DISPATCH FROM
AMERICA Sucking up to the military
brass By William J Astore
Few things have characterized the
post-9/11 American world more in the United States
than our worshipful embrace of our generals.
They've become our heroes, our sports stars, and
our celebrities all rolled into one. We can't stop
gushing about them.
Even after his recent
fall from grace, General David Petraeus was still
being celebrated by CNN as the best US general since
Dwight D Eisenhower (and
let's not forget that Ike commanded the largest
amphibious invasion in history and held a
fractious coalition together in a total war
against Nazi Germany). Before his fall from grace,
Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal
was similarly lauded as one tough customer, a sort
of superman-saint.
Petraeus and McChrystal
crashed and burned for the same underlying reason:
hubris. McChrystal became cocky and his staff
contemptuous of civilian authority; Petraeus came
to think he really could have it all, the
super-secret job and the super-sexy mistress. An
ideal of selfless service devolved into
self-indulgent preening in a wider US culture
all-too-eager to raise its star generals into the
pantheon of Caesars and Napoleons, and its troops
into the halls of Valhalla.
The
English used to say of US troops in World War II
that they were "overpaid, over-sexed, and over
here". Now we're overhyped, oversold, and over
there, wherever "there" might happen to be in a
constantly shifting, perpetual war on terror.
In
our particular drama, generals may well be the
actors who strut and fret their hour upon the
stage, but their directors are the national
security complex and associated politicians, their
producers the military-industrial complex's
corporate handlers, and their agents a war-junky
media. And we, the audience in the cheap seats,
must take some responsibility as well.
Even
when our military adventures spiral down after a
promising opening week, the enthusiastic applause
the American public has offered to our celebrity
military adventurers and the lack of pressure on
the politicians who choose to fund them only serve
to keep bullets flying and troops dying.
It's not that generals suck,
it's that we suck up to them Recent scandals involving
some of our top brass have one virtue: they've
encouraged a smidgeon of debate on things
military. The main problem isn't that our generals
suck, though one might indeed come to that
conclusion after reading two recent high-profile
articles. In the New York Times, Lucian Truscott
IV dismissed General Petraeus and similar
"strutting military peacocks" as phony heroes in
phony wars. What we need, he suggested, is not
"imitation generals" like Petraeus, but ruthless
nail-spitters like his grandfather, General Lucian
K Truscott Jr, of World War II fame.
Tom
Ricks, formerly the Washington Post's chief
military columnist and himself a fan of Petraeus,
was more circumspect if no less critical. In a
probing article in the Atlantic, based on his new
book, The Generals, he
argued that the US military has failed to reward
virtuosity and punish deficiency. Combine an
undiscriminating command structure that gives
every general a gold star with their constant
rotation in and out of command billets and you
have a recipe for "a shocking degree of
mediocrity" among the Army's top leaders.
Such
criticism comes as welcome relief after nearly a
decade worth of hagiography that marched into our
lives alongside Petraeus (once known sardonically
among some Army colleagues as "King David" or in
the media as the one man who could "save" Iraq)
and McChrystal (a "one of a kind",
"battle-hardened" Spartan ascetic, according to a
glowing 60 Minutes
profile in September 2009). But it doesn't go
nearly far enough.
Generals behaving badly
aren't the heart of the problem, only a symptom of
the rot. The recent peccadilloes of Petraeus et
al. are a reminder that these men never were the
unbesmirched "heroes" so many imagined them to be.
They were always the product of a
military-industrial complex deeply invested in
war, abetted by a media as in bed with them as
Paula Broadwell, and a cheerleading citizenry that
came to worship all things military even as it
went about its otherwise unwarlike business.
Pruning a few bad apples from
the upper branches of the military tree is going
to do little enough when the rot extends to root
and branch. Required is more radical surgery if
the US is to avoid ongoing debilitating conflicts
and the disintegration of our democracy.
Too many generals spoil the
democracy A simple
first step toward radical surgery would certainly
involve cutting the number of generals and
admirals at least in half.
America's military is
astonishingly top heavy, with 945 generals and
admirals on active duty as of March 2012. That's
one flag-rank officer for every 1,500 officers and
enlisted personnel. With one general for every
1,000 airmen, the Air Force is the worst offender,
but the Navy and Army aren't far behind. For
example, the Army has 10 active-duty divisions -
and 109 major generals to command them. Between
September 2001 and April 2011, the military
actually added another 93 generals and admirals to
its ranks (including 37 of the three- or four-star
variety).
The glut extends to the ranks
of full colonel (or, in the Navy, captain). The
Air Force has roughly 100 active-duty combat wings
- and 3,712 colonels to command them. The Navy has
285 ships - and 3,335 captains to command them.
Indeed, today's Navy has nearly as many admirals
(245 as of March 2012) as ships.
Any
high-ranking officer worth his or her salt wants
to command, but this glut has contributed to their
rapid rotation in and out of command - five Afghan
war commanders in five years, for instance -
disrupting any hopes for command continuity. The
situation also breeds cutthroat competition for
prestige slots and allows patterns of me-first
careerism to flourish.
Such
a dynamic leads to mediocrity rather than
excellence. Yet one area in which the brass does
excel is fighting to preserve their bloated slots,
despite regular efforts by civilian secretaries of
defense to trim them.
Still, such pruning isn't
faintly enough. A 50% cut may seem unkind, but
don't spend your time worrying about demobbed
generals queuing up for unemployment checks.
Clutching their six-figure pensions, most of them
would undoubtedly speed through the Pentagon's
golden revolving door onto the corporate boards
of, or into consultancies with, various armaments
manufacturers and influence peddlers, as 70% of
three- and four-star retirees have in fact done in
recent years.
Even a 50% cut would still
leave approximately 470 active-duty generals and
admirals to cheer on. Perhaps they should be
formed into their own beribboned battalion and
sent to war. Heck, the Spartans held the Persians
off at Thermopylae with a mere 300 fighters.
Nearly 500 pissed-off generals and admirals might
just be the shock troops needed to "surge" again
in Afghanistan.
Of
proconsuls, imperators, and the end of
democracy In Roman
times, a proconsul was a military ruler of
imperial territories, a man with privileges as
sweeping as his powers. Today's four-star generals
and admirals - there are 38 of them - often have
equivalent powers, and the perks to go with them.
Executive jets on call. Large retinues. Personal
servants. Private chefs.
Such
power and privilege corrupts. It leads to General
Petraeus, then head of Central Command, being
escorted to a private party in Florida by a 28-cop
motorcade. It leads to General William Ward, the
head of US Africa Command, spending lavishly and
so abusing his position that he was demoted and
forced into retirement. It leads to generals being
so disconnected from their troops that they think
nothing of sending a trove of flirtatious emails
to a starry-eyed socialite.
Disturbing as their personal
behavior may be, the real problem is that
America's four-star proconsuls are far more
powerful than our civilian ambassadors and
foreign-service members. Whether in Afghanistan,
Africa, or Washington, the military controls the
lion's share of the money and resources. That, in
turn, means its proconsuls end up dictating
foreign policy based on a timeless golden rule:
"He who has the gold makes the rules."
Think
of those proconsuls as the prodigal sons of a
sprawling American empire. In their fiefdoms, vast
sums of money can be squandered or simply go
missing, as can vast quantities of weapons. Recall
those pallets of $100-bills that magically
disappeared in Iraq (to the tune of $18 billion).
Or the magical disappearance of 190,000 AK-47s and
pistols in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, representing 30%
of the weapons the US provided to Iraqi security
forces. Or the tens of thousands of assault
rifles, machine guns, and rocket launchers
provided to Afghan security forces that magically
disappeared in 2009 and 2010.
Such scandals in US war zones
should surprise no one. After all, noting that the
Pentagon couldn't account for $2.3 trillion (yes -
that's trillion) in spending, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld declared a war on waste. Good
intentions, bad timing. The declaration came on
September 10, 2001. A global war on terror
followed, further engorging the
military-industrial-homeland-security-intelligence
complex with nearly a $1 trillion a year for the
next decade, while it morphed into the blob that
ate Washington.
Whether in money, personnel,
or the prestige and power it commands, the
Pentagon simply blows away the State Department
and similar government agencies. Sheltered within
cocoons of compliance (due to the constant stoking
of America's fears) and adulation (due to the
widespread militarization of American culture),
our proconsuls go unchallenged unless they behave
very badly indeed.
Put simply, Americans need to
stop genuflecting to our paper Caesars before we
actually produce a real one, a man ruthless enough
to cross the Rubicon (or the Potomac) and parlay
total military adulation into the five stars of
absolute political authority.
Unless we wish to salute our
very own Imperator, we need to regain a healthy
dose of skepticism, shared famously by our
Founders, when it comes to evaluating our generals
and our wars. Such skepticism may not stop
generals and admirals from behaving badly, but it
just might help us radically downsize an ever-more
militarized global mission and hew more closely to
our democratic ideals.
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