In the years and months since the US withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, public respect for our armed forces has fallen to a level not seen since the end of the US war in Vietnam.
This new wave of skepticism comes not only from the left, which has long been suspicious of the military, but also from the right. A recent Gallup poll found that public confidence in the military was still relatively high at 60 percent — far more than any other major public institution — but had declined sharply, especially among Republicans.
Conservatives are expressing concern about more than just the collapse of US nation-building efforts in the Middle East. Earlier this summer, Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama denounced Pentagon leaders as being too “awake.” He is now blocking the promotion of hundreds of senior officers, leaving the Marine Corps without a commander for the first time in 164 years, the Army without a chief and, as of this month, preventing Admiral Lisa Franchetti from assuming the position of commander. top position in the Navy. She would be the first woman in the Navy’s two-and-a-half-century existence to hold this post.
Tuberville and his ilk apparently believe that access to abortion and drag shows on military bases have been a corrupting force on our military, so it might be helpful to look back at some actual moments of moral and strategic failure in the ranks of the US armed forces. powers to get a sense of perspective. Generals and Admirals, Criminals and Thugs: Dishonorable Leadership in the United States Military (University of Notre Dame, 399 pp., $38) is more subtle than the title suggests. It’s actually a thoughtful study of the ways power corrupts.
The author, Jeffery J. Matthews, a historian at the University of Puget Sound, describes the recent leadership of the US Navy as particularly bad. According to Matthews, the modern Navy has had three major scandals involving admirals. He reminds us that in the 1980s, Vice Admiral John Poindexter was at the center of the Reagan administration’s underhanded plan to facilitate the illegal sale of high-tech weapons to Iran in exchange for hostages held in Lebanon, and to illegally transfer the profits. use it to fund a war. anti-communist uprising in Nicaragua.
The next two episodes of the Navy were even worse, Matthews suggests, because they involved entire subcultures within the service and showed that when cleaning houses, the Navy used investigators not to investigate the actions of its top people, but to investigate them. protect against outside supervision. In 1991, there were widespread complaints of sexual abuse at the “Tailhook” convention of Navy aviators in Las Vegas. Naval investigators let the leadership go free. Unsurprisingly, the studies showed thatpurposeful inadequate,” Matthews writes, after public pressure forced the Pentagon to look again.
As it turns out, the Navy chose not to question any of the more than 30 Marine Corps admirals and generals who attended the alcohol-soaked meeting. In addition, the Pentagon found that the vice admiral in charge of the Naval Investigative Service had not seriously pursued the investigation because he did not believe women should be in the military.
Amazingly, the Navy comes off even worse in Matthews’ account of the Fat Leonard scandal. Between 2006 and 2013, dozens of senior naval officers accepted a bribe from a Malaysian defense contractor in exchange for ignoring his inflated bills. Matthews portrays the Navy’s Pacific Fleet as a RICO-like criminal enterprise.
Leonard Glenn Francis, the contractor after whom the affair is named, even got through to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, a connection that helped him quash investigations into his activities. One party he hosted in Manila for US Pacific Fleet officers consisted of a “rotating carousel of prostitutes.”
Ultimately, the bribery scheme cost American taxpayers at least $35 million. Trials are pending, but to date more than 30 naval officers and contractors have been convicted or found guilty, including an admiral sentenced to 18 months in prison for committing federal crimes while on active duty, another first for the United States. navy is.
One of the lessons Matthews draws is that the U.S. military tends not to scrutinize senior officers as vigorously as younger officers. Another is that Congress must get involved to correct this tendency. The Navy did not take Tailhook seriously until the Senate Armed Forces Committee put all of its officer promotions on hold.
Of all the top leaders in American history, probably none have gotten away with breaking rules and disobeying orders like Douglas MacArthur. It was agreed among historians that he was indeed disobedient, but that in order to survive as a general long enough to defy three presidents—Hoover, FDR, and Truman—he had to be quite effective as a commander.
That is not the case, argues James Ellman MACARTHUR RECONSIDERED: General Douglas MacArthur as War Commander (Stackpole, 277 pp., $29.95). Reviewing MacArthur’s accomplishments in World War II and the Korean War, he comes to the conclusion that the general was a mediocre commander who had no interest in details, overwhelmed his staff with incompetent boot lickers, and often lied in his attempts to explain his actions. justify.
And, of course, he was quite disobedient, with an alarming tendency to disobey orders and contradict established policies. In a charge I hadn’t seen before, Ellman alleges that while Truman sought relief from the Korean War in early 1951, MacArthur undertook to tighten relations with China, extending the war by two years, a period in which more than 13,000 American soldiers died. Truman fired MacArthur shortly afterwards.
In contrast, Lieutenant General William Simpson, a more accomplished World War II army general, is hardly known today. So it’s good to see veteran armored officer William Stuart Nance COMMANDING PROFESSIONALISM: Simpson, Moore, and the Ninth US Army (University Press of Kentucky, 196 pp., paperback, $30) shed an appreciative light on his leadership style, which was best expressed during the Ardennes Offensive in the winter of 1944-45.
The gangly Texan commanded a force of 341,000 men and got along with everyone, including Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, a man who may have been the British version of MacArthur and who, writes Nance, “might have given Patton an aneurysm.” ‘ Simpson, calm and quiet, kept his cool.
To be honest, the resulting take on Simpson’s command-style approach is a bit boring and repetitive. But that could also be the point: in war, slow and steady tends to be fast and flashy. In any case, they are both better than being incompetent, amoral and corrupt.