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?

This brought immediate friction with military leaders (and their allies on Capitol Hill), who had deep reservations about both the style of the new secretary of defense and the substance of his policies. Rumsfeld dismissed these concerns. "If that disturbs people and their sensitivities are such that it bothers them, I'm sorry," he told the Pentagon press corps. "But that's life, because this stuff we're doing is important. We're going to get it done well. We're going to get it done right. The Constitution calls for civilian control of this department. And I'm a civilian. And believe me, this place is accomplishing enormous things. We have done so much in the last two years. And it doesn't happen by standing around with your finger in your ear hoping everyone thinks that that's nice." Some military visionaries, such as Admiral William Owens and Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, hopped aboard the transformation bandwagon. But Rumsfeld did not trust even those in the uniformed services who seemed to support his revolution. Transformation, he believed, would take place only with considerable civilian prodding and guidance. By the fall of 2001, as a result, Rumsfeld's relations with the senior military and congressional leaderships could not have been much worse. Many observers predicted that he would be the first cabinet-level casualty of the Bush administration.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, and the early stages of the global war on terrorism in Afghanistan imposed a temporary truce between Rumsfeld and senior military leaders. But as the Bush administration made clear that it considered Iraq the next front -- a view most military professionals did not share -- this truce broke down. In the face of what they saw as military intransigence, Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz showed little compunction about meddling in such issues as the number of troops required and the phasing of their deployments for Operation Iraqi Freedom. The clearest display of civilian willingness to override the professional military on tactical and operational matters was Wolfowitz's cavalier dismissal of troop-requirement estimates by General Eric Shinseki, the army chief of staff. In congressional testimony in February 2003, Wolfowitz dismissed Shinseki's assessment that the United States would need in excess of "several hundred thousand troops" for postwar stability operations as "wildly off the mark." Wolfowitz got his way.

When those "postwar" operations ran into trouble, finger-pointing and mutual recriminations between recently retired generals and civilian leaders in the Bush administration brought the persistent fault lines in U.S. civil-military relations to the fore. Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold, former JCS director of operations, wrote, in a searing piece in Time, that it was his "sincere view ... that the commitment of [U.S.] forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions -- or bury the results." Newbold joined a raft of other recently retired generals -- including General Anthony Zinni (former head of Central Command), Major General Paul Eaton (former head of the Iraqi training mission), Major General John Riggs (former head of the army's transformation task force), and Major Generals Charles Swannack and John Batiste (former division commanders in Iraq) -- in calling for Rumsfeld's resignation. According to a Military Times poll, 42 percent of U.S. troops disapprove of President Bush's handling of the war in Iraq.

In the fall of 2006, the White House and influential hawks outside of the administration finally conceded that the United States did not have the troop strength to secure contested areas in Iraq. But by then, senior U.S. military commanders in Iraq had come to believe that U.S. forces were part of the problem, rather than the solution, as the insurgency had morphed into an interconfessional civil war. So instead of asking for more troops, as they did in the run-up to the war, many senior commanders in Iraq began to argue that the United States needed to lower its profile and reduce its footprint. Less than 40 percent of troops supported an increase in force levels, the Military Times found. General John Abizaid, the current head of Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in November that he did "not believe that more American troops right now is the solution to the problem" in Iraq. In response to prodding from Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), Abizaid explained that he had "met with every division commander, General [George] Casey, the corps commander, General [Martin] Dempsey [head of the Multi-National Security Transition Command in Iraq]. ... And I said, 'In your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq?' And they all said no."

Abizaid and other senior U.S. commanders believed increasing the number of U.S. forces in Iraq would be counterproductive. As Abizaid explained on 60 Minutes, "There's always been this tension between what we could do and what the Iraqis do. If we want to do everything in Iraq we could do that, but that's not the way that Iraq is going to stabilize." In congressional testimony, he noted, "We can put in 20,000 more Americans tomorrow and achieve a temporary effect ... [but] when you look at the overall American force pool that's available out there, the ability to sustain that commitment is simply not something that we have right now with the size of the army and the Marine Corps." But despite such protests, the military leadership was once again overruled by civilians in Washington -- leading to the "surge" taking place right now.

ARMCHAIR GENERALS

Why did civil-military relations become so frayed in the Bush administration? James Mann recounts in his book Rise of the Vulcans that key civilian figures on Bush's national security team believed that the Clinton administration had failed to "keep a tight rein" on the military. Rumsfeld famously thought of civilian control of the military as the secretary of defense's primary responsibility, and he, along with Wolfowitz and other top administration figures, came into office convinced that they would have to resort to more intrusive civilian involvement to overcome service parochialism and bureaucratic inertia. After 9/11, Rumsfeld and other civilian proponents of a war for regime change in Iraq realized that the key obstacle to launching such a war -- and waging it with minimal forces, in line with Rumsfeld's vision of military transformation -- would be the senior leadership of the U.S. Army. Instead of listening to the warnings of military professionals, they resolved to overcome both widespread military skepticism about the war and, in their view, the bureaucratic inertia dictating how the services thought about the size and the mix of forces necessary to accomplish the mission. The fact that Wolfowitz, rather than Shinseki, prevailed in the debate about the force size necessary for the Iraq war shows just how successful the Bush administration was in asserting civilian authority over the military.

In their determination to reassert civilian control, administration officials were even willing to immerse themselves in operational issues such as determining force sizes and scheduling deployments. As former Secretary of the Army Thomas White recalled, Rumsfeld wanted to "show everybody in the structure that he was in charge and that he was going to manage things perhaps in more detail than previous secretaries of defense, and he was going to involve himself in operational details." Such an intrusive form of civilian oversight was bound to exacerbate friction with the military.

In his seminal treatise on civil-military relations, The Soldier and the State, Samuel Huntington proposed a system he called "objective control" to balance military expertise with overall civilian political supremacy. Huntington recommended that civilian leaders cede substantial autonomy to military professionals in the tactical and operational realms in return for complete and unquestioning military subordination to civilian control of politics and grand strategy. Although not always reflected in practice, this system has shaped thinking about how civilians ought to exercise their oversight of the U.S. military for 50 years. When followed, it has generally been conducive to good civil-military relations as well as to sound policy decisions.

The Bush administration embraced a fundamentally different approach to civilian control. Administration officials worried that without aggressive and relentless civilian questioning of military policies and decisions at every level, they would not be able to accomplish their objective of radically transforming the military and using it in a completely different way. Former Defense Policy Board member Eliot Cohen -- recently named by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as counselor for the State Department -- provided the intellectual rationale for this more intrusive regime. His book Supreme Command was read widely by senior members of the Bush national security team, reportedly even landing on the president's bedside table in Crawford, Texas.