Wreckage in Gaza, following the most recent eruption of violence in which Israel killed many terrorists and lost much international support. Photo Credit: Zuma Wire, Associated Press.
About a month ago I sent my mother an unsolicited late-night phone call. I consider it the mark of adulthood that one can provide for oneself at the bare minimum, so I had to swallow a little bit of my pride in asking my parents for a favor. Of the many worst-case scenarios that could have passed through my mother’s mind as she answered her cell phone, I’m sure that the last thing she expected me to ask was, “Mom, what’s your cable account information? I’m stuck in a hotel and need to stream the Fox News GOP debate.” As a conscientious objector to cable television, I had never needed an account before.
From my admittedly unprofessional analysis of the debate, peak applause was achieved in response to Governor Mike Huckabee’s comment, regarding the handling of transgender troops that, “The purpose of the military is to kill people and break things.” Although he would later add “protect[ing] every American,” to that job description, it was clear which statement resonated with the audience.
I can forgive Governor Huckabee for such an oversimplification. Having earned his living as a pastor and a politician (who, I assume, has never killed anyone and most likely avoids breaking things on a regular basis), this grossly reductionist view of the most trusted institution in the United Statesserved as a politically expedient and effective means of minimizing sticky internal issues and appealing to the hawkish nature of those in attendance. If I were in his shoes, it would be too easy for me to say the same and earn a little political capital. However, I am not in his shoes. I am an officer in the United States Army and the people of my country deserve and should expect better from my colleagues and myself.
Major Matt Cavanaugh, an infantry officer and Army strategist, excellently laid out the semantic and logical failings of the “oft-repeated and inaccurate maxim,” in a recent article. Based on the responses the article generated, many people (including currently serving and retired service members) agree that yes, Governor Huckabee oversimplified the many functions and stated purpose of the military, but, they say, the spirit of his words rings true. This is a dangerous misconception that threatens to undermine our profession and our effectiveness. Let me expand.
An institution’s purpose, both stated and implicit, should ideally shape the behavior of its members. In the absence of any guidance, the lowest “ground level” employee of an institution should be able to reference his or her institution’s purpose in order to answer the question, “What should I be doing right now?” The significance of this understanding is easily revealed in comparison to another government agency:
The American Police Force at home serves in a comparable but by no means entirely analogous role to our Armed Forces overseas. Both institutions are granted a nearly full legal protection for the use of force in the advancement of their respective missions. The trust emplaced in these two institutions to coerce, restrain, and kill if necessary, is undoubtedly a unique feature which separates them from other government agencies, but a single-minded focus on these capabilities would inevitably produce undesirable results. Consider the consequences if a police officer considered his or her primary duty to be, “arresting criminals and shooting bad guys,” rather than promoting the rule of law and securing the safety of the populace. While at times these actions may be necessary, the officer who conducts himself in a manner reflective of the former understanding creates a functional gap between policy and practice, damaging the effectiveness of his institution.
A common excuse for this mindset manifests itself in any one of many, “That’s above my pay-grade”-style quips. “If our job isn’t to kill people, then why is every Marine a rifleman first?” These objections to a more holistic view of the military’s purpose stem from a conception of the military as aninstrument of national power. Instruments, which have a limited number of capabilities, are meant to be used, usually with other instruments as well, by intelligent individuals to achieve a greater purpose. As such, it is not a significant mental leap to assume that, as an instrument of national power, the military should be proficient in its primary capability (the killing of others and the breaking of things) and simply guided by America’s policy makers, as a carpenter would guide a hammer. This conception breaks apart once one realizes that the American military is composed of human beings, not inanimate objects. Perhaps in an era where battalions and regiments were wheeled across open battlefields like massive, rigid firing platforms, or perhaps in some unforeseen conventional battle of the future, we could conceive of the soldier as an instrument. But this is no longer the case. The modern battlefield demands that each serviceman is more than just a cog in some massive machine, that he or she is also a set of eyes, a decision maker, a second-guesser, an expert, an active listener, a historian, a scientist, an investigator, a killer, and a negotiator as the situation demands. Rather than acting as a hammer, it is perhaps more accurate to view our military as the carpenter himself, capable of using multiple tools and techniques to address multiple problems, and to view our military policy as the job he is given.
This is the new challenge our military and our politicians must grapple with. Former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell writes in his book, The Great War of Our Time, that the enemies America faced in the past were, “easy to find and hard to kill.” Now, that paradigm has completely switched. The enemy wears civilian garb. Ideas spread across the internet faster than at any time in history. Despite our best technologies and efforts, Usama bin Laden was able to hide for over a decade while actively micromanaging al Qa’ida operations. By mentally fixating on killing people and breaking things, we are focusing on the easiest part of our job. We are the tennis player who only practices forehands. We are the doctor who can stop the bleeding but cannot reconnect the nerves. We are the musician who can read notes but is incapable of improvisation. The rifle in your hand, the notebook in your pocket, the muscles in your legs, and the radio on your back — these are the instruments of national policy. As a member of the most powerful military in the history of the world, you are more than that. You bridge the gap between instruments and policy and must act accordingly.
This is a lot to ask of the young men and women who form the ranks of our front lines. Perhaps it would be better to let our military focus on kinetic operations and to leave the ancillary tasks to the State Department or Joint Special Operations Command. This is a strategy. Or, better yet, we can deploy our military, let them wreak havoc, and then let the local government pick up the pieces with a strongly worded warning that the next time they decide to act up, things will be worse. This is also a strategy. Both of these approaches, unfortunately, present their own problems. In the first case, the State Department and JSOC lack the manpower to effectively deliver policy and intent to the sheer number of competing individuals, tribes, and factions that comprise the modern area of operations. As it stands, the Department of Defense is the only agency with the treasure, the population, and the physical connection between America and other countries or non-state actors to effectively do so. In the second case, the “fix yourself before we do it for you” attitude is precisely the process of deciding what not to break. Could we have left Saddam’s institutions in place and forced him, or his deputies, to host supervised and fair elections for the next decade? Maybe. Could we have invaded Afghanistan and told the Taliban, as morally reprehensible as they are, “We’re just here for al Qa’ida. If you harbor them, we will destroy you, if you hand them over, we will leave you be.”? We did.Our enemies have seen our weak side in the unconventional wars of the last decade and a half and will undoubtedly try to draw us into similar conflicts. We can either pull the wool over our eyes and fool ourselves into wishing for another easy victory like Desert Storm, or we can accept that this is the new reality we face and make ourselves better. The relics of nations choosing the former path can be found in museums across the world.
There will still be critics. There are those who will say, “Everything we do ultimately serves the purpose of making it easier to kill our enemies.” This is a mental shortcut that can be applied to nearly all outcomes of military action. Everything we do serves the purpose of occupying territory or denying it to our enemies. Everything we do serves the purpose of ending combat operations. Everything we do serves the purpose of getting back for a hot meal and away from Meals-Ready-to-Eat. The real damage of this critique, though, is not its logical shortcomings, but rather the implication it makes that if we are good at killing people, we will be successful. If this were true, a young female West Point graduate deployed to Afghanistan in 2007 would have never thought to ask why the Haqqani network primarily recruited the sons of widows, an insight that would significantly cut recruitment in her area of operations. In order to win complex wars, we need to avoid any train of thought that unnecessarily narrows our focus. We understand now that even if we are fully capable of killing a lot of people and breaking a lot of things, this does not guarantee us a quick and easy victory and in fact may generate more threats to our national security. This truism is almost as old as war itself, still taught to this day in the ancient Greek myth of the Hydra.
There will always be a place for the critics, for the ones who cannot accept that the gap between policy and practice has shrunken from the distance between Washington D.C. and the general’s command post to the distance between a soldier’s mind and his trigger finger. Perhaps that place will be on some future battlefield, as I said earlier, where futuristic tanks clash in the Fulda Gap, or where mariners unleash swarms of drones to dive-bomb ships in the Pacific. But for now, the critics’ place is under the supervision of intelligent noncommissioned and commissioned officers capable of using them for what they wish to be — instruments — Officers and NCOs who understand that wars are battles of will before they are tallies of the dead.
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