MACKUBIN OWENS
The United States spends a great deal of money on its military. But public acquiescence in this funding could collapse if people come to believe that the U.S. military is not a profession based on honor and duty, the purpose of which is to ensure the security of the United States, but rather just another self-interested bureaucracy.
That is not an idle concern. People notice the conspicuous lack of success in our post-9/11 wars in Iraq and especially Afghanistan. They look with horror as the United States executes a disastrous exit from Kabul and wonder about accountability.
At the same time, they are subjected to stories about how the military is making “diversity” rather than military effectiveness its primary goal. Or stressing “climate change.” They rightly wonder if there might be some connection between the Pentagon’s pushing such fads and the lack of military success in recent years. Does the Pentagon even care about military success anymore?
It should, because success on the battlefield is the only justification for a military.
The Era of ‘Strategic Happy Talk’
There are many reasons for our recent failures of arms. The first can be traced back to the strategically inept approach that took root at the Pentagon during the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union and the American victory against Iraq in 1991. I have called this vision of U.S. national security “strategic happy talk.” It arose from the acceptance by national security professionals of the “end of history” narrative, which argued that liberal democracy had triumphed as the universal ideology. While conflict might continue on the peripheries of the liberal world order, the overall trend was toward a more peaceful and prosperous world. The economic component of the end of history narrative was “globalization,” the triumph of liberal capitalism.
The end of history narrative was complemented by that of the “technological optimists,” who contended that the United States could maintain its dominant position in the international order by exploiting the “revolution in military affairs." The eminent British strategist Colin Gray described the optimists as pursuing a technological El Dorado, a “golden city of guaranteed strategic riches.”
The rapid coalition victory over Saddam Hussein that drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait led some influential defense experts to eschew what they had presumably learned from Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian philosopher, who wrote that war is a “remarkable trinity” composed of, first, “primordial violence, hatred, and enmity” (the realm of the people); second, “chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam” (the realm of the commander and his army); and third, the “element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes [war] subordinate to reason alone” (the realm of the government).
While the character of war is infinitely variable, the nature of war is basically immutable. It is a violent clash between opposing wills, each seeking to prevail over the other. In Clausewitz’s formulation, our will is directed at an animate object that often reacts in unanticipated ways. This cyclical clash occurs in a realm of chance and chaos.
Clausewitz contended that the human dimension is central to the proper understanding of war, which involves intangibles that cannot be quantified. War is shaped by human nature, the complexities of human behavior, and the limitations of human mental and physical capabilities.
Any view of war that ignores what Clausewitz called the “moral factors,” e.g., fear, the impact of danger, and physical exhaustion, is fraught with peril. As the Prussian observed, “Military activity is never directed against material forces alone; it is always aimed simultaneously at the moral forces which give it life, and the two cannot be separated.”
In contrast, these “experts” argued that emerging technologies and the revolution in military affairs had the potential to transform the very nature of war, rather than merely its character. In this view, emerging technologies and “information dominance” would eliminate “friction” and the “fog of uncertainty” in war, providing the commander and his subordinates nearly perfect “situational awareness,” thereby promising “the capacity to use military force without the same risks as before.” These “experts” ought to have known better. One consequence of the idea that technology could change the nature of war was the denigration of land power after the Gulf War of 1991.
But as T.R. Fehrenbach wrote in his classic study of the Korean conflict, This Kind of War: “You can fly over a land forever; you may bomb it and wipe it clean of life … but if you desire to defend it; protect it; and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did … by putting your young men into the mud.”
Some went so far as to suggest that future U.S. military power would be based on precision strikes delivered by air or space assets, perhaps coordinated and directed by a handful of special operations soldiers. Of course, the post-9/11 wars illustrated that ground forces still have an important role to play. But that recognition did little to dampen the enthusiasm for reliance on information technology and precision strikes.
The resulting “astrategic” understanding of conflict reflected a “business” approach to military affairs, stressing economic efficiency at the expense of effectiveness. But war is far more than a mere targeting drill. As our post-9/11 wars have demonstrated, success in destroying the “target set” does not translate automatically into achieving the political goals for which the war was fought in the first place. After all, wars are not fought just to fight, but in order to achieve desired political outcomes.
The Point of the Military Ethos
The triumph of strategic happy talk had several deleterious effects on our military. As noted earlier, one was denigrating the importance of ground combat, success in which depends in large measure on unit cohesion. After all, if success can be achieved by means of advanced technology, a military ethos that stresses the importance of such factors as unit cohesion can be dispensed with.
Anyone who has experienced war understands the dynamics of unit cohesion. It is based on a bond among disparate individuals who may have nothing in common except a commitment to a military mission. It was described by J. Glenn Gray in The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle: “Numberless soldiers have died, more or less willingly, not for country or honor or religious faith or for any other abstract good, but because they realized that by fleeing their posts and rescuing themselves, they would expose their companions to greater danger. Such loyalty to the group is the essence of fighting morale. The commander who can preserve and strengthen it knows that all other physical and psychological factors are little in comparison. The feeling of loyalty, it is clear, is the result not the cause of comradeship. Comrades are loyal to each other spontaneously and without any need for reasons.”
From time immemorial, leaders have aimed to forge a military ethos to create this sort of bond, without which there is no unit cohesion, which undermines military effectiveness. No military effectiveness, no military success.
What is that ethos? It has long been recognized that to achieve battlefield success, the military of necessity must instill behaviors that differ from those of liberal society. Indeed, a liberal democracy faces a paradox when it comes to the relationship between the military and the society at large it protects: The former cannot govern itself in accordance with the democratic principles of the latter.
Behavior that is acceptable, indeed even protected, in civil society is prohibited in the military. The military restricts the freedom of movement of its members, it restricts speech, and it prohibits certain relationships among members, such as fraternization. It stresses virtues that many civilians see as brutal and barbaric because they are necessary to success on the battlefield.
If the military fails, the society it protects may not survive. And long experience has taught us that certain kinds of behavior are destructive of good order, discipline, and morale, without which a military organization will certainly fail. The goal of military policy must be success on the battlefield, a purpose that cannot be in competition with any other, including “equal opportunity” or diversity. Unfortunately, many of those in positions of responsibility, including far too many members of the military itself, seem to have forgotten this imperative.
Huntington’s Warning
As I have written before, what is happening to the military was described nearly seven decades ago by the political scientist Samuel Huntington in his classic 1957 book The Soldier and the State. Huntington identified three variables affecting the relationship between American society and its military. The first is what he called the functional imperative, the ability of the military to respond to external threats to the U.S. The military must be capable of deterring war or winning it if it comes.
The second and third variables are components of what Huntington called the societal imperative, “the social forces, ideologies, and institutions dominant within the society.” The first of these components is our constitutional structure, the legal institutional framework that guides American politics and military affairs.
The second is the dominant ideology shaping political affairs, which Huntington identified as liberalism, “the gravest domestic threat to American military security,” due to its anti-military character. Huntington believed that in the long run, the social imperative would prevail over the functional imperative.
He argued that the anti-military instincts of liberal ideology tended to produce two outcomes. When the external threat was low, liberal ideology sought “extirpation,” the virtual elimination of military forces. When the external threat was high, liberal ideology pursued a policy of “transmutation,” refashioning the military along liberal lines by stripping it of its “particularly military characteristics.”
Transmutation has continued unabated, today manifesting as the elevation of “diversity” above even battlefield effectiveness. The problem with “diversity” as it is currently understood is that it undermines the sort of trust upon which unit cohesion, the cornerstone of military effectiveness, is based. Like all forms of identity politics, it pits individuals against each other.
The U.S. military is at a crossroads. Its leadership must validate the trust and respect afforded to it by the public, or risk watching that respect evaporate. It must demonstrate that it is an organization committed to success on the battlefield and that it is not a laboratory for anything that does not contribute to military effectiveness.
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