Revolt of the Captains

In yet another echo of the post-Vietnam reaction, junior officers have begun to question whether their superiors are upholding the military's interests in disagreements with civilian counterparts.

After withdrawal from Vietnam had begun in earnest, the Army commissioned an internal study by two of its mid-level officers. The resulting Study on Military Professionalism, along with influential books such as H.R. McMasters' Dereliction of Duty painted a stark picture of an officer corps that had embraced careerism and shirked its duty to provide honest military advice to civilian superiors that were punitive towards messengers bearing ill tidings.

These critiques of senior officers are, of course, backhanded methods for criticizing civilian superiors. Instead of risking breach of military discipline and the principle of civilian control by directly opposing the decisions of civilians like SECDEF Donald Rumsfeld and, in an earlier age, SECDEF Robert McNamara, military critics often direct their ire towards senior officers who fail to press their objections firmly enough in private councils with those civilian leaders. The underlying assumption implicit in this critique is that if only senior military officers had pressed harder, they would have been able to stop or alter the bad policy. That this assumption is almost certainly wrong in both the case of Rumsfeld and the case of McNamara is probably beside the point.

Rather, this indirect way of tacitly blaming civilians for failure in a war effort formed the basis in the 1970s and 1980s for a general shift of power towards senior military officers in national security decision-making in what came eventually to be known as the "Powell Doctrine" after Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Colin Powell. Whether this process will repeat itself over the forthcoming years, of course, remains to be seen, but the increase in legitimacy extended to military officers may already be seen in the breathless anticipation vested in General Petraeus' upcoming report on Iraq.

(story from Memeorandum)