On politicians and generals | TheArticle

It all started so well. Presidential candidate Donald Trump seemed to hold traditional Republican views on defence and a promise to restore military spending formed a central part of his

platform. President Trump then followed up by reinforcing Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, accompanied by a loosening up of rules of engagement, and appointed a posse of generals to fill some of

the big appointments in his cabinet. But as a recent rash of Washington-insider books by Peter Bergen and others illustrates, the course of civil-military relations has not run smoothly

within the Trump Administration.

The reasons for this are not hard to find. The American military reveres education and the recent generation of general officers are avowed bibliophiles, some with a slightly professorial

air. For a president whose reading seems rarely to extend beyond the McDonald’s menu and who is temperamentally equipped for deal making rather than the profound demands of complex affairs,

this was never going to be a fit.

No matter how hard the assiduous Jim Mattis or the rather more didactic H R McMaster tried, the President felt more patronised than informed by their briefings. But the tensions went beyond

matters of presentation and to the moral core of public service. For the generals, loyalty cut both ways and was the first duty of command; for the President, it was a one-way street and

came with the office. It couldn’t end well and the recent exchange of personal vitriol draws a line under an unedifying passage in US public life.

It hasn’t always been like this. The fact that no less than twelve US generals have graduated to the presidency, starting with George Washington, testifies to a cultural mobility between

military and political life. The branch of political science that has developed into the academic discipline of civil-military relations also found early expression in America, with Samuel

Huntington (he of The Clash of Civilizations) publishing the seminal The Soldier and the State in 1957.

And, if ever the dream general to serve a democratically elected political leader in war was made incarnate, it would surely be George Marshall. Marshall served as Chief of Staff of the Army

to both Roosevelt and Truman and his self-effacement, prodigious organisational skills, silky manner with Congress and ability to get along with allies made him the ideal support for the

politicians he served. He also possessed a no more than average strategic imagination, which encouraged both presidents to believe they were the authors of military success.

Other nations with less established traditions of political transparency have also enjoyed periods of successful civil-military relations, as the Prusso-German triumvirate of Moltke,

Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm the First illustrate. That success did not survive Hitler, and, while some generals pushed back against his arbitrary decisions — Guderian, Rommel and Manstein

prominent amongst them — they all paid a price. The abominations carried out by the German Army and SS offers a salutary example of what happens when the civil-military relationship loses

internal balance and one side becomes compliant to the demands of the other.

Even autocrats need military advice they can rely on, as Joseph Stalin found out when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. But it was a measure of both Stalin’s utter ruthlessness

and the different civil-military equation that obtains under dictatorship that he was able to consign General Georgy Zhukov — probably the single most successful military officer of the

Second World War — to internal exile in 1946.

Yet it is the British example in the Second World War that is perhaps most instructive. Winston Churchill and his Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, enjoyed a

relationship based on profound mutual respect and, occasionally at least, cordial dislike. Churchill characterised Brooke as a “stiff-necked Ulsterman”, which can loosely be translated as a

refusal to be bullied or intimidated by the Prime Minister’s histrionics.

In turn, Brooke recognised that Churchill possessed sublime skills of political leadership without which the war could not be won, but he also had a tendency to strategic eccentricity by

which it could easily be lost. The battle of wills between the mercurial politician and the acerbic general must have been exhausting, but the whole was exponentially greater than the sum of

the parts. It can reasonably be claimed that this was the most powerful civil-military combination of the war and gave Britain a prominence in final victory that would not have been

available in any other circumstances.

All of which provides the prelude to a brief meditation on a phrase which has entered the language and has become the proudest boast an aspirant politician, or journalist can make: to speak

truth to power. In this telling, the fearless seeker after truth confronts a power that might be unpredictable, spiteful and may have a habit of shooting the messenger, all in pursuit of a

greater public good. This was exactly the dilemma facing Brooke as, for example, he tried to deflect Churchill from his Balkan fantasies in 1944; speaking truth to power is the first duty

the general owes to the politician, the nation and his own conscience. Why is it then, that the phrase seems so fatuous to the generation of British general officers involved in the Wars of

9/11?

In our recent wars, power has appeared less as an implacable edifice and worn a more fallible human face — often hesitant and occasionally tremulous — as it confronted challenges that

nothing in its experience had prepared it for. Speaking truth to power has often felt less like a process to be recorded in an Official History and more like a counselling session for

politicians in search of comfort and reassurance. There are a number of reasons for this and the first commends the recent generation of British politicians: quite simply our society has

failed to throw up a political ego of Trumpian proportions, and we should be grateful for that.

Other factors are more subtle and must be seen in their aggregate rather than their individual effect. Churchill charged at the battle of Omdurman, was a front-line correspondent during the

Boer War and commanded a battalion in the trenches in 1916; he was involved in two wars of national survival where only definitive outcomes — victory or defeat — were possible. Very few

recent politicians have heard a shot fired in anger. They have fought wars of choice rather than necessity and been involved in ambiguous, insidious forms of combat that have few rules and

no definable end.

Many have entered politics from the law, forms of public service or as special advisors and never considered matters of life and death beyond a rhetorical level. They had also been

habituated to success, and Sierra Leone, East Timor and even The Balkans were no preparation for Basra in 2006. And, of course, the generals might have been better at sensing these changes

and revising the terms of civil-military engagement accordingly.

Put all that together and it is hardly surprising that a generation of political leaders has felt — and looked — out of its depth when dealing with conflict that has none of the moral and

material clarity of the world wars of the 20th Century. War is unchanging but warfare adapts constantly and civil-military relations need to do the same. While that happens, just remember

that anyone publicly claiming to be speaking truth to power is more likely to be burnishing their own moral credentials than addressing the fundamentals of strategy in a complicated world.

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