Clinton's military problem - and ours - President's problem as Commander-in-Chief

National Review, Dec 13, 1993 by A.J. Bacevich

It's easy to ascribe the military's disdain for their Commander-in-Chief to his background and character. Easy and dangerous. There is serious thinking to be done about the civil-military relationship.

ITEM: Venturing forth for the first time as Commander-in-Chief, Bill Clinton visits the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt. The troops give their new boss the cold shoulder. "An undercurrent of mockery... pervaded the ship," noted the Washington Post, recording the prevalence of "Hillary jokes and Chelsea jokes." Nor was it simply brash 19-year-olds sounding off to reporters. It was a career officer who said: "Maybe we can call this his military service," referring to Clinton's brief visit. "Three hours is more than he had before."

Item: In the White House, a Clinton staffer snubs a highly decorated general, sniffing that she doesn't "speak to people in uniform." Desk-bound warriors in the Pentagon lose no time in leaking the incident as prima facie evidence of a pervasive Clintonite animus toward the military. The Administration reinforces perceptions of the incident's significance by inviting the aggrieved general to join the smiling First Jogger on his morning jaunt.

Item: In a Washington Post op-ed, two serving officers, outraged by Clinton's declared intentions regarding gays, sound a clarion call on behalf of military dissent, aiming their remarks specifically at the service chiefs, whose job it is to "speak for us." Any chief who "fails to register vocal opposition" to permitting gays to serve openly, they warn, "could undermine his moral authority over his subordinates."A leader thus compromised will find himself attempting to "command without the loyalty of his subordinates," a problem the authors suggest the President himself ought to "be concerned about." Reviving a distinction last made by Douglas MacArthur--that a soldier "swears allegiance to the Constitution, not to the Commantler-in-Chief"--these officers put the President on notice that it is up to him to earn their loyalty.

Item: At a gathering of Air Force personnel and spouses, a hitherto obscure major general launches into a tirade in which he characterizes the President as a "pot-smoking," "womanizing," and "draft-dodging" Commander-in-Chief.

Item: Charged with putting the Tailhook scandal to rest, Navy Secretary John H. Dalton concludes that the service's uniformed leadership--starting with the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Frank B. Kelso--must be held accountable. He calls for Kelso's resignation. The admiral refuses to oblige. When the ensuing impasse is bucked up to Defense Secretary Les Aspin, he, after much agonizing, rules in Kelso's favor. According to one account, the fact that Kelso supported Administration policy "on opening combat jobs to women" weighed heavily in the decision.

Observers have seized upon incidents such as these to make the point that Clinton has a "problem" with the military. Given the self-referential culture of Washington, where everything is politics and politics is everything, the tendency is to frame that problem in conventional political terms. From this perspective, the military is just another constituency to be wooed and won over.

Maybe so. Yet to dismiss President Clinton's "military problem" as a garden-variety political affair may be to mask more substantive developments afoot. Americans have long taken harmonious civil-military relations for granted. Just perhaps, they can no longer afford to do so--lest they inadvertently invite a larger military problem of their own.

Our Citizen-Soldiers

TODAY'S military shows symptoms of evident distemper, no doubt aggravated by Clinton's social agenda and his personal history, but primarily attributed to factors for which Clinton himself is hardly to blame: a drawdown of American forces that continues apace toward an as yet undetermined end; the nation's lack of a clear strategic vision; the convergence of profound cultural changes and spectacular technological advances that threaten to render obsolete the military's warrior mystique--in short, a series of unsettling developments that the end of the Cold War has either ushered into being or brought into focus.

At the same time that the military is being subjected to acute stress, the United States has embarked upon a post-Cold War military policy that marks a pronounced departure from all previous American experience. Heretofore, American military policy has alternated between two basic forms, each conducive to regularizing the terms of the civil-military relationship. The first-easily the more common prior to 1940--reflected the fact that Americans normally perceived minimal immediate threat to their security or vital interests. Distant from the Old World, unchallenged in its dominance of the New, the United States seemed to be virtually invulnerable, a confidence that meshed nicely with popular fears of the danger posed by standing armies. That integral part of the American political heritage imbued the very notion of a regular army and a professional navy with a faintly disagreeable odor. Although events prior to 1800 disabused Americans of the idea that they could get along without any kind of standing force whatsoever, the nation limited itself to a small, oftentimes backward regular establishment consigned to the periphery of national life. Americans prided themselves that theirs was the antithesis of the garrison state. Many and varied were the interpretations of the true character of the "City upon a Hill," but no one suggested that it was rising in the shadow of a citadel.