Mission First, Troops Always
Ray Kimball is one of the founders of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, and he’s also an insightful observer of the political scene. Conspicuously nonpartisan, befitting a serving member of the armed forces, Kimball has also been pretty critical of many aspects of U.S. national security strategy. He writes on occasion for the Huffington Post, and I’ve just come across his latest post in which he argues, in an Eisenhowerian vein, that the military is in danger of becoming a self-licking ice cream cone.
What both candidates have gotten wrong here is the old adage of “Mission First, Troops Always.” This is a hard and necessary lesson learned and internalized by military leaders, from the most junior NCO to the most senior general and admiral. Simply put, it’s the idea that no matter how much you want to take care of those under your command, your unit’s assigned mission has to come before their personal well-being. It’s one of the toughest lessons of military leadership to internalize, but it’s also essential to a professional force that contains a core identity of Servant of the Nation. We’ve already lived through a previous period where this mantra got reversed – during our missions in the Balkans, when deployed forces were told repeatedly that force protection was to be the number-one priority of the force. The illogic in this is not hard to spot – if the top priority here is taking care of our soldiers, then the easiest way to do that is to not deploy them into harm’s way. In the words of an old saw, “A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what a ship is for.”
Want a better way? Rather than sending out feel-good platitudes about “honoring those who serve”, let’s create a strategy that’s worthy of their sacrifice. Rather than build an elaborate construct where we shower our troops with praise and benefits even as we ask them to take on more ill-defined missions, let’s give them, as I put it during the primary season, a “coherent, consistent vision of American power.”
Kimball is referring to a national security strategy that puts our resources in line with our commitments, and, more importantly, a wide-ranging public conversation that seriously addresses the strategic and moral basis for our commitments — and that weighs whether or not these (extraordinary) commitments are justified. As Kimball put it in his earlier post,
I want to hear if that candidate believes that it is necessary for our prosperity and survival that we continue to provide robust support to fledgling representative governments abroad, or if they believe we are better off focusing that time and energy within our own borders.
I actually think John McCain has done a reasonably good job at the first and that Barack Obama and other Democrats have at various points tried to do the second. But it’s true that polemical arguments about the troops often take the place of these deeper questions. This is no surprise — they connect with voters at a gut level. But we should have some sense of when, and some wariness when, candidates are trying to bypass our brains to connect directly with our guts.
My own view is that it is necessary for our prosperity — though not our survival, perhaps — that we support representative governments and encourage their spread. To some extent, this can happen through the instrument Paul Collier identified.
The European Union has a long tradition of setting minimum standards of political decency for its members, who must protect their minorities and defend basic rights. A collective E.U. withdrawal of recognition from the Mugabe or Shwe regimes would be an obvious and modest extension of the values that underpin the European project. Making any such suspension of recognition temporary — say, for three months — would present potential coup plotters within an army with a brief window of legitimacy. They would know that it was now or never, which could spur them to act.
Then there is the Poggean notion that we should aggressively question the right of repressive governments to trade and borrow in their country’s name. I realize that this introduces a lot of dangerous complications. As a theoretical matter, though, it holds some attraction. The trouble is that we are very far from a consensus on this matters. It will take a political transition in China and about thirty-forty years.
I really like the idea of being more creative about supporting representative governments. One possibility I’ve been considering lately is if the NSA, instead of working to be the best eavesdroppers in the world, did a 180 and started working to make all eavesdropping and censorship impossible across the globe. Cryptography that’s unbreakable until the day quantum computers arrive is already available—what remains to be done is to encourage its widespread use, to make it the “default” for the web, email, and voice. Develop “Remote Attestation” technology that could guarantee a user’s privacy even when their data is stored and processed in a far away database. Implement transparent, cryptographically guaranteed voting systems. Make it clear to every country that they can either have mass communications or they can have censorship and surveillance, but not both. In any country that chooses the latter, air drop millions of cellphones and PDAs that encrypt all their communications. These would not only be useful tools in their own right, they would allow the oppressed to speak with the outside world and each other.
My utopian dream is that we could build software that enforces something like the Three Laws of Robotics, apply them to all coercive institutions, and then use Remote Attestation to allow anyone to algorithmically verify that their government will always act justly. It would be a world of transparent governments and private citizens.
Another point I wonder about is whether it might make more sense to invest more in the “middle 4 billion” in the short term. The people with modest nutrition, marginal education, not so great sanitation or water, and corrupt rather than murderous governments. If during “round one” we work on enhancing their productivity and standard of living, we would have far more resources available and far tighter cooperation during “round two” when we work on the absolute poorest.
— Consumatopia · Jul 10, 10:22 PM · #
It seems more and more likely to me that, within the next 5 years, the Iraqi people will ask us to leave and in doing so do this country a huge favor. Every justification ad democracy or ad stability will disappear in a puff of smoke. And, of course, this is precisely what the Iraqi government should be doing. As supporters of the surge have said for a year, things are getting more stable— and so it’s time for us to go.
What is going to be very interesting is all the people who will reject the Iraqi timetable. I think you’ll be surprised how many people who have run the war and occupation, after 5 years of talk about democracy and self-determination, suddenly find it not such a hot idea….
— Freddie · Jul 10, 10:59 PM · #
Without issuing an opinion one way or another, this report is definitely something to think about.
— JA · Jul 10, 11:29 PM · #
How has McCain been doing a good job on making the argument that it is in our interest to support fledgling democracies? All that support democracy around the world talk we’ve been hearing the past 5 years—that’s just conservative political rhetoric. 10 years ago and beyond conservatives were all about vital national interests and the impossibility of nation building and how we shouldn’t be the world’s policeman, but then circumstances changed. So if McCain is repeating this kind of rhetoric, then he’s hardly making a convincing argument, because it’s just campaing tactics in the endless campaign of right vrs. left. So please point me McCain’s good arguments. I’m willing to be convinced.
I totally agree with what Ray Kimbal said, but I’m way mystified by the McCain props. He seems even more incompetent than GW Bush. Bush at least hired people (or they hired him) who ran a credible campaign ( and taught him what to say). I watch McCain and he’s like an actor without enough lines. He’s totally winging it half the time. I think the problem is he’s to old to retain the kind of training the profoundly uninformed presidential candidate requires to fool the public.
— cw · Jul 11, 03:54 AM · #
Actually he was in favor of intervention in Kosovo and Bosnia; Haiti not so much; so much for that red herring. I don’t see the ‘selfevident wisdom’
supposedly displayed by Kimball;his posting on the Huffington Post, makes me question his judgement. he’s basically arguing the force protection argument, ad absurdum. in another vein. One recalls that Roosevelt actually campaigned on a platform of ‘no Americans dying in foreign lands’ in 1940. Wilson was nearly as adamant in 1916. Stimson, FDR’s Secretary of War, and Hoover’s Secretary of State believed in that policy in the interwar period; we learned the folly of that statement, much too late.
— narciso · Jul 13, 01:07 AM · #
Reihan: In the future, please hyperlink to the post you’re discussing, if you’re able. It’s the world-wide web, after all.
— Olivia Xifry · Jul 13, 08:33 AM · #