Does the Military Follow Orders 

From Their Civilian Leaders?

 

Robert C. Whitten

      Robert C. Whitten is a retired commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve, and a retired NASA research scientist. He holds a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Duke University.

      Largely as a result of the clash between serving members of the armed forces and civilian appointees in the Clinton administration, the idea of a “gap” between the values of the military officer corps and the civilian world began to arise among members of the liberal academic elite. The gap was judged by some of that elite to be so great that it threatened civilian control of the armed services of this nation. Does such a gap really exist and if so, is it a threat to American democracy? Some people, mainly on the left side of the political spectrum, believe that it does exist and is such a threat.

      Several years ago the Triangle Institute for Security Studies (North Carolina) carried out a study, the “Project on the Gap Between the Military and Civilian Society,” which investigated the attitudes of officers in the armed forces using a questionnaire submitted to selected officers in the armed forces, defined as the “military elite.” The Air Force and Marine Corps excluded their officers from participation except for a small number attending national staff and war colleges. Despite the lack of support by those two services the Pentagon showed considerable interest, supporting conferences in which the “Gap” was discussed. I first became aware of this effort while paging through the Naval War College Review, Summer 2002 issue, and came across an article entitled “The Erosion of Civilian Control of the Military in the United States Today” by Professor Richard H. Kohn of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the leaders of the Triangle Institute study. On the surface, Kohn builds an impressive case in support of his suggestive title. This encounter led me to obtain the book that reported the results of the study, Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security, edited by Kohn and his colleague, Peter Feaver of Duke University. In fairness to the editors, not all of the articles support their thesis of a serious problem in civil-military relations. Indeed, one chapter by Benjamin O. Fordham explicitly suggests that while a gap may exist, it has no bearing on civilian control of the armed forces. Still, the general thrust of the book is that the gap constitutes a threat to American democracy.

      The first chapter after the introduction, by Ole Holsti, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Duke, is characterized throughout by a liberal political bias that sometimes verges on the ridiculous. To cite one example, Holsti shows inability to understand the preference for members of the armed forces for Ronald Reagan rather than Carter in the 1980 election on the grounds that Reagan “sat out the war in Hollywood” while Carter “had a distinguished military career.” Actually, Carter could have been accused of sitting out the war at the U.S. Naval Academy, but such accusations are fair to neither man. As for Carter’s “distinguished military career,” lieutenants in the peacetime Navy do not have distinguished military careers. (While Carter was on active duty during the Korean conflict, he never served in a war zone.) It is true that he was selected by Hyman Rickover for nuclear propulsion training, but he left the Navy with a hardship release to take over the family peanut business following the death of his father before he completed the training. What turned the soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen against Carter was the wide distribution of his statement, never denied by him, that “pay was not a problem when I was in the Navy and I don’t see why it is now” to justify refusing to allow a much-needed pay raise for the armed services.

      A second instance is the misrepresentation of the Kelly Flinn affair in a footnote. Lieutenant Kelly Flinn was a graduate of the Air Force Academy and a certified B-52 pilot. Lt. Kelly Flinn met and had an affair with a civilian who proved to be the husband of an enlisted woman in the same command as Flinn. This kind of behavior by an officer is enormously destructive of morale and discipline unless he or she is held to account. The wife somehow learned of the affair and reported it to her superiors. When Flinn was confronted with the charge, she at first denied the affair and then when she was no longer believable refused to break it off. In doing the foregoing she had used an officer’s position to take personal advantage of an enlisted person, had lied to her superiors and then had refused to carry out lawful orders. The Air Force, rather than be faced with the bad publicity generated by her family and the “liberal” press, gave her a general discharge and not the court-martial she deserved. Holsti gave a completely erroneous account when he wrote that she had an affair with an enlisted man.

      Let us now return to the Naval War College Review article by Kohn. Although he does mention that tension between military leaders and their civilian masters is not new, he claims that it is a much more severe problem today than in years past, probably because of his concern with the acrimony that existed between members of the Clinton administration and members of the armed forces, mostly junior and middle grade officers and all grades of enlisted personnel. In fairness, he does go at length into the efforts of Clinton and his entourage to antagonize the military services, efforts that extended from humiliating junior officers by turning some of them into White House servants to the mishandling of the incursions into Somalia and Haiti. However, the author’s emphasis is on the matter of loyalty to the president, indeed unbounded loyalty to the extent that a retired Navy Captain, now a professor of history at the Citadel, interpreted it as being uncomfortably close to the oath that German officers took to Hitler in the 1930s. The true situation concerning loyalty is more complicated in that a dual loyalty to the Congress is also required, stemming from the distrust of executive authority by the English Parliament in the late 17th century and embedded in the American polity by George Washington himself. According to Kohn, the loyalty to the chief executive should be so great that military leaders should recognize the right of the civilian executive to make serious mistakes without complaint. To insure that such loyalty is effective, the author proposes that officers of the armed forces (presumably non-commissioned officers as well) refrain from even voting, something that would in fact serve to further isolate service people from the civilian world.

      Following the debacle in Vietnam, Army Chief of Staff Creighton Abrams restructured the Army such that critical elements for any conflict were assigned largely to the reserves so that, unlike the response of the Johnson Administration to the war in Vietnam, no future administration could go to war without calling out the guard and reserve. Kohn was highly critical of this action because it might limit some future president, despite the fact that the Abram’s action had both executive and legislative approval at the time. Moreover, he makes no distinction between the guard and reserve and the regulars despite the fact that men and women serving in the guard and reserve are primarily civilians. Indeed they constitute the all-important link between the military establishment and the civilian world, partly through personal contacts and partly through their civilian employers.

      How serious is Kohn’s contention that the erosion of civilian control is a major and almost unprecedented threat to American democracy? While he does refer to the altercation between MacArthur and Truman which led to the firing of the former, he neglects the response of MacArthur (at the time the Army Chief of Staff) to Hoover’s request to the Army that it insure proper sanitation and other public health measures in the veteran bonus marcher’s encampment in Anacostia in 1932. In the summer of 1932 at the depth of the Great Depression a very large group of veterans (well over 20 thousand) converged on Washington to demand the bonus they thought they had been promised. After they set up a sort of shanty town in Anacostia and occupied some government buildings, President Herbert Hoover became concerned about the lack of sanitation and the possibility of an outbreak of disease and its spreading throughout the national capital. He accordingly ordered the Army to evict them from the government buildings but with no harm to be done to the veterans. Against the advice of his aide, Major Dwight Eisenhower, the Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur, took personal command and sent a major named George S. Patton, Jr. to carry out the eviction. When some of the veterans began to throw bricks at the troops, Patton attacked them with cavalry sabers and gas rather than surrounding the rioters as his orders required. By evening the veterans’ camp was in flames, exactly the opposite of what Hoover wished. All of these actions were approved by MacArthur.

      Nearly two decades later, the “Revolt of the Admirals” occurred in response to efforts by the then-Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson to severely downgrade naval aviation. Fortunately, the admirals resisted Johnson and the Navy Air was reasonably ready when the conflict in Korea came. Following the resignation of Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal in early 1949, President Harry S. Truman appointed political ally, Louis Johnson, to replace him. A devotee of the new U.S. Air Force, Johnson immediately canceled the construction of the “super” aircraft carrier USS United States and began measures to substantially downgrade naval aviation and absorb the U.S. Marine Corps into the Army. The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Louis E. Denfeld, resigned, and resistance by a number of aviation admirals led by future Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Arthur W. Radford began. The admirals proved to have strong support in the Congress and were able to blunt the attack by Johnson and save naval aviation and the Marine Corps, at least for the moment. When the Korean conflict erupted, naval and marine aviation were far more prepared to support the troops than was the Air Force and the threat against maritime aviation went away. In none of these cases was civilian control of the military services threatened nor did such a threat arise then or later.

      In their concluding chapter to their edited book, Kohn and Feaver propose several measures to reduce the “Civil-Military Gap.” One of them is to convert the service academies to post-graduate schools that would quickly train recent university graduates to be officers—quickly because 22-year-olds were thought never to agree to a three or four year program. A second proposal is to commission civilians directly into mid-level officer ranks. Except for marginal cases such would be quite impractical: Just imagine a newly minted lieutenant-colonel or Navy commander taking over command of an airborne battalion or an Aegis destroyer. Rather than forming a link with the civilian world, such officers would either be co-opted by the professionals or more likely marginalized. Finally, they suggest opening ROTC to the general populations of the universities without regard to “yield.” Aside from the fact that, if effective, the cost would likely be prohibitive, the students who want to participate in ROTC are already there. Three proposals and all of them impractical!

      If civilian control is not threatened, it is reasonable to ask the purpose of published concerns like those of Kohn and others. As is evident from recent polls, the country is almost evenly divided, with one side crudely described as “liberal,” the other as “conservative” (The election map of 2000 showing Bush counties in red, Gore counties in blue—a curious choice of colors). The values necessarily fostered by the military establishment are close to the conservative side and this appears to be the source of worry to liberal academics like Kohn and Feaver. Do they fear a civil war between the “blues” and “reds” with the military forces on the side of the “reds?” While such concerns appear to be greatly overblown to this observer, they may not be to the “liberals.”

      In a very perceptive article in The National Interest (No. 75, Summer 2004), Samuel P. Huntington (Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies) has classified much of this nation’s elite as “transnational” as opposed to most of the rest of the people whom he calls “national.” The former are composed of business leaders of transnational corporations, most of the “liberal” political class, and (especially) academe. Military personnel, on the other hand, are almost entirely national; after all, their duty is to defend the United States, not the United Nations. Would the personnel of the American armed forces be willing to become an adjunct to the U.N.? Very doubtful. This dichotomy appears to this writer to also be a major, possibly the major, concern of the “elite” such as Richard Kohn.     Ω

“Caught in the relaxing interval between one moral code and the next, an unmoored generation surrenders itself to luxury, corruption, and a restless disorder of family and morals, in all but a remnant, cling desperately to old restraints and ways. Few souls feel any longer that ‘it is beautiful and honorable to die for one’s country.’ A failure of leadership may allow a state to weaken itself with internal strife. At the end of the process a decisive defeat in war may bring a final blow, or barbarian invasion from without may combine with barbarism welling up from within to bring the civilization to a close.” —Will Durant, The Pleasures of Philosophy (p. 293), published in 1953