Votes For Veterans
10 Reasons You Shouldn’t Listen To Jim Gourley
Jim Gourley provides 10 reasons you shouldn’t vote for veterans in what we suspect is an attempt to be controversial. His complaint is that the people of this nation make a pariah out of anyone who dares to attack veterans and that this is unfair as veterans refuse to allow their ace in the hole to be undermined. As if any politicians would want their advantages undermined and would not attempt to undermine their adversary. What Gourley describes is standard procedure in politics. He fails to distinguish between hating the player and hating the game and, in the process, creates an absurd list of reasons why America should not judge veteran candidates for who they are individually but stay away from them generally.
10. Veterans are bad at handling taxpayer dollars. First, there is the obvious logical problem with taking systemic attributes and applying them to components within a system — of taking organizational or bureaucratic qualities and applying them to all individuals within the organization. Secondly, while it’s certainly less difficult to lose subcontractor records than a helicopter, does that really translate into the same kind of responsibility? I’d venture that when your life, and the lives of the personnel you command, depend on that equipment working properly, you tend to be very responsible with taxpayer dollars and take your accountability of it very seriously. Less dramatically, careers can be ended over accountability and anyone who has ever signed for millions of dollars’ worth of equipment knows that as well as anyone working at the Wounded Warrior Project. This becomes even truer when part of your job is training the next generation of leaders to do the same.
9. Veterans are just as political as politicians. Yes, because being political is required in politics. Again, don’t hate the player. Maybe some, however, are naive and hope to change things. Maybe some are concerned less about making a political career than making an impact for a short while. Maybe some are actually inspired by their experiences and the mistakes they felt political leadership made. And maybe some only became veterans to later become politicians. This is less a point about veterans and more about knowing for whom you are voting—which should apply to everyone, regardless of their background.
8. Veterans are not morally superior candidates. Those veterans running for office will be the first to admit that not all veterans, just as not all civilians, are morally superior. It is a straw man argument to claim that they are. And pointing out a few bad decisions made by certain service members does not preclude veterans from asserting their own personal moral record. Nor do those individual lapses necessarily impugn the generally ethical nature of the service.
7. Combat is not an accomplishment. Service to one’s country, especially in wartime, is absolutely an accomplishment and demonstrates values that many voters wish to see in their representatives. It may not require political acumen to deploy to Iraq and get shot at but it does take courage and, while it may not work in the reverse, that kind of courage translates well into political butchery. So do many other attributes developed on the battlefield — iron will, courage, mental toughness, flexibility, the ability to see patterns, the ability to read people, to inspire, to communicate effectively and efficiently, to generate teamwork, to adapt, to improvise, to sacrifice, to seize opportunities, to be ruthless, to be just, to suffer, to overcome, and the list goes on.
Besides, with such a consistently high disapproval of Congress by the people, perhaps a little less political acumen is a good thing. Gourley criticizes the game but doesn’t consider that if we find enough people who don’t play it, perhaps we can change the rules. That being said, while there are admittedly plenty of people who served without doing much for the cause, and many who actually hindered it, if one looks to the seats of power in government, the ratio of the incompetent to the competent is much higher than in the battalion and brigade command slates.
6. Veterans don’t understand the average American. It takes a lot of license to make this statement. Let’s just ignore that many veterans grew up raised by civilians and lived with siblings who were and remain civilians. Ignore that, while some veterans of military families attended school on military posts, the vast majority went to school with civilians. Ignore that many veterans worked civilian jobs before the military and most marry civilians. Ignore that all have friends who are civilians. Ignore that the majority of military personnel live off-base (an average of 75%), and that many do not shop at the post commissary. Ignore that numerous states don’t have state income taxes so their civilian population “gets a pass” as well. Emphasize the occasional “military discount” that sets this privileged class apart form the ordinary man. Ignore that many veterans had civilian careers before their military service and that many have left the service and done other things outside the military before running for office. Ignore that there are plenty of jobs with career advancement timelines—and many move faster than the military. Ignore all of these things and also ignore the capacity humans have for imagination, compassion and reason which allows them to listen, empathize and put themselves in another person’s shoes to see things from their perspective; do all this and then I suppose one could make Gourley’s point.
The last bit, about understanding and empathy, actually happens to be incredibly important to leaders in the military…and public representatives of diverse groups in a diverse electorate.
5. Veterans “life-experience” is limited because of…well, I don’t know. This bullet speaks to a very naive idea of what constitutes military service and calls into question what understanding Gourley gained of the military from his own service.
First, how is Gourley defining life experience? Because the 20-year old who watched a friend die, killed a man, and saved a civilian’s life by putting his own in danger has seen highs and lows of emotion that most people will never experience in life, and learned to deal with them. That is a life rich in experience. The veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and were also stationed in places like Korea and Germany, have seen more societies and cultures, been exposed to more points of view, and have a far broader perspective than most Americans. If that doesn’t constitute considerable life experience, we’re not sure what does.
Gourley’s assumptions about who serves are incredibly flawed as well. That commander who spent 95% of his time dealing with 5% of his formation was, I promise you, not dealing with “the top 1% of the top 20%” and has probably seen things and dealt with things most people only hear about through the internet. It is also far harder for him to remove a misfit than the average civilian manager. Talk to any rear-detachment commander and you’ll get a list of life-experiences to which no one in corporate America, or the halls of Congress, can likely lay claim.
The fact that Gourley claims, “They have never been in a job environment that routinely demanded them to build consensus, make compromises, or negotiate plans,” tells me he must never have had a disagreement with his subordinates, peers, or superiors about how to proceed on a tactical mission. He has obviously never worked for a day in a battalion operations section. He can’t have ever witnessed squad leaders in a Ranger platoon plan a time-sensitive raid. He must never have conducted a combined-arms operation with attached units or enablers, or any joint operation with members of other services. He must never have sat over a cup of tea with a district governor in eastern Afghanistan and tried to work out a security agreement. He can’t have ever conducted a combined exercise with peers in the army of the Republic of Korea. He must never have attempted to change the Program of Instruction in a TRADOC unit, or change the culture of any organization in the Army. And he has clearly never had to deal with a Family Readiness Group. Or if he has done any of those things, then he must not have done them very well, for “building consensus, making compromises, and negotiating” are required in every single one of them and are exactly what Army leaders do every single day of their careers.
Gourley goes on to fantasize that “units rarely have to worry about budgets,” confirming that he never knew anyone in G-8 or never really grasped one of the key obsessions of battalion executive officers everywhere. He apparently has never have had to innovate to train soldiers due to a lack of resources created by budget constraints, but a quick look at the force today will reveal leaders at all levels doing exactly that.
Perhaps he just had poor leadership, that would certainly explain his false notion that punitive action is the primary driver in military leadership, but that is not the way that the Army works in many, if not most, cases.
Additionaly, if Gourley believes the military to be any less of a bureaucracy than government, especially the higher up one goes, then he obviously hasn’t seen too much of either.
4. Veterans are over represented. Not quite, since there is no such thing as anyone being over represented in a democratically-elected body. The people elect who they want. If they want no veterans, we aren’t underrepresented and, if they want all veterans, we aren’t over represented. People elect leaders to take care of their interests, not to look like them demographically. And one does not have to do the latter to do the former.
3. Veterans “mess up the dialogue.” Since when is exercising first amendment rights, engaging in political debate, and advocating for and contributing to whom one desires based on whatever reasons one wishes considered “messing up the dialogue”? We thought those were the perks of living in a free country and that veterans were entitled to the rights they volunteered to defend.
2. The parties use veterans as poster children. True, both parties do, in fact, attempt to use veterans (and racial minority groups, and women, and the LGBT community, and the handicapped, and shooting victims, and natural disaster survivors, and those in poverty, and those desiring education, and children, and….well, you get the point). But we fail to see how that is a reason not to vote for a veteran. The logic is akin to saying, “Well, Hitler likes bananas, so you shouldn’t eat them.” No, you shouldn’t massacre people like he did, but bananas are fine.
1. Veterans feel entitled. Another sweeping generalization. Sure, there are some veterans who feel entitled, just as there are some wealthy 1%ers, some ivy-league lawyers from political families, some ”rags-to-riches” candidates, and some candidates from a group that suffered discrimination in the past. Entitlement is not a vice confined to veterans, or even representative of the majority of them. Gourley can disagree with Brown’s handling of his criticism, but perhaps Brown wasn’t exploiting his service but defending it. Perhaps, unlike some disgruntled cynical veterans, he cares for the service, believes in its values and truly believes in what it made him. Gourley clearly doesn’t feel that way and takes personal offense when Brown describes something that both he and Gourley share, military service, in a different manner than Gourley would prefer. Just as Gourley wishes to offer an alternate perspective on the suitability of military service for government, we have chosen to do the same…or, in reality, to correct the misrepresentations in his argument.
One thing is certain, politics is politics. If one wants to list everything that is unfair about it, there will be far more than ten items, and there are much richer places to begin that list than with veteran candidates.
