In the leadup to and the days after the Trump/Hegseth speeches to the generals and admirals (GOFO: general officers and flag officers), there was much commentary by retired senior military folks, criticizing the Trump folks. My first reaction was to tell them to shut the hell up. And my second, and my third.
The timing of this event is, um, helpful for me as I am teaching a session on Politicization on Monday's Civil-Military Relations class. For that class, I had a bunch of readings by Feaver, Robinson, Brooks, and, um, Saideman that address the larger and smaller issues of politicizing the military. The consensus in these readings and in the field of Civil-Military Relations is that dragging the military into partisan politics (or the military leaping into it) is bad for all kinds of reasons. We shall see why it is bad in the years to come thanks to the Trump regime politicizing the military.
But let's focus on a key issue in this area: what are retired GOFO's supposed to do? Yes, they have free speech rights, but they also have responsibilities. And they understand to a degree that there are norms that tell retired senior officers not to engage into much partisanship or else people will think that the military itself is partisan. However, as the linked article indicates, retired senior officers find a variety of reasons to violate that norm and speak up. Again, that is their right, but perhaps they are violating their responsibilities. And it is not just random academics who think this. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey has spoken out against these speakers on several occasions.
There is an irony in all of this: most GOFO's actually are not that expert on civil-military relations. One of the key dynamics in civil-military relations is that the military folks think they are the experts and that everyone else is amateurs when it comes to the deployment of violence. And they value experience far more than education or other ways to gain expertise. But most GOFOs have not spend much of their career in positions where they are directly engaging with the civilians responsible for overseeing them--either the Department of Defense people or Congress. That is mostly in the realm of 4 star officers, and even for them, it is just the last several years of their career.
Which means that they probably shouldn't speak up for two reasons--it violates a key norm that keeps the military out of partisan politics, and they may not have much expertise to comment. You know who does have that expertise? The civilians who spend much of their careers either in agencies that oversee the military or in places where they study civil-military relations. The media, rather than running to ask generals and admirals what they think about Trump and Hegseth, should be going to former SecDefs, former Deputy SecDefs, Senators and Congresspeople past and present who serve or served on the respective Armed Services Committees, think tank analysts who are sharp on civ-mil, and, yes, profs in the US (and elsewhere) who have spent their careers studying civil-military relations.
Of course, we live at a perilous time, so folks will argue that we need the retired GOFOs to speak up now to save democracy. But if their speech burns down a key foundation of democracy, the non-partisan military, it is kind of like destroying Hue in order to save it (Vietnam War reference, kids). I am on TeamBrooks, as Risa has regularly argued that the norms should be defended and observed and let other folks do the job of protecting democracy. It really is on our elected officials first and foremost and then civil society, but it is not on the current military or the retired military to save us from autocracy. That road just leads us to more autocracy.
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