Still “No Dems Need Apply” at the SecDef’s Office
AP Exclusive: Gates to stay at Pentagon – washingtonpost.com
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a holdover from the Bush administration, will remain in his Cabinet post for at least another year, his spokesman said Thursday.
I wonder if anyone, other than me, sees how corrosive this is? We have not had a Democratic SecDef since 1996. The message this sends to the uniformed military is “the Democrats’ bench is so thin that they can’t even find someone to serve as SecDef.” And their natural response is to continue to believe that Democrats are weak on national security.
The consequence is significant. Somebody in DoD — either in OSD or out at CENTCOM — doesn’t believe that the president can be trusted to make decisions, so they are misleading the White House on issue after issue in order to get their way. I discuss this issue in more depth here:
The Flash Point Blog » Blog Archive » Who is Driving National Security Policy?
Would Obama have approved the March white paper had he known he was signing onto a commitment of 100,000 troops? Would he have increased forces in December had he known that we didn’t have good knowledge of the situation on the ground? He explicitly approved the 30,000 troop increment if it could be deployed early, would he still have done so had he known that the new deployments would take a year to implement? I think there is good reason to doubt that absent all of these “miscommunications” we would have the Afghanistan policy we have today.
I wonder if anyone, other than me, sees how corrosive this is? We have not had a Democratic SecDef since 1996. The message this sends to the uniformed military is “the Democrats’ bench is so thin that they can’t even find someone to serve as SecDef.” And their natural response is to continue to believe that Democrats are weak on national security.
Huh? Where did that come from? Gates has never run for elected office, so most people don’t look at him as a Republican. Media pundits and political junkies who live near or in the beltway might look at it through that distorted party lens, but not most normal people and certainly not the military rank and file.
Besides, I think the consensus is that this guy is a damn good SECDEF. Who cares what party he’s in? Isn’t that about as substantive as worrying about his skin color or ethnicity? When is the last time that we had a black man running DoD? Oh no! What message are we sending?!
The consequence is significant. Somebody in DoD — either in OSD or out at CENTCOM — doesn’t believe that the president can be trusted to make decisions, so they are misleading the White House on issue after issue in order to get their way.
Who in OSD or CENTCOM could possibly be so stupid as reason that Republican SECDEF = a President who cannot be trusted? This smacks of either unbelievable spin or an exercise in fantasy. The President couldn’t possibly have made a bad decision or on that we disagree with, so he must have been lied to – and it probably happened because the SECDEF is a Republican. What?
No, I didn’t mean to suggest such a simple cause and effect relationship. That said, there is already widespread skepticism about Democrats’ national security cred in military circles. There is also widespread skepticism about the motivations and character of civilian leaders. And there is widespread skepticism about Obama simply because of his lack of experience.
It is quite clear that the uniformed military is more willing to buck Democrats — this has been the case since 1993 — while being, on the whole, prone to roll over when confronting a Republican.
To reverse that, the Democrats need to have a strong Democratic Secretary of Defense, and we have not had such a creature since Perry. It won’t fix all the problems, but you can’t begin to address them as long as Democrats seem afraid to take control of the department.
I don’t know if you’ve already got specific articles or other stuff in the works, but if you’re looking for suggestions, I’d love to see you expand upon this in a longer article.
Having been an Army Officer, having worked with gobs of them, and still keeping in contact with lots of them, to include a current BDE Commander, several BN Commanders, a lot of other field grades, and a handful of DA Civilians, your proposition strikes me as utterly absurd on its face. It sounds like something that I would expect to overhear from two weirdos in a Starbucks while they browse the Huffington Post on their laptops. However, I am aware that you have interacted with your fair share of military big shots (probably higher ranking than the folks I stay in touch with) and that your brain probably weighs a few more ounces than mine, so there has got to be more to this. If you’re looking for topics to write on, this one has my vote (assuming that the vote of an anonymous avatar on your screen carries any weight).
I have no idea which part of my argument you object to.
Do you disagree that in the military there is a pervasive sense that Democrats are relatively weak/inexperienced on national security?
Do you disagree that in the military there is a pervasive sense elected officials are corrupt, ineffective, media whores?
Do you disagree that in the military there is a pervasive sense that Obama, in particular, came to the job with insufficient foreign and defense policy experience?
These sentiments are so common that it didn’t even occur to me that they were in the least bit controversial.
I do acknowledge that my concern that keeping Gates on sends a bad signal is my own judgment. Is that the part you disagree with? Or do you believe I have misdiagnosed military attitudes across the board?
–BF
I disagree with the first and the last and both for the same reasons.
First, I disagree that in the military there is a pervasive sense that Democrats are relatively weak or inexperienced on nat’l security. Most military leaders prefer to play the role of organization men – not taking positions or concerning themselves with the nonsense of politics. But, even assuming that they do concern themselves with politics, I disagree that they would view it through a partisan lens rather than a realist lens. If there was any attitude about politics that I noticed in the Army, it was a widely accepted recognition that what a politican says and what he does are two entirely different things and party affiliation is nothing but a brand image that they use to market themselves with. Some people use the McDonald’s or Wendy’s brand image and open a fast food joint. Some people use the Democrat or Republican brand image and run for office.
I do think there is a pervasive sense that Obama is inexperienced in national security. I don’t know how anyone can even pretend otherwise. Candidate Obama was as inexperienced as candidate Palin – and that’s pathetic. But the Democrat brand? No. Sam Nunn still gets respect and I’m not even sure if he’s still alive. Ditto Joe Lieberman, Jim Webb, and (dare I say it) Joe Biden. And hey, the Republican brand isn’t getting much cred from Palin’s popularity among the fringe base of the Republican party.
Geez, I’m typing a lot and really beating this dead horse, but one more thing. Andrew Exum, John Nagl, Nate Fick, and others like them are not representative of the Army. I never met an Army Officer who dreamed of hanging up his uniform to go hang out at cocktail parties in DC and speak to crowds of eggheads at think tank events. Even less well-known former Army Officers who are plugged in to politics in the beltway – the Ink Spots crew, for example – are the outliers. Of all the Officers that they served with on BDE staff, how many of their peers pursued a similar career path after the Army? Most Army Officers are obsessed with their jobs – specifically with their BN or BDE – and they prefer to spend their free time with family (if married) or boozing it up downtown (if single) – not reading Politico.
That was really rambling. It was all directed to the first point.
To your last assertion (keeping Gates on sends a bad signal). Same deal. Who even realizes that he is a Republican? I bet that if I emailed any ten currently serving field grade officers that I keep in touch with and asked them whether Gates is a Republican or Democrat, 8 would assume that he is a Democrat because he serves in a Democrat administration. The other two would look it up on Wikipedia and claim to have known the answer.
Even assuming they know – and even further assuming that they care or assign any significance to his party affiliation – I still don’t think anyone can get past the fact Gates is so widely regarded as such a good SECDEF. Party affiliation will draw a big “so what?” when someone is so highly respected – especially when he is almost surely never going to run for any elected office. And even if I’m wrong about that, too, Obama campaigned as a “post-partisan” uniter who would reach across party lines. Hello, Republican SECDEF. People were lobbying for Obama to keep him when he took over.
I’ll stop now.
Side note: I read Robert Gates’ “From the Shadows” when it first came out about 10 or 12 years ago – I think I recall him stating that the Soviets feared Carter?
>>To your last assertion (keeping Gates on sends a bad signal). Same deal. Who even realizes that he is a Republican? I bet that if I emailed any ten currently serving field grade officers that I keep in touch with and asked them whether Gates is a Republican or Democrat, 8 would assume that he is a Democrat because he serves in a Democrat administration.<<
Try it. I bet you’re wrong.
And I am not basing my assessment primarily on my discussions with the Nagl/Fick/Exum types. I agree, they are very much outliers. What I am basing my assessment on is the literally hundreds of students I’ve had in the last 15 years at Georgetown and the National War College — the vast majority O3 to O5 — from whom I have picked up these sentiments. Now, it is possible that I am more sensitive than most about these issues, and that as a consequence I am overinflating relatively minor issues. But, I do think that for when military officers think of Democrats, they think anti-war, Nancy Pelosi, gays in the military, BJs in the Oval, and that kind of thing. And when they think Republicans, they think Ronald Reagan, good on defense, tough, support the troops.
“And I am not basing my assessment primarily on my discussions with the Nagl/Fick/Exum types. I agree, they are very much outliers.”
Actually, I think you are, inadvertently. You typed, “What I am basing my assessment on is the literally hundreds of students I’ve had in the last 15 years at Georgetown and the National War College — the vast majority O3 to O5 — from whom I have picked up these sentiments.”. That, to me, is a bunch of Nagl/Fick/Exum types. At risk of reinforcing the fallacious stereotype that the military is an anti-intellectual institution (which has recently been bandied about here and here), I would assert that the people who have any interest in spending their time in service going to Georgetown are the outliers. (Just to be clear, by “outlier” I do not mean “top performer” or anything similar). They also have a much greater interest in political nonsense. I don’t know why that correlation would exist, but it sure seemed to correlate based upon my admittedly narrow and anecdotal experience.
Now, we probably disagree on everything above, but there is one last factor that I think we may agree on. When people live in, and go to school in, DC, they are probably more aware of, and more likely to develop an opinion on, politics – even if they didn’t have any strong views before moving there. I would suggest that the impression that you got was more a product of those Soldiers being in DC than of any pervasive view held by military leaders in general.
Lastly, on a more agreeable note, I do hope that you continue to expand upon this and related civil-military issues in longer, more developed articles. You’ve put more focus on those issues over the past several months than anyone else I can think of. While I don’t agree with many of your assessments, I think it is a topic that doesn’t get nearly enough attention and you’re adding value to the public discourse with your writings… as opposed to some of us who just blog about whatever comes to mind because we’re procrastinating on something else.
>>That, to me, is a bunch of Nagl/Fick/Exum types.<<
Well, maybe, I admit I hadn’t really considered that fully. But that said, especially the War College students folks make up a disproportionate percentage of the future senior leaders. In the final analysis, it is the outliers who make up the ranks of the 2, 3, and 4 stars, no?
“In the final analysis, it is the outliers who make up the ranks of the 2, 3, and 4 stars, no?”
I think we’re now mixing terms. I would reiterate what I stated in the previous comment: “by ‘outlier’ I do not mean ‘top performer’ or anything similar.” Basically, I don’t mean it in the Malcolm Gladwell sense. I mean it in the “abnormal” sense. Given X attribute, 95% exhibit it and the “outliers” don’t. In this case, that attribute is a preoccupation with politics. 95% do not exhibit it. The Nagl/Exum/Fick types do. They are “outliers” in regard to that attribute. So, no, the Nagl/Exum/Fick types don’t make up the stars. They make up the think tanks. However, I do agree with your basic point – terminology aside…
“But that said, especially the War College students folks make up a disproportionate percentage of the future senior leaders.”
Yup. And since our disagreement basically boils down to our personal impressions (folks I know versus folks you know), perhaps that fact lends your perspective greater weight.