Happy Birthday?

A Soldier’s Perspective on Where We Are Now

June 14 Has Come and Gone

Well, a day I celebrate yearly has come and gone this year with not much of a celebration. Regular readers will have guessed by now that I am referring to the US Army’s birthday, which falls on June 14. This year is especially notable on the calendar, as it was the Army’s 250^th birthday – the first American armed forces and older than the country itself by a year.

This year, of course, was different in that President Trump finally was able to force on the military his own birthday parade. Fortunately, it seemed to have gone with minimal damage to DC and not much of a crowd (unlike No King Day gatherings everywhere).

But that parade was only the bad capstone for recent days. Over the last few days, we witnessed:

• A crude, bizarre political speech at West Point graduation.
• Deployment of National Guard soldiers and Active Duty Marines in the streets of a US city, when no one in state or local authority wanted the troops there. And to top it off, they planned and set up zero support for those troops (as in places to sleep, supplies, etc.) they deployed.
• An even more shameful political speech, featuring soldiers as a backup chorus, at Fort Bragg.
• A wink to the KKK in renaming all those posts that had been named for Confederate Generals, back with the same names but nominally for regular soldiers naming, not Confederates (wink -wink White Supremists – we hear you).

About That Term Soldier

I said at the opening of this posting that I am looking at events like these from a soldier’s perspective. And so I am – that was my life pretty much 24/7 for three decades. So yes, the roots run deep, and the connection is still very much alive.

But I also must acknowledge that I have been out of the active force for quite a while. At this point in time, I cannot claim to truly know what the feeling is like in our formations and among military leaders today. I do not know what pressures are being applied where, by whom. I can only relate current events to the Army I knew and think about what that means.

 What Is A Leader’s Responsibility?

Military leadership is not often easy, but the basic roadmap is not all that complex. Put in a simple form, officers are expected to accomplish assigned missions, take care of their troops, steward their resources, and train units to the highest standards possible, including mentoring of future leaders.

By now, pretty well everyone knows that military leaders swear an oath to the constitution – not to the country nor to the president, but to the core guidelines of our democracy. Every officer I ever knew took that oath dead seriously.

We have, most all military officers over time, have been in countries wherein the military is part of the governing force. That relationship seldom ends well, for citizens, for the armed forces, or for their country. Most of us, I daresay, never thought the risk of politicization at the level we see creeping up on us now would come to America.

But the idea of dealing with an illegal order is well ingrained in the military leadership core. Soldiers are not lawyers, and it may be difficult for someone to confidently declare an order illegal and refuse to obey it. It has certainly happened in our history. In fact, some have been punished in the past for not standing up to an illegal order.

Allow me to share with you, one old soldier’s perspective on how such situations may play out.

Consequences Count

Consequences do indeed count – for the individual leader, for the institution, for the country.

I have had friends with no military background ask how could one take orders, like march in a DC parade or occupy Los Angles? Why would one accept such orders, knowing they are bad?

In fact, in looking at human history, one does not want its organized armed forces, those entrusted with the power of unimaginable violence, to be deciding which orders they will accept or refuse. That is a short path to the “man on the white horse, coming to save the nation.” We have all seen that happened dozens of times overseas, leading to military dictatorships.

And so miliary leaders deal with a series of orders: Those they gladly carry out, those that are neutral to them but need to be done, those that are unpleasant, perhaps even unwise, but legal (a $50 million parade in Washington comes to mind), and any that seem, as best the leader can determine, unconstitutional and cannot be carried out legally.

Individual Consequences

If a military service member feels that an order is unlawful, the choice is to carry it out anyway, trying to rationalize and deal with the realization of making that choice for the rest of their career, or to refuse on constitutional grounds.

In refusing, an officer would expect to be in a minority at least initially, to be relieved of duties, and to face court marshal. The system generally works wherein almost all orders are correctly carried out. In large part, that high level of functioning, even in times of great stress or danger, happens on the basis of mutual trust. Soldiers trust their leaders, military and civilian, to do the right thing and to issue the right orders as best as possible. When someone finds it necessary to refuse on order, the system takes a hit.

Institutional Consequences

An institution that chooses to look the other way and obey illegal orders corrodes its value and the trust of its citizens. All that works to the advantage of those in power who want people to distrust all institutions and trust only the Dear Leader. There is an approach process that can lead to this rather subtly, that of willfully cooperating with efforts to politicize the armed forces in what seems like small steps.

The most glaring recent example of this soiling the institution with politics is the recent Trump trip to Fort Bragg, NC. I did multiple tours at Fort Bragg and know the community well. What happened on this trip was a wholesale failure of leadership, and it pained me to see it unfurl.

Military organizations reportedly screened soldiers to give Trump a visual background of supportive soldiers for his speech, encouraged to boo and cheer Trump’s political speech. The leaders had to know that is how it would go; they shamed the institution of the Army in allowing this to happen. At least West Point did not do that on their visit.

And to top it off, space was allocated to merchants selling Trump trinkets on post at Bragg during his visit – also completely wrong. Fort Bragg, the XVII Airborne Corps, and the 82^nd Airborne Division leadership failed their soldiers and their country on this one. Probably not illegal, but clearly wrong. That senior leaders among some of our best forces failed to meet this moment is heart breaking. We deserve better.

Institutions that stand up for their values and national security in the fullest sense can expect to have internal divisions, to take unfair political hits, and to see leaders fired from those who want obedience first and foremost. It is doomed to be a long, heavy fight, with the individual declaring resistance from within likely to take some serious blows. But people know that when they declare they cannot obey an order.

National Consequences

 When the armed forces are misused in these ways, they become yet another institution lacking in public trust, further eroding democratic fundamentals. The military has long rated very highly in public respect and trust, but the number of people with any real exposure to or time with the military is a small percentage of the US population. That bond of trust is not invulnerable. Misusing military forces in domestic matters is a short route to bad endings for everyone.

 What Is Next?

Who knows? But we are surely in a period of high drama. Trump and his joke of a Defense Secretary clearly would like to use the military domestically, politically. How much push back they get from Congress (remember them?), communities, and the armed forces will tell the tale.

If the Trump team keeps pushing to use the armed forces in these ways, there will be national division and split court decisions. Leaders who worry about receiving illegal orders are unlikely to find easy circumstances upon which they make a stand. In some ways, this is like combat: one does not know how they will do, how they will react until they are actually in their first battle.

So too, I expect, will it be with dealing with orders from this administration.

Let’s hope the core holds.

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