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February 2008
Don M. Snider is a professor of political science at the U.S. Military Academy. His most recent publications are The Future of the Army Profession, 2d ed. (2005) and Forging the Warrior’s Character: Moral Precepts from the Cadet Prayer (2007), both co-edited with Lloyd J. Mathews. This enote is based on his presentation at an October 15, 2007 conference sponsored by FPRI and the Reserve Officers Association in Washington, “Mind the Gap: Post-Iraq Civil-Military Relations in America.” A conference report and audio/video are available a www.fpri.org/research/nationalsecurity/mindthegap. Full-length article versions of this and other of the conference talks will be published in the Spring 2008 issue of Orbis. The views and opinions expressed in this essay are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the U.S. Military Academy, or any other U.S. government entity.
For a number of reasons, all much discussed both within the military and in the media, civil-military relations in America have been “frayed,” in the words of the Iraq Study Group, over the course of the Iraq war. Tensions manifested themselves in what has come to be known as the “revolt of the generals” of 2006, when several senior flag officers, all retired, spoke out publicly against both the military policies being pursued in Iraq and the civilian leaders (then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, et al.) most responsible for them.
Since the departure of Secretary Rumsfeld and many of the civilian leaders and military flag officers he put in place, and since changes in strategy were made that may finally be advancing the counterinsurgency effort in Iraq, these tensions have somewhat ebbed. However, this period in American civil-military relations still has reverberating influences on America’s military and political cultures.[1]
In early 2006, six retired general officers, in various manners and public forums and for somewhat similar reasons, broke their services’ traditions to speak out against their civilian leaders’ war policies—policies they had earlier helped to formulate or execute. As one of them, Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold, USMC (ret.), wrote in the April 2006 issue of Time magazine, after 9/11, “inside the military family, I made no secret of my view that the zealots’ rationale for war made no sense. … I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat—al Qaeda.”
Should this type of dissent be accommodated going forward in the military profession’s ethics, or should those ethics continue to strongly discourage such public dissent by uniformed leaders, active and retired, during wartime? And what is the influence of dissenting behavior on the evolution of the profession, its professionals, and their ethic?
One point that over-watches this inquiry is the concept of civilian—or, perhaps more precisely, democratic political—control of the military in America. The U.S. military is subordinate to the president and designated officials in the executive branch as well as to Congress. A desirable pattern of U.S. civil-military relations, including legitimate military dissent, would therefore enhance democratic political control while also facilitating sound strategic decisionmaking. These concerns are central to Samuel Huntington’s classic text, The Soldier and the State (1957).
The full spectrum of choices available to dissenting officers ranges from mere acquiescence to the policy in question up to the ultimate act of dissent: resignation of one’s commission, which includes forfeiture of retirement and all other benefits that go with it. According to Leonard Wong and Douglas Lovelace (“Knowing When to Salute,” Orbis, Spring 2008), the important responsibilities for leaders to evaluate in contemplating dissent lie in the policy environment: the degree of civilian leaders’ resistance to the military’s professional expertise and advice and the importance to the nation’s security of the issue being debated. Strong action is appropriate where both resistance and the threat are serious—i.e., situations like the Iraq war.
But officers have other, equally important responsibilities deriving from their status as leaders of a social trustee profession whose lifeblood is the public’s trust. On commissioning, officers of America’s military professions swear that they will serve according to the standards of the Uniformed Code of Military Justice. Retired officers, unlike active duty officers, can speak freely, and except in the rarest of cases cannot be prosecuted for such actions under the UCMJ. So the question is not whether they are entitled to speak freely, but whether they should.
United States Code, Title 10 - Armed Forces (Sections 3583, 85831, and 5947), “Requirements of Exemplary Conduct,” establishes the commander’s responsibility for the moral and ethical stewardship of his/her unit. All commissioned officers are expected to be at all times “a good example of virtue, honor, patriotism, and subordination.” This includes retired military professionals so long as they have not resigned their commission. But what is such a “good example,” and are there any alternative forms of dissent?
As noted by David Segal and Karen DeAngelis, “From the outset, the American military differed from other traditional professions in always being practiced in a bureaucratic setting, in being composed of people who in many cases did not have a lifelong commitment to their occupation, in having its autonomy constrained by responsibility to extra-professional (state) authority, and to explicitly being politically neutral.”[2] As professionals, the military’s ethic is built on public trust. As professionals, military officers rely upon largely intrinsic motivators such as the privilege and honor of service, the satisfaction of nurturing and protecting life and enabling society to flourish, and the social status of membership in an honorable and revered occupational group.
Maintaining the public’s trust in the profession’s willingness and ability to serve effectively when and where required is the most fundamental moral obligation of the profession and, therefore, of its strategic leaders. Sadly, after the fall of Baghdad in March 2003, it became apparent that strategic leaders of America’s land combat professions had failed the American people in this regard, and also failed their subordinates, who were asked to fight a counterinsurgency campaign with neither the expert knowledge nor the materiel support required to do so.
By the design and acts of many state legislatures and Congresses over the decades, the military professions have been structured as a hierarchical, public-sector bureaucracy and all too often have been treated as such. Unfortunately, the strategic leaders of our armed forces all too often have responded by leading their institutions as bureaucracies—i.e., treating their soldiers as bureaucratic, civilian time servers, rather than as a proud breed of can-doers who march to an entirely different drum.
Today’s volunteers within our armed forces, particularly within the commissioned and noncommissioned ranks, volunteer with the intention and expectation of becoming professionals in a profession that grants them autonomy to organize and execute their own work. But as one Army Major, frustrated by the increasing bureaucratization of her chosen life’s work, put it, “How can I be a professional if there is no profession?”[3] No one can make our armed forces a profession rather than a bureaucracy other than the uniformed strategic leaders, and even they must secure the cooperation of enlightened civilian leaders.
The military profession has trust relationships with first, the American people, and second, the public’s elected and appointed leaders in both Congress and the executive branch—the “civ-mil nexus” This is the set of relationships inhabited by the strategic leaders of the military professions, both those on active duty and those retired—“once a general, always a general.” There is also a third relationship—with subordinate leaders within the military professions, particularly the corps of commissioned and noncommissioned officers in our armed forces.
The first relationship is obvious, as is the third—leaders at all levels serve their subordinates. The second relationship—the profession’s relation to civilian leaders—requires explanation. It is derived from, and well understood within, the literature and practice of American civil-military relations. According to Huntington, our strategic leaders have three responsibilities. First is the representative function, “to represent the claims of military security within the state machinery.” This means that officers are to express their expert point of view on any matter touching the creation, maintenance, use, or contemplated use of the armed forces. Officers are to represent forthrightly the military perspective in all forums, both in public view and out of view. Huntington was reluctant to draw explicit boundaries to the officer’s responsibilities under this function: “The extent to which he may carry the presentation of his views is difficult to define but he must recognize and accept the fact that there are limits.” Thus the behavior will depend on the personal discretion and professional judgment of the individual officer. Apparently, in the case of the generals’ revolt, the officers construed the limits liberally, pressing their views even to the point of demanding an incumbent Secretary of Defense’s resignation.
The second function is advisory: “to analyze and to report on the implications of alternative courses of action from the military point of view.” This means providing candid professional advice to elected and appointed civilian leaders, regardless of whether the advice was solicited or is likely to be welcomed. After that, the civilians must choose and decide. Regardless of the hand-wringing of many academics and retired officers, there is no requirement that civilian leaders follow such advice. Civilian leaders remain responsible to the electorate for any ill consequences of ignoring professional military advice and, of course, for the political objectives of war they establish and the assessment of political risk in its undertaking.
The third function is executive: “to implement state decisions with respect to state security even if it is a decision which runs violently counter to his military judgment.”
Thus, for sound functional and instrumental reasons, the norm of the professional ethic is “military obedience.”
How will the “other” party in each of the strategic leader’s relationships—the American people, civilian leaders, and junior leaders—perceive acts of dissent? Will they view the act as something that reinforces and builds trust within the relationship, or will the act diminish their trust? Completely apart from the legal, prudential, and substantive advisability of rendering dissent, strategic leaders must also consider the effects of the contemplated dissent on these trust bonds through an analysis of five items: the gravity of the issue to the nation, the relevance of the strategic leader’s professional expertise to the issue at hand, and three indicators of the motive of the dissenter—the degree of sacrifice involved, the timing of the act of dissent, and the congruency of the dissent with the prior, long-term personality, character, and belief patterns of the dissenter. That is, does the dissent strike a sudden discordant aberration from those authentic, long-term behaviors that colleagues close to the dissenter would have expected?
The gravity of the issue as regards the nation’s security is a paramount factor in all three relationships. There is no raison d’etre for the existence of military professions other than national security; therefore, if national security is not in peril, there would be no cause for military professionals to consider dissent. Moreover, an inviolate principle of American civil-military relations is the supremacy of civilian values and the subordination of the military to civilian leaders. In the instant case, how will senior military officer dissent be perceived, given a deeply polarized public, many of whom perceive the military as too identified with the Republican Party, with the current administration, and with a war going badly over which the partisan divide is even deeper?
Though in 1957 Huntington posited the existence of a conservative military mind, an ideology that inheres in the professional function and which serves to restrain military involvement in politics and policymaking, that does not exist to the same degree, if at all, today. Thus, the recent dissent could well be construed as a positive development, suggesting that the putative military mind is not as monolithically partisan as it once was.
Alternatively, some scholars find the public education aspect of dissent to be potentially helpful in creating more fully informed public discourse. But, without violating limits on their political activities, there are several ways military leaders can make known their expert information and policy preferences.[4] These include their extensive access within the executive branch, informal communications and meetings with members of Congress and their staff, and dinners with journalists, business leaders, and other public figures. But how far should this type of dissent be carried? For when dissent begins to shade over into political activity, then the dissenters risk being seen as little more than uniformed lobbyists advocating a cause on behalf of their uniformed interest group.[5]
Parsing what is within the military’s knowledge and expertise is no easy task, since the profession has done such a poor job of defining for itself such a knowledge map and establishing certification/licensure protocols that amplify for both military professionals and their constituents what the boundaries are or should be. The only attempt by any military service to do this recently (the Army in 2002) revealed immense confusion on the part of the service and its strategic leaders, serving more than anything else to demonstrate why the service was contracting out various functions willy-nilly without any good understanding of future implications.[6] It was a case of a would-be military profession behaving almost purely as a bureaucracy.
Thus, we must be careful to understand the true essence of the issues that arise between civilian and military leaders, determining whether they are “professional” in some legitimate sense. If the issue can be thus characterized, then the professional is morally bound to “profess” (e.g., how many troops of what type are needed to support a particular war plan for a specific contingency, etc.). On the other hand, disagreements based on the dissenter’s “personal values and beliefs” may go beyond the scope of his or her professional knowledge.
That said, the potential dissenter must still use discretionary professional judgment to arrive at a decision to dissent. Part of that judgment must rest on the idea that professionals are obliged not only to serve the nation, but also to have “their own highly developed internal sense of the proper application of the professional knowledge.”[7] In other words, dissent without insubordination to civilian authority can rightly be based on loyalty to the profession’s expert knowledge and its appropriate application. If this were not the case, then there would be no need for military professions—the nation’s security could be provided by businesses and bureaucracies.
Some scholars go even further. In a recent challenge to Huntington’s assertion that loyalty and obedience are the cardinal military virtues, James Burk contends that:
Military professionals require autonomy, to include moral autonomy…. [There is a] conceptual space within which military professionals exercise moral discretion. The map includes a definition of responsible obedience and disobedience. But it also includes two types of actions that do not fit the classic definitions of these alternatives. They each exhibit a defect in which discretion is used either to do what is morally wrong or to do what was explicitly not authorized. Nevertheless, they are not simply forms of disobedience. They are ‘protected’ actions, protected because the discretion to commit them preserves the autonomy on which the moral responsibility of the military profession depends.[8]
Burk’s argument is compelling. When the exercise of discretionary professional judgment leads to dissent, such acts can fall in the “protected space” that professionals’ actions occupy, a space that may indeed require acts of dissent or disobedience if “the moral responsibility of the profession is to be preserved,” again citing Burk. But that is a narrow space, indeed. Knowing with certitude which acts fall in this narrow space will never be easy, but the knowledge that it exists should give pause.
The other parties in these trust relations can never know a leader’s innermost motives. They must rely on other indicators for insights as to whether the dissenter’s action is self-motivated or an act of selfless service: the degree of personal sacrifice involved for the dissenter, the timing of the act, and the dissenter’s apparent character.
Common sense must apply as to sacrifice, especially in the first and third relationships (the American people and junior professionals). In a profession that places great store in the military virtues of individual honor and loyalty up and down the chains of command, all members expect sacrifice to be shared at all levels. For the true professional, a right understanding of one’s loyalties always places loyalty to self last.[9] Absent personal sacrifice, dissent leads to suspicion of ulterior motives.
Common sense must apply to timing, as well. If the strategic leader discerns that something is worthy of dissent, the act should follow immediately. Any separation of months or years between the cause and the act is grounds, again, for suspicion of lack of moral agency and for a search for ulterior motives. Again, this is particularly true in the relationship with junior military professionals, who expect their leaders to lead. The dissenting strategic leaders are the very same senior professionals who have taught and led in accordance with the profession’s doctrines of decisiveness and audacity in battle; their subordinate followers will see no reason for different qualities to apply in acts of dissent.
As to character, competent, ethically upright junior officers and noncommissioned leaders are they key to shaping the future of the military profession and securing the nation. To make these idealistic young professionals cynical about their calling is an unconscionably large price to pay for an act of dissent. Over the course of long careers, not all strategic military leaders have displayed the steadfastness of character automatically assuring that any act of public dissent would be construed as disinterested. Yet authenticity in leadership is crucial for a professional culture that engenders effective combat units.[10] Disillusionment occurs when junior officers and noncommissioned officers discover that the strategic leaders who has exhorted them on in combat have been opposed to the war for some time, or when they learn that they have risked their lives and those of their subordinates for a cause in which their leaders did not believe.
In a hierarchical organization such as the military there is always some amount of mistrust between junior professionals and their strategic leaders.[11] But it sometimes becomes excessive and destructive, as it did around 2000, when the “exodus of captains” occurred, a catastrophe in professional development from which the Army had not yet recovered when the Iraq war began.[12] Thus, the possibility of fomenting cynicism and the consequent exodus of younger professionals should always figure prominently in the calculation of those contemplating dissent.
Should there be further limitations on military dissent by the strategic leaders of America’s military professions, particularly those in retired status, or is the current ethic, which strongly discourages such acts, still sufficient?
Vice Admiral James Stockdale, Vietnam prisoner of war and Medal of Honor recipient, once said, “even in the most detached duty, we warriors must keep foremost in our minds that there are [moral] boundaries to the prerogatives of leadership.”[13] These boundaries mean that the decision to dissent can never be a purely personal matter. Rather it will impinge at a minimum the military profession’s three critical trust relationships: with the American people, with civilian and military leaders at the highest levels of decisionmaking, and with the junior corps of officers and noncommissioned officers.
None of the five different but closely related factors that should be considered by the strategic leader when deciding whether to dissent—the gravity of the issue, the relevance of the professional’s expert knowledge, the personal sacrifice to be incurred, the timing of the act, and the congruence of such an act with the previous career of service and leadership within the military profession—alone will likely be determinative, but collectively they do provide a moral framework in which a judgment should be made.
If as a result of these considerations the military leader concludes that dissent is warranted, then no additional restrictions should be placed on any act of dissent. On rare occasions true professionals must retain the moral space to “profess.”
It is remarkable how little the “revolt” actually influenced events. The nation, the war in Iraq, and the military profession proceed apace. Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling’s critique of the current state of “generalship”[14] indicates that the revolt may have contributed to an internal professional environment more open to honest dialogue and critique; if so, that is a positive development, indeed.
What remains now is for the military profession’s strategic leaders to strongly promote and follow the existing professional ethic, reinforcing a culture that discourages public dissent owing to the risks it poses to the profession’s trust relationships. One tentative attempt in this direction is a formal letter of guidance issued last fall by the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen: “To the degree we allow ourselves to disconnect from the American People, we allow the very foundation upon which our success rests to crumble…. Every action we take, every day, must be executed in a way that strengthens and sustains the public’s trust and confidence in our ability and our integrity.”[15]
This will be no easy task for the current leaders, but it is an urgent one: reasserting that they alone fulfill the functional roles of representing the profession, rendering advice, and executing legal orders. They must make it abundantly clear that they alone speak for the military profession. All other military voices, including those retired, are those of non-practicing professionals and should be considered as such. This will require reestablishing control over their profession’s certification processes to ensure that all parties to civil-military relations understand that retired officers speak only for themselves as citizens.
It is not clear that recent acts of dissent have ruptured the moral limits to dissent, but those limits might be broken in the future, and at terrible cost to trust relationships, if we do not refurbish and fully implement the profession’s ethic on the rarity of public dissent.
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