The Mythology of the American Junta
Is the Trump Administration becoming over-militarized?
Too much military in the civilian government is bad.
It jeopardizes civilian control of the government, and potentially gives the Pentagon the ability to overreach on a budget which furnishes our military force with roughly $609 billion (or 16% of federal spending) annually.
Has the President-elect nominated too many generals for high-level administration jobs?
This accusation started to surface in the wake of Trump’s nomination for Secretary of Defense: General James Mattis.
Mattis joins General John Kelly for Secretary of Homeland Security and General Michael Flynn for National Security Advisor. Three posts, three generals. For some observers, that’s three too many.
However, if we wanted to entertain some speculation we could expand Trump’s potential picks for other high-level jobs to include Admiral Michael Rogers for Director of National Intelligence and General David Petraeus for Secretary of State.
To aggravate the paranoia, we could list everyone in the Trump camp with military experience who isn’t a retired general, including Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon, who has seven years of naval service, and incoming CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who spent five years in the Army.
But for sanity’s sake and for the time being we can just work off facts and not runaway speculation, because we can’t all make a living writing hit pieces on Mattis.
In the Washington Examiner, Jamie McIntyre pointed this out about Trump’s military-heavy cabinet:
I am concerned that so many of the President-Elect’s nominees thus far come from the ranks of recently retired military officers,” Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said in a statement Wednesday evening…. Yet when President Obama assembled his Cabinet in 2009, he also ended up with three retired four-stars in his inner circle: [Gen.] Jones as his national security adviser, retired Army Gen. Eric Shinseki as veterans affairs secretary, and retired Navy Adm. Dennis Blair as director of national intelligence. That’s 12 stars to Trump’s 11.
We heard no outcry then. Why do we hear it now?
Is heavy military influence (or the homogeneous point of reference it signifies) the issue, or is it General Mattis as SecDef in particular that’s upsetting op-ed writers? Hard to say.
Let’s first look at General Mattis
I understand the Mattis naysayers’ concern. You want proven administrators in cabinet positions; these posts are not revolving doors for generals. You want what you’ve grown used to: Obama picked civilians for Secretary of Defense.
To me, what’s weird is that the SecDef office has been held by someone without significant military experience for so long. SUPER. WEIRD.
Of the 24 men who have been appointed SecDef over the past 69 years, eight have had no military experience. Two of those eight were appointed by President Obama. Leon Panetta served just two years in the Army and technically counts as a service member, but by today’s standards he would not have accrued full GI bill benefits in that time. Obama’s only SecDef that served a full term of military service was Robert Gates (a Republican) who was previously appointed by President Bush.
We have normalized having comptrollers, not warriors, hold the SecDef post. This is not the way things have been and it’s not the way things should be. The Attorney General needs to have a law degree, the EPA Administrator should have a science background, and I’d prefer that the Secretary of the Interior come with a knowledge of our national parks. We need a SecDef who threw down and, at least theoretically, put his or her life on the line for mom, the flag, and apple pie.
Or maybe it’s not Mattis, but fear of military overreach
Post Civil War, President Ulysses S. Grant, the victorious Union General, had on his cabinet of seven no less than four generals at any one time, with a civil government structure in ruins and half the country functioning as an occupied hostile state. The time was ripe for Grant to declare himself dictator with the support of his crony generals and a civil government dripping with military influence. Except he didn’t. He left office after two terms before there was even a law mandating he do so (if you’ll remember, the only president to stay longer than two terms was FDR).
Okay so maybe it’s not the military per se, but rather a narrow set of viewpoints or lack of intellectual diversity that is its own red flag. Or as Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) put it:
“Each of these individuals [nominee Generals] may have great merit in their own right, but what we’ve learned over the past 15 years is that when we view problems in the world through a military lens, we make big mistakes.”
A single frame of reference, even featuring the best and brightest within that frame, misses some of the picture.
Viewing the world and its problems, political or otherwise, through only one lens is the fast track to making big mistakes.
Of the sixteen cabinet positions in the line of presidential succession there are two military nominees, three if the Secretary of State ends up going to General Petraeus. That’s two, maybe three, out of sixteen.
If you include the cabinet-ranking positions outside that line, positions such as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, the EPA administrator, and the Ambassador to the U.N., this number drops to two or three out of twenty three, or around 9%.
If we applied the same logic to backgrounds far more common in the history of White House insiders, like law degrees, civil service backgrounds, Ivy League education, career academics — this percentage could be far higher.
Look at the Ivy influence alone:
To repurpose Sen. Murphy’s phrase, if you view the world through the Ivy lens alone, you’re going to make really big mistakes. When the Obama administration took power, it stacked itself with the kinds of backgrounds and skills I described above: Ivy Leaguers, lawyers, academics, and civil servants.
There is nothing inherently wrong with finding the most talented, best-qualified candidates you can. America was largely okay with 46% of the degrees earned by Obama’s inner circle all coming from the same places, and it should be largely okay with 9% of Trump’s inner circle consisting of generals. Unless, of course, there’s something inherently unstable with military service that doesn’t similarly afflict Ivy League graduates.
It is fine to criticize appointments, so long as the criticism has in its sights some deficiency or shortcoming in the nominees themselves. But when the criticism looks beyond individual merit and capability to stipulate some group-level shortcoming — as in, too many cabinet appointees with military backgrounds destabilizes normal order — and it does so without argument, that’s where I cry foul.
The fact is, Mattis is fine. The rest of the picks are fine. Disagree, make a case that the individuals nominated are not qualified, not that an entire institution is.
Bradford Barrett is a veteran of the U.S. Navy. Aviator. Policy thinker. Graduate of Texas A&M University. Student of Martial Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and Military Science. You can follow him at: medium.com/@bradfordbarrett.
