Smart Power Blog

Great stuff. I've been meaning to read McMaster hopefully this will kick me in the butt.

I think a fundamental problem we are facing is the general inability, at a cultural level, for Americans to recognize an "objective." I don't mean this in the strict military sense but in a more general sense. This shows up mainly in our political discourse. The reason that politicians can "say a lot without saying anything" is because they assert objectives that are not really objectives.

The classic I always think of is John Kerry's "we will work with our allies" strategy. What on earth does that mean? How would you verify if it had been accomplished or not? If it were accomplished, why would we care? There's just too much room between what it could mean and how it can be verified. Does he mean "we will not invade other countries unless our allies agree?" Ok, that is verifiable, and it is stupid. It is precisely what Cheney called it -- a permission slip strategy. Or, it could mean we promise to call them before we do anything. Call them and listen to them, then do what we want. Well, duh? Bush did that, too, and he didn't try to make it sound like it was so special.

This relates to the civilian-military relationship because in civilian affairs, we use phony, objective-like language to substiute for real positions all of the time, but in the military, ultimately, real objectives are required. They are doing actual physical things that are going to be verified, like killing people and blowing things up.

What happens is that civilians create non-objectives that are palatable and then the military has to turn them into real objectives that can be operationally pursued. Then, when the civilians find out what the military is doing, they freak out. Sometimes they blame the officers, sometimes they blame the lower ranks, sometimes they blame war in general, but rarely do they look and see that the military is in fact doing their best approximation of what we, the civilians, asked them to do.

Take Abu Graib. Civilians never said "torture Muslim prisoners." But they did cheer when the President said "we're gonna smoke 'em out of their holes." That's a nice metaphor, but the military can't work metaphorically, they work literally. And in the literal world, fine distinctions are hard to make. I don't know much at all about military prisons, but my guess is there are two ways they can be run:
1. In a highly sterile, clinical, maximum security way
2. Like a zoo.

This is not a comment on our military or anybody's, it is a statement about the necessary costs of maintaining order when there are thousands of POW's/enemy combatants -- people who, just yesterday, were trying to kill you and, if they live, may try to kill you again. It is natural for soldiers not to treat these people all that well, and so the only way to keep them from being mistreated is to be very, very strict about how they are handled.

But being strict is costly. It places process over results. It slows things down. It is not, in other words, the default assumption you'd make when you are facing an enormous, imminent threat.

I found the Abu Graib photos, and stories, to be horrifying. But my point here is not that they were a horrible mistake or moral atrocity. My point here is that, whatever they were, they were the result of policy, of the actual objectives necessarily embedded in the bogus, nice sounding objectives we heard, like "democratizing Iraq." Robespierre was a "democratizer," too.

We asked the military to do this when we agreed to the Iraq plan as it was laid out. We asked because it was the obvious result of the loose objectives we articulated and we made no effort to make concrete exceptions or sub-objectives to prevent it.

So civilians should blame themselves for this, not the officers, not the privates, not even the President. He talked about potential terrorists like they were animals to be hunted, and then they were treated like animals captured after a hunt. He fulfilled his objective, we just pretended we didn't hear it.

Your use of Abu Ghraib doesn't strengthen your argument but it does strengthen the need to understand the civil-military relationship. The military is far more flexible than you give it credit. You also need to consider the role of civilian-created policies (Bremer for one), the role of contractors (not subject to mil prison control), and the role the military's civilian leadership played in preventing the deployment of a more appropriate force size and posture (including such "minor" things as the nearly 7,000 policemen recommended by civil and military authorities to train and support Iraqi police). Abu Ghraib wasn't and isn't a strictly military operation (don't ignore Other Government Agencies).

In your last paragraph, who is the chief leader here and where exactly does the buck stop (since you raised it)? You also assume the jailed were "potential" terrorists. Many weren't, but are now. Does that count for anything?

These are good questions. I will try to address as best I can. I've quote and will try to respond to each in turn...

"The military is far more flexible than you give it credit."
I'm never sure how to respond to "things are more this way than you say they are" challenges in cases where I don't think I made a particular statement about how much something was or was not a certain way. I'm not saying this is a bad challenge at all, just that I don't think I was saying the military is inflexible, I'm saying that in large scale operations collateral/accidental damages are inevitable. If an incentive is not identified and targeted for mitigation with an organizational committment, it is only a matter of time before the incentivized behavior is put into practice. This is not a criticism of the military. It is saying that the U.S. military, no matter how well trained and committed to excellence, is not capable of overcoming the laws of human organization.

My argument, in other words, is that there were reasons for soldiers to mistreat prisoners (to get information, to send a message etc.), and there were not strong counter-vailing reasons to stop them from doing so. Counter-vailing reasons would have been a committment by authorities above to instructing and enforcing anti-abuse policies over suspicions of the value of abuse. Since the President is the commander-in-chief, he would have had to demonstrate this preference, too. Otherwise, a general or military authority who insisted on enforcing "no abuse" would be subject to criticism from the administration that he/she was "helping the terrorists" by "slowing down the information gathering process" etc.

I admit that I do not know much about whether generals and officers should be expected to buck the president. But even if we assume they do have latitude, this doesn't change my point, which is that as civilians, we supported our representative in his choice not to favor anti-abuse. So to the extent to which abuse was avoided because some brave officers stood up to the President, we don't get credit for that anyway.

"You also need to consider the role of civilian-created policies (Bremer for one), the role of contractors (not subject to mil prison control), and the role the military's civilian leadership played in preventing the deployment of a more appropriate force size and posture (including such "minor" things as the nearly 7,000 policemen recommended by civil and military authorities to train and support Iraqi police). Abu Ghraib wasn't and isn't a strictly military operation (don't ignore Other Government Agencies)."

Totally agree. I admit I was not being clear and there is an argument one could make that Abu Graib was the result of non-military organizations interfering with military procedure. For example, the interrogators were often non-military personnel, right? I also agree that deployment plays an important role. Fatigue, frustration and inappropriate skill sets all increase the probability of these sort of behaviors happening.

I see this as a matter of time. There is some window, probably a month or two, during which an untrained guard can stay with prisoners whom he/she suspects are terrorists and not mistreat them despite over-long shifts, feeling outnumbered by the prisoners, and not being given encouragement from leadership to stick with the army code process. Throw in civilian interlopers with casual respect for army code of ethics that break rules regularly and that time shortens. This has nothing to do with the U.S. army, it is just the way enforcement via social norms works. If the norm is not enforced and overtly recognized, it undermines its power. Soon it appears to be abnormal to follow the rules. Psychological strain plays into it, too. So it is a matter of time. With all of the right troops and appropriate deployments, instead of months maybe it is years. Maybe 2 years, I don't know. But the only sustainable way to keep from having this behavior is to have institutional support for non-abuse, and this can only be supported over such a long time if the top levels agrees to it, i.e. the President.

In your last paragraph, who is the chief leader here and where exactly does the buck stop (since you raised it)?
The buck stops with the President. It is his job as the executive to deploy our institutional resources to achieve policy outcomes. I got in an argument with a former Bush WH staffer about this issue on this very topic. He said "you are suggesting that the President micro-manage the military." Not at all. I am suggesting that President take into account the manage-ability of the military in setting his policies and deploy what is in his control to minimize the risks of an un-manageable (by him) military. So if the President has a lot of control over the military, it's not micro-managing if he manages them in a way that leads to appropriate outcomes. If he doesn't have much control, then he is responsible for putting our national fate in the hands of an institution that is not directly accountable to the democratic process.

Again, this is not a criticism of the military at all. My point in this case is that the civilian leadership actually undermined the military's ability to the their job appropriately and you added some ways I hadn't thought of. But even if that weren't true, it is still the President's fault, because he is the executive to whom we have given power over the military. If it is not his fault, then we (the people) need direct access to the individual or group of individuals at the top of the military who could have made a change. We need to elect a "military commander" who is accountable for managing the military to meet our policy goals.

My other point is that civilians are to blame for something else. The President made some bad choices, those are his fault. We, however, should not act surprised at the result of those bad choices. We acted, I think, like we "didn't realize" what choices he was making. This is bull. Every signal he was sending was saying "btw, we may be torturing these guys in some cases." For us to say we didn't understand this message is the same slipperiness that we accuse politicians of. A similar example is when some of Clinton's staffers were shocked to learn about him and Monica. What in Bill Clinton's history said he would refrain from doing that if given the chance?

"You also assume the jailed were "potential" terrorists. Many weren't, but are now. Does that count for anything?"

Yes, definitely. When I say "potential terrorists" I mean this to be vague and full of insinuation. This is part of the policy that lead to the problem. When your policies and procedures make minimal, if any, distinction between two groups: a small number of people who have plotted and/or committed terrible atrocities and a large number of people who are associated with them sufficiently to warrant suspicion, your are asking your institution to treat them the same. If there is no formal way to distinguish them, there is no reason to believe that individual military personnel will systematically guess right about who "really" is a terrorist and who isn't. So they are all treated the same (on average).

Then the next decision is, what is the average categorization? In other words, is the policy tailored to treat the terrorists or the non-terrorist majority? I will suggest that at Abu Graib, they were treated as "possibly terrorists," and that this translates into treating them as terrorists. I make this assertion on the basis that our nation has set up very strict and explicit procedures for treating accused criminals differently than convicted criminals. I believe we have done this because we know that, in the absence of such procedures, the accused will be treated like the guilty by those who have apprehended them (on the thought that they were guilty). Thus, "potential terrorists" were treated as though they were terrorists, not as though they were innocent.

Does this increase the rate at which the potential terrorists become terrorists. I think so. And this is what makes this choice bad policy. If massive imprisonment was considered an effective strategy, a better policy would have been to treat them all as though they were probably innocent but hold them securely (but respectfully) in places away from areas in the field where they could attack/make trouble. I don't know much about how we normally treat POW's but I hope/believe it is something like this.

I hope this addresses your points -- I always find the prodding useful.

It occurs to me that what I have written is confusing because it does not specifically focus on civilian-military relations. Let me clarify that.

I understand the following to be true:

1. The U.S. military gets its legitimate authority to use violence from the American people. The American people elect a representative government which sets policy objectives and parameters, and it is the military's job, when called upon by the elected government, to achieve these objectives within these parameters.

2. According to the legal tenets of our political system (I believe set forth in the Constitution but perhaps elsewhere as well), the executive branch is primarily responsible for the deployment of military power. Congress has some informational and financial oversight, and has the ability to declare (or refuse to declare) war. But the bulk of the power of deployment is in the executive branch.

3. The President is the only elected member of the federal executive branch..

Therefore, in general, concerns about the degree to which the military is effectively achieving our objectives should be directed to the President. Citizens may be upset by military conduct, but they may not blame the military directly. Our armed forces report to the executive branch, and to Congress to some degree, not directly to the people. We the people agreed to set it up that way, and so we have to follow that. The military would not be doing its job if it responded to popular opinion over the directives of the President and those to whom he has chosen to delegate authority in the executive branch.

This does not mean the military should not do its best to keep the public informed of its activities when appropriate. If they feel it helps them to be in good standing in the public's mind, that's great -- more power to them. But they are not obligated to do so.

It is also the President's responsibility to keep the military in line. He/she owns all of their misdeeds, whether accidental or intentional. This is because they are only deployed at the President's behest. In cases where Congress has over-ruled the President or otherwise usurped some executive deployment authority, then they are to blame as well. Congress is always a factor. If the military bucks both the President and Congress, this is basically a coup situation. In such cases citizens should prepare themselves for much worse. It is my understanding that this is why we have the 2nd amendment.

The people can effect the President in two ways. One, through direct election. Two, via electoral pressure on Congress (either replacing or threatening Congress-people with replacement) such that lawmakers and party operatives refuse to cooperate with the President. We are seeing this now on Iraq.

This explanation may appear to be overly simplistic. I do not think it is. I think skepticism about this simple model is part of the problem itself. In my opinion, Americans have been seduced by many erroneous, alternative explanations of how power works. For example, they believe that "government bureaucracies" have a power of their own beyond that of the 3 branches. This is a convenient belief for those in the elected branches, because it allows them to deflect blame onto institutions over which we citizens have no direct authority. But that is all it is -- deflecting blame, mystifying to preserve power. These bureaucracies were built by the elected branches, and they can be taken apart by them. The reason they continue to exist is because elected officials choose to let them exist, and we choose to support the elected officials who do so.

So when I hear civilian-military relations, I think "citizen-President" relations. This does not mean we shouldn't learn more about how the different branches actually interface with the military. To the contrary, this is absolutely critical. It is in these interfaces that our elected officials hide their responsibility. Citizens not understanding how Presidential authority works enables Presidential mystification. Importantly, it makes it difficult for us to distinguish good presidential candidates from bad. Since our primary form of recourse is the replacement of presidents, this seriously limits the effectiveness of our government.

So I welcome learning more about how the elected branches interface with the military. I only seek to point out that these rules and procedures are not codified in stone or handed down from God. They are maintained by these same elected officials, and they can (and should) be changed if necessary.

Drew,
Have you read any of the suggested readings?

Duh, no. Not yet, anyway. I kind of thought you were going to synthesize them and educate me :) . Anyway, I've ordered McMaster, Cohen and Stevenson. These will be helpful to me in general so I thank you for the references.

My interest in this topic is on the leader (pres, congress) to follower (voter) communication. I think civilian-military issues are particularly interesting because they are a case where there is both high practial and moral risk as well as high "opacity." Where, basically, followers have no real ability to know whether leaders are telling the truth or doing a good job at any given moment because they do not have access to the facts or complexities that inform the leader's decisions.

I'll read up and continue the conversation...