Page 2 of 2 US MILITARY BREAKS RANKS, Part 2 Troops felled by a 'trust gap'
By Mark Perry
say, mask his steely intent to become one of the most influential JCS chairman
in the institution's history. Even before taking over as chairman, Mullen was
asking aides to provide him papers on his powers under the Goldwater-Nichols
Act (which details the responsibilities of the JCS and JCS chairman), and
querying friends and reporters alike on how he could become "a JCS George
Marshall".
The simple answer is that he can't - he's not in the operational
chain of command, which runs from the president to the secretary of defense to
the unified commanders - and right around him. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, Mullen is the primary military advisor to the president and the
highest ranking uniformed officer in the US military services.
But, ironically, as far as giving orders that affect the day-to-day combat
operations of troops in the field, Mullen is out of it. Mullen's colleagues say
that doesn't matter to him - he's dedicated, hard working and will speak his
mind. "He wants to shake things up, to have an impact," a Defense Department
official says. "He's not afraid to say what he thinks." The question remains -
is what Michael Mullen thinks right?
The only vote that counts
Mullen is particularly passionate when it comes to three topics - the state of
the military, the care of combat veterans and civilian-military relations.
Mullen spoke passionately about the state of the military during his first
public address, at a Washington gathering just weeks after being sworn in as
JCS chairman. "The troops and their families all sacrifice much to support the
pace of operations, but their resilience does have limits, and we need to be
mindful of that," he said.
"Are the ground forces broken? Absolutely not. Are they breakable? They are.
And I will do everything I can to prevent them from breaking." Mullen went on
to say that his primary concern would be with reducing individual combat units
deployment times in Iraq. Mullen is also passionate about the increasingly
obvious impact the Iraq war has had on individual soldiers. When asked by
prominent Vietnam veteran activist Bobby Muller what he would do to resolve the
psychological problems being suffered by Iraq war veterans who have served
prolonged periods in combat, he issued an unusually personal promise.
"I am old enough to have been in Vietnam and remember what we did and didn't do
then," he said, "and we have worked hard to identify the specifics of this
right now. I still think there is a great deal we don't know. We have got to
continue to address that, and it is a priority for me ... you have my personal
pledge."
The pledge is important in the military, whose hospitals are filling up with
soldiers whose time in Iraq has gone well beyond what they were told was
expected, and promised. Mullen knows the problem the constant strain of combat,
particularly in a war of uncertain legitimacy, causes and, his aides say, he
ought to know: it gutted a generation of veterans with whom he served.
Mullen's concern about civilian-military relations, however, trumps any of the
other issues he faces. The civilian-military divide remains deep and Bush's
September drawdown of combat troops deployed in Iraq, by some 30,000, has done
little to heal it. Mullen's answer to the question of whether the military
would obey civilian orders reflected not only the divisions over whether the
Bush administration would order an attack on Iran (a subject of keen interest
at the time and of continuing, but lesser, interest now), but also divisions
over whether the military should have been more outspoken in objecting to the
administration's decision to prosecute the Iraq war in the first place.
"I believe that men and women who serve who disagree with our civilian leaders
on a policy, whatever it might be, that their statement for the record, if they
are unable to stay or if they get to a point where they disagree so strongly,
that their statement for the record is that they vote with their feet and
leave, and they should," Mullen said. "And I feel very strongly about both
aspects of that and would leave it exactly at that."
But it's hard to "leave it exactly at that". For while Mullen's comments on the
treatment of combat veterans was deeply felt, his views on the state of the US
Army and on how and when officers should obey orders has raised uncomfortable
questions. Large numbers of retired senior officers, for instance, strongly
disagree with Mullen's comment that "America's ground forces are not broken".
A group of retired officers has been saying exactly the opposite, in public,
for years: retired Brigadier General John Johns, retired air force Colonel Dick
Klass, and retired Lieutenant General Robert Gard, who once served as Robert
McNamara's military assistant, have been outspoken in their criticism of the
Bush administration's abuse of the military's trust - and the enormous
pressures placed on the army by the administration's multiple Iraq deployments.
"If the army isn't broken, I don't know what is," Gard says. Mullen's comments
on the duty of military officers to obey the orders of the civilians
authorities, on the other hand, seemed innocuous and nearly predictable: they
are repeated, almost verbatim, by any man or woman who serves in the US
military. But they have taken on a special poignancy since the beginnings of
the Iraq insurgency, which began within weeks of the fall of Baghdad, in April
of 2003.
Ironically, as senior military officers now say, in the months and years that
have followed the fall of Baghdad, many of the best men and women in uniform
have actually followed Mullen's advice - rather than saluting and saying "yes
sir", they have turned their backs on their senior commanders and walked away,
a repudiation of trust in the nation's leadership that is nearly unparalleled
in American military history.
American military officers in key combat commands (the captains, majors,
lieutenant colonels and colonels who are actually responsible for carrying out
the orders of their superiors) are leaving the services in record numbers. "The
Marine Corps has just ceased to exist," a former marine commander says. "They
have been gutted by the insurgency. They are losing their cadre of officers,
their majors and captains. They are coming home and they are dedicated and
these are fine young men. And Yale and Harvard are offering them positions and
the marines are saying, 'Well, we can send you to do recruiting in Minot, North
Dakota.' I don't understand that. They are doing nothing to retain them. And
the army is just on the ropes - the tours are being extended and then
reextended. And they say the recruiting numbers are not down, but the truth is
they are lowering the bar. They are letting people in now that they would never
have allowed in five years ago. This is a disaster. The army is over-extended
and the Marines Corps has just been eviscerated. Iraq has been a catastrophe
for the American military."
Former Marine Corps commandant Joe Hoar agrees: "I think there is little doubt
that we have a crisis. It is indisputable that there is a direct tie between
officer retention rates and the trust that the officers have in their most
senior commanders and in the leadership of the country. When you can't answer
the most fundamental question - "why are we fighting?" - people lose faith in
their leaders. It's just that simple."
More specifically, and in the view of a large number of military professionals,
the reason fewer and fewer field grade officers are agreeing to stay with their
chosen profession has been a loss of faith in the general officer corps, an
officer corps that has consistently failed to stand up to civilian leaders and
who have allowed themselves (in the words of one officer) to be "stabbed in the
back by the likes of Rumsfeld, [former under secretary of defense for policy
Douglas] Feith and [former deputy defense secretary Paul] Wolfowitz".
This lack of faith in the nation's most senior commanders by those who actually
have to give the orders that send soldiers to their deaths has created what
military professor Don Snider has identified as a "trust gap". It is this
"trust gap", and not the Iraqi insurgency, that is killing the American
military. This may well be the final judgment: a large and increasing number of
field grade officers have come to believe that the wounds suffered by the army
and marines have been inflicted by a senior military leadership that simply did
not have the courage to stand up to civilian policymakers who were insisting
that they order 19-year-old Americans into a war that should not have been
fought.
Seen in this light, the question of whether the "surge" is working seems
unimportant for many American military officers: for even if it is working in
Iraq (and that is still a very big if) it is clearly not working in the US
military. In fact, the time for victory may long be past, as thousands of the
nation's soldiers have simply lost faith in their commanders and in their
government.
In a time when the rest of the nation is consumed with November's vote,
America's soldiers are already voting with their feet. They are doing what
Michael Mullen says they must do if they have lost faith in their country. They
are leaving.
Mark Perry is a director of Conflicts
Forum and author of Partners in Command (Penguin Press, New
York, 2007).
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