www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2006-04-16-1.html
Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card April 16, 2006 American Soldiers and How We Use Them When our young men (and women) volunteer to serve in our military, it is usually with an eye to serving their country, even at the risk of their own lives. In the process of their service, they will take orders, constantly. Sometimes those orders will come from people they respect -- even love. Sometimes, though, the orders will come from people they dislike, or disdain, or fear, or hate. Yet the ones who last in the military learn to submerge their own will and keep silent, except when some truly outrageous or dangerous or illegal order is given -- whereupon they either disregard it or make formal protest. Citizens first, citizens always, though they willingly surrender some of their rights during the duration of their service. That is why they have such respect for the principle of civilian oversight and control over the military. In America, despite the fantasies of some writers, there is scant danger of a military coup, because few are the soldiers who would cooperate in setting military authority above civilian. Self-Control of Our Soldiers I have sat in conferences and seminars where civilian experts (plus me -- I'm not an expert on anything) offer their counsel on issues that will matter to those making decisions concerning our military's future. And lining the walls are officers in uniform, who say absolutely nothing except when asked to provide some bit of information. Bereft as I am of expertise, I do have a full raft of doubts and questions and make myself quite irritating to some of the experts -- even as I eagerly learn from them. I remember being at one seminar a year or so before the election of 2004. The experts were, with perhaps one exception, all contemptuous of Bush and his administration, and some of them repeatedly spoke as if everyone knew that Bush would be turned out of office in the upcoming election. Finally I had to speak up and point out that it was highly unlikely that Bush would be defeated. "Americans don't turn out their presidents in the middle of a war. Even a bloody, unpopular war like the Civil War -- we kept Lincoln. Afterward, one officer took me aside and quietly said, "Thank you." For which bit of "wisdom" that I said he was thanking me, I could only guess. Perhaps that comment about President Bush and his chances of reelection. Only the Retired Can Speak Our soldiers silence their own voices while they're in service, so that no matter what party is in control, they can serve with their civilian leaders' full trust that they will carry out their orders. Only when a soldier leaves the military is he free to speak his mind. And boy, are they ready to do it -- at least some of them. Which brings us to the recent tempest in a teapot over the retired generals who, apparently, held a club meeting and agreed that Donald Rumsfeld was just awful and had to go. As a result, we had all kinds of sober, head-shaking editorials in the local Democratic Party paper, assuring us that the wisdom of these retired generals absolutely must be heeded. Nothing for it but to have Mr Rumsfeld's head on a pike. There were plenty of retired generals during the Clinton administration who warned about the danger of our depleted military stores and the inappropriate use of our military -- but the Democratic Party newspapers throughout America (which is, of course, most of them) paid scant attention, swatting these retired generals aside. What the Establishment Wants Because, of course, the academic-intellectual-media Establishment of America has nothing but contempt, in the main, for our military. The Establishment regards itself as the heirs of the Vietnam anti-war protestors (which is why they just hate it when I call them, accurately, the Establishment), and their attitude toward the military ranges from suspicion to hostility. They assume that anyone who enters the military must be a murderer at heart, who can't wait for a chance to torture people or club babies to death. Or at least turn their backs while other soldiers behave that way. These are the people who think John Kerry was not a liar or a stooge when he accused the US military in Vietnam of committing atrocities as a matter of policy. It was because of this attitude that so many of our embedded reporters were stunned to discover that the soldiers among whom they serve were actually decent, regular guys -- except that they were in really, really good physical shape and generally knew what they were doing in the face of the enemy. The Establishment does not care one whit what generals have to say about anything. As a general rule, whatever the generals and admirals want, the Establishment assumes must be a boondoggle or a murderous plot against civilization. But when you can find retired generals who want to say something bad about the Devil (ie, anyone in the Bush administration who seems to be effective), then the Establishment is all ears. Oh, yes, we must listen to these wise, experienced public servants. Why Some Generals Might Hate Rumsfeld But let's remember some recent history. As soon as the Bush administration took office, they started rebuilding military stocks and stopped misusing our military on fools' errands. The generals rejoiced -- somebody cared about national defense again! But the rejoicing soon slackened, because the Bush administration wasn't just listening -- it was talking. Donald Rumsfeld did not go down to the Pentagon with a blank purchase order on which the generals could write down their wishes, which it would be Rumsfeld's job to grant. Instead, he went there as one of the most accomplished and conniving bureaucratic maneuverers ever to work in Washington -- and that's saying something. Rumsfeld had an agenda, partly derived from President Bush and partly from his own experience in the past. Rumsfeld knew that the military, if left to itself, would choke on its own institutional debris. For all fulltime professional military cultures share some common traits. For one thing, during peacetime, it is not the great military leaders who rise, it is the conniving bureaucratic generals. As a conniving bureaucrat himself, Rumsfeld knew exactly whom he was dealing with, and he was better at the game. They could not delay and obfuscate and bloviate until he went away. When he said "hop," he kept watching until he saw some hopping behavior. His agenda was to remake the military into a force that could deal with modern asymmetrical warfare -- where a big country (us) must deal with a teeny-weeny country or a nontraditional military. And there were people already in the military who knew exactly how to do the job. How to create a highly mobile, effective force that could, openly or clandestinely, counter terrorism, insurgency, guerrilla warfare, warlords, or rogue states. Some of them had been struggling for years to get the bureaucratic generals to listen to them. But the old ways of warfare were so thoroughly intrenched that they could barely be budged. The result was a general change in doctrine and organization that required, for instance, Navy and Air Force pilots to be in direct contact with ground troops -- not with generals, but with captains and lieutenants and squad leaders on the ground. Small groups of highly-trained soldiers were inserted into remote areas where they became friends with the local citizens and earned their trust, until the locals began to tell them where the guerrillas or terrorists were hiding and what the best way was to get to them. As a result, they stopped preparing for the last war and actually began to prepare for the war that they were soon called upon to fight in Afghanistan and, after the initial conquest, in Iraq. Oh, that conquest of Iraq -- that was traditional warfare. It was only after that war ended, and the occupation began, that we began to see what had already been amply demonstrated in Afghanistan, if anyone had cared to notice: In asymmetrical warfare, you cannot win until and unless you have allies, small and large, among the locals. There is no quantity or strength or targeting of cruise m...
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