American Civil-Military Relations Basics: Partisan and Political

 A couple of weeks ago, I got into a running skeet spat because I argued we ought not valorize a military member for protesting the Trump administration while in uniform.  I argued that the US military has long stayed out of politics, and I meant partisan politics, even though it and any govt agency, especially armed ones, are inherently political.

Politics: the basic definition involves the making of decisions affecting the group/society.  Because the military is an arm of government, anything involving it is inherently political even before one invokes Clausewitz's war is politics by other means.

So, yes, the military is always involved in politics.  The use of it, the non-use of it (say on Jan 6th), are political.  Its behavior in the seas off of Venezuela or in the war in Iran are political.

But are they partisan?  Yes, the US military has taken sides in other people's conflicts---supporting the Afghan government against the Taliban, etc, but the US military has almost entirely stayed out of American politics.  Yes, some retired generals ran for office and won (no Admirals, sorry) the Presidency with Ike being the most recent.  Which is not very recent.  The US military has not put its thumb on the scale for any election.

In these dire times, folks were supporting this one officer who publicly protested in uniform.  To be clear, the regulations say he can protest as long as he does not wear his uniform.  Why?  Because, yes, even though this individual is a member of the military, they have the right to free speech.  What they don't have the right to do is make it appear that the military is taking a side in partisan politics.  This officer knew that, knew he was violating the regulations, and will pay a price for that.  This is civil disobedience, which I am normally ok with.  I am not ok with efforts to drag the military into politics, because it is hard to undo.  Yes, Trump is awful, and yes, the military should disobey illegal orders (like firing on civilian boats in the Caribbean), but if we start asking the military to decide who governs, when will that stop?  The best predictor of coups is the history of a country.  The US hasn't had any coups, and that is a major factor helping to prevent coups.  Break that once, and, let's how things go.  And, yes, militaries suck at governing and at engaging in partisan politics.

I finally returned to this conversation due to an incredibly bad argument in a legit outlet (which has also published bad stuff before).  The author is basically saying that the politicization of the military now is nothing new because MacArthur.  And that is just dumb for a number of reasons:

• Mac was an exceptional case where the senior theater commander defied the President on multiple occasions (and, yes, this left the troops on the ground in worse positions)
• This was not a case of the military being dragged into politics (the problem of today) but of a military officer trying to jump into politics (Mac also explored running against FDR in 1944 when he was still commanding troops in the Pacific campaign).  
• Back then, Mac was violating just one big norm. Today, Trump and Hegseth are violating piles of them (the data collection effort continues!) 
• There has been much work of late by civil-military relations scholars directly addressing politicization of the military.  This historian does his best economist imitation and ignores all of it..

To put my cards on the table, I am not an expert on the normative side of civil-military relations--what is a norm violation.  The network I have helped to create, the Civil-Military Relations Network, will be studying both the normative and analytical questions on this topic, but my research agenda is more on the absence or presence of oversight.  So, consult Risa Brooks and Christoph Harig and Pauline Kaurin and the like. But, please don't ask an historian who seems to focus on one event in the 1950s and hasn't considered what has happened since then, either by the US military and the politicians or by the scholars studying this stuff.

Oh, and yes, not all civ-mil folks buy the political/partisan distinction, but I do.   

 

 

The Bad Faith Actor Dictating Faith

 Perhaps it is unfair to call Pete Hegseth a bad faith actor since he seems to be a real believer in Christian nationalism.  But many of his arguments have been of bad faith--that the standards he applies to others he does not apply to himself. That part makes him fit in really well in the Trump Administration.  Much of the Christian Nationalism does as well, as Christian nationalism is far more about power and domination than it is about, you know, that whole Christ thing.

The latest move has been to reduce the list of faiths the Department of Defense recognizes.  This may seem strange since state is supposed to be separated from religion, but given that soldiers, sailors, aviators, and marines spend their entire daily/weekly/monthly lives in, on, near bases, their spiritual condition has long been something the US government has addressed with chaplains, chapels (the one at the US Air Force Academy would not be out of place at a Christian nationalist university.... oh wait, um, never mind), grave markers, and so on.  

But then you have to ask what counts? What fits into the bureaucracy so that each troop's spiritual needs are met?  Military chaplains are supposed to address the needs of all of the women and men in uniform, not just the Christians.  The good news is that Hegseth's reductions from 220 or so to 31 allows for some diversity: Buddhism, Hinduism, Baha'i, Judiasm, Islam, Sikhism, non-religion, "Other," 22 flavors of Christianity, and Latter Day Saints--Mormon. That last one was not listed under "Christian." Ooops. [This reminds me that just as Black Americans and Latino Americans voting for white supremacists surprise and appall me, Mormons voting for Christian nationalists should fit into the same category of voting for those who want to see you dead or gone].

One could wonder if this simplification of the coding is just a normal realignment to go along with reforms of the chaplaincy stuff in the military, but the guy at the top, Hegseth (not Jesus or God), is a Christian nationalist, complete with Christian nationalist tattoos on his body.*  These folks hate all non-Christians and have a very narrow definition of what counts as Christian.  The list is a bit generous since lots of Christian faiths are included that a Christian nationalist would abhor.  I guess this is a start?  Or Hegseth is too much of a coward to go all the way and crop Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and most of the other Christians who don't count?  

It is notable that Indigenous people's religions are dropped, as well as Unitarians and Wiccans.  Would it be a stretch say that Hegseth is trying to make military service less comfortable to non-Christians by reshaping the chaplain corps, reducing recognition of those who don't fit Hegseth's approval list?  Maybe that is too subtle for the guy who keeps firing women at the GOFO ranks (generals/admirals) and keeping people of color and women off of promotion lists.

Managing the list could be apolitical, aimed at efficiencies... in ordinary times.  Now, it is clearly an effort to define who can and should serve in a way that promotes the opposite of diversity.  Being anti-woke means being hostile to all kinds of diversity, so now more people are told they don't belong.  Not a great move if you want to maximize recruitment and retention, but if you want to build a military consisting of just white dudes who fit a narrow definition of Christian, this is a first step.

 

 

*  The Pentagon does have restrictions on tattoos, keeping out or kicking out those with Christian nationalist tattoos or Nazi tattoos because they want to keep out far right extremists.  If you think this is a subtweet of Platner, the candidate for the Maine Senate seat, you would be wrong--there is nothing sub here about it. 

Crowdsourcing Civ-Mil Violations

I am looking for help: with the help of a fantastic RA, Alireza Mamdouhi, I have created a googlesheet to crowdsource a list of violations of American Civil-Military Relations norms by the Trump Administration.  My inspiration was hearing about a panel on US civ-mil during the Trump era that concluded that it ain't so bad.  Um, yeah, it is.  Because so much has happened over the past 16 months, it is easy to lose track.  So, here's the list. And here's our start at a codebook.  Please comment to add crises, to raise questions about our coding, to help us come up with category coding.   

 This is my first effort at this kind of thing, so any help would be most appreciated. Peter Lucier of the Chamberlain Network has already jumped in so expect revisions to the columns (more columns with more specific coding)

For specialists in civ-mil, if you want editing privileges, let me know.  

Again, the idea here is to document the many ways in which the Trump Administration is undermining the norms that buttress civilian control of the US military and keep it out of politics.

 

When Modesty Is Not a Virtue: Learned Defence Expertise is Real

 I read a terrific piece by my partner in crime (I am sure some members of some legislatures will consider our latest book* criminal due to our discussion of their, um, lack of relevance),  Phil Lagassé, but took a heap of umbrage at his footnote:

 I dislike the term ‘expert’ when it comes to academics who study topics such as mine (defence policy or machinery of government), where practitioners are usually more knowledgeable.

 The funny thing is that Phil contradicts himself in the piece as he considers himself a defence politics specialist and not a generalist (see below for his invocation of Seva Gutinsky's piece and my reaction to that).  Apart from this, why was my chain yanked?

Because one of the fundamental problems in civil-military relations around the world is that most armed forces consider themselves to have a monopoly of expertise on military stuff and that Sam Huntington's flawed book then encourages them to consider all civilians amateurs.  Amateur is the antonym for professional, right?  Scholars, such as Risa Brooks and Sharan Grewal , have shown not only that this attitude exists but that it likely causes contempt for civilians and for civilian oversight. Not great.

To be clear, in Phil's piece, his expertise discussion is referring as much to those civilians working in the Department of National Defence as much as he is referring to the uniformed.  Still, any admission that academics are not experts on this stuff is problematic.  The military and adjacent folks already tend to denigrate the work we do: have you served? is political science really a science?  

Why? Partly it is about identity and ego, but much of it has to do with different notions of expertise. Military folks tend to think that one mostly gains expertise through exercising and experience, not through study and analysis.  Academics tend to think that expertise comes through rigorous analysis.  Both sides are right and wrong.  There are many ways to learn things and develop sharper understandings of something, relying on one source leaves one less well-informed.  As always, portfolio approaches make the most sense.

To be fair to the military types, when H's book came out nearly 70 years ago, there was not that much civilian expertise on military matters.   But since then, thanks to the Cold War, arms races, various wars, academics have gotten serious about military matters and so have other experts.   Defense agencies have grown in size and scope and relevance (well, not everywhere as Phil, Ora, and I are finding out for our next book--see my Chile and Brazil posts of late), for awhile defense was an important beat for journalists in some places (the US has a military journalist association!), think tanks in a few countries developed squads of experts, and so on.

There are now plenty of civilians who have knowledge and understanding of defense.  The coverage of the Ukraine war provides ample illustration (see Seva's piece for several of exemplars). And we need civilian expertise because experience is not always the best teacher.  There are often multiple lessons to learn from an experience, say Vietnam, which lessons are the right ones?  One of the ironies of Phil's post is that distinction between generalists and specialists also applies to military folks--some officers have wide-ranging careers with much joint service and much exposure to the civilian side, and  others hardly ever leave their specific niche.  

A quick word on Seva's piece since this post is already long enough: he is talking about who makes the best predictions (no one?)--that expertise, as Phil discusses, can limit the imagination.  For me, prediction is always fraught (I was in the Russia will invade and win decisively box of Seva's piece), as I have gotten much wrong.  

But prediction and diagnosis are two different beasts.  Those who have done much rigorous analysis are good at doing .... rigorous analysis and can dissect what has happened quite well.  Academics, at least in the areas near mine, do a great job of explaining, even if they are not great at prediction.  Why?  Well, the future is always in motion, it has not been written yet, and we will emphasize important factors but some smaller contingent stuff, for the want of a nail yada yada, may affect outcomes.

It was harder to predict that Trump would attack Iran, given his TACO-ing in the past, but it was easier to predict that the war would go poorly both because of the target and the attackers.

Anyhow, the point here is that there are lots of ways to get smart about something, and the smartest way to get smart about something is to rely not on just one pathway but as many as one can.

And, yes, I am pretty proud of not referring to the military folks as solitary trees trying to understand their forest.

*  Our book is now a finalist for Best Comparative Politics Book by the Canadian Political Science Association.  And this is pretty funny for this post since most comparativists would not consider Phil or me to be comparativists.  Especially me.  But that is a post for another day. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Christian Armed Forces

 I guess it is time to post this meme again

So much has happened in the past 13 months that has been awful for American civil-military relations that I had an RA put together a list.  I have to go through it and then I am going to share it so that it can be crowdsourced and updated.  So, are civil-military relations worse now than the various other awful moments?  It is hard to judge, but this latest story suggests the descent into the abyss is, indeed, further along.

What's the story?  That the Christian nationalism that has long been present in the US military is now more vocal than in the past.  Sure, SecDef Pete Hegseth has Christian nationalist tattoos but that's no big deal, right?  Wrong.

This story, that more than 30 different commanders issued Christian nationalist statements when talking to their troops as this illegal, ill-prepared, misconceived war of aggression was launched is truly awful.  Why?

First, that the military is infested or infected with Christian nationalism is not new.  Just look at almost any picture of the US Air Force Academy and you will notice the most distinct/celebrated building is its chapel.  It is quite symbolic of the place--where stories of evangelical Christians dominating the place and persecuting cadets who did not share their religion go way back.  I was aware of this even before I visited the USAFA in 2002 or 2003 as part of an academic conference.  Indeed, the group sited in the story, that seeks to protect those who in the military from religious discrimination/hazing/persecution had, I am pretty sure, its origins in complaints about USAFA.   The academy is in the most religious, far right part of Colorado, so the community around USAFA helps to reinforce the domination of "Christians" who have a very narrow version of Christianity--that non-evangelicals don't count--that Catholics are papists, that Presbyterians don't count, and on and on.  

Second, Christian nationalists, despite their name, don't have the usual Christian values of love and community.  It is about hate and domination.  We see that in their alliance with Trump is the opposite of a devout believer in Jesus.  The Christian nationalists hope for the return of Christ so that they can go to heaven and everyone else can burn.  They have long seen Israel as a means to an end--the Jews need to run the land of Israel for Armageddon to happen.  They see Muslims as not human and worthy of a new crusade, which is not really a great foundation for the US to work with some Muslim countries against other ones.  

Third, besides being wrong for all kinds of value reasons, it is also toxic for the US military.  That the majority of the US military is not this radical version of Christian (well, maybe the Air Force is) means that this Christian nationalism is divisive, far more divisive than gays in the military or women in the Marines.  This Christian nationalism seethes with contempt for the non-believers, which is why so many complaints get sent so quickly.

Which gets to our moment.  Hegseth has done for Christian nationalism in the military what Trump did for racism in the American public--he changed the permission structure.  Now it is ok to be an officer and invoke the language of Christian nationalism as part of one's job, to inflict it upon one's subordinates, just like Trump (and Fox) made it ok to be racist in public.  Hegseth was wildly unqualified for many reasons, but his Christian nationalism made him disqualified--he should never have been confirmed by the Senate.  Why?  Because he would eventually poison the military with his toxic ideology.

So, it is bad to purge the military of senior Black and female officers and replace with yes-dudes.  But that may or may not trickle down all the way.  But empowering the Christian nationalists is probably worse as it will affect everyone and everywhere.  

What happens if reason wins and the Dems come back into power?  How will they stuff the toxic toothpaste back in the tube?  Will they have to go through the US military and remove all of the Christian nationalists?  I am in Brazil right now, and they can't simply remove all pro-Jan8th military personnel--they were the same uniforms as everyone else.  The damage that Hegseth and Trump are doing to the military, like the damage done elsewhere, will simply be very, very difficult to undo, even if the Dems can get big enough majorities to impose their will and, yes, have the guts to do what is necessary.

As always, the big tragedy here, besides the death of innocents, is that it didn't have to be this way.  I hate the term war of choice as we should use clearer, stronger language--war of aggression maybe--but Hegseth was a choice that didn't have to be made.  The larger issue of the infiltration of the US military by Christian nationalists is not really a one-person story, of course, but Hegseth empowered these haters.  And now we have the lastest awful day in US civ-mil history. 

 

Why Do Civ-Mil Folks Yammer about the Norms?

 I read and then blueskied about this post by a former general, Mark Hertling, about the Trump Regime politicizing the military.  In the course of my skeets, I realized that folks may not get why we civil-military relations scholars talk so much about civ-mil norms.  So, a quick civ-mil norm explainer since my flight is delayed.*

First, when we speak of norms, we are basically talking about standards of appropriate behavior.  That such standards exist and that they serve us well when respected.  

Second, we need norms because laws and policies are inadequate.  The relationship between civilian officials and military officers is dynamic, chock full of gray areas, and there is a great need for some trust and respect.   But to have trust and respect, people need to have relatively clear ideas of what is good behavior--what is respectful, what is appropriate.  We cannot simply legislate civil=military behavior as it violate people's rights.  Saying that retired officers cannot speak, for instance, would violate their first amendment rights. Expecting them to speak responsibly is a norm thing.  

For instance, the piece linked above is by a retired general who is commenting on contemporary US civ-mil relations.  I tend to get uncomfortable about retired senior military officers speaking up as they can be seen as speaking for the active military, whether the active military wants them to or not, and thus gets the military a bit more involved in politics.  In this case, I don't mind so much because Hertling is explaining how officer promotion works, and what the impact of inteference in promotion would do to the army.  

It is political, of course, as all things involving the military are inherently political, and, yes, it is also partisan.  But it is partisan because the government itself is engaged in an effort to politicize promotion, a very partisan move to benefit the Trump Regime and the Republican Party, and not an effort to improve American national security.  To fight such partisan efforts may make one appear to be partisan, but to stay silent may make one appear complicit.

See, this stuff is hard to legislate.  Good civil-military relations requires both sides to have an idea of what is appropriate and what is not.  Interfering in promotions because the SecDef doesn't like one specific colonel who did his job very well but for someone the SecDef doesn't like is really problematic.  Congress can't really stop this by making a new law.  It could hold hearins that might clarify the norms and how the administration is violating them.  Two problems for that right now: the majority in the House and Senate don't care about their constitutional role AND the Trump regime revels in being inappropriate, so no education about norms will limit their behavior.  As I keep saying, a man who will lech after his daughter in public really has no shame or sense of appropriateness.

The question then becomes where do these norms come from and how do folks learn what they ought to do?  The norms generally come from past behavior--the prior restraint from Washington to Marshall to Ike help to set the model for how best to behave.  The historians and political scientists and philosophers and the like outside, and yes, inside professional military education programs, help to clarify the norms and convey them to the next generation.  

There have been lively discussions about where the lines are--when is it necessary, if ever, to resign if the civilians don't follow one's advice, should one speak out in public, when should civilians fire military officers, how best to engage in a respectful but unequal dialogue so that the military folks convey the info and recommendations as clearly as they can without publicly boxing in the politicians, and so on.  I have been told by senior Canadian military leaders about their conversations with their bosses and how they try to socialize them about what is expected.

If the next generation of the CDSN is funded, the Civil-Military Relations Network will be building a list of civ-mil norm questions for helping to foster better conversations so that both sides can navigate the gray areas.  In principal-agent parlance, all delegation relies on some level of trust--the more distrust, the less delegation, the more oversight, the more friction.  More trust can produce more delegation with adequate but not intense oversight, which can lead to flexibility and adaptation.  

To be clear, this government revels in being inappropriate and transgressive and wants to erode all institutions.  If we ever get out of this, we will need to remind folks of how one ought to behave so that the civilians listen to the military and then chose the best course of action for the country and that the military then obeys those orders. 

Doing research in this area always makes me think of Oprah and therapists--lots of talk about relationships and trust.  Because when one's life is on the line, you want to trust not just the buddy next to you to fire when you need them to do so, but also for the rest  of the actors to show up when needed and that the orders make sense and won't waste lives.   

 

*And, yes, I am not an expert on the normative side of civ-mil relations--I study what countries are doing nd why they do it when it comes to oversight.  But teaching civ-mil means reading much of the normative stuff and talking about it.

Cutting Edge Civil-Military Relations Amid the Carnage

 This weekend, I was in Reston, Virginia for my second IUS--the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society.  Founded by one of the biggest names in the earliest civ-mil era, Morris Janowitz, the IUS is the premiere American gathering of civ-mil scholars.  It ultimately led to IUS-Canada and I think the European Research Group on Armed Forces and Society--ERGOMAS--and maybe a few others. Folks were surprised it was only my second, but I started doing civ-mil halfway through my career and it took me a while to figure out the landscape.

And I am glad I did.  The civ-mil community and IUS in particular is just a hive of kindness, generosity, and insight.   Usually, when I go to a conference, I skip more than a few panel sessions as there are often timeslots where there isn't anything that engages me that much.  At IUS, I go to nearly all of the panels I can, and I get a bit frustrated when stuff is cross-scheduled.  This year, there were fewer conflicts in the schedule because, alas, far fewer folks attended.  Many scholars from outside the US were deterred because of Trump's border madness.  Most scholars from American professional military education places--the military academies, war colleges, etc--were either prevented from attending due to the shutdown or Hegseth's anti-academic engagement policies.  Some folks from outside the US and from PME places showed up anyway and brought a heap of insight and, yes, fun.

I participated in two panels--the first where I presented my paper about how joining NATO shaped Swedish and Finnish civil-military relations differently--and the second I will discuss further below.  I had a lot of fave presentations, but a few stick out.  Polina Beliakova of American University is simply one of the sharpest of the next gen of civ-mil scholars.  She presented a devastating bit of work--that many scholars keep citing that 3/4s of democracies have been felled by coups but if you take democracy seriously as more than just elections, that finding goes away.  Specifically, she focuses on a different coding of democracies, focusing not just on elections but on freedoms of press/association/speech and developed civil societies.  This is important because these might be the democratic equivalent of coup-proofing (we study more autocracies and how they coup proof by altering the ethnic balance of the armed forces, by setting up paramilitary organizations, by promoting due to loyalty and not merit, positioning party loyalists [commissars] next to senior military leaders] institutions/strategies dynamics.  Polina showed that if you include those kinds of measures, suddenly most of the places counted as democracies drop out, leaving very, very few (2) democracies being felled by coups.  Which means we need to look elsewhere for what might cause democracy to end.  Insert foreshadowing music here.

The second paper on that panel was by private citizen Lindsay Cohn, who has spent much time myth-busting Posse Comitatus.  She discussed the origins of PC and showed that it did not really reduce the use of US military forces in the US in law enforcement--it just moved it outside of the South.  That is, it was aimed at reducing the enforcement of Reconstruction against the racist people who wanted to deny civil rights to the newly freed Black people.  Her larger point is that using the military domestically is a political problem that the courts will not solve for us. I felt for Lindsay and Polina as both were doing vital myth busting that was compared to killing Zombies--that the arguments they were confronting have been attacked multiple times but are hard to kill.  Kind of like Huntington's stuff that has done a heap of damage both to civilian control of the military and to the study of civ-mil.  I pointed out after the panel that it is not that hard to kill individual Zombies, but it is hard to eradicate the Zombie virus.  

As a Brooksian, I should note that Risa Brooks presented a number of papers that all were super insightful and pushed me to think harder about stuff including one on accountability: 
 

 

 

 

 

 

The Kori Schake book panel was a heap of fun because Heidi Urben and Peter Feaver and Kori know each other well and like to give each other plenty of friendly grief.  Kori's book is a selected history of American civil-military relations (I haven't read it yet as the mail in Canada has been disrupted by strikes and always moves by ox-cart).  Heidi gave an incredibly sharp assessment of what the book adds to our understanding and what the book could have addressed better.  Peter asked a series of questions, many of which Kori claimed where poli sci and she's an historian (her degree is in Poli Sci).  It was just a delightful roundtable that raised a bunch of interesting questions.

The last panel I will highlight was one of the last of the conference: I was on a roundtable on what can we learn about American civ-mil from the comparativists and vice versa.  I was the chair and I started the conversation with a few slides.  I raised the question of whether the US example is relevant for the rest of the world:

Yes:

• Most folks including most militaries still rely on Huntington
• Most militaries want a heap of autonomy and think the civilians are amateurs
• Military effectiveness is hard to measure
• Principal-agency theory applies everywhere, and all militaries hate it despite the fact that they apply it every single day.

No

• The US model doesn't apply everywhere
• 
  It doesn't apply to the US
• I self-promoted by invoking our recent book 

I then suggested that the classic phrase of comparison being the thief joy is wrong. Envy is bad but comparison is joy.

I took inconsistent notes for the rest of the panel (sorry), but some of the key points:

Will the American troops fire on Americans?  Maybe, as it depends on such stuff as the ratio of protestors to troops (the bigger the protests, the less likely troops will fire); non-violence begets a non-violent mil response, is the crowd's composition (ethnic/racial) similar to the troops (maybe best for white folks to do the protesting?).   They also spoke on how Trump/Hegseth are trying to get an obedient military via ethnic stacking (making the military whiter), loyalty tests, counterbalancing by building up ICE, paying the military when no one else is getting paid, etc.

One scholar focused on militia-state relationships--borrowing from Staniland's work--will Trump's regime suppress the far right militias, contain them, collude, or incorporate.  We all voted on incorporating.  They also pointed out that we need to look at beyond the military to the ecology of the security sector--the balance of power among the various actors. Maybe the military will be left out of internal security stuff to marginalize it.  They reminded us that we civ-mil folks tend to ignore the National Guard (as does the regular military), so we need to think about them.  

Another scholar pointed out several lessons/warnings and a question: 

1. to deal with illegal acts is to take it to court, but this is a political problem, courts won’t save us, need political actors to take political steps—dems in Congress
2. how quickly norms can erode, failure of imagination about this regime, envision worst case scenario and then think worse than that
3. we focus so much on norms governing the military, we have not thought much about civilian norms, US case shows when civilians violate norms
4. we have to have correct concepts on the US case—Posse Comitatus for example.  We have to get this stuff straight, duty as a community to ensure that we are not spreading misinformation

Their question: have we lost the thread as a community of civ-mil scholars?  What are civ-mil norms for in democracies?  The norms serve a political outcome, at what point does the military become complicit for the fall of the republic by hiding behind norms?  

Which led to a conversation about what the military should be doing: the senior officers should be talking about what the oath means, that retired officers now have a reason to speak , don't comply in advance, governors should be getting legal advice about their national guard units and tlaking to them.

 The entire weekend was full of insight and camaraderie.  I am not going to say this community is more supportive, kind, and generous because it has more women in it than other parts of International Security, but I am going to imply that it does...  I am lucky to have found this field, mostly by accident. The work is fascinating and relevant, and the people are terrific.  It has made the second half of my career not just more interesting and more successful, but much fun as well.  The only downside is that IUS is biannual, so the next one is in 2027.

   

 

When Faux Civ-Mil Conflict Can Become Real: Canadian Edition.

 Twice in the past week, I have been asked by the Canadian media about a seeming split between the civilians at the top of the Canadian government and the military.  Last week, it was about how the military seemed to be moving ahead with Golden Dome and the civilians not committing to it.  This week, it is about the military moving ahead to be ready to receive a heap of F-35s while the civilians are still thinking about it.

To be clear this is mostly a comms problem, but politics is about comms and comms shapes politics.  The basic reality on these two things is that the military is doing what it is supposed to be doing--implementing past decisions.  The CAF is modernizing NORAD--the sensors Canada has to warn the US and Canada about incoming attacks--just as successive governments have promised and funded.  The CAF is preparing for the delivery of the first batch of F-35s, which the government of the day (the previous one) purchased.  In both cases, the preparation/work is for both the present day and the future deployments, and if the government changes its mind, then that future stuff will be wasted effort.  BUT the work has to be done and the military is not doing more than it is supposed to be doing.

 The challenge is the civilians are mostly trying to avoid making major decisions or announcing them about the future of Canada's contribution to American missile defense (called Golden Dome by the brand-focused President) and the future of the F-35 program.  Why avoid such announcements?  To not upset voters who wanted a more Elbow's up policy?  To hold onto some bargaining chips vis-a-vis the US?  Or just crappy comms?  That last one seems to be consistent with Liberal defence policy past and present. 

Alas, the media seeks the military seemingly ahead of the civilians and wants to catch them in a conflict.  This might have the impact of the military being less forthcoming when they are essentially doing their job, and that's bad for everyone.  It might also increase distrust between the civilians and the military, which is also not good.  

There are plenty of real civ-mil crises going around or in the future that we don't need to whip one up.  The bigger US-related one is that the military may be reluctant to follow the civilians' preferences of distancing from the US in other ways (see Phil's great piece).  Plus I do wonder how much oversight the new MinDef is doing.  

The larger point remains--the two big procurement projects of the moment (until the subs happen) are not causing tremendous friction between civilians at the top of government and the military... yet.  If the civs cancelled the F-35, then sure.  But the military is not doing anything inappropriate at this moment on these issues.  Sorry.   

 

 

 

Addressing the Mandatory National Service Question and, yes, the Guy Recommending It

 I have accused LtG (ret). Michel Maionneueve of having me live me live rent-free in his head, as he ended up featuring me (the unnamed Liberal-funded academic who was seeking to cancel him) in the origin story in his memoir.  By responding to his latest piece, this time at Macleans, I have to admit he is living rent-free in my head just a bit.  Before I get to that new piece, just a couple of thoughts of this whole thing.

First, when I find myself not being able to resist responding to a specific individual's online musings, I try to avoid their stuff.  I am trolled easily, so the best way to avoid that is to avoid the bait.  This is why I don't read the blog posts of Walt/Mearsheimer or else this blog would spend way too much time on them. And this is why I don't read MM's regular columns in the National Post.

Second, as we approach the anniversary of MM's emergence as a pundit of some kind thanks to his awful speech at the Vimy Gala (the gala is always near and before Remembrance Day),  I marvel at how he started the speech by saying he was cancelled, that he managed to turn the controversy that I helped to generate (oops) about it into a perch at the National Post.  It also reminds me that there aren't too many people who are Canadian experts on civil-military relations to comment on this stuff, so my value over replacement pundit is still positive.  

Third, tonight's class is on the politicization of the armed forces in democracies around the world, and, well, MM is very much a part of that dynamic/effort--retired GOFOs playing upon their military service to suggest that the military is supporting the partisan stance that the speakers are advocating.  So, writing here is a way to sharpen my thinking before tonight's class. 

On to the show, Maisonneuve is arguing that "Canada Needs a Mandatory National Service."  I am not going to grade this piece like I graded his response to my op-ed about the Conservative Party ought not to platform retired senior military leaders.  But he entirely omits Canada's history of draft riots, so that this essay would not get a decent grade. How would Quebec react to a new draft?  Nothing on this. 

MM starts by talking about meeting his wife in the service, and I have to ask, since no one else has, is whether she was his subordinate at the time.  I have long wondered if is his pique about culture change is driven by the damage done to his identity as a part of a generation of senior officers who preyed upon subordinate women to sate their sexual appetites.  I simply do not know if Maisonneuve is another Jon Vance or not.  And to be clear, I do not mean this as the ad hominen attack it might appear to be (see his op-ed targeting me for some great examples), but as a real question for journalists--is this guy taking controversial stances because he was a perpetrator of the abuse of power that caused so much damage to the CAF?  Ok, sorry for that tangent, but he mentions his wife at the top of the post.   

My biggest gripe with piece is not that he is making a factless argument about something that has been well-researched, but that he starts off by talking about the decline of confidence in public institutions with no self-awareness.  A key dynamic around the world including Canada has been
for right-wing populists to denigrate public institutions.  His Vimy Speech was exactly that--an effort to reduce trust in government, in the media, and in the military.  And so I must post a meme a student created for tonight's class to illustrate the dynamic so very well (I have the the students create memes to push them to think creatively about the readings ... and to compel them to do the readings).  

 

Anyhow, Maisonneuve makes the usual arguments that having a draft including a variety of forms of national service--it would give the kids a sense of purpose, improve their discipline, teach them about Canada and importance of defending it (well, that last one only for those who don't opt for all of the other forms of service that aren't military), and so on.  He cites a bunch of countries that have drafts, but does not cite anything about how those have worked out.  Do the youth in those countries have a higher sense of national purpose? Do they have a better command of civics and identify more with their fellow citizens than democracies sans drafts? Sweden would be a great experiment--they had a male-only draft, got rid of it just before Russia got especially aggressive, and brought it back for men and women fairly recently--did all this stuff about national identity and such swing with these changes. We social scientists love variation as it gives us leverage over the question.  

I frankly do not have time to read the literature on this, but he should have.  However, I have bumped into conscription during my research for both the recent book and the next project.  I was not asking about national unity or how it improves the discipline of Gen Z folks, but rather oversight and such.  Conscription came up in South Korea and Finland.  I wonder what we should take from the South Korean case--that their military was asked to suppress its parliament and resisted--was that due to conscription? If so, a point for Maisonneuve.  In Finland, conscription, despite its vaunted role in national unity, was a sore spot in civil-military relations, as the civilians keep asking the Finnish military for data on what activities cause conscripts the most injuries, and the military has resisted sharing that info.  So, no, I don't really know if conscription is a magical exilir fostering unity, discipline, and such.  But then again, MM presents no evidence.

MM does not address any of the tradeoffs involved (just as he didn't mention Canada's troublesome draft history).  For instance, if you draft, say, 20k people, where are you going to put them?  Who is going to train them?  Doing conscription does not automatically solve personnel shortage problems--it complicates them.  The CAF has had trouble training the soldiers/aviators/sailors it gets in, this is a key source of the recruitment problem because it does not have enough trainers, that it did until very recently incentive people to be trainers, and the regiments tended to send their crappiest people to be trainers or recruiters.  If you dedicate significant personnel to train the temporary members of the CAF, who will train those who are joining to make the military a career?  The newly trained reservists, who had been drafted, can't/won't be the new trainers.  There are probably ways to finesse this and figure out how to do both--train the professionals and train the drafted future reservists--but it is a real problem and should be addressed by anyone advocating conscription.

Another funky implementation problem is that MM includes in his proposal "Those selected would enter training and take courses on civics and Canadian history."   Who would be doing that?  Pointy headed profs who are stuck in ivory towers?  If not them, then who?  And what material do they use?  Given that Maisonneuve has denigrated scholarship in his past writings, I am unclear about where the civics/history would come from.  What would count as the good and necessary history that would be taught?  Would it be the anti-critical, Canada did everything great, we have nothing to apologize for stuff that he mentioned during his Vimy Gala speech?

A pet peeve: he also joins the chorus of threat inflation: "If anyone wanted to come into the North and seize our natural wealth right now, there would be little we could do to stop them, short of a strongly worded diplomatic protest."  Please.  There is no risk of that because it is really, really hard to operate up there.  If the Russians can't get the logistics right for invading a country right next door, how are they going to do it over the Arctic?  I learned this summer at our Institute that this threat inflation, while handy for getting the Canadian public to be willing to spend more on defence, is really scary to the people of the North.  We aren't doing them any favors with this threat inflation. 

Finally, MM is wildly exaggerating the impact of a draft.  He mentions a lottery along the way, but then concludes by saying:  "Once every young Canadian has worn a maple leaf on their shoulder, I think they’ll feel pride for their country [my emphasis]."  This ignores the fact that his proposal actually would only bring in a small percentage of the youth into the military as (a) many would choose other forms of national service that probably wouldn't involve uniforms with flags on the shoulders and (b) the lottery would mean that only a portion of the population would serve at all. It also ignores the fact that more than a few people might hate their experiences as a draftee.  But a flowery ending is probably best for an op-ed, rather than something that is internally consistent.

We are left with only one question: who edits these things at Macleans?  I am not saying that Maisonneuve can't submit stuff to Canada's various publishing outlets.  I am not even saying that Macleans shouldn't publish his stuff even though he has been essentially a far-right actor pushing out mis and disinformation.  I am saying that someone should have edited the piece so that it had more facts, less unsupported generalizations, and greater consistency. 

 

Retired GOFO's Should Do What?

 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.