When I first started lecturing to military audiences about civil-military relations 25 years ago, I said U.S. civ-mil relations were a excellent model.
I would never say that now. We have a dysfunctional civ-mil situation in so many ways. /1
Too many civilian political leaders lack military experience, and so they defer to the uniformed military too quickly. It's all "TYFYS" and "Tell us what you need to get the job done" and no real control other than some budgetary constraints. /2
We've gone from a citizen-soldier model to an army of venerated Spartans, who are treated - and who believe themselves to be - superior to the civilians they are supposed to serve and protect. We are creating a Latin American officer corps, isolated from society and above it. /3
Militaries by their nature are a little more xenophobic and nationalistic than most other institutions, but ours is developing malignancies within itself that are becoming hostile to democracy *at home*. Our praetorian veneration is a kool-aid we keep serving up. /4
We've allowed the military to become a closed ideological ecosystem, allowed it to become super-competent at operations but detached from strategic thinking and social realities. In this, I am sorry to say, PME has not been helping much. /5
I am not sure what the answer is. A draft would solve a lot of it, but that will not happen in this country. More ROTC scholarships in more schools, for more officers from across America, including elite schools? Maybe. But mostly, it's always the same problem: Us. The voters. /6
As long as we outsource our security to volunteers, defer to them, and then treat them as if they are The Avengers in uniform (and then underfund veteran's services once they're out), we civilians are going to create more Mike Flynns (of whom there are many still in uniform). /7
The "civil-military" relationship is not 50-50. Civilians, by the Constitution the leaders of the military. But we've gotten too lazy to bother with that, and too drunk on our own Soviet-like military-patriotic culture to bother to fix it. At our peril. /8x

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More from @RadioFreeTom

18 Apr
There are plenty of military folks who value education; military is sending one of my uniformed students for a PhD at a top school. (I am being vague to protect privacy.) But increasingly, I note that there are many who also say things like "Harvard" with dripping contempt. /1
Some of this is the recent division between conservative America the rest of the country over those commie pinko university socialists, but that's always been present in the military: Bob Gates pleaded to "embrace the eggheads" when he was SECDEF. /2
But I could tell you stories that go way back, like the ROTC student who got into an Ivy League school and her service didn't want to pay for it. "Why should I send you there when I can send five of you to a public school?"
And they complain that the elitists won't join up. /3
Read 6 tweets
18 Apr
And yes, since I am critical of how military education works - the place I've spent my career - I will say more at another time about it. But the problem with PME is simple: It's run by the military. /1
That is, PME institutions are intended to create a fusing of civilian and military education to produce a better officer corps, more agile, more intellectually flexible to face the challenges ahead even if we can't be sure what they are. /2
My own school - FOR WHOM I DO NOT SPEAK, if that's not clear enough - has for 50 years been trying to prevent the intellectual civil-military rift that created Vietnam. VADM Turner's convocation address back in the 70s is very clear on this. /3
Read 8 tweets
16 Apr
This is very American thinking. "If we keep doing this, does it make it better?" It's like asking: "If I take keep taking blood pressure medication, will my BP become normal?"
No. And you don't have to take it. And it does have side effects And maybe nothing will happen. /1
Part of the reason people hated the AFG mission is that it wasn't a "mission," it was prophylaxis. And that doesn't have an "end" or a "solution," you just stay in a bad situation to prevent a possible worse situation. Or you can accept the risk and move on. /2
The public has never sent a clear message about this, and the Pentagon is an organization based on risk-aversion, and presidents were trapped between catcalls of "warmonger" and "coward," and so Biden has made a decision, which is what presidents should do. /3
Read 4 tweets
16 Apr
Just to continue pissing people off about this, civilians who talk about "forever wars" were not "at war." We were never asked to sacrifice a damn thing. Volunteers were in combat and in danger in two short actual wars and then in protracted, preventive security ops. /1
Americans wanted to be "at war" to gain clear "victory" in places where that wasn't possible. We destroyed AQ, the Hussein regime, and most of ISIS. All things that made us more secure, and then we said: "Okay, just keep doing whatever it is that's working, we're busy." /2
As @dandrezner once wrote, U.S. governing elites were not constrained by foreign policy issues because the public doesn't really care about. The military was war weary and overstretched, but the public just didn't care that much, no matter how much they say they did. /3
Read 12 tweets
15 Apr
If you wonder why I bristle at "forever war" terminology about AFG, imagine a war where far more Americans are killed - say, 35K- there's never a peace treaty, and we stay for another 70 years to help nation-build.
Totally unacceptable! Insane! Forever!

That would be Korea.

/1
This is not an argument for staying in Afghanistan. It's an argument for making sure that when we debate the use of force and the risk to our security, we don't get sloppy with terms like "war" just to engage in political point-scoring. I think leaving AFG is unavoidable now. /2
I think Trump did it wrong and caused a lot of damage. Biden's doing it better, but it's still the best of a lot of bad options, in part because we obsessed on the word "war" which implies that any end is either "victory" or "defeat," neither of which is going to happen here. /3
Read 5 tweets
15 Apr
Part of the problem all along has been the "forever war" moniker that isolationists of the right and left stuck on this. It's not a war. It was policing and prevention. But we're not allowed to say that. So it became "America's longest war" long after it wasn't a war. /1
There were other problems: No military commanders wanted to accept that they couldn't "solve" this, so they kept saying "it's going well." Sure it was, if you mean "not a base for another 9/11," which is a good metric. /2
And yes, the early years were full of optimism that we could build a stable nation out of AFG. This was too big a job and we weren't ever going to commit to something that size, esp by using the military. /3
Read 7 tweets

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