A Clash of Cultures

The gulf between the military and civilian worlds in America, as the first decade of the 21st century comes to an end, has grown to unsettling size. Few members of Congress have any military experience, and yet must vote on military issues. Few top-level universities have ROTC units and many try to deny military recruiters access to their students. Those in uniform are drawn disproportionately from the lower economic classes, and frequently feel unappreciated by civilians. Conservative civilians, to be sure, frequently offer the military blank-check approval, but this shows as little understanding for the reality of the military as does the liberal’s blanket suspicion. Nobody knows what the relationship between the military and civilian worlds is, between the person and the uniform, or between the uniformed soldier who does the fighting and the civilian who pays the bills.

How can there be such a gulf? In a democracy, the military isn’t sui generis, it’s a tool, the hammer used by the civilian hand for certain ends. In this concept is the kernel of a bridge over the gulf. Hammers need to act like hammers, not like hands. By the same token, hands don’t disavow their own hammers. If both hammer and hand understand the relationship (for both sides of the metaphor are composed of individual humans), both too-positive and too-negative views each side of the other will give way to a more effective working relationship, based on pragmatism. 

The existence of the gulf is startling, unsettling. Probably it shouldn’t be surprising. Everything conspires against the military and civilian spheres having a clear view of the other. The military likes its secrecy, its sense that it’s doing something dangerous, romantic, and beyond the moral ken of the average citizen. The civilian world likes being able to send the military to do the dirty work of the civilians, and then reserves the right to be shocked, shocked, at the things that are involved in doing so. It’s difficult to find people who can get a handle on this situation, or even try. Those in uniform are forbidden from talking. Retired career people have the most clout, perhaps, but if they’ve stayed in for twenty years they’ve had to accept and take for granted many of the very qualities of the military that could stand to be questioned and reviewed. Civilians tend to be scared off by the military’s bravado, which is part of its nature: who would dare question people who say they’re willing to die for you? The military uses this moral high road as a vantage point to silence analysis (or criticism) from without.

What we need is a perspective from the middle. I may be able to provide that. Being a career civilian professor at the U.S. Naval Academy is like being parked in front of the glass of a huge aquarium: it’s all right there in front of you. All you have to do is watch.

For more than two decades I’ve lived on the fringes of the military, teaching as a civilian professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis. I’ve had a privileged position to observe the military, and to compare it with the civilian world. Not many people have something to do with the military for this long, but aren’t in it. Those in the military can’t say what they see. I can write and talk. As a tenured civilian professor, my primary allegiance is to truth and the big picture, not to this year’s particular administrators. And I can’t be fired or disciplined because somebody doesn’t like what I say. Of course, being military, this year’s administrators rattle their sabers: a recent Naval Academy Superintendent sent me a chain-of-command letter about an article I’d published, expressing his “disappointment” that I’d published this (it seems doing so wasn’t “professional”), and telling me my factual report on admissions criteria at Annapolis “needlessly criticized all midshipman (sic) past, present, and future.” My position is such that I can afford to smile grimly and soldier on: someone in the military isn’t so lucky. The military is always run by the people it’s run by, and you can be ordered to be quiet. Truth doesn’t usually win; the will of your superior officer does. 

Extremes

Civilian attitudes toward the military tend to be one of two extremes, either fanatical support (those in the military can do no wrong) or equally extreme rejection (they’re baby-killer robots). Both are based on lack of information about the military. Of course the military can do wrong, and does. But the fact is, those in the military are the ones who will fight our wars, whether what they’re doing is right or wrong. And they’re not robots. They’re people who see themselves as, and in fact are, sacrificing personal desires to the greater good.

Conservatives, whose world-view involves following immutable rules rather than personal inclinations, typically give knee-jerk support to the military, even when it’s apparent the military is being misused by a particular White House administration.  (This is fleshed out in my book Why Liberals and Conservatives Clash.) “Supporting the troops” comes to mean, supporting their use in the particular circumstances in which they’re being used, right here, right now. Indeed, conservatives seem much more enthusiastic about wars in general than liberals do: many of the martial virtues, as conservatives see it, mirror or adopt what conservatives see as their virtues—hardness, discipline, self-sacrifice. The military is good, those in the military are good, the use of the military is good. There’s no such thing for many conservatives as “love the military and for that reason think they should be back in the U.S. on base rather than fighting in X.” Conservative love for the military isn’t just for the people in the military, it’s for anything the military does. The function of civilians, they think, is to act as cheerleaders. Many conservatives thus end up like a martial version of Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s satire Candide, saying that anything the military does is for the best, because it’s the military doing it. Pangloss says that “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” 

Liberal civilians are equally prone to knee-jerk reactions to the military, though in their case usually negative. This typically comes from the liberal world-view that individuals have to chart their own paths rather than take their guidance from a general set of rules. According to many liberals, the military is inevitably used to carry on the long bloody tradition of the U.S. imposing its will on other countries. At the same time, liberals insist, this means increasingly getting caught in traps laid by America’s own ignorance and boundless self-confidence. When liberals try to “defend the troops” by insisting that troops not be sent in harm’s way, they’re almost always surprised by the troops’ apparent insistence that they want to be in harm’s way. That’s what they trained for, after all. At least they don’t want to be “defended” by liberals. It seems to make them weak.

The liberal version of individuality is something like “doing your own thing.” The conservative version of individuality is something like “choosing the right thing.”  Liberals, seeing the resultant conformity in the military, conclude that this is bad. They see on the result, not the active, daily sacrifice necessary to achieving that result. Thus they tend to look down on the machine-like units of this larger organization. This is a particular danger in a culture like ours where individual desires play so large a role: all advertising, after all, is about the appeal to individual choice. Even Burger King tells us: Have it your way. This world, where individual taste, desire, and even whim is apparently the bottom line, is profoundly antipathetic to the military, and leads to the general military conviction that the world around them is going to hell in a hand-basket; only they have remained pure.

Many liberals need to be able to adopt a point of view that is more like the military’s, specifically with respect to the relationship between the individual and the collective in the military. It’s true that the military has a need—stronger here than in other organizations—to subsume the individuality of its members to a collective will. But this doesn’t mean those in the military are machines; instead they’re people who have, to a degree, signed on the dotted line—and hence chosen—to act like machines. Those in the military see both their own individuality, and the process of subsuming it. The reality here, as elsewhere, is more complex than either extreme view.

Bad Marriage

In the United States of the early twenty-first century, the military and the civilian worlds are like the partners in a bad marriage, stuck together in a house they built together so long ago they can't even remember why, preserving a frigid peace for the sake of the children—here the citizens—but with no love lost, and no real understanding of each other. Sometimes the frigid peace is ruptured by bickering that shows how bad the relationship is, or by exaggerated compliments that show just as intensely how little each side understands the other.

Blame for this situation needs to be shared. If ignorance of the military is a pervasive civilian malaise, the military does little to provide facts about itself, rather than self-justifying hype. To a large degree, the intellectual classes are repelled by what they correctly see as the military's unwillingness to portray itself accurately, rather than insisting on a Hollywood version that does not stand up under scrutiny. The military has a negative side, one everyone should be aware of. If it were more truthful about this, its claims about the positive side would be taken more seriously in the world outside. Instead the military makes things worse by adopting a defensive stance when it's not unilaterally and continuously praised (think of our sacrifices!), and circling the wagons against the slightest criticism. This is a sign not of strength but of weakness. If the military wants to be truly respected, it will have to learn to transcend this default of repelling criticism, rather than dealing with it in a reasoned way.

Monopolies and Their Discontents

The structure of the military is that of an economic or political monopoly, with many of the problems of both. The military exhibits aspects of feudalism, of a dictatorship, and of the propped-up factories of the now-imploded East Bloc. There is no competition in any of these; dissent is a bad thing because it’s held to show that things are breaking up rather than working; nobody is asking whether anything is actually being produced; and everybody is supposed to go happily to the fields, singing songs in praise of the tractor. These are structural facts of monopolies. Monopolies are machines that, in theory, can be 99% inefficient, and still move forward, albeit at whatever speed they move forward. They have no impetus to change, nobody has anything to compare this 99% with, and in any case that’s the way things are. If a monopoly is inefficient, as in inevitably is, there are few pressures on it to self-correct. Why should they change?

So the most fundamental fact about the military is that it is such a monopoly. There are not two U.S. Armies, two Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and so on. Comparably, a sailor, soldier, or Marine does not have two commanding officers: he or she has one. He or she either gets along with and impresses that single person, or there are problems. There’s one of each, not several in competition.

Political, as opposed to economic, monopolies, controlled states like East Germany and Mengistu’s Ethiopia, the Stalinist USSR, or Castro’s Cuba, usually make the lack of open dissent, whatever people are actually thinking, “proof” of the validity of their regime. But then they set out to directly achieve what is held to be the by-product of health: lack of dissent. Dissent is stamped out. Lack of dissent is held to prove that things are going very well indeed. You hire people to wave flags as you pass, or punish them if they don’t: then you cite the fact of flag-wavers as proof that you’re loved. That’s the way things work at Annapolis, and in the military at large.

The military is deeply personal too the way monopolies tend to become, with their cults of personality and the way individuals and their whims trump the rule of law. Besides, the fact is that people in power don’t like to hear things that go contrary to their views. It takes a special kind of person not to equate criticism of the way things are with criticism of the person who made them that way. A  command is Colonel So-and-so’s until he is “relieved of command.” So the military discourages the criticism. Military underlings with views the brass don’t want to hear almost always get squelched, and are branded malcontents. The result is that problems multiply and fester until they erupt, rather than being addressed early on.

Waste

If we merely accept that the military is what it is, things seem fine. If we try and analyze it, we quickly become frustrated. Even speaking of the military as a “monopoly” implies that we can compare it with something: presumably, a competitive system, even if it isn’t one. But the more it’s the one and only, the less we can actually say anything about it. It’s only when we imagine alternatives that we can even run the thought experiment.

Let’s try: because the military is a monopoly like both the economic and political versions, what it does is likely to be like the results of virtually all monopolies, at least when seen according to economic models: it’s prone to waste and inefficiency. Or at least, we would see this if we had a less wasteful, more efficient, version to compare it with. Only we don’t, so by definition it seems there’s no waste or inefficiency: things are merely as they are. Because we have only one military, we don’t make the comparisons that are necessary for us to be able to apply economic terms like “inefficiency.” With respect to what?

Of course, that doesn’t make the military an anomaly. We don’t get to choose between sets of parents; we have the children we have, not someone else’s; we have the jobs we have, not others; we don’t go to college twice, only once; we don’t turn twenty-one under two sets of circumstances, only one. Indeed, the number of cases in our lives where we actually can compare two alternatives without one being already implied is so small, it’s amusing to an outsider to economics to read scholarly papers in economics that treat “irrational” choice as exceptions to the rule, rather than the rule itself. Most things we do aren’t the result of any sort of rational choice among alternatives, they just are. So we’re not in a position to say that what we do is more rational or more efficient than the alternatives.

For that matter, nobody has ever shown that human life itself is efficient: where’s it all going? Is it the most efficient thing that we could be doing, these seventy-some years on the planet Earth? As opposed to what? Is having two arms more or less efficient than having three? Would it be more efficient to be three inches high? Live a thousand years? Be frogs rather than people? Such questions are either idle or, at their metaphysical fringes, make no sense: we are us, so we do what we do. Similarly with the military. It does what it does; we can’t compare either its nature or its mechanisms, to a large degree, with anything at all.

Thus the economic model (following which everything can be converted into amounts of a common unit, usually money; everything can be compared) is foreign to the military, except perhaps making an appearance Congressional Appropriations Bills. In Congress, decisions on guns vs. butter (as economists like to couch economic choices) are in fact usually made for reasons other than efficiency or particular desirability of expenditures with respect to others, namely to grandstand or make a statement about the military as a whole. Otherwise we aren’t comparing things in a common currency. Do we say that bombs cost too much so we won’t buy them? That we’ll wait until a less costly technology is developed? We buy them now, because that’s what there is, and because we need them now, not something else in fifty years. Even if we calculate in dollar terms the monetary destruction of a victim country’s shredded infrastructure or its man-hours lost to death, how do we put a price tag on the psychological cost of the death that is dealt to families on both sides? The fear and suffering? For most things we simply lack measuring units, or ways to apply them.

There’s no way to put a price tag on the waste and inefficiency in terms of lowered morale that results from a bad leader. If the battle is won, nobody cares about the inefficiency and heart-ache of the process; if it’s lost he may be replaced—but not because he was a bad leader, only because the battle was lost. If an engagement ends in victory, nobody says the price tag in lives or goods was ten times what it would have had to have been; instead they’re just grateful for the victory. Perhaps the war shouldn’t have been fought at all? But that’s the sort of verdict, never unanimous, offered by historians, not by those in the military—not even of the politicians who sent them, who by then are out of office, or dead from old age.

It might seem we do have alternatives to the military. Our most radical alternative to having a military is not having a military. Let’s say we take the Draconian step of disbanding it. Yet even this isn’t based on a rational economic choice. Even here we can’t both disband it and not disband it, or disband it for half the country but not the other, in a scientific experiment to see which works better.  We have no way of running multiple strings of events to see which one is better. What would be the ultimate price of disbanding the military? We’ll never know. If we were never attacked, it would be a low price; if annihilated because lacking a military, unpardonably high. Or are these just the result of luck? Let’s say we consider the military like paying an insurance premium. How much insurance are we willing to buy? How much does it have to cover? Does the mere fact of having the insurance, here the military and its toys, give us peace of mind? Yet what of the fact that, once we have the technology, the tendency is to use it. After all, we have it. But this in turn has potentially deleterious effects. Perhaps it would be better not to have it at all?

War is Inefficient

If we could compare war with any alternative, we'd surely conclude that it's just as inefficient as the military. War takes healthy people with lives to live and kills them in the flower of their youth, rather than waiting until shortly before natural death. That's an inefficient way to treat human life. It destroys whole fabrics of families in the country that's attacked that in many cases can never be put back together again; this has nothing to do with the battle. That's inefficient too. Do we weigh the goal achieved against its costs? All we do is determine that the goal has been achieved, or not.

And as for the soldiers themselves, they're by definition inefficiently used, because battle is by definition inefficient with respect to the individuals in it. With no resistance, probably a single well-trained healthy soldier could achieve whatever mission we need achieved—or a small finite number. Add resistance, which is to say put him in a battle, and we're in the position of having to throw fifty rocks at a wall in order to get one into the hole we're really aiming at. Thereupon the mission is declared a success. Compared to what? Compared to getting none in the hole, it's efficient: it's achieved its objective. Compared to what might have happened, it's incredibly wasteful.

The problem with thinking this way is that we have to make our comparisons in a thought experiment. Still, this allows us to make some conclusions about the state of affairs that are. For instance: the chances are wildly against the military whether in peace or war being anything close to efficient. This doesn't mean that people are going out of their way to be inefficient and wasteful, just that any unregulated system or one without outside alternatives will by its nature simply do what it does because it does it, not because there's any actual justification for doing so. Justification means X rather than Y: if you merely do X, rather than explaining why it's better than Y, you do what you do without justification.

The most important conclusion here is this: the fact that we don't compare a monopoly to anything doesn't mean it's working well. All it means is that it's a monopoly. Of course the military bristles if this is pointed out, even though most of life is actually like this as well. The military insists that it's like Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way. This isn't mendacity or hypocrisy, it's good strategy. But that means, it's not true. It's just successful poker-playing. Only the military shouldn't be playing poker with the civilian world, nor the civilian world with the military. They're on the same team.

Just the Facts

So let’s try and characterize the military not by comparing it to something, but simply by saying true things about it.

First: The glue that holds the military together is personal relations—not, as it sometimes claims, abstract principles. Loyalty, which means loyalty to specific people, is the highest military good.

Life in the military isn’t at all abstract, but instead quite human and concrete: people have to be inspired by a human being telling them what to do in order to be willing to do distasteful things. People in the military do things for other people, not for things like democracy, or America. Because the brass thinks this truth won’t play too well in the civilian sector, it’s wrapped in all sorts of things that, in the view of the military, will play better—all those iterations that people in the military are every one of them great patriots, serving their country. It would be more effective to admit the truth, that their motives vary and include many things other than patriotism, and that their greatest loyalty is typically to each other.

Second:The military is about control, and control is established by intimidating enemies. Such intimidation is partly achieved by insisting loudly and repeatedly that the military is big, bad, and invincible. Truth isn’t the goal, intimidating the enemy is. This explains many things about the military, from the emphasis placed on things like shiny shoes and creased shirts (if you look sharp people will do what you say), to the military-wide tendency to insist that all things are working perfectly all the time. Control is maintained if people believe you have control. In the military, it’s not “fake it till you make it,” it’s “fake it and thereby make it.”

For the military, therefore, it’s not lying to insist that things are going well when they aren’t, just (it thinks) good strategy. In poker, it’s not lying to bluff; it’s good strategy.  Or at least this is so to the extent the military makes the mistake of thinking it exists for itself rather than as something serving the civilian world. When the outside world discovers the bluff, which is to say the deception, the discovery has exponentially worse effects than if the military had admitted initially there was a problem. For the military, the appearance of perfection is a form of intimidation of the outside world: the appearance of invincibility can cow  the enemy, and silence critics.

The military’s pose, as a result, will thus tend to be that it’s close to perfect, and in any case has internal means of dealing with problems, in the unlikely event that they should arise. If it’s caught being less than perfect, it immediately circles the wagons, denies wrongdoing up to the point where this is no longer feasible, and then, abruptly and tersely admitting the situation, announces that it has everything in hand and is taking care of things. Outsiders, back off.

This has been the pattern of the Naval Academy’s way of dealing with its own mistreatment of women. Women were, it’s clear, badly mistreated for many decades: during this period objections were brushed away, problems denied. One female graduate from the early years (women were first admitted in 1976 and graduated in 1980) spoke to my classes about having to keep a broom by her bed to grab it in the middle of the night to ward off male aggressors. When she complained to the then-Commandant, he said: “What did you think you’d find here at [historically all-male] Annapolis?”

Nowadays the pendulum has swung hard in the opposite direction, from complete lack of involvement to loud and apparently over-zealous pursuit of miscreants. This is the insistence that we’re doing what’s necessary to deal with the very problem we denied for so long.

Third: The military typically claims that problems are always individual, not structural. The Naval Academy superintendent, whoever he is, invariably describes every problematic midshipman as being just “one bad apple” rather than even considering the possibility, suggested below, that we create these issues by the nature of our system. Thus it will be difficult for the military to admit that it creates these problems; its posture is that they come from individuals.

Corollary: The result is that the military is reduced to crisis management, rather than having any control over predictable problems. To a large degree, its own messes come from within, and it makes them worse by failing to understand this. Because the military’s posture is that any problem is a blemish on its otherwise unstained character (rather than merely what’s to be expected), outsiders, such as the press, have to push and insist to have problems publicly revealed, a revelation which the military sees as losing face. It therefore will always seek to vilify those wanting the problems aired, a situation which naturally leads to black-and-white formulations of the situation. Those wanting information become the bad guys. High-profile examples from 2005-2007 include the fact that the Army apparently covered up the death by so-called “friendly fire” (in other words, death by incompetence) of former football player and Army Ranger Pat Tillman, as well as the alleged massacre by U.S. Marines at Haditha, in Iraq, in 2005. Journalists who pursue such things are accused of “hating the military”; politicians who do so are accused of “aiding and abetting the enemy.”

Fourth: The military is notoriously, bitterly, resistant both to change and to outside influence. Because power is so personal, the individuals with power tend to identify the things they do individually with things that are best for the institution. Everyone in the military exhibits a form of the Sun King’s “l’état, c’est moi.” Few people inside the system, trained to be “loyal” to specific individuals above them, will try to make fundamental changes within it; if they try they’re almost certain to be slapped down.

Fifth: The military is a gerontocracy. Older means more senior; you get to be senior by being older. As you get older, however, most people tend to get steelier and more inflexible. And the ladder nature of the chain of command means that you’re dealing with one and maybe two levels below you both in age as well as rank—you don’t really ever interact with those at the bottom. Those close to you make you happy by saying “Yes, sir” or “Yes, ma’am.” Thus the higher up you are, the more out of touch you are with what those on the bottom are really thinking. It’s filtered and sweetened as it goes up the chain, if it goes up the chain: usually input from below isn’t usually solicited, and when it is, everybody knows what s/he has to say to keep the brass happy.

When Things are Good

When the military officer making the decision is intelligent and educated, fair and enlightened, listens to opposing views, and has the best interests of the whole at heart, things are good. In fact, they’re very good. When things work, they give enormous satisfaction to the subordinate too: there are very few situations in the civilian world where mentor and mentored have the personal relationship that can cause them to reach new heights together the way they can in the military. The world is full of other kinds of pairings of mentors and mentored. But it’s rare when the relationship between, say, a physics professor and a graduate student or younger colleague becomes as personal as relationships can get in the military. This is so because of the way military commodifies (a Marxist word) “leadership” at every level of the chain of command, makes it an entity by itself in the way it rarely is in the civilian world except at the highest, visionary levels.

In the civilian world, people typically achieve a position of authority because they can do something better, have skills, or know more. People are hired because they show they have such skill or knowledge. Those doing the hiring may hope you can be charismatic enough to get others to do what you want them to do. But that’s not at the top of the list. Perhaps people get “big-picture” jobs like CEO or President of an institution because they combine the ability to get people to do what they want them to do with actual knowledge or skills. But it’s rare when the “leadership,” this indefinable ability to sway others, is separated off and rewarded in the civilian world the way it is in the military. In the military, it’s supposed to be shown at every level, someone guiding someone else only slightly junior. And it’s the justification given for the officer corps.

The ones who know the technical things are the senior enlisted, who spend their whole lives with the machinery. So what is the value of the officers? In terms of skills or knowledge, it’s unclear there is any. That’s the reason so much is made in the military, and by extension the military academies, of “leadership.” It has to have substance, or there’s no point to the hierarchy, or perhaps to the military academies—unless the strangest military secret of all is that the officers are simply the ones telling others what to do, not by virtue of any other quality, but simply as a result of being officers: anyone in this position could, in theory, do the same.  Certainly it’s true that in the military, people lead in a way they don’t in the civilian world: namely by being who they are, which means, being physically with the people they’re leading.

The “leadership” of which the military, and the military academies, make so much, is a mixture of charisma, smarts, physical attributes (for men, starting with a flat stomach and big biceps, “guns”) and hard-to-define qualities like sheer energy and positive outlook that make people want to do what you want them to do. Thus leadership isn’t a skill, and it’s unclear if it can be taught. We should be leery of claiming that we teach it or create it at Annapolis, or even pass it on as strong as we get it. Perhaps we actually diminish its strength—but who’s measuring? Yet precisely that is given as our strongest justification. If it turns out that leadership is a purely individual thing and can’t be taught, why should the taxpayers continue to fund the military academies? As for the military itself, we should be aware that people don’t have power over others because of their intrinsic qualities, but merely because that’s where they’ve been slotted into the system: this is what many people discover about the military by being in it. If this is so, we have to be aware of it, and not be disappointed when leaders don’t show leadership. By the same token, we should celebrate it when they do.

The nature of command is something akin to force of personality. The person taking orders has to be—words fail in describing this relationship— under the sway of the senior. The perfect subordinate intuits what the superior wants, and gives it to him, even before he’s asked for it. The relationship up the chain of command is can be akin to love, perhaps even to religious subjugation—but of course it’s neither of these things, it’s just the way the military works, when it works. It all amounts to a sort of feudal submission: your relationship, though ostensibly abstract, to a system, is in fact quite personal, based on a relationship with your immediate superior, whom you are trying with every fiber of your being to please. If this person is good, the relationship can be a dream. If s/he not, it’s a nightmare. The civilian world rarely gets this intense.

When Things go Wrong

The civilian world in a democracy contains many checks and balances that, while not making wrong courses of action impossible, at least render this more difficult in the long run: the system is to a large degree self-correcting. The military isn’t self-correcting, at least not as it’s currently run. In the civilian world there are the internal checks and balances of the multi-party system, the division of government into branches, an active press, and an informed citizenry. Some of these course-correctors are used “as is” by the military: it does what the civilian government tells it to do, after all, and the press is there for everyone. The military needs to find comparable course-correctors to those available in the civilian world to lessen the necessity of civilian overseers, such as the Secretary of Defense or the various Secretaries of the services, to intervene. This level of intervention means that many mistakes have been made for a long time.

Structural Weaknesses

We can’t eliminate the structural weaknesses of the military’s monopoly situation, but if we’re willing to acknowledge their existence, we can set about minimizing them. The key is being willing to acknowledge them, which is something the military—if left to its own devices, to make its own decisions based on its own proclivities—will never do. Because the military is based on individual command in a top-down situation, it reinforces its weaknesses, rather than addressing them. The solution is to build as many checks into this system as possible short of dismantling it.

Because the military is what it is, its tendency will be to be to encourage its weaknesses rather than discourage them. For every particular working-out of the weaknesses outsiders find, the assumption should be that there are a multitude more that don’t come to light. It’s nonsense for the military to act as if each problem that comes to light is the result of “a few bad apples”—though this is inevitably what it claims.

Such problems, to repeat, are not any one individual’s fault—though the military couches everything in terms of individual responsibility and every problem as an unforeseen aberration. If the military “owned” its weakness, it would treat its problems differently. Instead of denying them, it would acknowledge openly that they are the price of doing business, something to be taken care of without the smoke screen of denial or the pose of being shocked, shocked, that something like that could happen in their organization. They need not treat the identification of problems as a threat, problems that therefore must be aggressively identified by outsiders. This outside identification of problems is typically met by military denial, and countered by greater insistence from the outside. The outside always wins, because it invariably has truth on its side: the attempt to cover up by the military is almost always a big explosion that costs the military man-hours and prestige.

It would strengthen the military, therefore, not weaken it, if it were willing to acknowledge weaknesses rather than attempting to deny them. The military needs to regard its structural weaknesses the way we deal with building houses made out of wood or driving cars that can be involved in accidents. We have a fire department, which carries out campaigns against smoking in bed or stockpiling old newspapers, and deals with individual cases it knows are going to occur. We have a police force that tries to slow down speeders, get people to use seat belts, and helps mop up or at least deal with the accidents that, inevitably, occur. In both cases we’ve acknowledged we’re never going to be fire-free or accident-free, though care and attention can minimize the problem as much as possible. Individual cases can be someone’s fault, and frequently are: but structurally the problems are things we have to accept as the cost of living with cars and inflammable houses.

Dissent

Bad Leadership

Still, it’s possible to understand if not approve of defensive and authoritarian (read: bad) leaders. Men in a position of power typically have to project themselves to defend their power, impress the younger men under their power, and assert their will. In their early years they have a position of authority to defend, power to protect: somebody is always challenging them. In their later years the problem is just the opposite: no one is challenging them; everyone says “Yes, sir.” Under such circumstances, men typically only get more steely or convinced they’re right, not more relaxed and open to new ideas. They deal with challenges by becoming more authoritarian and doctrinaire, not less.

Because externals can be forced, and quantified, such leaders may be successful in these external terms. Nobody asks if they’re successful with the internal ones—these take longer to produce really bad effects, and can only be determined at all by asking subordinates what they think. This is rarely done, as it’s perceived as being unsure of yourself. Better just to yell louder. There are of course no statistics on this sort of thing, and all evidence is anecdotal—the military doesn’t share this kind of information anyway, especially not on bad senior officers. Partly for this reason, bad leaders aren’t rare in the military. And once they’re there, it’s difficult to dislodge them. In fact, amazingly, they continue to be promoted: somebody has to be, and they’re there. Or perhaps they’re part of a military program to promote more X—women, perhaps, or officers of color. She’s there, she’s female, and she hasn’t run the ship aground. She’s just what we want!

Those who deny that this is more the rule than the exception, perhaps because they want to take as Gospel the military’s strategic posture that it’s perfect as well as morally pure, simply don’t know what they’re talking about.

How to Minimize Weaknesses

Higher-ups should actively encourage input from more than the next layer down from themselves. They should to surround them with people who, instead of saying “Yes, sir,” will tell them things they don’t want to hear. And they have to constantly remind themselves they’re doing it for the civilians. The more the military and civilian worlds engage in “us vs. them” thinking, the more deeply entrenched these problems become.  The military needs civilian skills, and the civilian world needs the military. Both can benefit by unclenching their fists, dropping the defensive crouch, and talking with each other with, what else?, mutual respect.

The military needs more of the civilian ability to consider possible alternative paths objectively, and  to talk about criticism non-defensively. My job, considered in  Annapolis Autumn: Life, Death and Literature at the US Naval Academy, is to teach close reading, effective argument, the ability to justify an assertion, and attention to detail to future officers in the Navy and Marine Corps. When asked what my goal is, I always say this: to create thinking officers. Successful leaders aren’t successful because they’ve memorized answers from a list: they’ll always be caught short if all they have is a set of responses. They have to respond to new situations. And this usually means, choosing the better alternative, not the correct one.  What they have to have mastered is the art of squashing their own military propensity to pick something because they like it, and charge full speed ahead with it. Instead they have to consider all options, and pick the best, most justifiable one: usually there is no “correct” response. Officers who only know the answers to questions they’ve already seen won’t be good officers. Life is unpredictable; battle is very unpredictable. If they’ve considered other possibilities they won’t be surprised to see them when in fact they turn up when least expected.

My job is to make those in the military question the status quo (why do we have to do things this way? Perhaps there’s a better way), despite the fact that there is a strong tendency of those in the military to think that the goal should be to say “Yes sir” and “Yes ma’am” rather than “Why?” If the military were able to effect a change of its own attitude with respect to its endemic problems, I’m optimistic about the chances of it being effective in minimizing (not eliminating) them.  The possibility of orderly dissent needs to be something the military fosters and takes over as its own. If this is taken on board as its own project, rather than one foisted on it from without, it’s much more likely to succeed.

The military’s point of departure ought to be that weaknesses are there and need minimizing, not that they’re not there at all. The civilian world has to be aware of these weaknesses as a problem it shares with the military, which after all in a democracy is a creation of the civilian world and exists to defend it. Helping the military minimize these weaknesses should be the common goal of both the civilian and military sectors, the way to bridge the military-civilian divide.  The hand ought to have the most efficient hammer possible, after all.