Bush and the Generals

Michael C. Desch

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2007

Summary:  The rift between U.S. military and civilian leaders did not start with George W. Bush, but his administration's meddling and disregard for military expertise have made it worse. The new defense secretary must restore a division of labor that gives soldiers authority over tactics and civilians authority over strategy -- or risk discrediting civilian control of the military even further.

Michael C. Desch holds the Robert M. Gates Chair in Intelligence and National Security Decision-Making at Texas A&M's George H. W. Bush School of Government and Public Service. He is the author of Civilian Control of the Military and the forthcoming Democracy Triumphant?

The Vietnam experience was a ticking time bomb just waiting to explode civil-military relations. Only the Cold War kept it from going off. There was mutual agreement then that the military's primary mission was to prepare for a conventional war in Europe with the Warsaw Pact, and civilian leaders gave the military great latitude in determining how it did so. Still, Army Chief of Staff General Creighton Abrams consciously reconfigured active-component army divisions so that they could not go to war without Reserve or National Guard "round-out brigades," thus ensuring that future presidents would have to fully mobilize the country in order to fight a major war.

The post-Vietnam officer corps truly began to assert itself only after the inauguration of Bill Clinton, the first post-Cold War president and a man who came into office with an already difficult relationship with the military. Large cuts in the defense budget (27 percent between 1990 and 2000), significant personnel reductions (33 percent of the active component over the same period), and an ambitious social agenda (integrating gays into the military and allowing women to join the combat arms) placed civilian and military leaders in an openly adversarial relationship. A greatly accelerated operational tempo, as the armed forces were deployed to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and other global trouble spots, only worsened the strain.

Clinton's tense relationship with the military hampered his ability to make good on a number of campaign promises. After criticizing the first Bush administration for not doing enough to end the bloodshed in the Bosnian civil war, Clinton promised a more assertive U.S. policy of humanitarian intervention. In response, Powell (then chairman of the JCS) published an opinion piece in The New York Times and an essay in Foreign Affairs arguing against such a policy and on behalf of more restrictive criteria for the use of force, which became known as the Powell Doctrine. The military's reservations about intervening on the ground in Bosnia played an important role in limiting U.S. military options to air strikes in August 1995.

Another of Clinton's early initiatives was to end the Pentagon's policy of excluding homosexuals from the military. This had also been an important campaign plank, one to which he was reportedly deeply committed on civil liberties grounds. When he tried to implement it, however, Clinton ran into a firestorm of military and congressional opposition. He had to back down and accept a face-saving compromise -- "don't ask, don't tell" -- which most analysts do not regard as a real change in policy.

The poor civil-military relations that plagued the early years of the Clinton administration continued to affect it right up to the end of Clinton's second term. By the spring of 1999, it was apparent that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic would cease his ethnic cleansing in Kosovo only in response to military force. Clinton and his civilian advisers, such as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, advocated the use of limited air strikes and the threat of ground operations. The JCS, however, pushed for a more extensive air campaign while resisting any threat to use ground forces. Within days of the start of the war, a torrent of leaks sprang from the Pentagon about how the president had intervened in Kosovo against the better advice of the military. The JCS subsequently did as much to constrain the campaign in Kosovo as to facilitate it -- to the point of dragging their feet on supplying certain forces to General Wesley Clark's NATO operation. While promising to provide Clark with everything he needed, the Pentagon delayed for weeks in sending him the Apache attack helicopters he had requested and then never allowed him to actually use them.

This military resistance to many of the Clinton administration's initiatives should not have been surprising. After all, the senior military leadership emerged from the Vietnam debacle believing that civilians could not be trusted with weighty decisions that affected both the military's internal organization and where and how the military was used. Powell boasted that he and his post-Vietnam military colleagues had "vowed that when [their] time came to call the shots, [they] would not quietly acquiesce in half-hearted warfare for half-baked reasons."

Even after Powell's military retirement in 1993, the Powell Doctrine remained alive and well in the Pentagon. Powell's successor as chairman of the JCS, General Hugh Shelton, remarked to me in a 1999 interview, "I firmly believe in [former Secretary of Defense Caspar] Weinberger's doctrine, amplified by General Powell, and I think that we followed that" in the Kosovo operation. Echoing Powell, Shelton argued that military force should be the tool of last resort and proposed what he called "the Dover test" for committing U.S. forces to combat: "When bodies are brought back, will we still feel it is in U.S. interests?"

THE CIVILIANS' REVOLT

Many expected the 2000 election of George W. Bush to usher in a new golden age of civil-military amity and cooperation. After all, Bush campaigned for military votes with the promise that "help is on the way" after eight years of supposed neglect. In his speech accepting his party's nomination in August 2000, he warned, "Our military is low on parts, pay, and morale. If called by the commander in chief today, two entire divisions of the army would have to report ... 'not ready for duty.' This administration had its moment. They had their chance. They have not led. We will." An administration that included two former secretaries of defense (Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney) and a former JCS chairman (Powell) ought to have had excellent relations with the senior military leadership.

But Bush also entered the White House with an ambitious defense policy agenda, which made continuation of the civil-military conflict all but inevitable. In a September 1999 speech at the Citadel, Bush had said that he intended to "force new thinking and hard choices" on the military. In the first few months of the new administration, Rumsfeld set out to transform the U.S. military in line with what he and other civilians anticipated would be a "revolution in military affairs."