The dangers of a US civil-military
divide By Sadi Baig
In an
interview with Time magazine in December 2001,
second-time US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
recollected a conversation he had with President George
W Bush during the early days of his administration. "A
lot of people in the world had come to conclude that the
United States was gun-shy, that we were risk-averse,"
Rumsfeld told Time. "The president and I concluded that
whenever it occurred down the road that the United
States was under some sort of threat or attack, the
United States would be leaning forward, not back."
These comments were not merely a criticism of
former president Bill Clinton's cautious approach to the
use of force but, more important, a veiled challenge to
the mode of thinking the US military had adopted from
the lessons it had learned in Vietnam. Summarized
famously in the doctrine named after its author, General
Colin Powell, it stated: "Have a clear political
objective and stick to it. Use all the force necessary,
and do not apologize for going in big if that's what it
takes. Decisive force ends wars quickly and in the long
run saves lives."
The doctrine was a reflection
of a consensus within the military leadership that
emerged toward the end of the Vietnam conflict. Writing
in his memoirs, Powell lamented: "Our senior officers
knew the war was going badly. They bowed to groupthink
pressure and kept up pretenses, the phony measure of
body counts, the comforting illusions of secure hamlets,
the inflated progress reports. As a corporate entity,
the military failed to talk straight to its political
superiors or to itself. The top leadership never went to
the secretary of defense or the president and [say],
'This war is unwinnable the way we are fighting it.'"
Powell went on to add: "Many of my generation, the
career captains, majors and lieutenant-colonels seasoned
in that war, vowed that when our turn came to call the
shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in half-hearted
warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people
could not understand or support."
By promoting
the Powell Doctrine, the US military had quietly
negotiated with its civilian leadership the power to
decide whether a certain situation justified the
application of its destructive power. This encroachment
of military influence over civilian authority did not
recede with Operation Desert Storm in 1991, despite its
spectacular success, as the war was fought with the
Powell Doctrine at its core. Characterized by his
brusque and threatening style, a secretive Rumsfeld set
out to undo the Powell Doctrine and restore civilian
supremacy over the most serious business a state can
conduct: war.
So how successful has Rumsfeld
been in overwriting this institutional memory with a
competing doctrine of "agile" forces fighting
"preemptive" wars? Furthermore, what has been the affect
of such attempts on the US civil-military relationship?
Despite its monopoly over unparalleled physical
power, the US military's subordination to civilian rule
is deep-rooted. It has seen its ups and downs, but the
military has never been disobedient to the civilian
leadership. In such a situation, the quality of the
relationship between civilian policymakers and the
military leadership cannot be measured in terms of
coups. It can, however, be measured in terms of who
prevails in a situation where there are competing
preferences. Iraq is a case in point.
Even
before it began, the Iraq war had been highly unpopular
with the military. Retired military brass such as
General Norman Schwarzkopf and the erudite "warrior
diplomat" General Anthony Zinni voiced their opposition
early on. In-service generals such as Eric Shinseki
implicitly questioned the tenability of the postwar
occupation. Although there were no op-eds written by the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as Powell did
during the Bosnia crisis, there was widespread dissent
within the ranks. Riding high on the wave of popular
support and energized by the overthrow of the Taliban in
Afghanistan, the Bush administration subjectively
dismissed such concerns and dragged an unwilling US
military into a war in Iraq. The civilian leadership had
prevailed.
The rapid collapse of Saddam
Hussein's regime in the face of US military might was
predictable. So was the insurgency that has since proved
quite resilient. The worst fears of the military have
come true. April marked a violent upsurge in highly
coordinated insurgent attacks on multiple fronts, with
the military gasping to control a creeping
counter-insurgency situation. With each passing day the
perils of a prolonged occupation in an overtly hostile
environment look starker, its sustainability in greater
question. It is in such circumstances that the Iraq
prison-torture scandal broke out.
The torture
scandal marked a turning point in US domestic support
for the Iraq war. It is hard to believe the possibility
of the report by Major-General Antonio Taguba being
leaked without a nod from the army's top brass. This is
lent credence by revelations in the press of an
unprecedented visit of officials from the Judge Advocate
General's office, the judicial arm of the US military,
to human rights lawyers in New York earlier in the year.
They complained about how the military's judicial
oversight arm trained in international law such as the
Geneva Conventions was shut out, and politically
appointed civilian lawyers were employed in their place
to dilute the application of such laws. In an article
titled "Dissension grows in senior ranks on war
strategy" in the Washington Post of May 28, an unnamed
senior general was quoted as saying: "It is doubtful we
can go on much longer like this. The American people may
not stand for it - and they should not." Predictably, in
the post-Taguba environment, the Bush administration can
no longer claim unstinting public support for its
involvement in Iraq.
Such an extreme step where
military personnel take their case outside the confines
of the political leadership, and right into the hands of
vociferous opponents of the administration, is telling.
It signals a sense of exasperation bordering on
hostility. To them, rightly or wrongly, Rumsfeld's view
of the modern US military is less about a lean and
"agile" fighting force equipped with the right
technologies, and more about subjective assertion of
civilian will in pursuance of dubious policies, even if
it means overriding established military procedures and
affecting cohesion. In the same Washington Post article,
an unnamed young general is quoted as saying: "Like a
lot of senior army guys, I'm quite angry" with Rumsfeld
and the rest of the Bush administration. He listed two
reasons. "One is I think they are going to break the
army." But what really incited him, he said, was "I
don't think they care."
Arguably, this is the
lowest point in US civil-military relations since Robert
McNamara was defense secretary in the days of the
Vietnam War.
The political leadership of the
United States, despite existing norms of its supremacy
over the military, cannot push it beyond a certain point
without risking a severe deterioration in the
relationship - a relationship that is all the more
crucial in maintaining preeminence of US power in the
world today. In the dichotomy of US civilian power,
where the executive lays out policies, and the
legislature exercises influence on their implementation
through various oversight committees, the military sees
an opportunity to address its concerns by appealing to
one to affect the other. Samuel Huntington laments this
disunity of civilian power for the same reason. But
ironically, it is this dichotomy between the legislature
and the executive that serves as an important pressure
valve in preserving civilian control over the military.
Increasing pressure from key legislators on the
executive belonging to its own political party indicates
their concern of the military's unease with ongoing
national policy and can be a harbinger of change.
Lately, the pressure from senators heading key
committees has shown a steady rise. Departing from
normal committee practice, the chairman of the powerful
Armed Services Committee, Senator John Warner, put all
Iraq prison-torture inquiry witnesses under oath,
including the secretary of defense, who was reportedly
quite irked by this show of assertion. A veteran of
World War II and the Korean War, Warner is an
ex-secretary of the navy from the Richard Nixon era. "I
have a tremendous obligation to the military," he
recently proclaimed in a Washington Post interview.
The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
committee, Richard Lugar, has mounted his own rear guard
on the Bush administration by openly questioning the
soundness of the scheduled June 30 handover of
"sovereignty" to Iraq. In a recent speech at Tufts
University, the Indiana senator lashed out at the lack
of a coherent political strategy behind use of military
force: "The United States must assign US economic and
diplomatic capabilities the same strategic priority that
we assign to military capabilities." At one point in his
speech, he made a startling remark: "Military action
will often breed more terrorists and more resentment of
the United States."
The US military evidently
feels that it has achieved all that it could in Iraq. It
wants to declare victory and lower its level of
engagement. It does not want to be left fighting a war
of attrition, long after the appeal of its protean
justifications have worn off. Major-General Charles
Swannack was quoted in the Washington Post as saying: "I
think strategically, we are [losing the war]."
One thing is therefore clear. Regardless of the
outcome, the effects of the Iraq conflict on US
civil-military relations will be felt for long in their
ability to reinforce rather than diminish the lessons
the US military learned in the battlefields of Vietnam.
No clear exit strategy, no war.
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