Tag Archives: Civil-Military

Thoughts on Congressional Oversight of DoD

by Jonathan Rue Posted on August 23, 2012

Rosa Brooks’ weekly column is up at Foreign Policy. She’s been writing mostly on civil-military relations but this week dives into runaway Pentagon spending. She echoes a lot of my own thoughts on the subject, particularly her last paragraph where she asks a lot of tough questions that I’m fairly certain nobody on Capitol Hill or in the Building is asking.

Congress, being the large, slow-moving target that it is, receives a broadside as a major culprit of wasteful DoD spending. Brooks writes:

When I was a newly minted Pentagon employee, one of the things that astounded me most was how hard it was to get Congress to stop funding stupid stuff. This should not have surprised me, since funding stupid stuff is one of Congress’ constitutional functions, but it surprised me nonetheless. I recall, for instance, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ so-called “heartburn letters” to congressional appropriators. Most of his complaints related not to proposed funding cuts, but to Congress’ insistence on giving DOD money for programs the military did not want or need, such as extra VH-71 helicopters or C-17 Globemaster IIIs.

My own thoughts on Congressional oversight of DoD are evolving–this is a really complicated relationship about which much more could be written–and what follows isn’t necessarily a rebuttal or a defense of Congress, but rather some food for thought.

In the 1960s, the Army began issuing new M-16 rifles to soldiers headed to Vietnam. Unfortunately, it did so with some really crappy ammunition. According to Army records, and courtesy of the inimitable C.J. Chivers, 80 percent of 1,585 soldiers surveyed in 1967 claimed a stoppage while firing. Publicly, the Army claimed that nothing was wrong and that the M-16 was best rifle available. A Congressional subcommittee investigation forced the Army into making improvements to the weapon and ammunition.

In 1985, Barry Goldwater assumed the Chairmanship of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Before the legislative session even began, Goldwater had decided to make defense reorganization his number one priority. The Pentagon fought reorganization tooth and nail for the next two years. Goldwater-Nichols, though not perfect, is widely regarded as one of the smarter pieces of defense legislation ever passed by Congress and it was done against strong objections from the Pentagon.

And my personal favorite was that time when George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, James Forrestal, Lauris Norstad, Clark Clifford, the Navy, and the Army TRIED TO GET RID OF MY BELOVED MARINE CORPS. Good times. Luckily, the Senate Naval Affairs Committee and later the Senate Armed Services Committee rejected their proposals to reorganize the War Department without providing the Marine Corps statutory authority.

I’m not trying to say Congress always gets oversight of the Department right, particularly when it comes to appropriations and acquisitions. Lord knows some things <;cough>; the F-35 alternate engine <;/cough>; can’t be defended. But just because the Pentagon says it doesn’t want or need something, doesn’t necessarily mean it knows what the hell it’s talking about. Sometimes, and I know this will come as a shock, large bureaucracies want what’s in the interest of… large bureaucracies.

*Thanks to Chris, Ryan, and Dan for helping me think through some of this.

Posted in Civil-Military Relations, Defense Acquisition, Military, Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Just because someone’s willing to die for their country doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to protect them.

by caidid Posted on January 24, 2012

Joshua Foust and Zack Beauchamp had an argument on Twitter this morning about the morality of drones, one that has already inspired this Atlantic piece by Foust (which is worth a read on the moral implications not just of drones specifically, but of our nation’s global counterterrorism initiative as a whole). I saw the debate a little after it happened, a lengthy back-and-forth between the two of them, with occasional comments from others I follow, plus a few retweets by Foust or Beauchamp of comments from people I don’t. I thought both had moments of clear, serious argumentation, as well as the occasional minor cheat, but overall the conversation was interesting and brought up a number of issues with broader applications, beyond the realm of drones (a number of which were addressed at greater length by Foust in the Atlantic piece).

There was one claim that cropped up around the edges of the argument–especially in some of the outside comments on the debate–that niggled at me: specifically, the idea that because individuals accept inherent dangers when joining the military, up to and including the potential loss of their own lives in the course of duty, then decision-makers are not under obligation to avoid exposing them to risk.

This is wrong. It is at the heart of the civil-military bargain that precisely because these men and women commit to service and bear the risks it entails, the rest of society–represented by our policymakers–has an obligation to take those risks seriously. The primary thing society owes to service members is not to put their lives in danger lightly, to respect their willingness to put themselves at risk and not take advantage of it foolishly or for no clear end. To say that because they agree to the risks, we don’t need to factor in the degree to which our political, strategic, or operational choices will put them in harm’s way, is unacceptable. There will be risk, and in war it is inevitable that many members of the military will be put in harm’s way, but why, and when, and to what degree must be considered by the decision-makers among the many factors that determine what wars we choose to wage, and how we choose to wage them.

UPDATE: The internet being known as Petulant Skeptic made the very solid point that there are a number of other examples of professions/situations where enormous sacrifice might be asked of people, but their lives are not risked without serious consideration. With his permission, I will quote him directly:

Police aren’t asked to individually rush into drug dens. First rule of search and rescue is that you don’t put the rescuers at risk. Firefighters don’t rush into buildings they know will collapse.

Point being that when people accept great risk to themselves, they can commonly have an expectation that this willingness to sacrifice will not be exploited without all available precautions and forethought.

ADDITIONAL UPDATE: In response to this post, James Joyner posted a link to his truly excellent piece in the American Conservative that covers similar territory to this in much greater depth. I wish I had thought to include a link to it in this in the first place, because it is one of the best things I’ve read on civil-military relations.

Posted in Civil-Military Relations, Military, War | Tagged | 2 Comments

Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

by caidid Posted on July 26, 2011

Kings of War has a very good post up about the meaning of a soldier’s sacrifice and the various interpretations thereof, which gets to some of the thorny issues about the political dimension of war. I’m not going to dive into all of that right now (you should definitely read it), but I want to riff a little on something the author mentioned. In the course of the argument the author references, “the U.S.where bumper sticker aphorisms such as ‘Hate the war, not the warrior’ abound.” The idea embodied by these bumper stickers is what I refer to as the ‘don’t hate the player, hate the game’ approach to supporting our troops. Essentially, this is the approach embraced by those individuals who don’t support the war(s), but don’t want to imply that they don’t support the individuals who fight them.

I’ve seen this differently over the years. To take it back to the start, going into Afghanistan made sense to me. Going into Iraq did not. I listened with a feeling of impotent horror to NPR’s broadcast of the Senate hearings on granting war powers to the President in the Fall of 2002, when the only two who said a word against the measure were my own Senator Ted Kennedy, and West Virginia’s Robert Byrd, who gave dire warnings to his fellows about the lasting dangers of ceding those powers the Constitution reserved for the Legislative Branch away to the Executive. They granted him those powers, of course, and we went into Iraq on what I was sure were trumped up pretenses. I washed my hands of it. I supported the troops, for sure, but not the war.

In the last few years, I have come to see that attitude as a cop-out, an easy way of absolving myself of responsibility for that war, and for the sacrifices made in that war, and I came to regret it. I am not saying that one has to support all of our country’s wars in order to support the men and women of our military, and I am certainly not saying that everyone who thinks this way about our wars and our service members has done so as cavalierly as I once did. However, I do think it is all too easy to use that stance – don’t hate the player, hate the game – to wash one’s hands of the whole thing, and I think that issues as big as war, defense, and the civil-military relationship warrant more depth and more nuance than that.

It comes down to this: what someone does as a member of our military, they do on our behalf, and what they do is our responsibility, as is how they are supported. If we don’t approve of what they are doing – the war they are fighting, the way it is being fought – then it is our responsibility to do what we can to change it, and to make our dissenting voices heard. And if we profess to ‘support our troops’ as so many magnetic yellow ribbons on our cars did in the early days of our long wars, then we should put our money where our mouth is. We should seek to understand what an ethical, responsible civil-military relationship looks like. We should try to grasp just what it is that the military owes to society, and what society owes to the military, and to ensure that that burden is met on both sides. It’s not an easy balance to understand, and there is no clear consensus. My own thinking on this is still a work in progress, but unlike a few years ago, I can at least say that now I am mindful, I do think about it, and I act on my thinking when I have the opportunity through the way I vote, the way I interact with my elected officials, and the volunteer work I do.

So by all means, hate the game, not the player, if that’s the way you feel, but don’t let it be just an empty statement: if you hate the game, try to change it; and if you support the player, act on it.

_____

My own re-thinking of these issues began a couple of years ago when I read Nathaniel Fick’s One Bullet Away. That started me reading a long string of books about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, mostly memoirs with a few journalist’s stories thrown in. I read Buzzell. I read Exum. I read Rieckhoff and Campbell and Mullaney and Gallagher. I read Wright andFilkins and Finkel and Junger. By the time I finished my war-stories reading marathon, I was re-thinking my attitude toward the wars, and toward those serving in them.

Posted in War | Tagged | 3 Comments