Comments on: Expertise and Influence in Military Policy

By: Kolohe

Kolohe — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:43:57 +0000

But what we can say, I think, is that Pres. Obama needs to always keep in mind that the information he gets is going to be skewed in favor of whatever policy the military brass prefer. He also needs to keep in mind that if things start to go sour, the generals are not likely to tell him about it until it’s too late.

But, on the other hand, as Admiral Mullen explicitly stated the other day: http://washingtonindependent.com/79299/the-mullen-doctrine-takes-shape
(and others in the military and the current administration have been saying on and off for a few years now) the Military(TM) understands its limitation wrt 4th gen post-modern COIN war or whatever term one wants to call it. It *wants* the ‘striped pants set’ to be involved, and sometimes, if not most of the time to be actually in the lead.

“We ought to make it a precondition of committing our troops,” Mullen said, warning that “we aren’t moving fast enough” to strengthen the institutional capacity of the State Department and USAID in order to lift the greatest burdens of national security off the shoulders of the military.

By: Bob Hawkins

Bob Hawkins — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:48:40 +0000

There’s also the fact that the civilian departments don’t take their war responsibilities seriously. The military ends up doing jobs that are theoretically the responsibility of State, Justice, etc., because if they don’t the jobs won’t get done. The civilian departments don’t staff for it, don’t budget for it, and don’t organize for it. What little they do is ad hoc.

The fact that State doesn’t hire enough ex-military so they maintain their own pool of expertise, is another way they don’t take their responsibilities seriously.

By: Jamie

Jamie — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:14:35 +0000

I’m pretty sure there’s a wider comment about hard-liners on many current issues being black-or-white thinkers, the general tendency of cultural conservatism to obsruct and then fall over when the inevitable occurs, and how that leads to a more painful process of change than the alternative. Indeed, if we took the occasional “let a thousand flowers bloom” sort of argument about state’s rights seriously, that would be one, flawed but real, method of experimentation. But somehow, we only hear state’s rights arguments in very limited contexts, and you do, of course, know what I mean.