Posted on 05/25/2006 12:02:00 PM PDT by Mr. Silverback
Did you know that over half of Americans won’t mind us having a banana republic government structure? That’s what a Fox News/ Opinion Dynamics poll found last week.
Fifty-four percent of respondents said that our military should be run by military personnel, with only 20% coming out in favor of civilian control.
In over two years of being a complete news junkie, I have never seen scarier poll results than that. Don’t get me wrong, I have an enormous level of trust for our men and women in uniform. But the Framers of our Constitution weren’t exactly kum-bai-yah anti-military types either, and they established a bright line between the responsibilities of the civilians in the chain of command (the President and the Secretary of War/Defense) and the warfighters who were commanded.
Granted, the respondents were probably thinking about the narrow concern of war planning. But if we’re going to pretend that generals and admirals always have a great war plan (and history tells us otherwise) why not just dispense with having the President sign off on it? For example, why should an actor who never served in combat (Reagan), a draft-dodger (Clinton), or a former Lieutenant with no combat experience (Bush 43) tell the Joint Chiefs how to best deploy their forces?
He should because if a President elected by the people and his appointed secretaries (confirmed by the Senate) is telling them what to do, that means we the people are telling them what to do. If it’s the other way around, our new national anthem should be “The Banana Boat Song” by Harry Belafonte. We could even dispense with letting the Congress decide whether we go to war, where our forces are based or even what equipment they use. Let the generals nuke Iran, invade it or just pretend it doesn’t exist if that’s what they think is best. Talley me banana, baby.
Not coincidentally, the poll comes out as the current Secretary of Defense is under attack from seven Army and Marine generals who are demanding his resignation. Their claim is that Rumsfeld scrapped a perfectly good war plan for Iraq and crammed one of his own making down the throats of the military. But as far as integrity and credibility goes, a couple of these generals have major problems.
Take retired Marine General Anthony Zinni. He should have enormous credibility on the subject of Iraq, having been the commander of Central Command. He even planned and led the spanking of Saddam’s forces in 1998 known as Operation Desert Fox. Zinni says we didn’t have enough troops on the ground (possibly true) and didn’t anticipate the size of the insurgency, which is definitely true. The problem is he also criticizes the intelligence assessment prior to the war.
Why is that a problem, given the intelligence failures we’ve seen? Zinni isn’t just saying the intelligence was flawed, he’s repeating the “Bush lied” slander. He claims that Bush “had to create a false rationale for going in to get public support.” He went on to say that "The books were cooked, in my mind. The intelligence was not there."
There is simply no way that a man as smart as Zinni really believes that Bush (and Clinton, and UN weapon inspectors and intel analysts in countries all over the globe) lied about WMD intel. He should know this because he was part of the “Saddam’s got WMD’s” chorus. In 2000, Zinni testified before Congress about the strategic situation in the Middle East. He called Iraq “the most significant near-term threat” in the region due to their “pursuit of WMD.”
“Despite claims that WMD efforts have ceased,” he continued, “Iraq probably is continuing clandestine nuclear research, retains stocks of chemical and biological munitions, … Even if Baghdad reversed its course and surrendered all WMD capabilities, it retains the scientific, technical, and industrial infrastructure to replace agents and munitions within weeks or months. … The Iraqi regime’s high regard for WMD and long-range missiles is our best indicator that a peaceful regime under Saddam Hussein is unlikely.”
So much for General Zinni.
Another dissenting general is retired Army Major General John Batiste. Batiste says Rumsfeld is a disaster and has called him “contemptuous, dismissive and arrogant” toward career officers. But that’s not what he told his men when Rumsfeld visited them in Tikrit in 2004: “This is a man with the courage and the conviction to win the war on terrorism.” Sure, Batiste wouldn’t have criticized Rumsfeld in front of the troops, but why the flip-flop from courageous to contemptuous?
Sure, the generals aren’t a conspiratorial cabal, and they are all men of patriotic service. But the two most vocal ones definitely have an axe to grind, and all of them have forgotten that in America the Secretary of Defense fires generals, not the other way around.
Can you say “Day-O?”
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Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.
It would be interesting to see how the poll was actually conducted and exactly how the questions were phrased. I believe that the vast majority of Americans would answer as they did for one (or more) of these reasons.
1. They hate Bush, so do not want him in charge.
2. They are grossly ignorant of the system of checks and balances and the reasons we have for putting the President in charge of the military.
3. They gave a quick answer without too much thinking. (Put the generals in charge of the military? Sure, sounds sensible to me.) I think many otherwise intelligent people would answer like this if they were being pestered on the phone or in the shopping mall. Only later would they realize their mistake.
4. The question came at the end of a series of leading questions cleverly designed to elicit this answer.
Another point - a lot of these "dissenting generals" made general during the Clinton years. Many were the touch-feely, kumbaya types. Many got where they are not due to leadership ability and military ability, but due to suck-up ability.
That poll says more about lame, incompetent, criminally negligent educational systems than what people think about civilian control of the military, of which clearly they've never heard.
Ping!
Another dissenting general is retired Army Major General John Batiste. Batiste says Rumsfeld is a disaster and has called him “contemptuous, dismissive and arrogant” toward career officers. But that’s not what he told his men when Rumsfeld visited them in Tikrit in 2004: “This is a man with the courage and the conviction to win the war on terrorism.” Sure, Batiste wouldn’t have criticized Rumsfeld in front of the troops, but why the flip-flop from courageous to contemptuous?
Here is how Batiste explains this in the WSJ:
"...Just weeks before his troops left Iraq, the general had an opportunity to confront Mr. Rumsfeld publicly. The secretary, who was making a 2004 Christmas tour through Iraq, came to meet with him and take questions from his troops.
Gen. Batiste introduced Mr. Rumsfeld to his soldiers as a "man with the courage and conviction to win the war on terrorism." The general says he was disillusioned with Mr. Rumsfeld's leadership at the time, but felt he needed to pump up his soldiers who were in the final days of a grueling, bloody deployment."
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB114748270803051995.html
I'd go for a benevolent dictator at this point.
True, but until 1947, many issues of command were fuzzy. The National Command Authority was created and from that no doubt existed that the chain of command went from the President to the Secretary of Defense. The Chairman of the Joints Chiefs is in that chain as a messenger. The Joint Chiefs are not. From the Chairman, orders go directly to the commanders of operational commands such as the Special Operations Command, Centcom, etc. Except for training, logistics and advice, the joint chiefs are left out, as are most post and base commanders. They are housekeepers, not operational commanders.
You're probably correct, but that doesn't make it any less scary.
It is one of the core principles of leadership that you never, ever, are dishonest to your subordinates. You don't lie, you don't ommitt unless absolutely necessary, you never shade the truth at all. You shoot straight, period. My 11 year old is a patrol leader in Boy Scout troop and he already knows this. And all of this goes double for military leadership.
I'm just a guy with a two year college degree who never rose above the rank of buck sergeant, and I could sit down and write Batiste 10 introductions that would have been properly respectful of Rumsfeld without compromising his integrity.
I think this guy's a suck-up. I know he either isn't telling the truth or is such a crappy general his advice is worthless.
"Another point - a lot of these "dissenting generals" made general during the Clinton years. Many were the touch-feely, kumbaya types. Many got where they are not due to leadership ability and military ability, but due to suck-up ability."
Well, ok, but if they made General under Clinton, then they made Colonel and probably Lieutenant Colonel under Bush 41 or Reagan. They might have made Major under Carter, but more likely it was under Ford, and were Captains and Lieutenants under Nixon.
So, where did they become the touchy-feely kumbaya types coming up through the ranks over 25 years? Was it that touchy-feely kumbaya types were promoted to Major under Carter, and then just given passes to Lt.Col. and Colonel under Reagan and Bush, just so they could finally enforce their flower-power as Generals made during the Clinton Administration?
Don't get me wrong, I am unimpressed by these ex-Generals' comportments. I think they are lying politicians with a Democratic Party agenda. But were they bad Generals? And before that were they bad Colonels and Majors, Captains and Lieutenants? Is it that every bad officer who somehow wormed his way through four or five selection boards were all chosen by Clinton?
In short: is to have been chosen as an Admiral or General during the Clinton Administration a mark of incompetence and cowardice? Should we look at when professional officers achieved flag rank and, depending on the President, evaluate their personalities and military careers?
Most flag officers promoted during the Clinton years is an incompetent suck-up? Is that the way we should look at them all, including the ones still in the forces?
I don't like the inference.
The President doesn't really pick generals.
I see your point, but let me throw this at you: y Wing King got the very last Order of the Sword awarded by the NCO's of Strategic Air Command. Why? He was the operation commander of the 3701st Provisional Wing in Desert Storm, and while leading a cell on a bomb run in Iraq he took a SAM close aboard and brought his BUFF home with fuel coming out of the wings like a firehose.
More from WSJ on Batiste:
"...Gen. Batiste grew up on military bases, in the U.S., Europe and Iran. He followed his father, who fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, into the military. One of his most powerful memories is of his father, then a colonel, returning from Vietnam in the late 1960s. "I remember picking him up with my mom and sister at Dulles Airport. He came home so unceremoniously," Gen. Batiste says. "The people in the airport could not have cared less."
Gen. Batiste speaks in the short, crisp sentences of a person accustomed to giving orders. He graduated from West Point in 1974 and joined an Army damaged by the Vietnam War. As he walked into his battalion headquarters building for his first day at Fort Hood, Texas, he recalls medics carrying out the corpse of a soldier who had overdosed on heroin. "I thought to myself, 'Holy s-t, what have we done to this Army?' " he says.
In 1977, he married his battalion commander's daughter. He rose quickly through the ranks, serving as the military aide to Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey at Fort Benning, Ga. "I wrote on his officer evaluation that I wished he could have replaced me and I could have worked for him. That's how highly I thought of him," says Gen. McCaffrey, who retired in the 1990s."
I suspect that Batiste got bogged down in a very cynical environment that prevails today everywhere. I've never been been in the military, but I've been in a position to observe and see the behavior of many so-called leaders of corporate America. When necessary they will lie, spin, flip-flop, cheat, steal and backstab to maintain and advance their careers. This is not breaking news to anyone aside from those who still believe in Santa Claus. Straight-shooters don't last long at the upper tiers of any organizational hierarchy, military not excepted. We don't have true leaders anymore.
Perhaps all of these dudes have book contracts in mind, or perhaps a political future.
First, that's just not true. Such cynicism just provides cover for the Zinnis and Batistes of the world. Second, there's a difference between tact and lying. When Batiste did his introduction (and presumably signed off on the Iraq War plan, unless Rummy and Meyers are liars, too) and then did a 180 as soon as he took off the uniform, he was either lying or too stupid to be leading troops.
Can you say "red herring"? This was a dumb question, not just because it appears to exploit the lack of civics classes in our schools, but because the question depends on semantics ( OR as WJBC might say) on what the definition of "control" is. There are a dozen ways to "re-ask" the question (e.g. "Would you like to see the civilian Secretaries of Defense, Army, Navy and Air Force replaced by active duty military personnel, or do you think that is still important to guard against military takeovers of the government by maintaining civilian control?"). On the other hand, if you asked, "Who should be controlling the tactics, techniques and procedures of our military personnel, civilians who may never have served a day in the military, or Generals and Admirals?", in which case you'll probably get the same answer as the Fox poll.
As he walked into his battalion headquarters building for his first day at Fort Hood, Texas, he recalls medics carrying out the corpse of a soldier who had overdosed on heroin. "I thought to myself, 'Holy s-t, what have we done to this Army?' " he says.
The people who screwed up his army were some of the same people he's giving cover to by portraying Rumsfeld as some kind of scumbag.
There's a quote I've heard, but did not use because it is probably apocryphal. It is attributed to the great Air Force strategist, John Boyd:
"There is no creature more pained than a general whose opinion has been considered and rejected."
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