May 12, 1975
Page 13875
WHAT DO WE EXPECT OF THE MILITARY?
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the Washington Post published recently excerpts from an excellent speech given by Philip Geyelin, editor of its editorial page. His address, given before a symposium on Officer Responsibility at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, is a thoughtful and important analysis of what is expected of the military by our society. In order to share his thoughts with my colleagues, I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
WHAT DO WE EXPECT OF THE MILITARY?
(By Philip L. Geyelin)
(The following is adapted from an address given at a "Symposium on Officer Responsibilities" at the Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth: )
I have been asked to answer the question what do most Americans, in and out of government and however intimately or remotely involved in the political process, expect of you who have taken military service as your career?
The short answer is, quite a lot – and often, almost certainly, too much. For example, we expect you:
To defend us from foreign enemies and in fact from any threats to our national security as this may be defined, not by you, but by political leaders;
To maintain order during disturbances at home – without trampling upon civil liberties;
To be quite precise about your needs – even though the dangers you are charged with defending us against may change drastically from time to time;
To design experimental weapons and give us firm estimates of their cost and to deliver them to your units at no higher cost than you estimated;
To advise the President and other civilian leaders about the military implications of this or that foreign policy question, even though you do not participate as an equal partner in the making of that policy; and when an ill-conceived policy gets us into a war that cannot be won under the rules of engagement that have been imposed upon you, we expect you to win it anyway;
To be scrupulously truthful about your needs, however they may be altered by unpredictable events, and also to be scrupulously honest about your battle reports and never mind how much aid and comfort adverse reporting might give to an enemy.
If some of these expectations seem to you to have particular application to the long and tragic Vietnam struggle now ended, the fact is that there is no better example than Vietnam of a war in which too much was asked of the military by civilians who were unprepared to take the risk of doing nothing and equally unprepared for the risks that would have been involved in moving in a
conclusive and decisive way.
An even larger lesson, however, is that the war, and the manner in which it was waged, asked too much, not only of the military, but of the process of government of which the military is an essential element and a vital arm. For what was asked of military and civilian leaders alike was that they lend themselves to a kind of continuing, calculated deception – a conspiracy in restraint of candor – required by the very nature of this new concept of limited war. The name of the game was "graduated response" to enemy initiatives. The objective was to convey by incremental increases in the application of military force an impression of limitless American will power and staying power. This, it was believed, would persuade the North Vietnamese and their supporters that their cause was hopeless. And so, the theory went, they would soon stop doing what they were doing and leave their neighbors alone – in Secretary of State Dean Rusk's familiar litany.
What this means in practical terms, however, was that military progress reports were very nearly required to report progress. Civilian leaders, for their part, were encouraged to conceal military setbacks – or escalation – from their own people in order not to alarm the public or generate the sort of divisive debate that might undercut the impression of a united resolve that we were trying to project to the enemy.
Well, it didn't work – because it was by its nature unworkable. And the reason it was unworkable, in my view, was that we were all expecting too much of each other. Civilian leaders in the executive were asking too much of the military and also too much of the Congress and the public and the press.
They were asking Congress to suspend free debate and blindly vote for resolutions and for appropriations in support of a war that nobody was prepared to declare. They were asking the public to pay the taxes for it and to send their sons, without saying how long it would last or how big it would get or even admitting that it was getting big without anybody knowing it. And they were asking the press not to question their official accounts of their conduct of the war.
You in the military were asking us in the press to accept your body counts and your estimates of enemy forces and your warnings of enemy intentions on faith, even though, to be blunt about it, they were not always reliable.
And we in the press, of course, were asking you to tell us about your plans and future operations and force levels and deployments, because we were not formally at war, and there was no censorship – even though you knew that this information could help the enemy.
I don't want to labor the point or re-fight the war. But I think it is important for us to recognize that the question we are asking ourselves has no easy answer out of our recent experience. For our recent experience is almost a case history of our system gone wrong, of a sustained distortion and straining of healthy adversary relationships between us all – between the relevant branches of government, between civilian and military, between government and the people, and between government and the press. There is at least the glimmer of an answer, however, growing out of our recent experience, and it is that each of us is going to have to not only ask less of each other, but also try harder to understand each other.
Accordingly, what I would put high on my list of what civilians expect of professional officers in the armed services is simply that you understand the rights and prerogatives of the public and the press in our society. Yours is a society which, by necessity, indeed almost by definition, depends on strict discipline, tight security and firm, not to say unquestioning, support for policies and directives issued by higher authority. But the larger American society operates under no such constraints. The right to question, to debate, to dissent, to demonstrate lawfully, is inherent. No government policy is sacrosanct. It is not disloyal or even necessarily destructive to disagree openly and as forcefully as possible with the word of the authorities. On the contrary, that is the way we conduct our government; that is the essence of a free society.
And when we think about the problem of preserving this free society, it is necessary for all of us to remember that there is more than one way to destroy it. It can be destroyed from without by hostile adversaries against which you are charged with defending us. But our fundamental freedoms – our national security, if you will – can also be threatened from within, when in the very name of national security we resort to "plumbers" and "enemies lists" and unconstitutional invasions of privacy in order to suppress public discussion and debate about a war in which the public has a vital stake. In this respect it is perhaps worth recalling the point that Arnold Toynbee makes in his study of civilization: of the 16 great civilizations that have been destroyed over the centuries, every one was destroyed from within – from the corruption of fundamental institutions and the slow erosion of fundamental values. The most that any outside power did was to administer the coup de grace.
I'm sure that you know that. But I also sense that sometimes you find our fundamental freedoms inconvenient, that you often feel that they work contrary to your purposes, and that there are times, and the Vietnam war is a notable example; when you believe it would be in the urgent interest of national security to suspend these processes and liberties.
The origins of your Vietnam dilemma, of course, did not lie with you. The origins began with your civilian superiors who were consistently unwilling to be honest with Congress and with the public about a policy that was ill-founded and failing.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that too much was expected of the American body politic, with all that term implies, by the military establishment during the course of the war. You expected the press and the Congress not to inquire too deeply into the course of a war that was taking a heavy toll in casualties and in material resources without showing any promise of coming to an end. You expected the public to retain its confidence in policies and strategies that depended for their success on a high measure of demonstrable dissembling and deception. And you measured the performance of both the press and the Congress in terms of a "patriotic" willingness to support whatever the government proposed even though it is inherent in our system to question whether what's good for the country at any given time is what a particular politician or cabinet head or President proclaims to be good.
We live, in fact, by a difficult and delicate system of checks and balances, which may in extreme crises oblige a newspaper reporter to report something that others will believe is harmful to the national interest, and may also require an Army officer or a government official to go against the official line. We have, I think, recently undergone two such extreme crises in our affairs: Vietnam and Watergate. To work our way back to that careful balance by which we manage our affairs may well require all of us to reexamine and redefine what it is we can reasonably expect of each other as military officers, private citizens, civilian leaders, politicians, and members of the press.