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 CIVIL-MILITARY RIFT

It is no secret that the relationship between the U.S. military and civilians in the Bush administration has deteriorated markedly since the start of the Iraq war. In 2006, according to a Military Times poll, almost 60 percent of servicemen and servicewomen did not believe that civilians in the Pentagon had their "best interests at heart." In its December 2006 report, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group -- of which Robert Gates was a member until President George W. Bush tapped him to replace Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense last year -- explicitly recommended that "the new Secretary of Defense should make every effort to build healthy civil-military relations, by creating an environment in which the senior military feel free to offer independent advice not only to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon but also to the President and the National Security Council."

But the tensions in civil-military relations hardly started with Iraq; the quagmire there has simply exposed a rift that has existed for decades. During the Vietnam War, many military officers came to believe that their unquestioning obedience to civilian leaders had contributed to the debacle -- and that, in the future, senior military leaders should not quietly acquiesce when the civilians in Washington start leading them into strategic blunders.

For a time after Vietnam, civilian and military elites avoided a direct confrontation as military leaders focused on rebuilding the armed forces to fight a conventional war against the Warsaw Pact and civilian officials were largely content to defer to them on how to do so. But the end of the Cold War uncovered deep fissures over whether to use the military for operations other than foreign wars and how to adapt military institutions to changing social mores.

The Bush administration arrived in Washington resolved to reassert civilian control over the military -- a desire that became even more pronounced after September 11. Rumsfeld vowed to "transform" the military and to use it to wage the global war on terrorism. When they thought military leaders were too timid in planning for the Iraq campaign, Bush administration officials did not hesitate to overrule them on the number of troops to be sent and the timing of their deployment. And when the situation in Iraq deteriorated after the fall of Baghdad, tensions flared again. Retired generals called for Rumsfeld's resignation; there is reportedly such deep concern among the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) about the Bush administration's plans to use nuclear weapons in a preemptive attack against Iran's nuclear infrastructure that some of them have threatened to resign in protest; and the Bush administration's "surge" now has tens of thousands of more troops going to Iraq against the advice of much of the military.

The new secretary of defense therefore has a lot on his plate. In the short term, Gates must play out the endgame of a war in Iraq that he admits the United States is "not winning" but that he and the president do not want to "lose" either. He must continue the efforts to transform the U.S. military while repairing a ground force that has been nearly "broken" by almost four years of continuous combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. But Gates can hope to succeed at those tasks only if he manages to rebuild a cooperative relationship between civilian leaders and the U.S. military. He must both rethink how civilian officials oversee the military and clarify the boundaries of legitimate military dissent from civilian authority.

The key is that Gates needs to recognize that Rumsfeld's meddling approach contributed in significant measure to the problems in Iraq and elsewhere. The best solution is to return to an old division of labor: civilians give due deference to military professional advice in the tactical and operational realms in return for complete military subordination in the grand strategic and political realms. The success of Gates' tenure in the Pentagon will hinge on his reestablishing that proper civil-military balance.

SALUTE AND OBEY?

There is an inherent tension between senior military leaders and their civilian overseers. Debates about using force, contrary to popular perception, tend to pit reluctant warriors against hawkish civilians. The current civil-military breach actually began with the Vietnam War. The decision to intervene in Vietnam was driven largely by civilian leaders: Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, and a supporting caste of lower-ranking officials. From the start, the senior military leadership was unenthusiastic about committing U.S. ground forces to Southeast Asia. Even after civilian officials persuaded them that vital national interests were at stake, they had serious reservations about Washington's strategies for the ground and air wars. By the summer of 1967, military discontent had reached such a level that the JCS reportedly considered resigning en masse. They did not, but the damage done by the military leadership's willingness to salute and obey as the debacle in Vietnam unfolded was not lost on junior officers.

In one of the most memorable passages in his memoir, former Secretary of State Colin Powell recalls that during Vietnam, "as a corporate entity, the military failed to talk straight to its political superiors or itself. The top leadership never went to the secretary of defense or the President and said, 'This war is unwinnable the way we are fighting it.'" Colonel H. R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty -- a book that was long featured on the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff's reading list -- demonstrates that this lesson of Vietnam has now been thoroughly internalized by the contemporary officer corps. The implicit message of McMaster's military bestseller is that unqualified allegiance to the commander in chief needs to be rethought.