Center for a New American Security

Peter Beinart, hailing the Israeli system:

Every time I get depressed about politics in Israel, I try to remember one salient fact: their political system still sometimes functions better than ours. ...

Why is their system working when ours did not? In Israel, as in the United States, military and intelligence officials are generally more cautious than civilian leaders when it comes to war, largely because they know firsthand how crude and unpredictable an instrument war is. But the Israeli system is less hierarchical. The military and intelligence agencies in the United States certainly leak to the press, and use bureaucratic tactics to box in their civilian overlords. At the end of the day, however, soldiers and intelligence analysts are trained to give their professional advice and then get out of the way. In Israel, the lines are more blurred, and bureaucrats are more freewheeling in speaking to the press. This has its disadvantages, but in a case like this, it gives the antiwar generals and spies greater leverage to fight back.

If anyone noticed Sam Huntington spinning in his grave, that's because Beinart is arguing that in a democracy, a military that actively resists the policy preferences of its elected leaders is a more responsible military than one that faithfully executes those same policy preferences. 

Needless to say, this is a model of civilian-military relations that few political scientists would endorse.

It is fine to think the decision to invade Iraq -- which Beinart loudly supported, if memory serves -- was a poor decision. And it is also fine to think that a decision to attack Iran in order to retard the development of the Iranian nuclear program would be a similarly poor decision. We can have debates about either, of course, but the positions are ones reasonable people can get behind.

But endorsing a system of government in which military officers get to pick and choose which policy preferences of their elected leaders to carry out is not a prescription for better policy-making. It is instead a prescription for turning yourself into Pakistan.

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — An inquiry by the Defense Department inspector general into a magazine profile that resulted in the abrupt, forced retirement of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has cleared the general, his military aides and civilian advisers of all wrongdoing.

 

Pentagon investigators said they were unable to confirm the events as reported in the June 2010 article in Rolling Stone, and the inquiry’s final review challenged the accuracy of the profile of General McChrystal, who was the top commander in Afghanistan. ...

 

“Not all of the events at issue occurred as reported in the article,” the inspector general’s review stated. “In some instances, we found no witness who acknowledged making or hearing the comments as reported. In other instances, we confirmed that the general substance of an incident at issue occurred, but not in the exact context described in the article.” ...

 

The Pentagon inspector general’s team had invited Mr. Hastings to meet with investigators to provide his views. He declined, and pointed to previous statements and the article, according to the inquiry. Mr. Bates provided some clarifying information in an e-mail, the investigative report stated.

 

In looking at specific incidents reported in the article, Pentagon investigators found contradictory or inconclusive information on the statement disparaging the vice president.

Let's take bets on the page number of the Times in which this article will run? A16? And while we're taking bets, what are the odds, between this investigation and the now discredited article on Gen. Caldwell, that Rolling Stone will conduct its own internal investigation into these stories?

When the president fired Gen. Stan McChrystal last year, a chorus of pundits rushed to proclaim the United States faced a crisis in civil-military relations. I do not want to argue that civil-military relations are entirely healthy, because I do not believe they are*, but it seems clear in retrospect that L'Affair Rolling Stan was not as symptomatic of a crisis as we were initially led to believe. As Hew Strachan correctly noted, "This was a cock-up, not a conspiracy. [McChrystal's] dignified response, and his refusal to try to justify or explain away the remarks attributed to him, confirmed his disciplined acceptance of his own constitutional position."**

I think today's news*** only confirms what Strachan argued, though the next time Gen. Petraeus disagrees with someone in the White House about the pace of Afghanistan troop withdrawals, you can count on pundits to reliably begin screaming anew about a crisis in civil-military relations.

*Richard Kohn offers the most exhaustive list of reasons to be worried about civil-military relations in this 2008 essay. As with this other essay by Kohn, I do not endorse everything he argues but nonetheless found it enlightening and powerful.

**Strachan went on to argue that the affair revealed a more immediate problem with our strategy in Afghanistan. Read his essay here.

***In the interests of full disclosure, my employer is a partner of the White House in this welcome new initiative focusing on military families. Also, I think readers of this blog understand I have both long admired Stan McChrystal and completely understood the president's decision to replace him in the aftermath of that Rolling Stone article.

"Riddle me this," a particularly careful student of civil-military relations wrote to me this morning:

How many of the people who think we have a serious civil-military problem because the military is controlling Obama (or whatever word one wants to use) also a) complained when Shinseki spoke out about the Iraq war strategy, b) thought Rumsfeld was correct in general to ride roughshod over the generals in 2001-2003, and c) thought that the generals complaining about Bush's Iraq strategy should have piped down and been quiet?

Good questions. I, for one, am not arguing questions being asked about civil-military relations right now are appropriate or inappropriate. If pressed, in fact, I would argue that we should always be having a dynamic debate about these issues lest we grow complacent. But it's worth noting how partisan preferences shape when and how people choose to get their panties all up in a twist on this. (Although it needs to be said that some individuals, such as Richard Kohn, have been writing about this issue in a determinedly non-partisan manner for some time.)

Update: Case in point: Here is Andrew Sullivan warning, today, of the menace David Petraeus poses to healthy civil-military relations. But when a bunch of retired flag officers get politically involved and start lobbying the administration on the "right" side of an issue that Andrew Sullivan cares about, they are to be applauded. And when generals complained about Don Rumsfeld, they too were to be lauded for speaking out. I'm not trying to pick on Andrew Sullivan here, but the uneven way he approaches civil-military relations -- alternately praising or chiding flag officers for getting politically involved depending on the issue and the political preferences of the writer -- seems representative of most punditry I read on this on both the right and the left. Again, I respect folks like Andrew Bacevich or Richard Kohn for being more ecumenical (if uncompromising) in their treatment of the issue. Read Kohn's biting essay on the subject here.

Today's newspapers have some good thoughts on the dismissal of Gen. McChrystal, some predictable drivel on the dismissal, and a touching tribute written by one of Gen. McChrystal's Afghan colleagues. The Skype connection between Denver and CNN's studios malfunctioned, so you the reader will miss me talking about all this today with Tom Friedman and Dave Kilcullen on Fareed Zakaria's show. Alas. One thing that I will add to Andrew Bacevich's op-ed, though, is that he may have missed a trick: yes, civil-military relations are strained when you ask an officer corps to fight as long as it has, but as I was discussing with a friend the other day, officers within the special operations community might be more likely than others to treat their civilian leaders with contempt. Within the uniformed officer corps, officers who serve in special operations assignments seem less likely to serve tours of duty in Washington -- and are thus less likely to remember that we have these things called "civilians" which determine U.S. foreign and defense policy. Since the readership has officers and soldiers who have served in both regular assignments and in special operations, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this. Are special operators more likely to treat their civilian leaders with contempt?

Update: A friend wrote in to say that based upon her experiences, special operations types tend to treat everyone with contempt. Heh. But maybe contempt is the wrong word, or at least the wrong way of looking at things. Maybe a better way of thinking about this is to consider the issue in terms of separation. That might be closer to what Bacevich is getting at too. When you separate an officer from the society he or she serves for long periods of time, the officer might grow distant from the institutions he or she is meant to be protecting and serving. Special operations officers tend to be more separated than most other officers from their society and its institutions, so maybe civil-military relations are more fraught with peril when they are involved. Thoughts?

I arrived in Vail, Colorado this afternoon to digest the news from Washington -- which I did during a trail run up Riva Ridge, getting in touch with my 10th Mountain Division forefathers. I think the president acted very wisely today. I think he was well within his rights to fire Gen. Stan McChrystal, a friend and a man for whom I have great admiration, and that it was correct for healthy civil-military relations that he did so. He did so in a very classy way, too, noting Gen. McChrystal's long record of service and the role he has played since 2001 as both commander in Afghanistan and in command of the Joint Special Operations Command. (I believe he will someday get the credit he deserves for his service at the helm of JSOC.) And he did so in a way that minimized many of the risks I wrote about yesterday by replacing Gen. McChrystal with Gen. Petraeus. Those who hoped this episode would lead to a wider examination of U.S. and allied strategy in Afghanistan will be disappointed. But it will be interesting to see how Gen. Petraeus responds to the day-to-day challenges of Afghanistan and what shifts he recommends to both President Obama and President Karzai.

These have been a remarkable but tough few days. We have reason to hope, though, going forward. The president acted with confidence and wisdom. And we have a very good general en route to Kabul. All that is left, then, is to thank Gen. Stan McChrystal for his service. It is a pity that a man who has given so much to his nation ends his career in such ignominious fashion.

Something very, very positive happened today in Washington, DC. Senior Republican legislators, to include Sen. John McCain, and Bush Administration national security specialists, to include Peter Feaver and Eliot Cohen (both careful scholars of counterinsurgency and civil-military relations, I might add), have made clear that the president is well within his rights to fire Gen. McChrystal for comments made in a Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings. Those who love our constitutional democracy should exhale, because I for one was really afraid this was going to turn into a partisan catfight, with those on the Left screaming for the president to fire McChrystal and those on the Right laying the blame at the feet of the president.

I am at a loss, though, as to what the best option for the president is. As I have made clear, I believe any course of action carries risk. The purpose of this post is to share three options for the president that, I believe, minimize those risks.

1. If you decide to retain Gen. McChrystal:

Have him resign ... and then do not accept his resignation. If you really do not think the war in Afghanistan can be waged without Gen. McChrystal, you still have to make clear that words and actions carry consequences and that at the end of the day, the President of the United States is the commander in chief. This option allows the president to keep Gen. McChrystal while at the same time reestablishing a healthier civil-military balance.

2a. If you decide to fire Gen. McChrystal (but believe the current strategy is still the most appropriate strategy for Afghanistan):

Fire him, and replace him with LTG Dave Rodriguez, McChrystal's deputy. This is a simple "drop one" drill, it allows for the greatest continuity, and it allows you to procede as planned with both operations this summer and this fall's strategic review.

2b. If you decide to fire Gen. McChrystal (but decide you need a new strategy as well):

Fire him and name LTG Rodriguez the interim commander while you carry out another strategic review. Once you decide on your new strategy, name a commander best suited for carrying out that strategy. The shame here is that the U.S. general best qualified to carry out a lighter-footprint counter-terror strategy like the one described by Austin Long is ... Stan McChrystal.

Sigh.

I have been struck by the degree to which a lot of smart friends are in disagreement about what should be done about l'Affair Rolling Stan. In some ways, the argument about whether or not you dismiss Gen. McChrystal for comments made by the commander and his staff in this Rolling Stone article breaks down into unhappily familiar lines. Critics of the current strategy in Afghanistan unsurprisingly think McChrystal should be fired. Supporters of the strategy think that while the comments made to Rolling Stone were out of line, McChrystal should be retained in the greater interest of the war effort. Neither side, that I have yet seen, has acknowledged that either course of action would carry risk. The purpose of this post is to outline the risks of dismissing Gen. McChrystal as the commander of ISAF in response to the affair. This is an uncomfortable post to write. I very much admire Stan McChrystal and have looked up to him since my time in the Rangers when I fought in Afghanistan under his command. I know the man personally and worked with him last summer in an effort to analyze the war in Afghanistan and NATO/ISAF operations there. And so there may be a limit to how objective I can really be, but I'm a defense policy analyst, so I'm going to try and soberly analyze these risks without letting my admiration for McChrystal get in the way. I'll let you be the judge as to how well I succeed here.

Dismissing Gen. McChrystal

1. If you think the current strategy in Afghanistan is the right one -- and that is a big if -- this is not the ideal time to change commanders. (By contrast, if you feel the strategy in Afghanistan needs a radical change, this would be the ideal time to change commanders.) Shaking up the command in Kabul for the third consecutive summer would throw operations into temporary disarray. A new commander -- Jim Mattis, anyone? -- might not feel comfortable with all of his subordinates or staff and seek to change them, which would be his right as the commander but not so great in terms of continuity. Most crucially, the relationship between the president of Afghanistan and the new commander would have to be re-built. If you think the strategy in Afghanistan is the correct one, then, you are risking mission failure by replacing the commander and his staff at this stage in the conflict. You are in effect arguing that healthy civilian-military relations are more important than winning in Afghanistan.

2. In dismissing Gen. McChrystal, you may be dismissing the wrong American. The person who emailed Noah emailed me as well:

“It would be a travesty if we fired McChrystal and kept Eikenberry.” Not only is McChrystal the “only one with any sort of relationship with [Afghan president Hamid] Karzai,” says this civilian NATO advisor. But Eikenberry “has no plan, didn’t get COIN [counterinsurgency] when he was the commander and still doesn’t.” Plus, the advisor adds: “The Embassy hates Eik. That’s not necessarily an indictment (I’m no fan of the Embassy). But it contributes to the dysfunction and it means that half the Embassy is focused on keeping Eik in line.”

I would further add that Amb. Eikenberry has been, in my opinion, as intemperate in his comments and actions as Gen. McChrystal. Ahem.

Retaining Gen. McChrystal

1. Here is Article 88 of the UCMJ:

Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

If you do not dismiss Gen. McChrystal, what message does that send to junior officers? The president aside, both Gen. Petraeus and Adm. Mullen have an obligation to hold their four-star field commanders up to the same standard to which they hold lieutenants. Failure to enforce the standard establishes a new standard. And no officer is irreplacable.

2. But the same person who made the point about McChrystal and Eikenberry also noted that in every single review of best practices in counterinsurgency, unity of effort is at the top of the list. "Every. Single. Review." It's obvious we are not singing from the same hymnal in Afghanistan. Can we ever as long as McChrystal and Eikenberry serve alongside one another? I am not sure, which is why I suspected that Eikenberry would leave his post. But in the end, Eikenberry might be the one who stays, and McChrystal might be the one who leaves. I still think it would be best for one of them to go.

In conclusion, I believe there are grounds for dismissal or other discipline under Article 88 of the UCMJ. But I also believe the president has every right to say that while Gen. McChrystal's statements to Rolling Stone were shockingly inapparopriate, there is a greater good here, and that greater good is stablizing Afghanistan. In the end, your opinion on whether or not Gen. McChrystal should be dismissed might come down to whether or not you think the current strategy is the correct one for the war in Afghanistan. My own prediction is that Gen. McChrystal will be retained. As much as critics of counterinsurgency like to blame Gen. McChrystal (and nefarious think-tankers, of course) for the current strategy, the reality is that the civilian decision-makers in the Obama Administration conducted two high-level reviews in 2009 and twice arrived at a national strategy focused on conducting counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan. I suspect the president will not replace the man he has put in charge of executing that strategy with just 12 months to go before we begin a withdrawal. On the other hand, there are those who will argue that the principle of civilian control over the military is more important than whatever national interests we have in Afghanistan. And that is a legitimate argument to make. We just need to be honest about the risks both courses of action carry with them.

This article by Jonathan Alter in Newsweek on how Obama tamed his generals is great and worth reading -- although not necessarily for the reasons the author intended. I'm going to offer up my bottom line conclusion up front and then use the article as a starting point to consider some other issues.

BLUF: President Obama has brought civil-military relations back into line in a way that would have made Samuel Huntington proud. There are problems with this, as I will note later on in this post, but overall, this is a really good thing. Alter:

Deputy national-security adviser Tom Donilon had commissioned research that backed up an astonishing historical truth: neither the Vietnam War nor the Iraq War featured any key meetings where all the issues and assumptions were discussed by policymakers. In both cases the United States was sucked into war inch by inch.

I have spent a little time recently with Paul Pillar, a man whose intellect and record of service I really respect. Paul has made a point similar to Tom Donilon's regarding the Iraq war -- that there never really was a coherent governmental decision-making process. Obama's decision-making process on Afghanistan, by contrast, is to be applauded for the way in which it differed from the "decision-making process" (if you can even call it that) of 2002 and 2003. Why?

First, do what Dick Betts does when writing about Huntington's so-called "normal theory" for civil-military relations and draw a big triangle on a sheet of paper. Now draw three horizontal lines on the triangle, dividing it into four levels -- political, strategic, operational and tactical. In the normal model, civilians have responsibility for the top section. They decide the policy aims. Then civilians and the military decide on strategic goals and resources. (Betts adds a fifth layer, actually, for ROE.) The military has responsibility for everything else under Huntington's model.

If you look at the decision-making process in 2009 on the war in Afghanistan, things more or less proceeded according to the normal theory. The president commissioned a review of policy and strategic goals in the winter of 2009, which resulted in this white paper. Gen. McChrystal then thought about how to operationalize the president's policy and strategic goals and submitted his own assessment along with a request for more resources. That assessment, combined with a corrupt Afghan presidential election, caused the administration to re-think its assumptions and prompted another strategic review. This was, on balance, a good thing that made me feel good about the president. The president then re-affirmed his policy aims, articulated new strategic goals, and committed more resources to the war in Afghanistan. (I write more about this process here.)

The good news in all of this is that whether or not you agree with the decisions made by the president and his team in 2009, the national security decision-making process more or less worked, and the civilians were in charge every step of the way. This is as both Sam Huntington and the U.S. Constitution intended.

Now for the problems...

1. Jonathan Alter allowed himself to be spun like a top for this article. Reading Alter on Obama is like reading Muhammed Hassanein Haykal on Gamal Abdul Nasser. As veteran media critics have noted, a growing number of "journalists" have exchanged ridiculously uncritical coverage of this administration for the kind of high-level access necessary to write "insider" books on the administration. This article is -- surprise! -- an excerpt from one of those insider accounts. Nothing in this article seriously challenges the administration's version of events, which leads to some humorous moments. In Alter's narrative, for example, Obama courageously stood up to his general's request for 80,000 more troops for Afghanistan. In reality, of course, Gen. McChrystal offered the president several options, and the president chose the middle path. Making it seem like Obama was fighting his generals over every infantry company, though, presumably makes the troop surge Obama authorized more palatable to his base. (It also conveniently ignores Obama's rather consistent campaign rhetoric in 2008 about how President Bush had ignored the war in Afghanistan and how he, Obama, would more fully resource the war.) In Alter's narrative as well, the generals are all media-savvy leakers trying to box in the administration, while the Obama Administration is filled with media "neophytes" (he honestly wrote that) who would presumably never leak anything to a reporter ... and just fell off the turnip truck yesterday. I shouldn't criticize Newsweek when it's run by a Chattanooga boy-turned-good who has had a bad enough week already, but Alter's "journalism" more closely resembles court stenography than a public service.*

2. We've still a long way to go before civil-military relations get as healthy as they should be. On the one hand, the U.S. military and its officer corps is seriously sick in terms of its relations with the elected civilian leadership. I subscribe to many of Richard Kohn's worries that the officer corps is overly politicized. My cousin, who serves as an officer in the Marine Corps, just returned from Iraq and reports that officers there regularly make disparaging remarks about the president in front of subordinates. Have any of these guys ever heard of George C. Marshall? (The fact that these soldiers are serving in Iraq yet spare the younger President Bush any criticism is kind of hilarious if sad.) On the other hand, it seems clear the Obama Administration thinks "us vs. them" more appropriately describes the administration's relations with the uniformed officer corps than it does the fight against the Taliban. Why, I have to ask myself, have members of this administration -- I'm looking at you, Mr. Vice President -- seemingly gone out of their way to cast the June 2011 decision as a zero-sum game between the civilians in the administration and the uniformed officers in the Department of Defense and at NATO/ISAF? Shouldn't we all be in this thing together and reconvene to assess our strategy as one team this winter? I'm encouraged the president apparently likes Stan McChrystal, because honestly, if a Democrat can't get along with Gen. McChrystal, there's not much hope he can get along with any U.S. general. But below the president I sense this paranoia in the administration's staff that the military is out to get them. And that's not healthy, because...

3. The normal theory of civil-military relations is not enough for Afghanistan. This was the theme of my most recent policy paper at CNAS. When I first read Eliot Cohen's book on civil-military relations, I thought he had lost his mind. I now realize Eliot Cohen is simply much smarter than I am. For starters, it is highly unlikely Huntington established his normal theory as prescriptive. Dick Betts has convinced me he instead established it as more of a theoretical reference point. The problem is, military officers (and sometimes civilians) look at it and think it's the way things should be because it basically leaves the execution of war at the operational level up to the military with little to no civilian oversight. (And what military officer wouldn't want that!) When fighting counterinsurgency campaigns as third parties, though, civilian leaders need to stay involved during the execution of the campaign. They need to convince and cajole the leadership of the host nation, for example, to act in ways that serve both their interests and our own. I think the Obama Administration has realized this about Afghanistan and Hamid Karzai, if belatedly. But the administration does not have the luxury of just putting the war on auto-pilot and allowing the military to win or lose it. It has to stay involved. Which means it has to work with its uniformed officers.

Anyway, I think I have succeeded in writing something in this blog post to offend nearly everyone in Washington, DC, so I'll be surfing the internet for jobs back home in Tennessee for the rest of the afternoon. To sum up my points above, though, I think the president has restored some much-needed balance between the civilians and the officer corps on national security decision-making in the past year. But the U.S. military's officer corps and the administration are both going to have to do a lot more work to repair civil-military relations back to where they need to be. And Jonathan Alter ... well, I'm sure his book will be a best-seller.

*If Jon Meacham had gone to Baylor instead of McCallie, of course, I wouldn't even think twice about giving him grief.

My friends Laura Rozen and Michael Cohen are way off base if they think the report written by Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn on the failure of military intelligence in Afghanistan constitutes a crisis in civil-military relations. Some folks in the public affairs shop at the Pentagon were predictably upset that they were not in the loop regarding the report's release, but this is Pentagon spokesperson Geoff Morrell speaking today on behalf of his civilian boss, the Secretary of Defense:

[The report] is exactly the type of candid, critical self-assessment that the secretary believes is a sign of a strong and healthy organization. This kind of honest appraisal enriches what has been a very real and hearty and vigorous debate that, frankly, has been taking place within this building, within this department and within this government for years now.

So, uh... where, exactly, is this civ-mil crisis that Michael and Laura are worried about? I am writing as a guy who both served as a volunteer advising the Obama Campaign on defense policy issues and as a guy who served a volunteer advising Gen. McChrystal on operations in Afghanistan.* I fail to see, yet again, how the latter is supposedly undermining the former. The report that Maj. Gen. Flynn published through CNAS was above all an indictment of his own branch of the U.S. Army. (General officers have no branch, I know, but Maj. Gen. Flynn rose up through the ranks as a military intelligence officer and currently serves as Gen. McChrystal's intelligence chief.) This report should cause some shockwaves, but those waves should be felt primarily within the defense intelligence community. After all, this report was in part prompted by the inability of military intelligence officers to get their civilian bosses the kind of answers they requested this fall. How an attempt to better serve civilian decision-makers gets spun into a revolt on the part of uniformed officers is, as my dad says, more twisted than color TV.

*I had to settle down Evan Hill, one of the editors of the awesome website The Majlis, regarding my "work" for the Obama Campaign. I never advised the Obama Campaign on Afghanistan issues, and I ceased all work for the campaign in November 2008 before starting my work at CNAS in March 2009. My "work" for the campaign was decidedly unsexy, too. I was just one of what I suspect were hundreds of graduate students who volunteered for a few hours a week. Longtime readers of this blog will remember that I did not allow any discussion of the 2008 presidential campaign on the blog in order to keep our discussion of COIN operations and strategy as nonpartisan as possible. The only reason I mentioned the fact that I had volunteered on the campaign was to note that I quite admire the president and Gen. McChrystal and can't understand those who think the latter is out to get the former.