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Jewish World Review July 18, 2008 / 15 Tamuz 5768 Be suspicious of retired generals bearing bull horns By Michael Arnold Glueck
This week the topic is "Retired Generals." An old Army friend, a retired major general and three-war veteran, once told us: The minute you pin on stars, two things happen. First, your family will never again lack for provender. And second, you'll never again hear the truth." The friend was certainly half-right. Retired flag officers get splendid jobs. Whether or not they hear the truth may be debated. Whether or not they can tell the truth is the subject of this column. The event (such as it was) has already gone down in history as the Revolt of the Generals: a dozen or so retired flag officers speaking and writing publicly against President Bush's decision to invade Iraq and the subsequent conduct of the war. Even as the Revolt petered out, the New York Times revealed that numerous other retired officers had been coached and leaked sensitive Pentagon information to buttress their pro-war and pro-administration appearances on various TV news outlets as "unbiased experts." Today, both presidential candidates enroll dozens of retired senior officers as paid and unpaid advisers. Most recently, two Obama supporters have engaged in attacks against Senator McCain. Tony McPeak, a former Air Force Chief of Staff and a congenitally skinny fellow, has commented on Senator McCain's waistline. Former NATO commander Wesley Clark, who spent two years at Oxford between West Point and Vietnam, has wondered whether Senator McCain's POW time really matters as positive preparation for the challenges of the White House. One thing may be safely concluded from all this. Retired flag officers can be as mean, petty, nasty and narrow-minded as anybody else. But should that preclude their participation in political discourse, as both media and as partisan advisers? The answer should be a resounding, No - let 'em yammer. But only if we understand what they're offering the American people - and what they should be offering, but currently are not. First, let's dispose of the obvious. Retired senior officers can be wrong. They can also be manipulated and bought. They also regard themselves as members of a club that does not always take kindly to public criticism of its members. And nobody needs them to point out that Yes, this is a tank, this is a plane, these are arrows on maps, etc. At issue here is the nature of the military profession as a profession and that profession's relationship to the society that sanctions it. In the classic sense, a profession is a group legally empowered to do things that others should not or may not. A profession selects and trains its own members, sets its own standards, polices itself. It's primary obligation: to put society ahead of itself. Physicians, for example, should "do no harm" and must avoid actions that benefit themselves financially to the detriment of patients. Lawyers exercise fiduciary responsibilities toward their clients and must always remember that they're officers of the court. Clergy answer to higher authorities. The military, in exchange for its (eroding) monopoly on violence, must defend the nation even unto death. It must remain totally apolitical; its ultimate loyalty must be to the Constitution. But how to discharge these responsibilities today? For active-duty officers, the answer is simple. Once the civilian leadership decides, you either shut up and carry on, or you resign. The situation with retired officers is more complex, since retirement pay is technically a retainer and retired officers may be ordered back to active duty until age 65, perhaps even beyond in certain cases. Still, these retired officers constitute a unique and invaluable pool of experience and expertise that could legitimately be used to educate this nation - provided we recognize that every profession has both formal and informal responsibilities. And among the greatest of these is the obligation to speak out when the fundamental relationship between profession and society has been grievously damaged. Today, the military-society relationship has been damaged in three separate ways. And it must be addressed. First, our military is imploding. Waste, fraud and abuse are less of a problem than the military's addiction to preposterously expensive weapons. Retired officers need to educate the American people on why we can't maintain a reasonable Navy; why our planes are falling out of the sky; and why our Army's half the size it ought to be - and why no conceivable budget increases can fix this. Second, retired officers must explain to the people that the national security establishment, an early Cold War creation, no longer avails. A new, fundamental debate is needed, with everything on the table, including the nature of the Defense Department itself. Finally, retired officers must work to craft a new relationship between the military and the people. Between the present unsustainable volunteer system and a direct, unlimited federal draft, there are many alternatives. The citizenry must be brought back into the common defense. Bottom line: The next time you run across some retired officer on the op-ed page or the tube or the Net, it's legitimate to wonder, is this person addressing issues that need to be addressed? Or is it just more of the same, whatever that "same" might be? Editor's Note: Philip Gold Ph.D., whose next book is Closing Ranks: The Citizen's Guide to Victory after Iraq (Praeger, 2009), contributed to this commentary. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Michael Arnold Glueck, M.D., writes on medical, legal and allied social issues in numerous newspapers, magazines and journals locally, nationally and internationally. He is widely quoted in the media. Comment by clicking here. © 2007, |
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