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Don't miss Andrew Bacevich in today's Boston Globe: "Responsibility for the disaster of Iraq lies not only with the President of the United States, but also with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president needs expert and candid military counsel. Not yes-men in uniform":
Worth reading. It's quite evident that there are quite thoughtful people close to the JCS structure who worry that there are institutional reasons that they are not able to ever advise that it's time to call it a day, even some of the ones who are most familiar with the dynamic from earlier eras. Bacevich's piece today really speaks for some of them, who can't or won't say publicly what he can without destroying their careers. Which is precisely the problem, Bacevich says, with the institution of the Joint Chiefs.... Long before Pace arrived on the scene the JCS had established a well-deserved reputation as one of the most ineffective institutions in Washington. ...
The creation of a permanent JCS two years after the war was intended to replicate that success: drawing on the accumulated wisdom of their profession, the new Joint Chiefs would help the president and Congress maintain adequate but economical defenses, avoid unnecessary wars, and wage effectively those wars that proved unavoidable.
Measured by these criteria, over the course of six decades the Joint Chiefs of Staff have performed miserably. Attempts to fix the institution only introduced new varieties of dysfunction, culminating in the rise of General Colin Powell, the most talented -- and most problematic -- officer ever to preside over the JCS. After Powell, things would only get worse.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff inhabit the seam at which war, statecraft, and domestic politics intersect -- an environment saturated with political considerations. Charged with providing professional advice to civilian policymakers, they also represent the institutional interests of the armed services. In pursuit of those interests, the natural tendency of the chiefs is to encroach on territory ostensibly reserved for civilians. Likewise, the tendency of strong-willed civilians -- for example, defense secretaries in the mold of Robert McNamara or Donald Rumsfeld -- is to encroach on the territory claimed by the generals.
As a consequence, instead of military professionals offering disinterested advice to help policymakers render sound decisions, the history of this civilian-military relationship is one of conniving, double-dealing, and mutual manipulation. As generals increasingly played politics, they forfeited their identity as nonpartisan servants of the state. ...
In his now-classic 1997 book, "Dereliction of Duty," Colonel H. R. McMaster, an active-duty army officer who has served in Iraq with considerable distinction, described how a civil-military relationship based on mutual dishonesty and suspicion reached its pre-Iraq low-point during the US intervention in Vietnam. In his blistering indictment, McMaster charged the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the early 1960s -- the "five silent men," he called them -- with complicity in the lies and deceptions that produced the debacle of that war. ...