An army's morale on the downswing

An army's morale on the downswing
William Pfaff
International Herald Tribune
PARIS When George W. Bush was first elected president, civil-military relations in the United States were worse than they had ever been before. They are no better today, for more serious reasons.
The decline had begun with the Vietnam War. The less perspicacious part of the officer corps chose to blame civilian interference for the loss in that war.
What the military would have done in Vietnam without civilian interference remains unclear; they never offered the government a coherent alternative plan to the one provided by Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. This was undoubtedly because there wasn't one - the war was unwinnable, short of the Dresden option (an option retested in November at Falluja in Iraq).
With the Vietnam defeat, the years of the "hollow army" began, with an angry and alienated military leadership, unsympathetic politicians and an amnesiac public.
A non-conscript professional army was built up. The result of professionalization was to create an officer corps politically on the right. This concerned academic observers and civilians sympathetic to the military, as well as thoughtful officers themselves, aware of the importance of defending the American tradition of an apolitical military.
The professional military's alienation from its civilian leadership increased with the Clinton administration's arrival - a draft-dodger president, with a feminist first lady and a liberal agenda. As one military historian has written, first there was the disastrous don't-ask, don't-tell clash over homosexuals in the service (where, as anyone who has been in the military knows, there has always been an underground homosexual culture, for self-evident reasons - where else can you meet so many guys?).
Then came Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo - and the Tailhook uproar - plus stalemate over national security policy. Colin Powell, as chairman of the joint chiefs, actually presented the civilian government with specific terms on which the military would agree to go to war. (These terms - clear objective, overwhelming force, exit strategy - were completely ignored, bizarrely enough, in going to war in Iraq, with the fearful consequences we now see).
The new President Bush, in 2001, was another draft-dodger, in fact if not form, but he walked and talked in a way the military liked. However, his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was not such a likable fellow, and he set out to reform the Pentagon and re-establish civilian authority.
He has in considerable measure imposed himself on the uniformed military, but in a way they now hate.....