OUT OF ORDER -- THE CHANGING CLIMATE OF AUTHORITY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

OUT OF ORDER – THE CHANGING CLIMATE OF AUTHORITY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 26, 2010

Colonel Matthew Moten of the U.S. Army writes in FOREIGN AFFAIRS (September/October 2010) that the relieving of General McChrystal of command of the war in Afghanistan by President Obama was not new. Indeed, it wasn’t.

President James Polk had a problem with Generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scot in the Mexican-American War of the 1840s.

President Harry Truman famously removed General Douglas MacArthur from Command of U.S. forces in Korea in 1951.

President Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War removed General George McClellan from Command of the Union Army of the North, and appointed an over-the-hill known drunk Ulysses S. Grant to that command, and as a result won the war. Lincoln couldn’t win the peace because he was assassinated.

President Andrew Jackson was exploited by the times with a dysfunctional relationship with Grant that crippled his presidency and reconstruction, a poison, which has remained in our system to the present day.

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Colonel Moten sees the problem of order a matter of political-military tension with “the additional issue of personalities and individuals; mixing together ambitions, powerful, highly skilled, and strong-willed people with diverse perspectives and different experiences to collaborate on solving problems.” He goes on to say such tension can be either destructive or constructive. How true, but mostly for those who have no voice in the affair.

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For the past more than thousand years of institutional society the design of authority has imitated and emulated two powerful components, the Church and the military. All other institutions from governance to education to industry and commerce have fallen into line with this construction. From the Renaissance on, there has been little question of such authority. There have been wars and revolutions resulting in changing of the guard, but the authority model has been maintained whatever the political system.

Colonel Moten claims that General McChrystal’s problem was mainly because his career was in the “shadowy environment of special operations (which) left him unschooled in dealing with the media and ill equipped for the political demands of a four-star (general’s) position.” He goes on to say, however, the general is far from naïve. He maintained a Spartan almost monk-like existence, close to his troops, and close to the tribal lords of Afghan society. He was, in a sense, a tribal general. My wonder, then, is if his dismissal does not represent a larger issue. General Petraeus, his replacement, acclaimed as a “strategic leader” and “soldier-scholar” is also a political general in the image of Dwight David Eisenhower.

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MANICHEAN AMBIVALENCE OF AUTHORITY

Reading Colonel Moten’s article, where he correctly relates the current approval of the military at 82 percent compared to 60 percent during the Vietnam War, I had the sense there is a preference for order to chaos, security to freedom, by-the-numbers robotic certainty to creative license at any cost.

The U.S. Congress has an approval rating around 20 percent while President Obama’s is around 40 percent. My question: is this approval rating bad or is it normal for a thinking free society in transition? I vote for it being normal, healthy and good.

True, the two major political parties are stalemated. Congress appears in stasis. Independent voters are moving away from ideologies on the left and right to find a new common ground in the pragmatic center. How does that bold for the military?

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The colonel argues for increased professionalism in the military, a throwback to the “the military’s professional ethic, the constitutional principle of civilian control, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” This sounds good but what is missing here?

It appears that the military, like industry and education, is top heavy and will be increasingly so as “the army now promotes almost 100 percent of eligible captains to major and about 90 percent of majors to lieutenant colonel; less than 15 years ago, these figures were 25-30 percentage points lower.”

We are increasingly becoming a professional society of leaders who cannot lead; who can order but cannot relate to ordinary people or to the mundane things of life.

We have tenured professors who can’t or won’t teach preferring to do research that often go nowhere. We have the good-ole boy network in corpocracy where the privileged few are promoted to top executive positions in industry and have no idea what goes on in the trenches with little apparent interest in finding out.

Colonel Moten writes, “If the military selects its generals simply as a function of their 25 years of perseverance . . . with no qualitative winnowing – the US. Military’s strategic leadership will only get weaker, with disastrous consequences.” It already has not only in the military but also across society.

We are seeing those disastrous consequences in Katrina, in the Gulf of Mexico oilrig explosion, in the subprime real estate collapse, in bankruptcy of the automotive industry, in the cavalier disregard of main street by Wall Street, in the menacing possibility of a double dip economic recession, not to mention the economic and personnel costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We suffer from too much, too many, too soon. Are we Rome revisited more than a thousand years later?

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The window of leadership of society is often viewed through the lens of the military and the Church. The military appears to be on top of the issue, which is misleading, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would suggest, while the Church is in chaos and decline in moral authority, which is disconcerting.

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THE SHADOW ARMY

The colonel writes, “Ever since the military began to shrink after the Cold War, it was inevitable that the country would come to rely on contractors to meet the heavy demands of fighting active wars.”

There are more than 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan today. There is an equal number of contractors from such firms as Halliburton, DynCorps, CACT, and Blackwell, to name just a few of the thousands of such corporations now performing military functions in that war in that country.

Many of these contractors are ex-military. Moten writes, “U.S. military has hired 158 flag officers as advisers and senior mentors at rates from $200 to $340 an hour. Eighty (80) percent of those had financial ties to defense contractors.”

A 2008 Government Accountability Office report found that as of 2006, 52 defense contractors employed 2,435 former generals and admirals in contracting and acquisitions positions senior enough to be subject to lobbying rules. The colonel concludes, “A military that relies on contractors for its doctrine is farming out its thinking, the armed forces fight with their brains as much as with their arms.”

It is the same of all society.

Such a shadowy army is, of course, not new. We have a shadow government as well. There are ten times as many lobbyists dictating policies to our elected members of Congress, change masters who manage to stay essentially under the radar. The same can be said of the Church and our educational institutions. They are swayed by endowments and well heeled shadowy figures that act as puppeteers beyond the level of those directly affected.

Colonel Moten concludes, “A military that chooses short-term expediency over long-term professional health is also choosing slow professional death.”

This may be true, but is professionalism the answer?

Professionalism implies specialization, and specialization would appear the problem not the answer.

Where is the jack-of-all-trades in the equation?

We may be a paralyzed society because we can no longer do the simple things, or even have an appetite for doing them.

We can explain what is wrong but we have no one to do anything about it. This is why we have contractors fighting our wars, illegal immigrants doing our mundane chores, drug dealers flourishing to put us in a happy state to handle our insane self-created stress, tons of medical specialists to deal with the privileged few ailments while few physicians are available to take care of the flu, and soldiers at the front in Manichean life and death situations, fighting wars they don’t understand because politicians are misinformed or asleep at the controls.

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