From The Washington Monthly:
Hawks for Dissent
A pro-Iraq war ex-soldier defends the generals who took on Rumsfeld.
By Ralph Peters
Pop quiz: Who was our secretary of war--the closest figure we had to a secretary of defense--in 1942? Too hard? Then who was FDR's trusted adviser on how to wage the Second World War?
The secretary of war was Henry L. Stimson. But it is General George C. Marshall whom we remember, the man who shaped a war-winning strategy and then went on to win the peace with the Marshall Plan. Secretary Stimson's performance was competent and constructive, but he did not interfere with military operations. By contrast, everyone remembers that Robert S. McNamara was the secretary of defense as the Vietnam war went awry, but few could name the nation's most senior military officers in any given year of that conflict.
Unpalatable as it may be to those raised on Oliver Stone's reinvention of history, the truth is that our nation's most successful wartime partnerships have been between presidents and generals: Lincoln and Grant, Wilson and Pershing, FDR and Marshall. Such professional, non-political relationships brought us a remarkable century of victories, from Mexico City to Tokyo Bay.
Thereafter, the miserable road to Saigon--and Baghdad--was paved with the best intentions. Six decades ago, the National Security Act of 1947 inserted buffers between presidents and their top military men, leading immediately to a series of military debacles or, at best, stalemates. Instead of Marshall speaking--respectfully but frankly--to FDR, we got McNamara huddling with LBJ and, now, Donald Rumsfeld, who never saw combat, interpreting warfare to a president who never saw combat. Instead of making battlefield decisions based upon military necessity, the rise of powerful secretaries of defense resulted in combat decisions based upon political expediency.
Defense secretaries, not dissident retired generals, have politicized our national security. As for the recently invented "requirement" for retired officers to remain silent and apolitical, would we really like to strike George Washington and Dwight D. Eisenhower from our history books? After all, it was Eisenhower, the former soldier, who warned us so presciently of the military-industrial complex, while secretaries of defense--one after another--merely shoveled money into its maw.
The Goldwater-Nichols Act, an echo of Vietnam, was supposed to guarantee unfiltered military advice to the president. It didn't work. The elaborate superstructure of the contemporary presidency, with its many gatekeepers, excludes the nation's senior military leaders from the frequent, intimate, and unconstrained contact with the president that served us so well in the past. Too much has been delegated: While the president has the indisputable right to dismiss military leaders (as Lincoln certainly had to do), he also has the duty to study the professional advice of those who will lead our troops into battle before overruling it. With the approval of Congress (and increasingly without it), the president makes our strategic decisions, but it is his obligation to the American people to make informed decisions.
Today, however, our presidents do not hear unvarnished, de-politicized military advice, and the situation has never been graver than under the current administration. Presidential interviews with generals are essentially pre-scripted, with vetted talking points--political courtiers control access to the president and determine what the president will hear. Only the president himself could change the situation by demanding to hear a range of military views (without commissars at the shoulders of the generals). President George W. Bush, who has chosen war as a policy tool, may be the American president most isolated from sound military advice.
Brass Attacks
At least six retired combat commanders have now gone public with the sort of technical--not political--criticism I've heard for years in private conversations with our generals. None of the critics has anything to gain personally. Indeed, each has much to lose by speaking out against any aspect of the most vindictive presidential administration since the Nixon era. Dissenters are automatically blackballed from the lucrative defense industry jobs that corrode the ethics of retired senior officer and they'll never be offered plum posts in any future administration, Republican or Democrat. In addition, they've had to undergo savage and dishonest personal attacks in the media from support-the-administration-at-all-costs conservative columnists, from retired officers who draw their paychecks from a defense industry that has plentiful reasons to be grateful to Donald Rumsfeld, and from serving officers promoted by the secretary of defense--not least the chairman of the joint chiefs, Gen. Peter Pace--who are not supposed to take public political positions, but who have nonetheless been slavish in their praise of Rumsfeld.
Remarkably, our gotcha media have given Rumsfeld's high-ranking uniformed supporters a pass while falling for the red-herring issue of civilian control of our military. Nor have our media investigated the defense industry and Bush administration ties of the retired officers who appear as television talking heads or write op-eds condemning the critical retirees. Were reporters or broadcast producers to do the slightest legwork (or keyboard work), they would uncover blatant conflicts of interest--it's as if a talk-show host interviewed an oil-industry executive on the rising price of gasoline without revealing his corporate allegiance.
The crucial issue, though, is the bogus charge of insubordination threatening the good order of civil-military relations. It's a spurious claim that has nonetheless been embraced uncritically by the orthodox on both the left and right. Instead of being alarmed that former soldiers--with no political ties or agendas--searched their consciences then went public with their criticism of a notoriously imperious defense secretary, we should celebrate the fact. Each of these men played by the rules, retiring before speaking out. None prejudiced good order. Not one stands to profit from his courage (quite the contrary).
If former officers cannot speak out on complex military issues, to whom can we turn for expert advice? To politicians who never deigned to serve in uniform themselves? To pundits equally lacking in military experience? To defense industry publicists? Surely, lifelong expertise should hold some value in our specialized society.
Note: Continue reading at:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0606.peters.html
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