public oversight of strategically competent executive oversight of a
willingly accountable, self-policing military.
What we have today, instead, is the
polar opposite: not civilian supremacy over, nor even civilian control of the
military, but what could be characterized as civilian subjugation to the
military, where civilian officials are largely militarily illiterate, more
militaristic than the military itself, advocates for – rather than overseers of
– the institution, and running scared politically (lest they be labeled weak on
defense and security).
That, then, is our lot today. Civilian
authorities are almost unequivocally deferential to established military preferences,
practices, and ways of thinking. The military itself, as the three “items”
above suggest, sets its own standards, makes and produces its own news, and
appropriates policy and policymaking for its own ends, whatever civilian
leadership may think or want. It is a demonstrably massive, self-propelled
institution increasingly central to American life, and what it says and wants
and does matters in striking ways. We would do well to consider the many faces
of civil-military relations today, especially in light of the role the military
has arrogated to itself.
A crisis appears and disappears
University of North Carolina historian
Richard Kohn raised the specter of a civil-military crisis in a 1994 National
Interest article
titled “Out of Control: The Crisis in Civil-Military Relations.” He focused on
the ill-disguised disdain of many in uniform for Commander-in-Chief Bill
Clinton, highlighting the particularly politicized behavior of Joint Chiefs of
Staff Chairman Colin Powell, who had spoken out in opposition to two prime
items on the Clinton agenda: intervention in the Balkans and gays in the
military. Typical of how the bounds of propriety had been crossed, Kohn also
alluded to the example of the Air Force major
general who, at a military gathering, contemptuously characterized
the president as “gay-loving,” “pot-smoking,” “draft-dodging,” and
“womanizing.”
Too alarmist for many pundits, Kohn’s
claim of a growing crisis gave way to the milder thought, advocated most
forcefully by journalist Tom Ricks,
that there was simply an increasing cultural, experiential, and ideological
“gap” between the military and society, a thesis that itself then went dormant
when George W. Bush entered office.
Those who profess expertise on
civil-military relations have tended to focus almost exclusively on civilian
control and the associated issue of the military’s political “neutrality.”
That’s why so much attention and controversy were generated over President
Obama’s highly publicized firing of General Stanley McChrystal for the climate
he created that led to the disparagement of senior Obama officials by his
subordinates (as reported in the 2010 Rolling Stone article
“The Runaway General”). Yet far bigger and more fundamental matters have gone
largely unnoticed.
Civil-military relations are built on a
tacit but binding social contract of mutual rights, obligations, and
expectations among the military, its civilian overseers (executive and
legislative), and society. Four things are expected of the military as part of
this compact: operational competence, sound advice, political neutrality, and
social responsibility. Operational competence and social responsibility are
rarely even part of the discussion and yet they go to the heart of the crisis
that exists, pointing both to the outsized presence of the military in American
life and statecraft, and to a disturbingly pervasive pattern of misconduct over
time among those in uniform.
The failure of
operational competence
If we enjoyed a truly healthy state of
civil-military relations, it would be characterized by a strategically – not
just a militarily – effective force. By implication, such a military would be
capable of successfully accomplishing whatever it is called upon to do. The
military we have today is, arguably, ineffective not only militarily but
demonstrably strategically as well. It doesn’t prevent wars; it doesn’t win
wars; and it certainly doesn’t secure and preserve the peace.
No, the military doesn’t prevent wars.
At any given time over the past quarter century, on average roughly 40 violent
conflicts a year have been under way around the world. The US
military has had virtually no discernible influence on lessening the outbreak
of such conflicts. It isn’t even clear that its size, configuration, and
positioning, no less the staggering sums invested in it, have had any
appreciable deterrent effect on the warring propensities of our so-called peer
competitors (Russia and China). That they have not sought war with us is due
far less to simplistic Washington assumptions about deterrence than to factors
we don’t even grasp.
And no, the military doesn’t win wars
any more. It hasn’t won one of note in 70 years. The dirty wars in the shadows
it now regularly fights are intrinsically unwinnable, especially given our
preferred American Way of War: killing people and breaking things as lethally,
destructively, and overwhelmingly as possible. It’s an approach – a state of
mind – still largely geared to a different type of conflict from an era now
long since past and to those classic generals who are always preparing for the
last war.
That’s why today’s principal adversaries
have been so uniformly effective in employing asymmetric methods as a form of
strategic jujitsu to turn our presumed strengths into crippling weaknesses.
Instead of a strategically effective
military, what we have is quite the opposite: heavy, disproportionately
destructive, indiscriminately lethal, single-mindedly combat-oriented,
technology-dominant, exorbitantly expensive, unsustainably consumptive, and
increasingly alienated from the rest of society. Just as important, wherever it
goes, it provokes and antagonizes where it should reassure and thereby
invariably fathers the mirror image of itself in others.
Not surprisingly, the military today
doesn’t secure and preserve peace, a concept no longer evident in Washington’s
store of know-how. Those in uniform and in positions of civilian authority who
employ the military subscribe almost universally and uncritically to the
inherently illogical maxim that if you want peace, you had best prepare for
war. The result is that the force being prepared (even engorged) feeds and nurtures
pervasive militarism – the primacy of, preference for, and deference to
military solutions in the conduct of statecraft. Where it should provide security,
it instead produces only self-defeating insecurity.
Consider just five key areas where
military preferences override civilian ones and accentuate all manner of
insecurity in the process.
Rapacious defense
spending: The US military budget exceeds that of
the next 10
countries combined, as well as of the gross domestic products of all
but 20 countries.
At 54% of federal discretionary spending, it surpasses all other discretionary
accounts combined, including government, education, Medicare, veterans’
benefits, housing, international affairs, energy and the environment,
transportation, and agriculture. Thanks to the calculations of the National
Priorities Project, we know that the total cost of American war
since 2001 – $1.6 trillion – would have gotten us 19.5 million Head Start slots
for 10 years or paid for 2.2 million elementary school teachers for a decade. A
mere 1% of the defense budget for one year – just over $5 billion – would pay
for 152,000 four-year university scholarships or 6,342 police officers for 10
years. What we spend on nuclear weapons alone each year – $19.3 billion – would
cover a decade of low-income healthcare for 825,000 children or 549,000 adults.
Promiscuous arms
sales: The United States remains by far the
world’s leading proliferator of conventional arms, accounting for some 50% of
all global sales and 48% of all sales to the developing world. During the
2011-2014 period alone, US weapons deliveries included a wide array of advanced
weapons technologies: 104 tanks and self-propelled guns, 230 artillery pieces,
419 armored personnel vehicles, 48 supersonic aircraft and 58 other aircraft,
835 surface-to-air missiles, and 144 anti-ship missiles, much of that to the
volatile Middle East. Skeptics would say that such transactions are motivated
less by an urge to enable recipient countries to defend themselves than by the
desire to buy influence abroad while aiding and abetting arms manufacturers at
home. The result of such massive sales is, of course, the creation of yet more
instability where stability should be.
Garrisoning the
planet: The military maintains up to 800 bases
in more than 70 countries and stations more than 200,000
active-duty personnel in some 150 countries. This global presence
represents the geostrategic equivalent of Parkinson’s law: operational and
social entanglements expanding exponentially to fill the space created by these
far-flung outposts.
The nuclear black
hole: The military remains the permanent
keeper and executor of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal:
an estimated 4,700 nuclear warheads on some 800 delivery systems, as well as
another 2,340 “retired” but still intact and presumably usable warheads. A
three-decade, trillion-dollar
upgrade of this already monstrous arsenal is now underway. The Economist
has called
this Washington’s “unkicked addiction.”
It should be clear, but apparently
isn’t, that these are weapons of disuse. Other than for destroying the planet
if used, their only value is as a measure of muscularity against mirror-image
peers. They deter nothing at other levels of muscle-flexing but do feed an
insatiable thirst for emulation among jealous non-possessors of such weaponry.
Spurning the rule of
law: Though the US regularly espouses and
pretends to practice the rule of law, administration after administration has
chosen to forswear important international
agreements for parochial, largely military reasons. Among those not
even signed are the 1969 Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory
Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, the 1997 Ottawa Mine Ban
Treaty, the 2002 Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture, the 2006
International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced
Disappearance, and the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions. Among those
Washington has signed but not ratified are the 1977 Protocols I and II to the
Geneva Conventions, the 1994 Convention on the Safety of United Nations and Associated
Personnel, the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the 1997 Kyoto
Protocol, and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Add to
this list the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, ratified in 1972, from which
the US withdrew in 2002. Then there are agreements to which the US is a party,
but which we nonetheless choose to ignore or circumvent, wholly or in part.
These include the 1928 Kellogg-Briand General Treaty
for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy; the 1968 Treaty on
the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (Article VI
of which states: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue
negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the
nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty
on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international
control”); and the United Nations Convention
against Torture and selected provisions of the Geneva
Conventions. (We don’t do prisoners of war; we do “unlawful enemy
combatants.” We don’t do torture; we do “enhanced interrogation.” And of course
we don’t engage in other illegalities, like “extraordinary rendition” or
targeted killing or the use of black sites where hostile parties can be
disappeared.)
Militarizing America’s
world – at home and abroad
Added to the foregoing excesses are many
examples of what we might call organizational hypertrophy. Institutions like
the military are, by nature, self-selecting, self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating
constellations of values and practices that generate their own realities and
can rarely be disestablished once born. As at Hotel California, you can check
out any time you like, but you can never leave.
Of particular note in the post-9/11
world is our bloated intelligence apparatus of 16 separate
agencies, nine of which are military organizations (if you count
Coast Guard Intelligence). Most notably, there is the National Security Agency
(NSA), always commanded by a general or admiral who now also heads up the US
Cyber Command. NSA’s massive surveillance culture and capabilities foreshadow a
totalizing new-age cyber warfare regime guaranteed to completely redefine
traditional notions of aggression, self-defense, sovereignty, and territorial
integrity in hair-trigger terms.
The military itself has nine combatant commands,
six of which are regional and divvy up the planet accordingly. Except for NATO,
there are no regional ambassadors, so the face we show to the world, region by
region, is military – and combatant – not diplomatic. Even the “homeland” now has its own combatant command, the US Northern Command.
In tandem with the “civilian” Department of Homeland Security, it has produced
the militarization of the domestic front. Even the “homeland” now has its own combatant command, the US Northern
Command. In tandem with the “civilian” Department of Homeland Security, it has
produced the militarization of the domestic front, dispensed with historical
border sensitivities vis-à-vis Canada and Mexico, magnified concerns about
civil liberties, and fed a permanent state of paranoia and alarm among the
public about both illegal immigration and terrorism.
US Special Operations Command
Special attention also must be given to
the massive expansion of US Special Operations Command, once a modest cohort of
elite specialists, into a force now larger than the militaries of many
countries. Its ostensible raison d'être is waging permanent “war”
against terrorism.
The growing presence of and preference
for using special
operations forces globally ought to command the attention of anyone
concerned with civil-military relations. Each armed service has a special
operations command, as does each combatant command, including Northern Command.
Estimates
are that special operations personnel already number
or are expected
to number around 70,000 (roughly the equivalent of four and a half Army
divisions). This provides an almost infinite amount of potential space for
meddling and “mission creep” abroad and at home due, in part, to the
increasingly blurred lines between military, intelligence, police, and internal
security functions.
Of the various ways the military could
be configured – for warfighting; peacekeeping, nation-building, humanitarian
assistance, and disaster response; or covert special operations – the last
poses by far the greatest threat to effective civilian control of the military.
An increasing reliance on and reverence for Special Operations Forces (SOFs)
only exacerbates already existing civilian deference to military preferences,
practices, and mindsets. Conducting a range of operations, from low-profile
assignments unknown to most Americans to secret missions beyond the bounds of
stringent congressional oversight, the very nature of SOF missions fosters a
military culture that is particularly destructive to accountability and proper
lines of responsibility. Especially in times of divided government, as at
present, when working around Congress is a preferred norm for getting things done,
the temptation to employ forces that can circumvent oversight without objection
is almost irresistible.
The failure of social
responsibility
As an institution, the military is
accorded carte blanche authority to possess and wield violence on behalf of the
state. It is also a mammoth social institution that reaches deep into American
society and many other societies worldwide. It thus is tacitly expected to
comport itself in a socially responsible manner and its members to demonstrate
professionalism in their conduct. And yet the pervasive, long-term misbehavior
of those in uniform is striking, even alarming. This is where civilian
subjugation to the military manifests itself most glaringly, and where the lack
of a willingly accountable, self-policing military comes most clearly into
view.
Each year for at least the past two
decades, literally hundreds of incidents have occurred that undermine any
claims the military might make to moral superiority: atrocities, corruption and
bribery, fraud and waste, sexual misconduct, cover-ups, racial and religious
persecution, and acts of cultural intolerance. Moral arrogance is in abundant
supply among those in uniform, genuine moral superiority in short supply. To
cite just a small sample of such incidents from the recent past:
* The continuing “Fat Leonard”
scandal that involved an exchange of bribes, gifts, and prostitutes
for classified information on ship movements, implicating at least seven
officers and officials and leading to the censure of three rear admirals.
* The ongoing Army National Guard recruiting fraud
and kickback scandal involving thousands of soldiers and tens of
millions of dollars in illegal payments.
* The four-star former
head of US Africa Command, reduced in rank and forced to pay
restitution for lavish spending of public funds on private business; the three-star
former deputy nuclear force commander who used counterfeit poker
chips at a casino; the two-star
commander of the ICBM force who went on a drunken binge and insulted
Russian counterparts at a joint exercise; the one-star
commander of Fort Jackson, South Carolina, relieved of duty for
adultery and physically assaulting his mistress; the one-star
assistant division commander of the “elite” 82nd Airborne Division,
fined $20,000 and reduced in rank for multiple affairs and other sexual
misconduct; and the one-star
commander of special operations forces in Latin America, relieved of
command and reduced in rank for drunken altercations.
* The forced resignation of the under secretary
of the Navy over a scandal in which the brother of a naval
intelligence official billed the military $1.6 million for weapons silencers
that cost only $8,000 to manufacture.
* The proficiency exam cheating
scandals that implicated several dozen Air Force and Navy nuclear weapons
personnel.
* The Army staff
sergeant, sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering 16 civilians
and wounding six others in Afghanistan.
* The Army staff
sergeant, also sentenced to life imprisonment, and five other
soldiers who, as part of a “thrill kill” unit, murdered three Afghan civilians
for sport and took their body parts as trophies.
* The Rolling Stone exposé
of the Special Forces A-Team that allegedly “disappeared” 10 men and murdered
eight others in Afghanistan.
* The video of four Marines
urinating on dead Afghan bodies, alleged to be Taliban fighters.
* The photos of 82nd Airborne Division soldiers posing
with body parts of dead Afghan insurgents.
* The burning of as many as 100 Korans
and other religious texts by American troops in Afghanistan.
* The unceasing surfeit of sexual assault
reports in the military (22,000 between 2010 and 2014).
Such episodes aren’t, of course, only of
recent vintage. Walking the calendar back a few years reminds us of many other
similar examples:
* 2011: the suicides of Marine Lance
Corporal Harry Lew
and Army Private Danny Chen
after hazing and harassment by fellow soldiers.
* 2010: the Khataba raid
in Afghanistan in which Army Rangers killed five civilians, including two
pregnant women and a teenage girl.
* 2009: the massive sex scandal at Lackland Air
Force Base, in which 43 female trainees were subjected to sexual
predation by instructors.
* 2008: revelations about a Pentagon military analyst program
in which retired senior officers working as news commentators received special
access to insider briefings and information in return for publicly promoting
Bush administration policies.
* 2007: a US Naval Academy
scandal involving a Navy doctor secretly videotaping midshipmen
engaged in sex acts; a Walter Reed Army
Medical Center scandal involving extensive patient neglect and execrable
living conditions; and revelations concerning massive Iraq War contracting
fraud, bribery, and kickbacks totaling $15 million.
* 2006: the rape and killing
of a 14-year-old girl and the murder of her family by five Army soldiers in
Mahmudiyah, Iraq; the murder
of an Iraqi man in Hamdania, Iraq, with associated kidnapping, obstruction of
justice, and conspiracy, by seven Marines and a Navy corpsman; and the relief
of the USS Enterprise
captain for producing and showing sexually explicit and offensive
videos on board.
* 2005: the massacre of 24 Iraqi men,
women and children by Marines in Haditha, Iraq,
and the associated cover-up in which all criminal charges were dismissed; and
the Pentagon’s planting
of stories favorable to the war effort in the Iraqi press.
* 2004: the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman
and the tragedy’s associated cover-up, extending up the chain of command to the
Pentagon.
* 2003: massive acts of prisoner sexual
abuse, torture, rape, sodomy, and murder by Army personnel at Abu Ghraib
prison in Iraq.
* 2002: the deaths of two unarmed civilian
Afghan prisoners, who had been chained to the ceiling and beaten by
US troops, at the Bagram internment facility in Afghanistan.
All of this is but the tiniest tip of
the military misbehavior iceberg, a sample of countless incidents that have
regularly occurred over an extended period of time. Remember the Tailhook
sexual assault scandal, the Aberdeen
sex scandal, the Camp Lejeune
water contamination scandal, the Cavalese cable
car disaster, the firing and reduction in rank of the sergeant major
of the Army for sexual misconduct, the murder of Private First Class
Barry Winchell,
the discharge of Air Force Lieutenant Kelly Flinn?
Such a tidal wave of ethical breakdowns
can’t be dismissed as mere exceptions to the rule or deviations from the norm.
Institutional defenders nonetheless persist in claiming that such incidents
represent the actions of a few bad apples in an otherwise healthy cultural
barrel. In this, they are simply wrong, yet their positions are eternally
bolstered by the fact that annual opinion polls
of public trust and confidence in society’s institutions invariably place the
military at or near the top of the list.
What is to be done?
To this question – What is to be done? –
there is no easy answer, perhaps no answer at all. Part of the reason is that
the underlying crisis in civil-military relations has gone largely
unrecognized, unacknowledged, and unaddressed for decades now. A first step,
therefore, might simply be to break the bonds of denial and admit that there is
a problem.
A second step – admittedly a far march
onto an unknown planet – would be to encourage serious, thoroughgoing
institutional self-reflection from both the military and civilian authorities.
This would, of course, mean facing up to those facets of military culture that
warrant reengineering: aggression, intolerance, authoritarianism, parochialism,
congenital secrecy, and pronounced anti-intellectualism among them. It would
also mean acknowledging the numerous myths that have come to define the
institution over time – for example, that the military nurtures and rewards
leadership (rather than dutiful followership); that it instills discipline
(rather than indiscipline); that it exemplifies competence and efficiency
(rather than incompetence and inefficiency); that it is committed to
accountability (rather than cover-ups and secrecy); and that its members,
especially at senior levels, regularly demonstrate moral courage (rather than
moral cowardice).
A third step would involve a concerted
educational effort, inside and outside the institution, to enhance strategic
thinking, ethical thinking, and civic literacy (especially, but not
exclusively, among those in uniform).
A fourth step – ultimately the most
fundamental and paradigm-shattering, as well as the least likely to occur –
would be to reconsider the very purpose and function of the military and to
reorient it accordingly. That would mean transforming a cumbersome, stagnant,
obsolescent, irrelevant warfighting force – with its own inbuilt
self-corrupting qualities -– into a peacekeeping, nation-building,
humanitarian-assistance, disaster-response force far more attuned to a future
it helps shape and far more strategically effective than what we now have.
Translated, counterintuitive as it might sound, this would mean seeking to
demilitarize the military, an overarching strategic imperative if bona fide
lasting peace is ever to be achieved on this planet.
Humpty Dumpty
posed the question to Alice in Through the Looking Glass of whether
words are to be the masters of men or men the masters of words by determining
their meaning. Similarly must we ask whether an institution, the military,
supposedly endowed with supernal character by objective circumstances, is to
master us, or we to master it by determining for ourselves what it properly is
and does.
This piece, including Tom Engelhardt's intro, is reposted
from TomDispatch.com , published on March
15, 2016, with that site's permission.