COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Even as America’s wars continue to go poorly by any reasonable measure, no prominent high-ranking officer has yet stepped forward either to take responsibility or in protest.

Seventy years of military mediocrity

The shared failings of america’s military academies and senior officers

21 AUGUST, by William J. Astore
Thomas Jefferson Hall, West Point’s library and learning center, prominently features two quotations for cadets to mull over. In the first, Jefferson writesGeorge Washington in 1788: “The power of making war often prevents it, and in our case would give efficacy to our desire of peace.” In the second, Jefferson writes Thomas Leiper in 1815: “I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power, the greater it will be.”
Two centuries ago, Jefferson’s points were plain and clear, and they remain so today: while this country desired peace, it had to be prepared to wage war; and yet the more it avoided resorting to raw military power, the more it would prosper.
Have America’s military officers and politicians learned these lessons? Obviously not. In the twenty-first century, the U.S. unquestionably ranks number one on this planet in its preparations for waging war — we got that message loud and clear — but we’re also number one in using that power aggressively around the globe, weakening our nation in the process, just as Jefferson warned.
Of course, the world today is a more complex and crowded place than in Jefferson’s time and this country, long a regional, even an isolationist power, is now an imperial and global superpower that quite literally garrisons the planet. That said, Jefferson’s lessons should still be salutary ones, especially when you consider that the U.S. military has not had a convincing victory in a major “hot” war since 1945.
There are undoubtedly many reasons for this, but I want to focus on two: what cadets at America’s military academies really learn and the self-serving behavior of America’s most senior military officers, many of whom are academy graduates. Familiar as they may be with those words of Jefferson, they have consistently ignored or misapplied them, facilitating our current state of endless war and national decline.

America’s military academies: high ideals, cynical graduates

America’s military academies are supposed to educate and inspire leaders of strong character and impeccable integrity. They’re supposed to be showcases for America’s youth, shining symbols of national service. Ultimately, they’re supposed to forge strong military leaders who will win America’s wars (assuming those wars can’t be avoided, as Jefferson might have added). So how’s their main mission going?
I taught at the Air Force Academy for six years, and I’ve talked to former cadets as well as fellow officers who taught at the Army’s West Point and the Navy’s Annapolis. Here are a few reflections on the flaws of these institutions:
1. In reality, the unstated primary mission of the three military academies is to turn raw cadets into career officers dedicated and devoted to their particular branch of service. On the other hand, service to the American people is, at best, an abstract concept. More afterthought than thought, it is certainly mentioned but hardly a value consistently instilled.
Careerism and parochialism are hardly unique to military academies. Still, as one former cadet wrote me, it’s surprising to encounter them so openly in institutions dedicated to “service before self.” More than a few of his peers, he added, were motivated primarily by a desire for “a stable, well-paying career.” While a perfectly respectable personal goal, to be sure, it’s a less than desirable one at academies theoretically dedicated to selfless, even sacrificial service.
2. The academic curriculum is structured to prepare cadets for the technical demands of their first jobs, meaning that it’s heavily weighted toward STEM(science/technology/engineering/math). Despite the presence of a Cadet Honor Code, the humanities and questions of ethics play too small a role in the intellectual and moral development of the students.
3. Cadets quickly learn that excelling within the system is the surest path to coveted opportunities — increasingly scarce pilot slots, Special Ops schools, or the like — after graduation. Educationally speaking, they are driven by the idea of advancement within the conformist norms defined by their particular academy and branch of service. A system that rewards energetic displays of conformity also tends to generate mediocrity as well as cynicism. As one former cadet put it to me, “There is something deeper and more perverse here as well: The ‘golden boys’ [in the eyes of Academy officialdom] got the coveted slots but were generally hated by their cynical peers. Cynicism seems to define the Academy experience.”
A former colleague of mine had this comment: “The [military] academies don’t make great people and they don’t always make good people better. I have seen them turn off a few really good people, however.”
4. Because the academies are considered prestige institutions as well as symbols of rectitude and their reputations are always at stake, few risks are taken. Misconduct, when it occurs, is frequently hushed up “for the good of the Academy.” Scandals involving cheatingsexual assaults, and religious discrimination have often been made worse by not being dealt with openly and honestly. Cadets know this, which is another reason many emerge from their education as cynics when it comes to the high ideals the academies are supposed to instill.
5. As schools, they are remarkably insular, insider outfits often run by academy graduates whose goals tend to be narrow and sometimes even bizarrely parochial. For example, I knew of one superintendent (a three-star general) at the Air Force Academy whose number one goal was a winning football program. In that sense, he certainly reflected American society: think of the civilian college presidents who desire just that for their institutions. But military academies are supposed to be about creating leaders, not winning football trophies — and the two bear remarkably little relationship to each other no matter how many times the Duke of Wellington is (mis)quoted about the Battle of Waterloo being won on the playing fields of Eton.
6. Finally, there’s a strong emphasis at all the academies on simply keeping cadets busy. To the point where — especially in their first year — they’re often sleep-deprived and staggering into class. Theoretically, this is meant to be a test both of their commitment to military life and their ability to handle pressure. Whether they learn anything meaningful while dazed or sleeping in class is not discussed. Whether this is a smart way to develop creative and strong-minded leaders is also not up for consideration.
As one former cadet put it: busywork and demanding rituals that sometime cross the line and become hazing are embraced in military education as a “rite of passage.” The idea “that we [cadets] suffered through something and prevailed is an immensely powerful psychological ‘badge’ which leads to pride (or arrogance) and confidence (or hubris).”
Add up the indoctrination and the training, the busywork in classrooms and the desire to excel in big-time collegiate sports, and what you tend to graduate is a certain number of hyper-motivated true believers and a mass of go-along cynics — young men and women who have learned to subsume their doubts and misgivings, even as they trim their sails in the direction of the prevailing winds.
While the cadets are encouraged to over-identify with their particular academy and service branch, they’re also encouraged to self-identify as “warriors,” as, that is, an elite apart from and superior to the civilians they’re supposed to serve. That this country was founded on civilian control of the military may be given lip service, but in the age of the ascendant national security state, the deeper sentiments embedded in an academy education are ever more distant from a populace that plays next to no part in America’s wars.
That the classic civilian-military nexus, which was supposed to serve and promote democracy, has turned out to have a few glitches in our time should surprise no one. After all, President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about what was coming back in 1961. As Ike noticed, the way it was working — the way it still works today — is that senior officers in the military too often become tools of the armaments industry (his “military-industrial complex”) even as they identify far too closely with the parochial interests of their particular service branch. Add to this the distinctly twenty-first-century emphasis on being warriors, not citizen-soldiers, and you have the definition of a system of self-perpetuating and self-serving militarism rather than military service.
To the extent that the military academies not only fail to curb this behavior but essentially encourage it, they are failing our democracy.

America’s senior officers: lots of ribbon candy, no sweetness of victory

In my first article for TomDispatch back in 2007, I wrote about America’s senior military leaders, men like the celebrated David Petraeus. No matter how impressive, even kingly, they looked in their uniforms festooned with ribbons, badges, and medals of all sorts, colors, and sizes, their performance on the battlefield didn’t exactly bring to mind rainstorms of ribbon candy. So why, I wondered then, and wonder still, are America’s senior military officers so generally lauded and applauded? What have they done to deserve those chests full of honors and the endless praise in Washington and elsewhere in this country?
By giving our commanders so many pats on the back (and thanking the troops so effusively and repeatedly), it’s possible that we’ve prevented the development of an American-style stab-in-the-back theory — that hoary yet dangerous myth that a military only loses wars when the troops are betrayed by the homefront. In the process, however, we’ve written them what is essentially a blank check. We’ve given them authority without accountability. They wage “our” wars (remarkably unsuccessfully), but never have to take the blame for defeats. Unlike President Harry Truman, famous for keeping a sign on his desk that read “the buck stops here,” the buck never stops with them.
Think about two of America’s most celebrated generals of the twenty-first century, Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal and how they fell publicly from grace. Both were West Point grads, both were celebrated as “heroes,” despite the fact that their military “surges” in Iraq and Afghanistan proved fragile and reversible. They fell only because Petraeus was caught with his pants down (in an extramarital affairwith a fawning biographer), while McChrystal ran afoul of the president by tolerating an atmosphere that undermined his civilian chain of command.
And here, perhaps, is the strangest thing of all: even as America’s wars continue to go poorly by any reasonable measure, no prominent high-ranking officer has yet stepped forward either to take responsibility or in protest. You have to look to the lower ranks, to lieutenant colonels and captains and specialists (and, in the case of Chelsea Manning, to lowly privates), for straight talk and the courage to buck the system. Name one prominent general or admiral, fed up with the lamentable results of America’s wars, who has either taken responsibility for them or resigned for cause. Yup — I can’t either. (This is not to suggest that the military lacks senior officers of integrity. Recall the way General Eric Shinseki broke ranks with the Bush administration in testimony before Congress about the size of a post-invasion force needed to secure Iraq, or General Antonio Taguba’s integrity in overseeing a thorough investigation of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Their good deeds did not go unpunished.)
Authority without accountability means no one is responsible. And if no one is responsible, the system can keep chugging along, course largely unaltered, no matter what happens. This is exactly what it’s been doing for years now in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Can we connect this behavior to the faults of the service academies? Careerism. Parochialism. Technocratic tendencies. Elitism. A focus on image rather than on substance. Lots of busywork and far too much praise for our ascetic warrior-heroes, results be damned. A tendency to close ranks rather than take responsibility. Buck-passing, not bucking the system. The urge to get those golden slots on graduation and the desire for golden parachutes into a lucrative world of corporate boards and consultancies after “retirement,” not to speak of those glowing appearances as military experts on major TV and cable networks.
By failing to hold military boots to the fire, we’ve largely avoided unpleasantness between the military and its civilian leadership, not to speak of the American public. But — and here’s the rub — 70 years of mediocrity since World War II and 14 years of failure since 9/11 should have resulted in anti-war protests, Congressional hearings, and public controversy. It should have created public discord, as it did during the Vietnam War, when dissent was a sign of a healthy democracy and an engaged citizenry. Nowadays, in place of protest, we hear the praise, the applause, the thank-yous followed by yet another bombastic rendition of “God Bless America.” Let’s face it. Our military has failed us, but haven’t we failed it, too?

Listening again to Jefferson

America’s military academies are supposed to be educating and developing leaders of character. If they’re not doing that, why have them? America’s senior military leaders are supposed to be winning wars, not losing them. (Please feel free to name one recent victory by the U.S. military that hasn’t been of the Pyrrhic variety.) So why do we idolize them? And why do we fail to hold them accountable?
These are more than rhetorical questions. They cut to the heart of an American culture that celebrates its military cadets as its finest young citizens, a culture that lauds its generals even as they fail to accept responsibility for wars that end not in victory but — well, come to think of it, they just never end.
The way forward: I don’t have to point the way because Thomas Jefferson already did. Just read his quotations in the West Point library: we need to become a peace-loving nation again; we need to act as if war were our last resort, not our first impulse; we need to recognize that war is corrosive to democracy and that the more military power is exercised the weaker we grow as a democratic society.
Jefferson’s wisdom, enshrined at West Point, shouldn’t be entombed there. We need a new generation of cadets — and a few renegade generals of my generation as well — who want to serve us by not going to war, who know that a military is a burden to democracy even when victorious, and especially when it’s not. Otherwise, we’re in trouble in ways we haven’t yet begun to imagine.

19 comments:

  1. World | Sat Sep 26, 2015 6:49am EDT Related: WORLD, SYRIA REUTERS

    U.S.-trained Syrian rebels gave equipment to Nusra: U.S. military


    Syrian rebels trained by the United States gave some of their equipment to the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front in exchange for safe passage, a U.S. military spokesman said on Friday, the latest blow to a troubled U.S. effort to train local partners to fight Islamic State militants.

    The rebels surrendered six pick-up trucks and some ammunition, or about one-quarter of their issued equipment, to a suspected Nusra intermediary on Sept. 21-22 in exchange for safe passage, said Colonel Patrick Ryder, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, in a statement.

    "If accurate, the report of NSF members providing equipment to al Nusra Front is very concerning and a violation of Syria train and equip program guidelines," Ryder said, using an acronym for the rebels, called the New Syrian Forces.

    U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, was told of the equipment surrender around 1 p.m. on Friday, Ryder said. Earlier on Friday, Ryder had said all weapons and equipment issued to the rebels remained under their control.

    The news was the most recent sign of trouble in a fledgling military effort to train fighters to take on the Islamic State militant group in Syria, where a 4-1/2-year civil war has killed about 250,000 people and caused nearly half of Syria's prewar population of 23 million to flee.

    A top U.S. general told Congress last week that only a handful of the rebels are still fighting in Syria, though U.S. military officials said this week that dozens more have since joined them.

    U.S. officials have told Reuters that a review is underway that could result in scaling back and reenvisioning the program.

    (Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati; Editing by Sandra Maler and Christian Plumb)

    ReplyDelete
  2. SOME GENERALS STAND OUT

    General Wesley Kanne Clark, Sr., former Supreme Allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) during the war against Yugoslavia and presidential candidate, revealed recently on CNN that the Islamic State (ISIS) was “funded by our friends and allies in order to fight Hezbollah.” (I WONDER WHO THAT COULD BE?)

    Clark stated in a recent CNN interview: “ISIS got started through funding from our friends and allies. Because as people will tell you in the region that if you want somebody who will fight to the death against Hezbollah, you don’t put out a recruiting poster saying, ‘sign up for us. We’re gonna make a better world.’ You go after zealots and you go after these religious fundamentalists. That’s who fights Hezbollah. It’s like a Frankenstein.”

    This is not the first time Clark has revealed inside information about the wars in the Middle East. In a 2007 interview with “Democracy Now” radio talk show host Amy Goodman, Clark made big news by revealing that only days after the 9-11 attacks one of the top generals in the Pentagon had showed him a memo from then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld outlining long-term U.S. war plans even before the invasion of Afghanistan had commenced.

    According to Clark, the general had told him, “We’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” For many, this was proof that the wars were planned ahead of time earning Clark credibility in the antiwar movement.

    - See more at: https://americanfreepress.net/general-blows-whistle-on-islamic-state/#sthash.7qaTWKQ8.dpuf

    ReplyDelete
  3. Mediocrity ?

    Banish the thought.

    A military expert like Rufus has called the Iraq/ISIS fight 'the best run military campaign of my life time'....

    And, the world of Jefferson is not today's world......I love Jefferson but he is out of date, a type of anachronism in today's world, and even he had to deal with the Barbary Pirates.....

    Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates

    First Barbary War
    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


    The First Barbary War (1801–1805), also known as the Tripolitanian War and the Barbary Coast War, was the first of two Barbary Wars between the United States and the four North African states known collectively as the "Barbary States". Three of these were nominal provinces of the Ottoman Empire, but in practice autonomous: Tripoli, Algiers, and Tunis. The fourth was the independent Sultanate of Morocco.[2] The cause of the war was pirates from the Barbary States seizing American merchant ships and holding the crews for ransom, demanding the U.S. pay tribute to the Barbary rulers. United States President Thomas Jefferson refused to pay this tribute. It was the first military action in foreign lands and seas authorized by the U.S. Congress.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War

    The United States did well in the Second World War, and in the First too....keeping things in perspective....

    ReplyDelete
  4. deuce's constant tirade against America and Israel are telling.

    maybe he needs to go and live in gaza, iran or russia for a reminder of how lucky he actually is.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. APARTHEID ISRAEL

      I like and respect Benjamin Pogrund enormously, but he is wrong on three counts ("Israeli policy is not apartheid," August 25.)
      Since 2002, apartheid has been defined as a crime against humanity in international law. That definition is enshrined in Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which refers to the definition of apartheid in the 1973 United Nations International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.

      South Africa (or to be accurate southern Africa) is only mentioned once in the ICSPCA, as providing an example of the “policies and practices” of racial discrimination. It then goes on to define them in detail, without reference to South Africa. The Rome Statute doesn’t mention South Africa at all, other than specifying it as a signatory to the treaty (from 1998) and in various footnotes and references.

      All of which means that apartheid has an international legal standing beyond and irrespective of its roots in South Africa. It is the exemplar of apartheid, but by no means the required model. 

      All that is necessary is that a country commit “inhumane acts,” as defined by the statute, in the context of an “institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime,” as paraphrased in the first paragraph of Article 7 of the Rome Statute.

      Anyone who thinks Israel fits that description can legitimately and accurately describe it as an apartheid state. Those are the facts. The rest is just semantics – and the pedantic flogging of a dead horse.

      The fact that Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute has no bearing on the validity of its definition of apartheid in international law.

      But it’s another statement by Pogrund that’s the real hair-raiser. “What [Bradley] Burston insists is apartheid,” he writes, “are the actions of a right-wing government behaving like a right-wing government.”
       
      Really? As if the occupation began with Benjamin Netanyahu and he, rather than Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, was the godfather of the settlements. As if it was a right-wing government that conducted the ethnic cleansing of 1948 and developed Israel’s clandestine nuclear capacity (according to foreign reports), thus thrusting the entire region into a nuclear arms race.
      As if Israel’s current government is a Jewish version of Margaret  Thatcher’s or Silvio  Berlusconi’s – a little rough around the edges, a bit too strident in its pronouncements and no friend of the working man – but basically well within the Western, democratic consensus.

      Israel’s colonial dispossession and subjugation of the Palestinians began long before Netanyahu and long before the first right-wing government took office in 1977. In fact, it began long before the first so-called left-wing government took office as well.
      The Israel of today – irredentist, paranoid, intolerant and increasingly unhinged – is the culmination of a process that began at the turn of the 20th century, when the early Zionists created the myth of a “land without people for a people without land” and set about expropriating Palestinian land. (Not dissimilar, by the way, to the hundreds of years of racial discrimination that preceded the formal system known as apartheid.)

      read more: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.674291

      Delete
    2. WORTH REPEATING

      The Israel of today – irredentist, paranoid, intolerant and increasingly unhinged – is the culmination of a process that began at the turn of the 20th century, when the early Zionists created the myth of a “land without people for a people without land” and set about expropriating Palestinian land.

      Delete
    3. The Israeli firster and the GOP hack on this blog well represent the real face of Israel and The GOP Likuds Force.

      Delete
    4. As to the merits of the Israeli army, they are a joke. Jim Webb before he became a senator saw the IDF in action, and Webb called them a fourth-rate army fighting seventh-rate armies.

      The IDF can’t operate above the brigade level, the same as Iraq’s army under Saddam. The IDF got its ass kicked every time it took on Hezbollah.

      Delete
  5. How about a change of subject ?

    Schizophrenia: The Inward Journey

    by Joseph Campbell

    1970

    Published as an essay in his Myths To Live By


    http://jacobglass.typepad.com/so_i_was_thinking_/files/campbell-schiz.pdf

    ReplyDelete
  6. Deuce has a ticket to ride, bought and paid for.

    He served; he can criticize.

    I reserve the same right for myself.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Fuck off

      You admitted you should never have been in Vietnam, and Deuce 'served' in the Air Force in the safety of the green fields of England.

      The country belongs to us all, asshole.

      Delete
    2. I was in the military for seven years asshole. It included duty tours in Labrador, St Johns Newfoundland, Bentwaters England, Da Nang Viet Nam, Larissa Greece, Lakenheath UK, Woodbridge Uk, Kassel Germany, Aviano, Italy, Martlesham Heath UK, Biloxi, Mississippi and San Antonia Texas.

      You have done nothing.

      Delete
    3. Good for you. These days all you do is dis your former associates. You have said you would never recommend anyone go into the US Military.

      What I am objecting to is the assertion by Rufus that, in his case, only someone who falls off the bar stool, rolls into the recruiting office, then decades later questions the wisdom of his behavior is qualified to express opinions on our politics.

      It sounds more like a disqualification to me, if we are going the route of qualifications. Rufus has shown with his idiotic predictions of the early demise of ISIS that he doesn't have a clue what the hell he is talking about......I don't claim to be a military analyst, just a realist, yet even I could see this Obama caused debacle coming.

      Delete
  7. I am now going inward in emotional preparation for "The Journey Home to the Dome", Idaho v. Georgia Southern......it is exhausting being a Vandal, but it builds character....

    ReplyDelete
  8. N.C. (Elon): Trump 22, Carson

    !

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. North Carolina: Trump vs. Clinton
      Elon University
      More US Polls »

      Clinton (D) 47
      Trump (R) 40
      Clinton (D) +7
      North Carolina: Bush vs. Clinton
      Elon University
      More US Polls »

      Bush (R) 46
      Clinton (D) 43
      Bush (R) +3
      North Carolina: Carson vs. Clinton
      Elon University
      More US Polls »

      Carson (R) 52
      Clinton (D) 41
      Carson (R) +11


      People really like Carson.

      Delete
  9. Here's a Bible Rufus might comprehend.....he certainly doesn't understand a word of the one found in motel rooms across our nation.....


    Book review: ‘The Beer Bible’ an accessible look at the history, theory and practice of beer


    THE BEER BIBLE

    "The Beer Bible" by Jeff Alworth (650 pages, Workman, $35)

    THE BEER BIBLE

    Jeff Alworth

    656 pages, Workman, $35

    ........................ ADVERTISEMENT ......................
    Click Here

    Posted: Wednesday, September 23, 2015 10:30 pm

    Associated Press |

    It is thought that beer was created when an early human left a damp bowl of grains forgotten in a corner. The grains fermented and mingled with naturally available yeast, a drinkable spirit was produced, and it beat the heck out of chewing on damp cattails after a hard day of foraging. It was called gruel-beer, and it was considered pretty good — for the time, which was around 10,000 B.C.

    The Sumerians and Egyptians took things from there, as did Celtic inhabitants of Scotland, people living on the banks of China’s Yellow River, and so on. Essentially, wherever there were abundant grains, there were people; and once people found they could make beer, as well as bread from those grains, they were off to the races, civilization-wise.

    Beer was easy to make and it made hard work a little easier. Once brewers came to harness the power of the simple recipe of malted grain, water and yeast, and the ways to keep it stable so they could share it beyond the humble home brewery, humanity was awash in choice.

    For some, it might be too much choice. The labels, the types and the flavors can be inscrutable; you wonder if it’s appropriate to talk about a wort in public. You don’t want to have to join an Illuminati-like society to understand good beer. You’ll stick to the same porter you’ve been drinking since 1992, thank you, although you have no idea if there are any other kinds you might like, let alone explain why you drink it.

    Portlander Jeff Alworth is preaching a gospel you can embrace. His lively new “The Beer Bible,” patterned after Karen MacNeil’s wildly successful “The Wine Bible,” is an accessible, if doorstop-sized, history of and theory behind the suds we imbibe today............

    http://www.richmond.com/entertainment/books/article_74bf31bc-e5a1-5084-be4f-7bab01558d30.html

    ReplyDelete
  10. Did you know that you can create short links with BCVC and get money from every visitor to your short links.

    ReplyDelete