Stretched, but not broken
Joshua Foust on Mar 03 2008 at 8:36 am | Filed under: Military Matters
A poll conducted by Foreign Policy and the Center for a New American Security (which just hired the almost-retired LTC John Nagl, one of the coauthors, along with GEN Petraeus, of FM 3-24) asked what worries 3,400 active and retired military officers ranked O4 and above.
88% think Iraq has stretched the armed forces “dangerously thin” (but only 42% think it is “broken”). 60% think the military is weaker as a result. Nearly 45% do not trust the President to make sound decisions (and 16% registered zero confidence). The DoD fared 1% better, and the State Department, CIA, and even VA scored very low confidence. Nearly 80% think the civilian leadership—which has had a tenuous connection to the military nor two administrations now—sets unreasonable goals for the military.
Disappointingly, only 22% seemed to think letting gays and lesbians serve openly was a good idea. But here I’d want to look at selection bias—by only surveying higher-grade officers, who have likely been in the service for 15 or more years, you’d be facing a generation gap in expectations and values. Think of the split between boomers, Gen-Xers, and whatever the hell you call the rest of us, over gay rights.
So what does the military need? In stark contrast to most of the cilivian pundits I read talking about “the next war,” the military seems to want better and more intelligence, and bigger ground forces. With the exception of the Air Force, of course, which seems to think the next big deployment can best be served by $150 million dogfighters.
I could be completely historically ignorant, but the growing disconnect between the military and the administration seems like a development worth watching further. At least in the popular narratives, even during the darkest depths of Vietnam the military and Administration seemed to be on the same page (I know there are exceptions, I’m just going off perceptions from someone who never lived through it). Five years ago, my military friends would either only say something good about the administration, or they would keep quiet. Now, however, even in places where it can get them into trouble, there is openly-expressed anger at what the wars have done to their services.
What all of this means in the long run I can’t say. But the growing discontent is certainly worth watching further.
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I would suggest it is par for the course. Wars inevitably weakens a military in some senses, in others it strengthens them. The experience, doctrinal improvements and other aspects that are positive are usually dominated by the more obvious losses. The same with opinions on leadership. Once the costs of war are being paid the disagreements become more important in officers minds. They speak up, questionable decisions are less forgivable, more divisive. Vietnam was worse in my estimation.
Take officers leaving. While undoubtedly this is a loss, and normal in wartime, it is not as devastating as it may seem to some. Many of these officers, while fine men, and valuable if they stay, are not as important as those who choose to stay. Always they claim are leaving because of their frustrations at the military and civilian leadership’s lacks. Common sense would tell us that in fact, they are leaving for less noble, if understandable, reasons, including war sucks. This has been a tough war, but hardly tougher from either a strategic, tactical or plain how people live and die standard than past ones. In fact, it scores rather high in that regard. If so, then we cannot help but conclude that these men did their job, and now they don’t want to anymore. Whatever their frustrations are, they pale in comparison to the past. Armies have survived far worse strains, this one will as well. By the standards used to justify this one as broken, past armies were pre broken. Somehow we managed to liberate Europe and defeat Japan with armies far more broken than this one.
I say this not as a critique of the officers, but just an acknowledgment that for any concerns of their’s to be perceived as important, or to justify leaving, one rarely hears people use prosaic language. Rather, we hear broken, etc. Obviously they, and we, should want things to be run better, but there will always be a sizeable contingent during wartime who feel that things are badly run, even if by historical standards it is remarkably well run. That can lead to positive change, but we should keep such complaints in perspective.