Engaging the Gap in Military-Civilian Relations

CNN ran an article today quoting ADM Mullen on a topic that tends to come up every now and then. I think the issue is important. Here are some of the quotes from Mullen in the CNN article.

The nation's top military man warned Monday of a potentially dangerous gulf between the civilian world and men and women in uniform.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said most Americans know "precious little" about the military.

"To the degree we are out of touch I believe it is a very dangerous force," Mullen said in a speech to a conference on military professionalism at the National Defense University in Washington.

...

"Our audience, our underpinnings, our authority, everything we are, everything we do, comes from the American people," Mullen said. "Fundamentally I believe that. Everything we do, and we cannot afford to be out of touch with them."

...

"They know that we are in two wars, we've sacrificed a lot, lost a lot of people, over 5,500 people. They are very supportive of that," Mullen said. "They care a lot about great young men and women that they know. Many of them don't know that many, and it just speaks to the disconnect."

...

"Whatever their fond sentiments for men and women in uniform, for most Americans the wars remain an abstraction, a distant and unpleasant series of news items that do not affect them personally," Gates said at Duke University. "Even 9/11, in the absence of a draft, for a growing number of Americans, service in the military, no matter how laudable, has become something for other people to do."

...

"American people are extraordinarily supportive of our men and women ... there is a sea of good will," he said. The military must work to build and sustain trust or risk negative consequences, he said.

Mullen predicted, ''We will find out that, yes we are less than 1% and we are living in fewer and fewer places and we don't know the American people and the American people don't know us."

It is unclear what prompted this issue to become the focus of ADM Mullen, but the discussion comes at a good time. It is noteworthy that a big debate on defense politics is currently taking place across the left side of the political blogosphere, and in many ways that debate represents a real opportunity for ADM Mullen if he is looking to follow up his speech with action.

Back on January 4th I highlighted a blog post by Information Dissemination contributor Robert Farley back on his home blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money that encouraged progressives to think about defense issues. I had some problems with the original blog post, but I knew it was an important topic. I don't know why Dr. Farley encouraged progressives to focus on doctrine and tactics, but I imagine it has a lot to do with the factors that tie technologies to budget. I believe that military topics of technology are best educated by coming at the issue sideways - by discussing policy and strategy, then working down to tactics and doctrine and opening the discussion at that point regarding technologies and budget.

What is interesting to me is how the discussion evolved. Initially is was Jason Sigger and Bernard Finel who jumped in, rightfully so, as those folks are established in discussing military issues from a progressive point of view, but both are also nitch area experts with relative smaller audiences across the progressive political spectrum. As far as I am concerned, this issue became a big deal when Matthew Yglesias posted on the topic.

The content produced by Matthew Yglasias is important if you believe the topic ADM Mullen is discussing is important, because it represents the mainstream starting place for the politically active, engaged, progressive voter. Here is why. A typical military blog has between one and two thousand readers daily. Information Dissemination is considered enormous for a military blog by having between 9,000 and 14,000 readers average daily. Matthew Yglasias and Think Progress has at least 40,000 politically engaged citizen readers on a slow day. Now read what Matthew Yglasias wrote, keeping in mind it was in response to Robert Farley's encouragement to think about tactics and doctrine, and ask yourself if ADM Mullen is on point.

Evolution of a Topic

Thankfully the discussion has evolved into thinking about policy, but unfortunately the discussion hasn't really evolved in a way where people are actually discussing policy - just the merits of politicized policy. More posts including this great one at Ink Spots are carrying the discussion forward. Dr Farley has another post, as well as Bernard Finel. Since I am not politically savvy enough to know what is progressive or conservative when it comes to defense policy, I'd like to engage the debate from a different perspective in hopes that the outcome meets the objective ADM Mullen is discussing - specifically that Americans start thinking about the military and what it means to them.

My thoughts of the ongoing wars in Afghanistan were summarized nicely today when my new fellow blogger at the United States Naval Institute, Nathan Hughes of STRATFOR, discussed serious topics in his first piece Tactical and Operational Needs Run Amok in the Afghanistan war. Nathan Hughes is probably as progressive, or conservative, as I am - meaning the cup isn't very big - but that post could have easily been written and posted to any progressive political blog and resonated with the audience. Why? Because it asks critical political policy and military leadership questions that Americans who are skeptical of the direction of the war should be thinking about. The problem is, there is nowhere in the rather large and active progressive blogosphere where one can find posts that posit such important questions - mostly because progressives don't have a deep bench of strategic thinkers familiar with the military in a way to pose such questions.

And that is Dr. Farley's point as I read it.

On Information Dissemination, Bryan McGrath has already started thinking about military policy issues for the time period that follows the war. His Seapower Manifesto is an example of the numerous ideas that are already out there regarding what the United States needs to do be doing instead of waging small wars across the globe. Progressives too often come at the military with the budget, as if comparisons of budget figures in what are ultimately comparisons of apples and oranges will somehow resonate as an intelligent idea. They never do, and as Ink Spots notes, they often simply discredit the author for failing to address military policy responsibly.

If I was going to encourage someone to think about defense policy in a responsible way, it would be to think about what one wants and how that translates into policy. For example, I never, ever want to see the United States committed to fighting a land war of choice in Asia for at least the rest of my life, so I believe we need to somehow build institutional protections into insuring this. The most common topic that pops up is the draft, but I think America is best served by the All-Volunteer force, so for me the draft is not an option. So for me, that means we need to build the institutional protection into the force structure.

How? I think the way to do it is to reduce the Active Army down to a very small number of brigades, perhaps no more than 30. With that said, one of the lessons of war from the last decade of war is that the Army is too small, so I would increase the overall size of the US Army by increasing the size of the Army to at least 75 brigades total. This would include Active, Reserve, and more importantly - National Guard.

The way that force is organized would be to make the ~30 brigades as mobile as possible, specifically by either making them Airborne brigades or by having ships built and ready to move them rapidly to forward theaters. We should equip the active brigades with the very best, latest and greatest equipment. We then build 2nd tier quality equipment for the Reserve brigades that can be rapidly produced, for example, instead of a Future Combat Systems brigade it would use modern and capable, but less expensive tanks and APCs. Then an expanded National Guard can be built and structured towards national disaster and other human terrain activities. Why this type of structure? Because it would mean anytime politicians want to use the military, it will require them to conduct a massive call up of civilians in the Army Reserves and National Guard - a posture for the Army that would always require a nationalization of war effort in support of any war, which means the threshold for going to war anywhere with a major, sustained ground force is raised considerably above the threshold used over the last many, many years.

It has long been said the Marines fight battles while the Army wins war. I think the United States should structure both the Army and Marines accordingly, and by doing so I think that if reserves represent the majority of ground combat power, then preventing war becomes a greater strategic priority for the policies that drive the use of our armed forces.

I do not know what this would cost, so I don't know if it will cost more or less. What I do know is that it would provide more capacity for the Army to focus major benefits like education and health care as recruitment tools for high school graduates to enter the Army Reserves, which makes service a useful way to integrate a larger American population into the military but at the cost of maintenance for a reserve brigade as opposed to an active brigade.

This idea is certainly not well developed, but is merely offered as an example of thinking about what one believes defense policy should be, in this case the limited use of the Active Army, and developing policy ideas towards how one believes that could, or should be achieved. In general I think the discussion that Robert Farley has started in the politically left blogosphere is important, because the more folks think about military issues the more familiar they become with what the military is, and in general become smarter in what the military does for the nation besides fight wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, or wherever. The military is a constitutionally mandated tool of politics with a history of capabilities that goes well beyond policing the problems deemed war worthy by the political leaders of a superpower.

In general, the DoD is fairly limited in how they can educate Americans about the military. It is good to see the politically left blogosphere discussing the military, even if the debate isn't actually about the military so much yet. I think that discussion might offer opportunity for the DoD to engage the conversation, an action that even in limited form could encourage further discussion and debate. I think ADM Mullen is on target, and every opportunity should be seized to close the military-civilian gap when it comes to military affairs, and I don't see how that happens in a broad way without active military engagement online.

After all, there really is no easy way for a civilian to engage the military in discussion and debate easily, particularly when most public military officer appearances consist of very large 'Fleet Week' type events or high cost, smaller crowd convention style events.