Is Military Service Qualifying or Disqualifying?

Thanks, John Kelly!

 Today, I got into a twitter argument with Dan Gardner, who I respect a lot.  He was making a claim about the next Trump administration being worse than the first one, which is something I readily agree, but asserted that the first batch of appointees restrained Trump.  I scoff at that as I documented here quite often that his first batch included many arsonists and incompetents.  I brought up John Kelly who was a xenophobe in charge of Homeland Security.  Gardner responded that Kelly was highly accomplished when he was appointed.  Which caused the conversation to turn: how was Kelly highly accomplished?

Kelly was a retired three star marine general.  And?  To me, that means he had the qualities that the Marines desired.  Because of a number of awful folks getting promoted to the top of various military hierarchies, I can't say that because a dude has a bunch of stars or leafs on their shoulders that they have done great things.  Tommy Franks was great at sucking up and kicking down and got four stars along the way, and then mismanaged Central Command, helping to birth the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I would have swerved off the highway on the way out to California when we passed the Tommy Franks Institute for Leadership if my daughter was not the one behind the wheel.  Yesterday, I gave a talk at the Canadian Club of Kingston, and I ran through some of the senior officers in the CAF who rose despite (or because of) their abuse of power and sexual misconduct.  Art McDonald might have been good at driving a ship, but commanding the CAF?  He showed his incompetence in so many ways but most obviously by sending an email to the entire community of senior officers telling them that he was coming back after being "exonerated," etc.  

So, my first point was simply that the promotion processes are far from perfect so accomplishing high rank does not mean as much as one might think.  My second point is that whatever they were good at to get promoted in the military did not mean they had the skills to operate on the civilian side of government.  There is a critical contradiction or irony at play here.  One of the key widely shared characteristics of contemporary military officers in many democracies is that they define themselves as the only professionals in military matters--that they have expertise on the management of violence and such expertise civilians know not (thanks to Sam Huntington).  Indeed, this can lead to contempt for civilians who "interfere" as those who are not "professionals" are amateurs.  The contradiction is that these same military officers, when they retire, often think they can serve in civilian roles without any significant training despite lacking expertise.  These military officers are often far more amateurish in civilian capacities than those civilians working in defence agencies.  Running through the list of senior officers who served under Trump: which ones covered themselves in glory and competence?  Kelly? Mattis? McMaster?  Flynn (the shortest serving National Security Adviser)?  

Another contradiction is at work.  Military officers, thanks again to Sam Huntington, think that they are apolitical.  This can mean many things, but militaries are hardly apolitical and working within any large organization requires politics.  But they are trained not to think politically, a paradox of professionalism, despite the fact, you know, war is the continuation of politics by other means. So, dumped into a civilian spot, they need to be sensitive to the politics of their job and of their agency.  Which they are often not.

Finally, for cabinet-style governments, where there is some collective decision-making, the decision-makers should not be retired senior officers.  I have written about the mistake of making retired officers SecDef or MinDef.  I am not alone in arguing that retired senior military officers are unfit for being the top civilian in the chain of command as they are not really civilian--they have military mindset and they are embedded in military networks.  What is true for the head of the defense agency (department/ministry/whatever) is somewhat less true but still applicable for other cabinet officials when there is collective decision-making.

Some will say: hey, you need military expertise.  The answer to that is that there are plenty of military folks to ask for advice.  Indeed, democracies tend to have specific folks designated as the senior person responsible for providing military advice--the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of the Defence Staff, etc.  

Some will say: hey, Ike was a former general, Marshall was a former general, etc.  And the answer is: sure, they were incredibly exceptional people.  Ike, as Supreme Commander of the European theatre had to engage in much politics to manage the competing American generals like Patton, not to mention foreign generals like Montgomery and De Gaulle and civilians like Churchill.  Marshall's experiences managing the US Army during the war gave him a sense of strategy and of politics so that he could be a pretty terrific Secretary of State.  Those individuals did not just earn stars on their shoulders but performed amazingly well in difficult circumstances heavily laden with politics, and they were self-aware as they engaged in politics.  Does that describe Tommy Franks or Wesley Clark or Art McDonald?  Hardly.

To be fair, I don't think that all military officers, retired or active, are as flawed as these folks.  I just don't think that military service and promotion to the highest ranks are signals that someone is going to be a great cabinet secretary.  It may be unfair to use the retired/active folks who served under Trump because that was such a shitshow.  But perhaps only a shitshow would focus more on stars on shoulders than real qualifications for the job at hand?  I have the same attitude here as I do towards term limits--I prefer to have experts in important positions, not rookies.  Would you like to be the first patient for a brand new surgeon or dentist or the first client for a brand new lawyer?  Retired military officers would have to learn the job while on the job--and that is not good when the stakes are high.