Tradition Abandoned: America's Military in a New Era
Mini Teaser: American civil-military relations will remain vexed for some time.
Overlooked by the general public, resolutely ignored by policy
elites, misconstrued by those few scholars who attend to its study,
the relationship between the United States military and American
society clamors for attention. Despite our best efforts to pretend
otherwise, we have a serious problem on our hands.
At first blush, this may seem an exaggeration. After all, the polls
in recent years rank the military at or near the top of major
institutions that Americans trust and respect. Such polls are
misleading. They mislead because popularity at the level of mass
politics counts for little within the precincts of elite politics
where national security policy is made. Indeed, attributing great
weight to public opinion may exacerbate civil-military problems by
conveying to the officer corps an inflated view of its status and
political clout.
That contentiousness, disharmony, and pervasive mistrust characterize
present-day American civil-military relations at the elite level is
all too clear. A bill of particulars would include the following
evidence: the overt disrespect to which active duty military officers
subjected President Bill Clinton after he took office; the
controversy generated by the role of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff--especially pronounced while General Colin Powell served as JCS
chairman--in circumscribing or pre-emptively vetoing policy options;
the near rebellion in the ranks, apparently condoned by senior
uniformed officers, over the issue of gays in the military; the
refusal of the military to assign accountability for failure (except
by passing the buck upward), spectacularly evident in the aftermath
of Mogadishu and the Dhahran bombing; the recent army scandal over
widespread sexual harassment in its training centers; and above all,
Tailhook, with its lingering and poisonous fallout culminating,
however obliquely, in the suicide of the chief of naval operations,
Admiral Jeremy M. Boorda.
Such incidents have given rise to a spate of articles pointing to a
burgeoning "crisis" in civil-military relations. Published analysis
has included loose speculation that the American military may be
careening "out of control." Featuring titles such as "Welcome to the
Junta" or "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012", these
efforts to assess the current state of U.S. civil-military relations
have portrayed the issue chiefly in terms of an ominous erosion of
military subordination to civilian authority. Yet none of these
efforts has put civil-military relations on the national political
agenda. Few informed observers can imagine circumstances in which
American soldiers might directly threaten the republic. Most military
officers, meanwhile, consider the entire line of argument to be
deeply insulting. To suggest that the institutions they serve might
mount a constitutional challenge is, in their eyes, to impugn their
own personal loyalty and patriotism.
Indeed, the more lurid the forecast and the more provocative the
language, the easier it has been to dismiss the entire subject. If
anything, the well-intentioned efforts of members of the "out of
control/coup over the horizon" school have proven counterproductive.
However inadvertently, they have foreclosed serious public
consideration of civil-military relations, and reinforced the popular
inclination to consign such matters to that realm in which myth is
served neat, undiluted by facts. No coup? No problem, and no further
discussion required.
A Revealing Episode
Yet the alarmists are correct in suggesting that Americans can
ill-afford to take healthy civil-military relations for granted.
Paradoxically, their failure stems not from an excess of imagination
but a dearth of it. In advancing the case for more attention to
civil-military relations, they have spent themselves in a futile
attempt to resuscitate a paradigm--the uniformed military as a threat
to the constitutional order--that has long since breathed its last.
In doing so they have missed other, more important kinds of evidence
that something is fundamentally amiss. Take this example: General
gets dissed by White House staffer; outraged at the affront, military
officers instantly leak incident to the press, triggering a furor; to
make amends, President invites general to go jogging; general next
surfaces escorting First Lady to State of the Union address, where he
is lauded as new drug czar; during re-election campaign, President
cites general as proof positive of his administration's vigorous
opposition to illegal drugs.
What are Americans to make of President Clinton's deft deployment of
General Barry McCaffrey to shore up a vulnerable political flank?
Should they be troubled by the unseemly exploitation of a highly
decorated career officer for blatantly partisan purposes? Does it
matter that the Clinton administration remains, by all indications,
oblivious to the implications of politicizing the military? These are
questions to which the alarmists give short shrift.
Yet beyond those questions is one larger still: Who manipulated whom?
Skillfully orchestrated by Pentagon apparatchiks, the public
humiliation of Clinton's staff at the very outset of his term
signaled unmistakably the dangers awaiting the White House if it
failed to treat the military and its views with appropriate respect.
The deference subsequently accorded General McCaffrey is only one
indication that Clinton got the message. Perhaps more than any other
incident, the McCaffrey episode established the parameters of the
President's relationship with an officer corps that viewed him and
his entourage with ill-concealed antipathy.
Viewed in that light, the episode suggests that the real problem in
civil-military relations is not that the military might jump its
traces, but that the boundaries between the civilian and military
camps--delineating prerogatives and responsibilities, protecting
certain practices and proscribing others--have lost much of their
salience. Indeed, among civilian elites and in the officer corps as a
whole, awareness that such boundaries ought to exist is itself fast
disappearing. In addition to the McCaffrey episode, the egregious
Republican effort during the 1996 convention in San Diego to identify
the GOP as the "pro-military" party provides the most noteworthy
recent example of civilians violating previously recognized norms of
civil-military behavior.
Worse, the blurring of civil-military distinctions once widely
recognized and respected is manifesting itself precisely at a time
when American military policies have been cut loose from the moorings
to which they were traditionally tethered. Two points highlight this
disjunction. The first concerns the role of military power in
enabling the United States to fulfill what are now commonly called
its "global responsibilities." The second relates to the size and
character of America's post-Cold War military establishment.
In the heady days after the Persian Gulf War, when the extent of the
American conventional military dominance first became fully evident,
expectations that the mere display of great military power might
enable the United States to preside over the creation of a "New World
Order" were commonplace. But Americans had hardly finished
congratulating themselves on their desert victory when events gave
lie to those expectations. The ordeal of the Kurds in northern Iraq
forced the first, abrupt departure from the triumphal script.
Interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, and Bosnia, a war scare with
North Korea, confrontation with China in the Taiwan Straits, and
recurring clashes with Saddam Hussein followed in short order, making
clear that the use of armed might rather than its possession had
emerged as a staple of American post-Cold War policy.
If the tempo of activity has been unexpectedly brisk, the immense
military capacity maintained to undertake such activities on a global
scale is altogether without precedent in American history. This is
the second major departure from the traditional pattern of
civil-military relations. The fact that the United States has chosen
to retain a large and powerful standing military force in the absence
of any proximate threat to its own security violates principles long
held to be integral to the American experiment. The Founding Fathers
would have looked askance at such a development. Expressing in his
Farewell Address sentiments that once lay at the core of American
political thought, George Washington counseled future generations to
"avoid the necessity of those overgrown Military establishments,
which under any form of Government are inauspicious to liberty, and
which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican
Liberty."
Generations of Americans took Washington's warning to heart. Indeed,
they needed little convincing. As a result, despite expansionist
foreign policies and the progressive growth of American interests,
the United States made it a habit to retain only minimal military
forces in peacetime. Threats foreign or domestic and the imperatives
of destiny might (and frequently did) impel the nation to raise great
and powerful armies, but once the emergency passed Americans quickly
dismantled those forces. Perverse, wasteful, and even reckless, this
practice embodied the American system of civil-military relations.
Following the precedent established at the conclusion of the
Revolutionary War, the United States adhered to this routine in every
subsequent military crisis up to and including the Second World War.
With the end of the Cold War, however, the United States has
abandoned that pattern. A disparate but apparently real consensus of
elite and popular opinion has rejected the view that in
non-threatening circumstances a large military establishment and
political liberty go ill together. In this matter (and others), the
warnings of Washington and the other Founding Fathers now strike us
as overdrawn, hyperbolic, even slightly paranoid. We have persuaded
ourselves that such antique considerations no longer apply. Thus,
although efforts to identify an adversary worthy of the appellation
"peer competitor" have proven futile, both the Bush administration,
conservative in its basic outlook, and the Clinton administration,
supposedly liberal, have agreed on this point: The United States must
maintain a military establishment explicitly designed to dominate.
There is every reason to expect that future administrations will
concur.
In short, despite the absence of a credible threat and contrary to
the nation's political traditions, Americans today appear dedicated
to the proposition that henceforth the United States will set the
world standard in military power. And, as noted above, events have
already shown that the United States will not hesitate to use that
power.
But toward what end? With what prospects for success in the long
term? At what cost? Most important, with what consequences for
American democracy?
Postmodern Democracy and Global Hegemon
The relationship of the military to American society ranks first
among a handful of indices that are indispensable for a serious
consideration of those questions, and that is the chief reason why
civil-military relations demand attention. More than the composition
of the House or Senate, more than the editorial opinions of the
networks and major newspapers, more than marginal fluctuations of the
defense budget, civil-military relations provide a barometer that
enables us to measure the fitness of the United States to play the
part of democratic superpower. To state the matter differently, the
sparks generated by recurring civil-military friction illuminate,
however fleetingly, the dilemmas awaiting the United States as it
attempts to reconcile its identity as postmodern democracy with its
self-assumed responsibilities as global hegemon.
Three large issues define that dilemma, and the present
civil-military predicament exists precisely where those three issues
intersect.
The first issue is that of grand strategy. Here the problem is one of
dissimulation and denial. In terms of civil-military tensions, it
takes the form of a consistent pattern of misrepresentation of
American intentions, fostering illusions among citizens and soldiers
alike about the purposes for which the United States wields its
power. The resolution lies in a candid acknowledgment of the reality
of American policies and the long-term costs that they will entail.
The second issue concerns American culture. Here the problem is one
of massive change that is antagonistic to the traditional military
ethos. In terms of civil-military tensions, this issue manifests
itself in several ways: in the growing isolation of the military; in
a belief among some soldiers that they represent a morally superior
remnant in an otherwise decadent society; and in the proliferation of
inappropriate efforts by political activists to use military
institutions as venues and instruments to advance their own agenda.
The resolution lies in finding a new definition of military
professionalism that reconciles the distinctiveness of the soldier's
calling with changing social norms.
Only the third issue--the problem of technology--touches directly on
military affairs. The very technologies that may hold the greatest
promise for preserving American dominance threaten cherished military
customs, organizational arrangements, and carefully negotiated
agreements regarding roles and missions. This threat incites military
resistance to change that would enable the United States to
capitalize fully on the potential of advanced technologies. It
encourages soldiers to cling to outmoded rituals and institutions.
Resolving this third issue requires forceful and informed civilian
leadership.
Strategic Candor
Many have bemoaned the apparent failure of the United States to
articulate a coherent grand strategy appropriate for the post-Cold
War era. The problem is not the absence of strategy, however, but the
unwillingness to acknowledge openly the strategic enterprise to which
the United States has tacitly committed itself. American leaders will
not say out loud what they know American purposes to be. As a result,
meaningful discussion of means and ends, costs and consequences,
becomes impossible.
President Clinton has designated the United States the "indispensable
nation", an evocative but vacuous phrase that neatly captures the
balderdash permeating public discourse on basic national policies. In
proclaiming American indispensability, the President plays to
national vanity without describing the specific responsibilities and
costs that such a lofty status entails.
To give the President and his speechwriters their due, this
phrase-making responds to a real problem. The vocabulary employed by
their predecessors to justify American endeavors overseas has lost
its persuasive authority. Explaining the U.S. intervention in Somalia
in terms of "vital interests" confuses rather than clarifies matters.
As an explanation of why American soldiers are occupying parts of the
Balkans, "national security" is likewise inadequate. "Department of
Defense" itself has become a misnomer. The Department's day-to-day
activities are not defensive. Rather, the Pentagon is in the business
of projecting American power in order to undergird American influence
around the world.
Obscured by presidential testimonials to American indispensability,
this projection of power suggests the essence of the de facto U.S.
grand strategy: establishing a benign imperium conducive to American
interests and values. It is the seamless confluence of Teddy
Roosevelt's "big stick" without the bombast, Taft's "dollar
diplomacy" without the overt venality, and Wilson's missionary
diplomacy without the condescension--implemented on a global scale
and extending indefinitely into the future.
The armed forces rank first among federal agencies engaged in
maintaining that imperium--an undertaking analogous to the task once
undertaken on a far smaller scale by U.S. Marines in places such as
Nicaragua and Haiti. Just as the United States throughout most of
this century intervened to keep order in the strategically vital
Caribbean, so in the age of the "world community", a "global
economy", and "universal rights", similar concerns now lead the
United States to dispatch American soldiers much farther afield. A
new lexicon describing new categories of non-traditional military
missions--"peacekeeping", "peacemaking", and "peace enforcement"--has
evolved to describe the American military's expanded role. Given the
slipperiness of such terms, military officers have tended to be leery
of them, but the very considerable extent to which they have achieved
common usage further illustrates the blurring of functional
boundaries between soldiers and civilians.
The immediate purposes upon which those soldiers embark bear small
resemblance to high-minded crusades. Their task is not the lofty one
of saving the world from totalitarianism but the necessary one of
staving off disorder. As a result, their efforts will seldom yield
the satisfaction of clear-cut victory. Nor will they culminate in the
"lasting peace" that presidents from FDR to Reagan held up as the
great object of American participation in world affairs. Indeed,
elites have discovered--perhaps they have known all along--that
permanent world peace is an illusion. The best one can hope for is a
modicum of stability--and even that requires continuing American
"engagement." As this handy euphemism for blood and taxes would
suggest, policing the imperium is a task for which there is no end in
sight.
Unwilling to let the people in on this one big secret, elites work
themselves into a further bind. When it comes to explaining the
far-flung endeavors of U.S. forces, they prefer subterfuge to
straight talk. On his final official visit to Bosnia, Secretary of
Defense William Perry characterized the mission of American forces
there as doing "God's work." President George Bush had used the
identical phrase to describe the U.S. intervention in Somalia.
Whether the Dayton Accord will produce results that merit divine
approval remains to be seen. In the case of Somalia, the outcome is
clear: Soldiers doing the Lord's work ended up using helicopter
gunships against those they came to save, and the objects of American
beneficence took pleasure in publicly defiling the remains of GIs
that they killed. Amid such nastiness, claims of a heavenly mandate
quickly crumbled, as did the policy itself, in a torrent of
recrimination.
In short, the absence of candor in describing the purposes of U.S.
policy sows confusion among the American people and within the
American military itself. When decision makers contrive exalted moral
justifications for military operations that actually derive from
American intolerance for disorder or egregious misbehavior, they
erect policies on the flimsiest basis. As the late General Mohammed
Aideed demonstrated, such a rationale is prone to collapse if things
go less than swimmingly well.
The lack of candor also encourages an excessive sentimentalization of
American military professionals, manifested in posturing about
casualties that has become de rigueur among politicians and pundits.
(It seems likely that the sentimentalization of today's GI is a way
of making amends for the reckless demonization of American soldiers
during and after the Vietnam War, a process abetted by opponents of
the war who have now risen to prominence in public life.) Yet this
self-proclaimed sensitivity to casualties again creates false
expectations at home and in the ranks. Worse, it signals adversaries
that they need not defeat, but merely damage, U.S. forces in order to
achieve their aims, a prospect that invites attacks against the very
men and women in uniform whose well-being is the subject of such
concern.
By allowing casualty avoidance to become the leading measure of
success, policymakers also surrender influence to senior military
officers. That these officers use that influence to advance their own
institutional interests rather than the ends of national policy is
hardly surprising. The process is well illustrated by the limited
mandate of U.S. forces camped in Bosnia. At times, this military
leverage approaches that of a near veto: If the Joint Chiefs of Staff
cannot be cajoled into offering support, the civilian leadership is
stymied.
The iconography that depicts soldiers as fuzzy-cheeked draftees
engaged in saving the world rather than well-trained professionals
handed a dirty but essential job; the debilitating preoccupation with
casualties; the smudging of distinctions between military advice
(once the business of soldiers) and policy advocacy (formerly the
exclusive preserve of civilians)--all these testify to a
civil-military relationship that is out of kilter. All undermine the
effectiveness of U.S. policy. All are attributable not to a lack of
strategy but to an unwillingness to speak the truth about what U.S.
strategy entails. For a democracy to serve as global hegemon is
difficult enough; that its leaders should undertake that task without
telling the people and its military what they are doing is to invite
continuing misunderstanding and possibly disaster.
A Shrinking Enclave
But who are the people? The end of the twentieth century finds
American society sharply divided and American culture in the midst of
tumult. Most important to our purposes, the cutting-edge forces of
cultural change--radical individualism, multiculturalism, the
politics of gender and sexual orientation--are fundamentally
antipathetic to military institutions and the military profession
itself as traditionally conceived. This is the second great source of
civil-military dissonance in the United States today.
A shrinking enclave within American society, the military subculture
has become something of an oddity. Military "society" is
undemocratic, hierarchical, and quasi-socialistic. It prizes order,
routine, and predictability. It resists change. America as a whole
has none of these qualities.
Traditional military professionalism--rooted in the ideal of the
warrior as the embodiment of soldierly virtue--has also become an
anachronism. It celebrates the group rather than the individual. It
cherishes virtues such as self-sacrifice, self-denial, and physical
courage that are increasingly alien to the larger culture. It clings
to a warrior spirit that is deeply and perhaps irreducibly masculine.
In short, orthodox notions of what it means to be a soldier clash
head-on with the imperatives of political correctness.
The thrust of postmodern politics is to tear down old boundaries and
to discard once sacrosanct distinctions. This has been true in art
and in a wide range of academic disciplines. It has been truer still
in matters related to gender and sexual morality. The military has
not been immune to this assault. Progressive thinkers, abetted by
allies in the media, question the necessity or justification for the
boundaries that set the military profession apart from society at
large. The ferocity with which the traditional soldierly ethos has
been attacked has repeatedly taken military officers by surprise.
Having themselves taken that culture for granted, they have been slow
even to recognize the importance of mounting a defense. As Tailhook
has made painfully obvious, their response when offered has tended to
be either obtuse or simply lame.
The upshot of cultural divergence has been an unhealthy estrangement
of the military from other influential sectors of society. In a
sense, American elites have gotten what they asked for; the
journalist Thomas E. Ricks puts the matter succinctly: "The end of
the draft, in 1973, ratified the separation between American elites
and the military." As a result, according to former Secretary of the
Navy John Lehman, since Vietnam, "We have created a separate military
caste." In times of stress--and for soldiers the immediate aftermath
of the Cold War era is laden with stress--that separation can harden
into alienation and disdain.
Despite such separation--or perhaps because of it--civilian elites
clamor loudly for the military to quit dragging its heels on the
leading social issues of the day. The remedy for such recalcitrance,
enthusiastically supported by critics such as former Representative
Pat Schroeder, is "culture cracking": subjecting military folkways to
ridicule, harassing the armed services to submit to the dictates of
political and cultural fashion. Ritualistic humiliation of male
officers, the more senior the better, figures prominently in such
endeavors. But the true motive is not simply sexual retribution;
rather it is to use the military as a wedge to allow the aggrieved to
advance a larger political agenda. In this respect, advocates of
women's rights and gay rights who engage in "culture cracking" are
following the example of civil rights leaders for whom the
desegregation of the armed forces was a pivotal event. Leading
practitioners of culture cracking--few of whom possess any firsthand
military experience--cannot grasp and thus do not sympathize with
claims that a distinctive identity and distinctive values might
contribute to military effectiveness.
Among soldiers, civilian intrusions into matters once reserved for
the military itself arouse fierce resentment. Worse, distaste for
what they perceive to be the unruliness and decadence of civilian
life breeds contempt for the society that soldiers are sworn to
protect. As a result, the American military finds itself today
standing not only apart from but dangerously at odds with the society
it is pledged to defend. As a spokesman for the U.S. Naval Academy
put it in rejecting any institutional responsibility for an outbreak
of criminal activity by "a small number of miscreants" among
midshipmen, the real fault lies with society. There, "a great
reversal has taken place", a de-emphasis of character. As a result of
that reversal, "the academy, standing as it does for decency, honor,
[and] honesty . . . is now the counterculture."
The notion that the military has become a bastion of rectitude in a
society awash with evil is as misguided as it is bizarre. Among its
unfortunate effects, it encourages the belief in some quarters that
the military might serve as an agent for rejuvenating a society
fallen into debauchery. Typifying this school of thought is Major
Ralph Peters, an army officer and a writer of pulp fiction that
features incorruptible military officers as the good guys, and oily,
ambitious civilian officials as villains. The U.S. Army, Peters
recently advised the Wall Street Journal, is "a noble institution
from which the rest of society could learn a great deal--the ideas of
duty, honor, and country, the idea of putting responsibility before
rights"--this comment appearing precisely as the army's sexual
harassment scandal at Aberdeen was erupting.
In many respects, the army and the other armed services are indeed
noble and admirable institutions. Yet when they entertain fantasies
of serving as agents of moral renewal, soldiers stray into areas that
should remain strictly out of bounds. Armies preserve their nobility
by serving as effective instruments of policy, leaving to others the
task of social transformation.
Given the burdens accruing to the World's Only Superpower, that
Clausewitzian role should prove sufficiently arduous. When it comes
to keeping the United States atop the international order, the most
onerous tasks will inevitably fall to soldiers. As civilian elites
awaken to that fact, they may come to recognize the utility of
nurturing values within the ranks that are conducive to toughness,
discipline, and cohesion--and that provide, not so incidentally, a
firewall against praetorian inclinations. Such enlightened attitudes
might lay the basis for a new compact between the military and
civilian elites, delineating in a way acceptable to both the
responsibilities that soldiers will undertake and the prerogatives
that they will enjoy. Negotiating the terms of such a compact will
demand concessions from both sides. Almost inevitably, it will
require a reformulation of the warrior's calling, adapting and
updating its externals in order to preserve its essentials.
The penalty for failing to devise such a compact will be protracted
and intensifying discord. Uninformed politicians, journalists, and
intellectuals will continue their ill-advised campaign to civilianize
the military. Responding with indignation and disgust, soldiers will
flirt with the notion that they are called to save America by
militarizing it. The result is unlikely to be conducive either to
effective hegemony or to healthy democracy.
For now, however, whether such enlightened attitudes will take root
remains an open question. With other Somalias, Haitis, and Bosnias
lurking in the nation's future, this much seems beyond dispute:
Pursued indefinitely, efforts to strip the military profession of its
characteristic ethos will render the prospects of maintaining a Pax
Americana problematic.
Technological Change
In military journals, civil-military relations seldom appear as more than an afterthought. Technology, on the other hand, regularly attracts enormous attention. Yet the two are intertwined. To the extent that it may be reshaping the conduct of future warfare, technology is itself the third issue destabilizing American civil-military relations.
In the new international order, the United States pursues a strategy in which the soldier's role incorporates many tasks once left to diplomats and relief workers. In the midst of culture "wars" at home, venerable distinctions between civilian and military life become contentious. Similarly, the information technologies pointing to what some have described as a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) threaten other distinctions - between warrior and non-warrior, between officer and NCO, and between service claims of proprietary rights regarding certain modes of warfare.
According to RMA visionaries, the coming revolution will transform the nature of war. It will render obsolete (or at least marginalize) weapons that define service identities: tanks, aircraft carriers, and manned aircraft. Familiar organizations such as battalions, brigades, and divisions that have long characterized armies will become superfluous.
The prospect of change on this scale inevitably gives rise to civil-military complications. Past efforts to reorganize the American military establishment according to the dictates of some "revolutionary" concept have triggered tumultuous fights both among the services, and between them and civilian authority. The passionate advocacy of strategic bombing by airmen of the interwar period is one example. Similarly, the infatuation with nuclear weapons to which military planners succumbed after the Second World War provoked bitter disputes both within and among each of the services. Thus, despite its trappings of radicalism, the RMA is nothing new. It is rather the latest expression of a deep-seated yearning for, and a recurrent effort to find, an absolute technological guarantee of American security.
Every search for the next technological fix upsets the status quo and provokes ugly intramural conflict. If that conflict becomes public, it is likely to embarrass all concerned. No one is more sensitive to this than military leaders themselves, and no one is more anxious to avoid a return to the internecine feuding of the late 1940s and 1950s. This is a major reason why present-day Pentagon leaders, nominally devoted to acquiring the most advanced technology that the American taxpayer can afford, are leery of the RMA. Senior military officers are skittish about violating the truce that in recent decades has kept interservice rivalry within reasonable bounds. The prospect of tight (and perhaps further declining) defense budgets reinforces this caution because in any wholesale reorganization of the Defense Department, the losers will lose big.
But there is another factor dampening military enthusiasm for the RMA. The promised revolution endangers internal arrangements hitherto central to the military "way of life." To an extent that soldiers themselves are usually unwilling to acknowledge, the daily rewards of military life revolve around ancient rituals of status. In the army or the marines, for example, every officer worth his salt aspires to battalion command, every NCO to be appointed company first sergeant. Subordinates pay homage to the "Old Man" or the "top kick" as part of the rite by which they in turn demonstrate their worthiness for such exalted positions. Yet the information revolution has already sounded the death knell for such middle management positions in the private sector. Lean and flexible "flat" organizations outperform those modeled along hierarchical lines. The new art of leadership lies in articulating a "vision" and developing consensus. Tasks are executed by small teams. Informality reigns.
Grafting these precepts onto highly structured institutions where satisfaction derives from one's status within the unit or the ship will have huge institutional implications. The organizational and leadership principles mandated by the new information technologies defining the RMA are likely to make the military's elaborate hierarchy of rank redundant - and may even see the cult of command eclipsed by mere technicians, analysts, and programmers. Given this prospect, the RMA debate within military circles centers as much on fending off change as on coming to terms with it.
The point is not to suggest that experienced and thoughtful military officers should obligingly acquiesce in the designs promoted by reform-minded visionaries. The fervor of RMA visionaries no more guarantees that they have unlocked the secrets of future warfare than did Billy Mitchell's vehemence in insisting that his bombers had made surface navies obsolete. Whether an RMA is actually underway and what its true character might be are questions that deserve thorough examination. The cases for and against need to be considered on their merits, recognizing, however, that technological dominance - not manpower, access to strategic resources, old-fashioned industrial strength, or willingness to endure great sacrifice - comprises the basis of America's putative edge over any would-be challenger. In short, if the RMA is not for real, U.S. military superiority may prove less enduring than most Americans imagine. Hence, the imperative of joining that debate honestly.
The key to restoring the integrity of that debate is tough-minded civilian leadership that refuses to let soldiers dodge the difficult issues and demands that military practice remain responsive to the needs of policy. This does not imply meddling in the style of Robert McNamara; senior Pentagon civilians should not presume to dictate the answers to questions falling within the realm of soldierly competence. But they must insist that the right questions be asked and answered. As Eliot Cohen has suggested, the model for such leadership may still be Winston Churchill: incessantly challenging, prodding, and needling, driving his generals to distraction, but thereby eliciting outstanding service and sometimes even brilliance from men of no more than passing ability.
In the near term, what are the prospects for improvement in the climate of American civil-military relations? They are poor, the main difficulty being that none of the three factors described above - strategy, culture, and technology - can be addressed independently of the others.
Until the United States acknowledges its strategic purpose, evaluating arguments for and against the Revolution in Military Affairs will remain difficult. (Does the RMA promise the right forces to police the imperium? For such purposes, what mix of capabilities is most appropriate?) Until the United States comes to terms with the RMA, a formula for reconciling the military with society is likely to remain elusive. (How "different" must high-tech warriors be from other citizens? Is greater conformity with civilian norms compatible with military effectiveness in a new era of warfare?) Finally, until civilian elites no longer disdain military affairs, the capacity of the United States to sustain the grand strategic project upon which it has embarked will remain in doubt. (What price hegemony? How much of that price can America's warriors be expected to pay?) In all likelihood, American civil-military relations will remain vexed for some time, a constant reminder of the predicaments awaiting a cocksure and fractious democracy that fancies itself called to bring order to an obstinately unruly world.
A.J. Bacevich is executive director of the Foreign Policy Institute at The Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC.
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