Combating the crisis of civil-military relations.

Denial is a powerful psychological weapon, and a disturbing common political one. No less than it protects individuals and institutions from the hurtfulness of truth does it shield those in authority from accountability and responsibility. Thus it has become the weapon of choice for those--public officials and citizens alike--who seek to avoid facing up to the crisis that confronts us today in civil-militar relations.

This crisis came to a head last summer with the U.S. Air Force's highly publicized and controversial dismissal of Lieutenant Kelly Flinn and the adultery-related withdrawal of General Joseph Ralston from consideration as the next chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the period immediately preceding these scandals, charges of sexual misconduct swirled around the sergeant major of the army; a string of court-martial cases against army trainers accused of widespread sexual abuse proceeded apace at Maryland's Aberdeen Proving Ground and Darmstadt, Germany; and separate sexual harassment allegations prompted the navy to relieve the two-star admiral who commanded its 10,000-person supply service and the Defense Department inspector general to initiate an investigation of the army general counsel. Queried about such matters, a Department of the Army legal official was quoted as saying, "I wouldn't describe it as anything out of the ordinary. These are indiscretions. People make mistakes. We're human. They come on the screen every once in a while."

The very day that statement was made, a high-level panel investigating life at the U.S. Naval Academy issued its preliminary findings. Cochaired by former CIA director and academy graduate Admiral Stansfield Turner, the pane concluded that there is no internal systemic flaw to explain the spate of cheating, rug, car-theft, an sex scandals that have racked the Naval Academy over the past eight years. The problem was attributed, instead, to a permissive society that shapes (or misshapes) future midshipmen before they enter.

About the same time, Secretary of Defense William Cohen, addressing the graduating class at the U.S. Air Force Academy, sought to minimize recent military breaches of the public trust:

I believe the reason that our military is the best in the

world is that we re use to accept the least .... Sometimes

members of the force will fall short of our standards....

While harassment, abuse, [and] misconduct have

occurred in the ranks, these breaches of faith are the

exceptions rather than the rule, and they do not paint

the true picture of service in the armed forces.

Occurrences of the type alluded to by Cohen may not paint a true picture of how things ought to be or how we might want them to be, but the evidence at hand suggests that they clearly do paint a true picture of how things are. Although there were previous incidents, in recent years the American people have been deluged by a steady stream of unseemly, embarrassing incidents involving the military, including "Tailhook," the U.S.S. Iowa, the shootdown of an Iranian passenger plane, Beirut, and various instances--we later learned--of Pentagon "truth management" during the Persian Gulf War. During the Clinton administration alone, there have been literally hundreds of reported examples of abused authority, unaccountability, negligence, malfeasance, waste, inefficiency, intolerance, greed, indiscipline, and general parochialism. The signs of crisis are palpable, whether we are talking about the rape of a young girl by U.S. servicemen in' Okinawa or Australia, the existence of G.I. white supremacists in one of our most "elite" combat divisions, intelligence and security failures that produce scores of deaths and injuries from a terrorist truck bomb, the death of the secretary of commerce and thirty-four others in a military plane crash caused by faulty safety procedures and insufficient navigation equipment, the suicide of a chief of naval operations facing allegations that he had been wearing unauthorized combat decorations, the decision to proceed with full-scale production of a weapon system that has failed fifty-three of seventy-one performance standards set by the Pentagon itself, cheating by more than 100 marine officers on a land navigation test, intelligence training manuals that advocate execution and torture, or any of the countless other acts of malefaction.

A Triad of Failed Expectations

At one level, such recurring incidents are symptomatic of a military institution that, as an institution (as distinct from the individuals who constitute it), is seriously diseased--one characterized not by an idealized ethos of duty, honor, and country but one in which incorrigible parochialism, a steady undercurrent of chest-thumping machismo, and even the sort of self-serving advocacy and duplicity we thought only politicians (and perhaps used-car salespeople and public relations flacks) capable of have become all too much the norm.

At a deeper level, such occurrences reflect the failed mutual expectations of all three parties which make up the triad of civil-military relations: the military itself; the civilian officials who ostensibly control the military; and The People, acting either independently or through their elected representatives in Congress, who bear ultimate responsibility under republican rule for overseeing the military's civilian overseers.

It may not be altogether clear how to cure the military's ills. Judging from the feeble response to date of the country's most senior decision makers, both civilian, and military, it isn't even clear that they recognize--much less are willing to admit to and deal with--the existence of such problems. (Perhaps that is because they are so much the culprits themselves.) The start of a solution, then, must rest with our collective ability as a nation to diagnose the source of the disease rather than simply acknowledge its most obvious symptoms. And the source of the disease lies deep in the expectations the three parties involved have of one another and in their uniform failure to measure up accordingly.

What are these expectations? For their part, civilian officials in general--and presidents in particular--expect two things above all else from the military: operational competence, the ability to successfully accomplish assigned missions, whatever they may be; and sound advice. Of course, there are no clearly objective bases or determining what at constitutes either of these things. Both are inherently subjective and depend ultimately on the powers of discernment possessed by those who make such judgments. For example, a political appointee or average citizen who is devoid of military understanding, especially of the strategic ramifications of military affairs, is fundamentally ill-equipped to distinguish a military that is doing what it should be doing well from one that is doing either the right thing badly or the wrong thing satisfactorily.

Soundness of advice similarly may be a function of how broad (strategic) or narrow (purely military) the advice is, whether it coincides with what its recipients want to hear, or whether it truly determines results that are subject to so many other intervening influences. Success or failure of result, in other words--whether in the policy or the operational realm; whether in Haiti, in Bosnia, or at Aberdeen Proving Ground; whether concerned with NATO expansion, Gulf War syndrome, or the treatment of homosexuals--may bear little direct relationship to the quality of advice that precedes action (or inaction).

Beyond expecting the military to provide operational competence and sound advice, civilian officials give ample evidence that they expect generally unquestioning obedience--not merely to legitimate political direction but to the full range of civilian dictates and desires (however frivolous, ill-conceived, or self-serving). By this line of reasoning, even responsible dissent is considered dis-obedience, and no task--like ushering at the White House, for instance-is considered too inconsequential or demeaning to direct dutiful military personnel to perform. They also expect a measure of political sensitivity to avoid becoming a political liability and, finally, sufficient affordability so as not to visibly drain resources from other political priorities.

The military, in turn, expects several things from civilian officials generally and presidents specifically. The most important of these, executive competence, reflects the degree to which civilian decision in makers demonstrate the cardinal courage, decisiveness, integrity, and vision in sufficient measure to earn the deference of the military. No less, though, does the military seek from its civilian masters clear strategic guidance--an unambiguous articulation of national purpose, direction, and priorities that effectively charts the country's course into the future. Such guidance transcends and provide an antidote to the momentary imperatives of expediency and convenience that pervade the policy process. It also establishes a rational basis for allocating national resources, preventing constant crisis, determining military requirements, and justifying the use or nonuse of the military under particular circumstances. Clear strategic guidance thereby gives reasonable assurance to the military and the public that those in charge know what they are doing, understand the complexities of the world around them, and are motivated by something worthier and more consequential than base self-interest.

Given the shortcomings of politics, however, the military generally is content to limit its expectations of civilian officials to two things that could reasonably be said to be the minimal obligations such officials bear under the tacit social contract of civil--military relations: appreciation and support--if not understanding--of the military's purposes and uses, its capabilities and limitations, its needs and concerns, and its value to society; and sufficient political acumen to get things done properly and effectively in the messy, frustrating pluralistic worlds of domestic and international politics.

No less telling in their impact on the attitudes, comportment, and performance of the armed forces are the military's expectations of The People. Though hoping for true appreciation, the military expects the support of the citizenry--if for no other reason than as psychological recompense for the sacrifices the military sees itself making. But it seems willing to accept mere noninterference in its professional affairs as a minimal reflection of public trust. The military also seems to expect civic commitment and public order--the contemporary equivalent of a permanently patriotic and dutiful home front--as essential signs of the public's willingness to meet the obligations of citizenship (preferably of the compliant, deferential kind).

For their part, The People seem to share with civilian officials the expectation that the military provide operational competence and sound advice--although the public's powers of discernment and judgment, as well as the concomitant good-faith willingness to forsake the rights to know about and speak out on allegedly sensitive national security matters, vary widely. Thus given to more or less blind trust in those who profess to serve them, The People therefore also implicitly ask that their military maintain strict political neutrality-distancing itself from partisan politics, staying out of domestic affairs-and that military personnel conform to the highest standards of ethical and legal conduct, even if the international environment in which they may have to operate is the dog-eat-dog, kill-or-be-killed Hobbesian jungle realists tell us it is and must be.

What is not so clear is what civilian officials and The People truly expect of one another and, moreover, where Congress fits into the equation--whether as an extension and voice of The People, as representative of an elitist class that consorts with Executive Branch officials over the heads (or behind the backs) of The People, or as an independent force having its own agenda, perspective, and expertise. One would like to think that The People (including Congress) expect civilian officials to demonstrate executive competence, provide clear strategic guidance, and serve the public interest unconditionally; and that civilian officials, in turn, expect active, knowledgeable civic participation for the common good from The People. A more cynical view, tempered by experience, suggests that what each ought to seek from the other is quite the opposite of what they actually do expect or want.

Today precious few of the mutual expectations the three parties to the civil-military relationship have of one another are being met. And from these failed expectations flows the crisis that now afflicts us. Ideally, the military would be a useful instrument of national power that facilitates the attainment of the country's strategic goals, as well as a socially, politically, and economically responsible institution that contributes to the preservation and functioning of civil society. Civilian authorities would establish definitive strategic purpose and direction for the country, effectively manage events and circumstances, and exercise responsible military oversight. The People would be civically engaged and employ reasoned judgment to rigorously monitor the military's overseers.

But reality has fallen well short of this ideal. The military--parochial to a fault, insatiably greedy for resources and the expensive appurtenances of its craft, disturbingly politicized at the top, and beset by a largely unrecognized but nonetheless real and pervasive civic illiteracy within its own ranks--has made the most of its practiced bureaucratic and political survival skills. While ostensibly accepting a variety of nontraditional assignments its core believers consider extraneous and burdensome--peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, and the like--and zealously trumpeting itself as the revolutionary vanguard for a new age of third-wave, fourth-generation cyberwar, the military has remained stubbornly wedded to a hidebound conception of war and self. The central tenets of this entrenched worldview are only too familiar: that war is inevitable; that peace, never but a temporary respite, is a function of one's readiness for war; that war is traditional combat; that victory in war goes to the party most proficient in the application of violence; that the military exists solely for the purpose of preparing for and waging war; and, therefore, that the profession of arms occupies privileged standing and subscribes to a superior ethos that should be immune from the meddling scrutiny of unworthy amateurs.

Such beliefs, deeply ingrained in the thinking of uniformed professionals and their most ardent acolytes (including more than a few on Capitol Hill), have led the military to continue preparing, as always, for the wars of the past; to deny the relevance,of, and therefore be generally unprepared for, the many contemporary contingencies that do not conform to the traditional model of war; and, accordingly, to give experience-impaired civilian officials little strategic maneuver room in responding to emergent crises. These same beliefs, because they reflect something deeper about the types of individuals the institution attracts and rewards in fulfilling its mission and self, also have contributed materially to the military's incessant proneness, to scandal. Such incidents constitute a form of collective institutional disobedience that is the outgrowth of an institution that has lost its identity and no longer has confidence in or respect for those it is supposed to serve.

Also not without fault are civilian officials who, increasingly devoid of first-hand or even derivative military experience (a general portent of the future that has been especially pronounced in the Clinton administration), have shown commensurately little faculty for critical discernment in military matters. Consistently less than adroit--amateurish at best, totally inept at worst--in the larger conduct of international affairs as well, they thereby have failed to engender the minimal credibility necessary to compensate for their pronounced military illiteracy. Instead, they have feigned understanding and support--first, by invariably deferring to established military practices and preferences; and second, by shamelessly invoking insider rhetoric, not only to mask their substantive shortcomings but also to counter prospective criticism and to ingratiate themselves with potentially restive military elements. (Lest anyone doubt this, it is instructive to review the public utterances of this administration's senior national security officials and count how often they have invoked the twin mantras of "military readiness" and "national interests.")

At the same time, under the guise of urgency and national self-defense, these civilian officials have perpetuated the practice common to all recent presidencies of repeatedly circumventing--or at least outmaneuvering--Congress in committing U.S. troops abroad. The unfulfilled promise to pull U.S. troops out of Bosnia within a year of their deployment is but the most glaring recent example. The result of this practice has been a progressive, largely subliminal diminution of effective civilian control of the military.

Finally, The People--increasingly disenchanted, cynical, alienated, and captive still of the Cold War mentality which convinced them that they endanger the Republic by knowing too much about or questioning the methods or motives of their military and its civilian masters--evince varying degrees of apathy, hostility, and distrust, all of which undermine national will, societal civility, and the very life of democracy. Congress, in turn, far from fulfilling the republican ideal, has generally set itself above The People and repeatedly shown its cultivated incapacity as a deliberative body, as an effective check on presidential excess, and as a representative voice for popular sovereignty.

In their totality, these conditions call to mind the facetious Cold War aphorism that under communism the workers pretend to work and the state pretends to pay them. Similarly, it might be said that, under post-Cold War American democracy, civilians in the United States pretend to control the military and the military pretends to be controlled. The implications of this are profound. When mutual expectations go unmet, the result almost invariably is alienation, distrust, disunity, and, ultimately, strategic debilitation. We are at that point today--notwithstanding our self-absorbed, chest-thumping claims to Lone Superpower status. Missing is the social glue of trust and coincidence that results when expectations are met. Missing also, therefore, are the attendant mutual credibility, acceptance, and legitimation necessary for the unity--of purpose, effort, and action--so essential to executive energy, able governance, and overall strategic effectiveness.

Redefining the Military's Mission

It would be too simplistic to suggest that a solution to the current crisis lies in somehow ensuring that the expectations the three parties to the civil-military relationship have of one another are fulfilled. If a solution is to be found, it must come from the military itself. All institutions, of course, but especially innately conservative ones like the military, resist self-correction. They change only when change is forced upon them from the outside. Nevertheless, today we face a situation that demands the initiation of change--of sweeping transformation, in fact--from within.

For conscription will not return, and, considering that we purport to be a democracy based on the consent of the governed, perhaps that is as it should be. Accordingly, as we move further beyond the Cold War, civilian officials and members of Congress--both part of a generally affluent, upwardly mobile political class that rarely anymore feels obligated to serve in uniform or sees any career advantage in doing so--will increasingly come to office devoid of military experience. The result, on the whole, will be a pronounced insensitivity to and unfamiliarity with military affairs and the military ethos that will only be accentuated by the strategic illiteracy that is already so pronounced among most contemporary political practitioners.

Paradoxically, this self-inflicted vulnerability bon of inexperience and ignorance seems likely to make civilians more, rather than less, dependent on and deferential to a military they cannot afford to alienate politically. Lacking perspective and confidence, they typically will be forced to acquiesce--often unknowingly--to the military's preferences and practices. The military then, given the upper hand both politically and bureaucratically, would naturally tend to push its own selfish agenda, believing it to be in the larger national interest. It is imperative, therefore, that the military face up to the realization that it is centrally a part of a crisis in civil-military relations and step up to the challenge of self-initiated change.

Such change clearly does not lie in the sort of cosmetic, superficial correctives; some might suggest as appropriate and adequate: military familiarization classes for new civilian officials, for example, or more intensive ethics instruction for those in uniform. A solution lies, rather, in the most fundamental of institutional concerns: the central mission of the military.

Is the military's proper and strategically most productive function to contribute to and enhance security or simply to provide for the common defense? Is the military's purpose to secure and preserve peace or to prepare for and wage war? Is the military a strategic or simply a martial instrument of power? Is the military in the business of preventing war or merely responding to crisis? Is the military strictly an executive instrumentality or does it have a legitimate and necessary role in actually determining strategic direction? Should the military be entirely subordinate (if not subservient) to civilian authority or should it assume a position of essential coequality? Does the military bear responsibility for being a thinking and learning institution or just a dutiful action arm of the state?

Such questions, depending on how they are answered, are vitally connected not only to the state of civil-military relations but to the particular importance we attach to civilian control. A military whose essence is seen to be the management of institutionalized collective violence on behalf of the state, and which is thus prepared--physically and psychologically--only to employ violence as its primary or sole mode of operation, is one that must be under the hand of popularly constituted civilian authority if it is to possess legitimacy and if democracy is to survive and prosper. In contrast, a military acknowledged to have a proper and necessary constructive purpose--as opposed to a strictly destructive one--might not only lend itself to restrictive external control but be expected to exercise more collective self-control over itself and its members.

Mission affects the substance of what the military does, quite obviously, but it also has everything to do with how the institution sees itself and is seen by others. It has a material impact on the attractiveness of the military as a profession and, thus, on the extent to which the institution's members are representative of the larger society. The more the military is called upon to perform tasks for which it is ill-prepared and ill-disposed, the greater is the tendency for its members to question the competence of those who direct it, to feel besieged, to withdraw unto themselves, and to seek outlets for their frustrations. The institution, then, when its members commit deviant acts that run counter to both its societal obligations and its own high-flown preachments, is not only engaging in collective disobedience to civilian authority (rather akin to the infantile behavior of a youngster who flouts authority through surreptitious acts of vandalism) but thumbing its nose at society and resisting, rather than adapting to, the environment with which it is so woefully out of sync.

Would a military whose primary mission is peacekeeping, nation building, humanitarian assistance, and disaster response--as opposed to the current mission of warfighting--be as prone to civil-military crisis, or as strategically wanting, as the U.S. military is today? The answer is no. To begin with, a military thus reconstituted or reinvented would be one operationally capable of acting and succeeding, where now it is generally incapable and unwilling. It would be a demonstrably different military, one suited to the postmodern age in which we live rather than a past that is no more.

We still carry the baggage of the Cold War, where the driving imperative was actually inaction, or nonuse, of a consummately lethal military. Our concern was with the most critical threat facing us, and the name of the game was the accretion of traditional warfighting capabilities for the purpose of tacit threatmaking to an adversary that was more like than unlike us.

But all that has changed dramatically. Today the most likely threats or challenges are the ones that matter, and our prospective adversaries are more unlike than like us. What affects them is not the amount of big, sophisticated weaponry we possess nor the stridency of our rhetoric but, rather, how willing we are to act and how effectively we perform when we do. Success in the pseudowars of the present requires the ability to take anticipatory, preventive action to truly resolve--rather than simply avoid, dampen, or temporarily quiet--conflicts when, or even before, they occur by treating their root causes.

However, the military we have is ill-suited for taking preventive action or effectively treating root causes. It is too blunt an instrument--too destructive, provocative, and escalatory--to do anything other than react to visible symptoms. Its personnel reflect this not only in the repertoire of skills they possess but in their psychological and emotional makeup, their attitudes, and their behavior.

Because the tasks and associated skills required for peacekeeping, nation building, humanitarian assistance, and disaster response are so different from those required for warfighting, a military that assumes these newer tasks as its primary mission would necessarily have to make fundamental changes in organization, doctrine, technology, personnel, training, and education. Ground forces would predominate over naval and air forces, and support functions would take precedence over traditionally recognized combat functions. Combat functions, then, would assume primarily policing, advisory, and mediating character.

It is reasonable to presume that a reoriented force of this nature would require a different type, even a different caliber, of individuals to staff it than at present: more highly trained an educated, especially in language, foreign area studies, and perhaps the humanities more generally; more experienced and mature; and more diverse in terms of ethnicity, gender, and even age. While such a force undoubtedly would prompt some, perhaps many, of those now in uniform to leave the service, it would also attract others--perhaps including aspiring members of the political class--who now have no incentive to serve.

The new caliber of soldier could reasonably be expected, on the whole, to be more self-disciplined, self-motivated, and tolerant--certainly more so than those who are now grabbing the headlines to the military's detriment. They would reflect a different mentality--less the technician or tactician, less the macho warrior than the strategically attuned diplomat in khaki--and subscribe to a different ethos, oriented less on obedience and followership than on autonomous leadership and service. Their greater experience and maturity would necessitate a compression of the rank structure, less hierarchical organizational arrangements, and more democratic decision processes.

And what would become of the traditional warfighting mission? It would fall principally to the reserves, thus legitimizing and giving substance to the claims we make about the increased warning time now available to us in the absence of a major adversary; signaling once and for all that the Cold War is behind us and that the United States is willing to take the lead in moving toward global demilitarization; reestablishing a clear-cut demarcation between peace and war; revitalizing the founding notion of the citizen-soldier; reinvigorating mobilization as an instrument of national power; restoring the necessity an t e practice of congressional consent for serious commitments of force abroad; and thereby strengthening civilian supremacy over the military.

The crisis we face today in civil-military relations is real. Its symptoms, though suffocatingly pervasive, have not been recognized for what they are. But like an unseen lymphoma or termite infestation that destroys silently from within, the danger signs are more ominous than we care to admit. Because institutions in general are so much the lifeblood of society, and the military particularly so, neither suicide nor negligent death are options we can afford to let happen. Accordingly, we have no choice but to move quickly to seek a cure.

Gregory D. Foster is George C. Marshall Professor and former J. Carlton Ward Distinguished Professor and director of research at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, National Defense University, at Washington, D.C. The views expressed here are his own.