Document created: 22 October 03
Air University Review, September-October 1973
And is there anything more
important
than that the work of the soldier should be done well?
Plato, The Republic
Writing in the July 1971 issue of Foreign Affairs, Colonel Robert G. Gard, Jr., asserted that “the armed forces of the United States are in the throes of what is popularly termed an identity crisis,” After taking note of increasing criticisms leveled at the services, along with certain already implemented institutional reforms reflecting the concern of the services over those criticisms, he went on to address the deeper problem of “the search to adapt traditional concepts and practices of military professionalism to changing requirements and radically new demands.”1 Although the general run of conversation around the stag bar would lead one to think that the Colonel was whistling in the dark, the spate of books and articles addressing similar themes over the past year or two suggests that he was not alone. For those whose duties keep them from following the current literature, a review of some of the more significant contributions to the debate over military professionalism might prove helpful or suggestive.
It could equally well prove irritating. Many career officers have had it with the critics, whether they come from within or without the services, and appear satisfied to withdraw behind the ramparts that divide “us” and “them.” Unhappily, however, problems tend to get worse rather than better in response to such an approach or attitude. “Also, if change is coming—and it most surely is, in one form or another—those within the service have an obligation, as well as a vested interest, to assure that change evolves from within rather than be dictated from without. Or, as the editors of the professional journal of the U.S. Army put it,
One of the marks of any professional man is participation in the process of professional development and betterment. A very real part of this process is free and open discussion of matters which are leaving, or will leave, a profound influence on the profession. Stand up and be counted. Unleash your pens!2
After well over a century of uncertainty, the question of whether the officer corps of the military services should be considered a profession, comparable to the traditional view of medicine and law, was answered in the affirmative by the opening of the 1960s. The seminal (if nonetheless controversial) works of Walter Millis, Samuel P. Huntington, and Morris Janowitz are now recognized as classics.3 Huntington drew the initial model by identifying the three basic characteristics of any profession: a distinctive expertise, a strictly regulated responsibility to society, and a sense of corporateness (or of organic unity and consciousness as a group apart from ordinary laymen).4 These characteristics, he convincingly argued, fit the officer corps as well as the more traditional professions.5 In the 1962 Lees Knowles Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, General Sir John Winthrop Hackett put the seal of approval on Huntington’s analysis and went on to single out one other element that makes the military profession unique among all other professions: the unlimited liability clause that applies to the military life.
The essential basis of the military life is the ordered application of force under an unlimited liability. It is the unlimited liability which sets the man who embraces this life somewhat apart. He will be (or should be) always a citizen. So long as he serves he will never be a civilian.6
Adding Sir John to Huntington, we find military professionalism defined as encompassing expertise, responsibility, corporateness, and a willingness—indeed even a duty—to lay one’s life on the line.
By the middle of the 1960s, the debate over military professionalism began to lag as serving officers found their attention increasingly directed to more urgent challenges in Southeast Asia. But not before Colonel Russell V. Ritchey reminded us in these pages of yet another characteristic of the military profession, one that most civilian academics had overlooked and most senior officers seemed more ready to condone than condemn.
The military profession is unique in that, unlike law or medicine, its members are in competition with one another, whether as colleagues, allies, or potential enemies. Branches of one service are in competition, each to play as important a combat role as the other, . . . Services of one nation are in competition, each to develop the art of war as it applies to its environment and expertise.7
Competition, encouraging the competitive spirit, sayeth the military ethic, is a good thing. (“Here on the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds——”) How could it be otherwise? Isn’t war our business? It’s too bad the answer is not as simple and clear-cut as we would like. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t (vide SAC’s “Peace Is Our Profession”); and the conflict, whether in our minds or emotions, over the essence, aims, and goals of military professionalism strode headlong into the jungles and skies of Southeast Asia. There military professionalism took some hard knocks, not all of which could be blamed on men in uniform and which led in turn to a reopening at home of the whole question of the role of the military in our society.
As usual, the Army came in for the first, the loudest, and the most criticism, whether from within or without. (For reasons never quite clear to me, the Air Force can absorb the relieving of a General Lavelle, the Navy the loss of a Pueblo, and the Marines another scandal at Parris Island, but the Army always takes it right on the chin.) By 1972 the Army found itself faced with what one of its own characterized as a manifold crisis: a crisis of confidence, born of an “unwon” war, charges of mismanagement and incompetence, and doubts about the future role of ground forces; a crisis of conscience, stemming from charges of war crimes and official cover-ups, post exchange kickbacks, official misconduct, and allegations of self-serving careerism; a crisis of adaptation, as the traditional hierarchical service attempts to come to terms with a revolution in American styles, manners, and morals.8
Interestingly enough, one of the first books to raise most of these questions was a novel, Anton Myrer’s Once an Eagle, originally published in 1968. * Myrer’s hero is Sam Damon, the archetype of the pure romantic, yet rugged American hero. From Walt Whitman, Nebraska (“good farming country, on the great south bend of the Platte River between Kearney and Lexington”), Damon enlists in the Army during World War I, goes on to exceed Sergeant York in individual bravery and General MacArthur in combat leadership, wins a battlefield commission, and then—horror of horrors to the folks back home—decides to stay in the Army after the war.
* Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle (New York: Holt, Rinehart &Winston, 1968, $7.95), 817 pages. (Republished in paperback by Dell, May 1970, $1.25, 1043 pages.)
In this day of personnel cutbacks and occasional promotion freezes, the picture Myrer paints of life in the peacetime military of the twenties and thirties gives one pause (until perhaps, one recalls that the only USAFer ever to rise to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff did so even after serving seventeen years as a lieutenant). It’s all there: dreary barrack towns; cavalry officers lording it over lesser breeds; decrepit quarters, from which Damon gets bumped when outranked by a day or two; silly intrigues; and the reappearance now and then of Courtney Massengale, the archetype of the suave, chickenhearted, bootlicking general’s aide who, one can sense quickly, will get all the breaks. Late in the thirties, while stationed at Clark Field, Damon is sent on a special mission to Shansi Province, China, to observe the guerrillas of Lin Tso-han (Mao Tse-tung?), who are holding down five Japanese divisions. He becomes close to Lin, marvels at his irregular tactics and continuing successes against insuperable odds, returns to Manila, and writes a brilliant report for the Army on “the most significant development in warfare of this century.” He then sees his report shoved
into a desk drawer with a finality that was all too apparent. They were not, he was informed, overly concerned about the antics of unwashed guerrillas; the focus of interest was the Republic of China and the Japanese drive on Changsha. He saluted and left.9
World War II comes, and Damon again exhibits both superb combat leadership and superb disdain for everything else. He rises to the rank of major general by war’s end (Courtney Massengale goes all the way up) and then retires, satisfied in his own mind with his life’s work. In the early sixties he is recalled for a special observer mission to the Delta in Khotiane (Vietnam?), where he is killed by a guerrilla while sitting in a seedy little cafe near the airfield of Pnom Du (Soc Trang?). Courtney Massengale is COMMACK (COMUSMACV?), but Sam Damon dies as he had lived, believing to the end that the romantic, spendthrift, moral act is ultimately the practical one; that the practical, expedient, cozydog move is the one that comes to grief.
The literary critics were unimpressed with Myrer’s morality tale, finding the plot line melodramatic and the characters too pat. One is reminded of Edna Ferber’s Giant, in a military rather than a Texas setting. Indeed, as Ward Just later wrote:
. . . it is astonishing that central casting has not grasped the opportunity: Greg Peck/Damon, a man so pure of heart and instinct that he could only have been drawn from life; George C. Scotti Massengale as the brilliantly suave and ambitious general’s aide who has troubles with his sex life; Deborah Kerr as the embittered (and finally redeemed) Army brat of a wife; Burt Lancaster the sturdy colonel; Pat O’Brien the faithful sergeant. There is no role for Dustin Hoffman.10
Once an Eagle was widely read among Army officers and the Corps at West Point. Appearing in paperback almost coincidentally with public disclosure of the My Lai episode, the novel raised a basic question in many minds: Which is more characteristic of the modern Army officer, Sam Damon or Courtney Massengale?
Three books subsequently appeared—one by a civilian, one by a retired officer, and one by an active duty officer who has since resigned—that variously addressed that question, among others. Taken together, they answered that Sam Damon is still amongst us but that he usually finds himself on the losing end of the struggle against Courtney Massengale (for which read self-centered careerists and/or the stupidities and caprice of “the organization”).
Ward Just’s Military Men * came out in December 1970, following a preview of much of it in the October and November issues of The Atlantic. Just, a correspondent for the Washington Post, had published two earlier books: To What End, a critical account of the war in Vietnam (1968), and A Soldier of the Revolution, a novel (1970). In addition to the fact that he writes very well indeed, Just has an amazing insight (for an “outsider”) into the nuances of military life; he can lay fair claim to being the enlisted man’s David Halberstam.
*Ward Just, Military Men (New York: Afred A. Knopf, 1970, $6.95), 256 pages. (Also available in paperback, Avon Books #W310, $1.20.)
Just’s book is about the Army in the year 1970 (making this reviewer wish that the publisher had let Just keep his original title, Soldiers, rather than the more general Military Men). To gather data he traveled throughout most of the country, from West Point to Fort Hood, Fort Lewis, Fort Bragg, the suburbs of Los Angeles. The picture he has drawn is of an Army in a state of flux, unsure of its purposes and goals, angry at being blamed for things done in support of decisions in which it played no part, torn between disbelief and disgust over the war in Vietnam. His interviews ranged from cadets and faculty members at the Academy, through the enlisted ranks, all the way up to the Army Chief of Staff. “Suspicious, resentful, angry beyond measure at what they consider to be indulgent and unfair criticism, the professionals have drawn together at the barricades of the institution,” many looking on themselves as walking wounded in the center of a monstrous joke: Gary Cooper on a street without joy.11
Even though Just relies heavily on stereotypes, his book is remarkably suggestive and well worth reading by Air Force officers. His chapter on the development of the Sheridan tank, for example, has parallels in our own service (the TFX, the C-5A), as does his fascinating account of the doctrinal struggle under way in the Army over future roles and missions—essentially between the Leavenworth crowd, ever anxious to get back to the North German Plain (against whomever, but presumably the Russians), and the MAOP (Military Assistance Officers Program) crowd at Bragg who speak of the need to “politicize” the Army but who, casting anxious eyes at Latin America and Africa, can’t seem to decide whether to read the future as no more Vietnams or lots of smaller and better Vietnams.
Perhaps his most valuable chapters are those entitled “‘The Academy,” “The Generals,” and “Futures.” His perception of the mood at West Point in 1970 was later borne out by press reports in mid-1972 of 33 young officers resigning while stationed at the Point.12 Generals, he writes, are now managers. “The Army technocrat, careful and circumspect not so much from personality as from training, is on the rise.” The root problem, he suggests, is the virtual deification of general officers.
Respect for authority in the minor things, the saluting and the spit and polish and vernacular Yes, sir, becomes slavishness in the major things. . . . The Army is compulsively anti-intellectual, as opposed to being anti-brains. Brains do not lock a man out, imagination does. The system does not yield to it, any more than it does to doubt; ideas are tested not in give and take, but in conformity to doctrine. . . . Deny the status quo and you deny your own career.13
Those blue-suiters who have had the opportunity (!) to be invited to try to work out solutions to problems with the staff at MACV in Saigon know what Just is talking about: Eight or ten officers sitting around a table, two of them blue-suiters, the rest Army. The army colonel in charge begins by stating “what the General wants,” (Colonels never want anything, one learns; it’s always “the General,” any general.) The blue-suiters, advisers to the Vietnamese Air Force (VNAF), are informed that the VNAF needs an additional CH-47 (Chinook helicopter) squadron. Reasons, not readily apparent to the Air Force types, are hard to come by. One probes, one questions, one receives steely-eyed glares—until it finally surfaces that there is an Army manual that posits a ratio between maneuver battalions and medium-lift helicopter units. Since the Army of Vietnam (ARVN) has X maneuver battalions, the VNAF must have Y squadrons. The heretical question, “Is this based on U.S. or Vietnamese experience and doctrine?” brings uncomprehending stares. Pointing out the inability of the VNAF, in less than two years, to train the required maintenance types is put down as negative thinking—even though the squadrons already formed required skimming the cream off the entire active UH-1H (Huey) fleet. The meeting breaks up with instructions to write a plan: a sign of progress; a challenge to the doubters to put their negative thinking in writing.
The same conference room a few weeks later (or earlier). The question: “How can we speed up the Vietnamization program?” The Army answer: give them more, bigger, and better equipment (like 155s, Long Toms, in place of 105s already on hand, no matter whether the barrels wear out faster or the 105s, with crews, can be lifted by CH-47s and the 155s absolutely cannot). Questions about whether new and bigger equipment might in fact complicate problems and thus draw out the time required for the ARVN to become self-sufficient are summarily dismissed. Only after the meeting does one hear, surreptitiously in a hallway, an Infantry officer mumbling about 155s for close support being “about as useful as Sheridan tanks in a rice paddy,” A few experiences like these leave one sympathetic to Just’s claims that the Army looked on Vietnam as an engineering problem; that in Vietnam the operations were the strategy, there being no end point, no objective in the Clausewitzian sense; that, as a type, there is very little about the regular Army officer that is analytical. “We are interested in the doer,” Major General Koster had said, “not the thinker.”
How many of Just’s generalizations—let alone which ones—are applicable to the Air Force as well as the Army is a question one would be advised to ponder well before answering. When Just, in his chapter “Futures,” traces doctrinal developments applicable to the so-called automated battlefield (“the final depersonalization of warfare”), he tracks ground very close to that later discussed in the Cornell Air War Study Group’s Air War in Indochina.14 For all his implied criticism, however, Just is on the whole both fair and sympathetic, seeing a Sam Damon for every Courtney Massengale.15
“Fair and sympathetic” is almost the last thing one would say about The Death of the Army: A Pre-Mortem, by Lieutenant Colonel Edward L. King, USA (Retired).* King, whose book came out following much ballyhoo and several previews,16 comes on like the Prophet Armed. Courtney Massengale, he seems to say, is the Army, and the American people are the losers. King, who retired from the Army rather than serve a tour in Vietnam, states his purpose as being “an attempt to trace how the Army arrived at its present point of virtual disintegration, to examine the causes of some of its past mistakes, the price of those failures, and what the future may hold in store.” In essence, he believes that “the sickness. . . consuming the Army is the result of years of false leadership and parochial self-interest.”
*Edward L. King, The Death of the Army: A Pre-Mortem (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972, $6.95), xi and 246 pages.
The book opens with a dismal chapter treating King’s experiences at Hill 582 near Kumwha, Korea, in 1951. There, a lieutenant colonel (King names names throughout), a staff officer in World War II, now in his first combat command, sacrificed men needlessly, driven by the desire to be promoted and the felt need to appear aggressive to his superiors. This chapter sets the tone for most of what follows. In “Why I decided to stop making it in the Army” and “The fight to leave,” King relates with both anguish and self-pity the official harassment he was put through when he finally decided to opt for retirement rather than Vietnam. This morbid tale, set in early 1969, reminds the Air Force reader of certain similar incidents in his own service when the traditional wisdom had not yet come to the realization that the way to treat “malingerers” is simply to let them leave the service and forget about them. (The traditional wisdom, as explained to me at the time by a senior Staff Judge Advocate in Washington, was “Don’t let the bastards get away with it. Let one guy get away with it and we’ll have a mass exodus.” That theory is not only unsound but shows a lack of confidence slandering the great majority of men in uniform.)
King gets down to cases in chapter 4 when he attempts to answer “What has happened to the Army?” Vietnam he sees as a catalyst rather than a cause to present discontents. The real breakdown, he writes, began in 1955 or 1956 as the Ridgways, McAuliffes, and Gavins gave way to the new technocrats from the “Airborne Club” (for which read Taylor, Medaris, Adams, Westmoreland, etc.), who, desperately looking for a mission in the nuclear era, grasped at counterinsurgency and limited, brush-fire war, “the vehicle by which the United States was taken into Vietnam.” And there everything went wrong, in King’s accounting at any rate. How, he asks, did the Army let an erroneous doctrine, false pride, and parochial ambition lead it to failure in Vietnam?
The answer he offers runs the gamut from the failure of leadership, through racial bitterness, selfishness at the top (in the Army, he asserts, loyalty is a one-way street), a caste system, a principle of elitest control by West Point graduates, disorganization, favoritism and neglect, enthusiasm for corporate growth, to lockstep training and sterile education (chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8). Few targets are missed, virtually every major unit of the Army, whether in the U.S., Europe, Korea, or Vietnam, taking its turn on the chopping block. What makes the book potentially misleading is that, while being so often right, he sometimes is wrong. His diatribes on the incongruities of NATO strategy or the role of the Army in Korea make good sense, but he is unfair when he implies that these are the fault solely of the Army. His discussion of racial problems in the Army would almost make one think that the Army invented the problems.17 In the end, betraying his inability to see the Army in historical perspective and his apparent absolutely confirmed opinion that no good can come from within the Army itself, King declares that only public pressure can bring about reform. As a guideline, he offers a 22-point blueprint for reform and calls on the nation to rise to the challenge if it is to have an Army capable of defending the United States.
For all its faults, this is a valuable book if only because it asks so many of the right questions. What King apparently couldn’t foresee was that the Army itself, not the public, would—whether admitting it or not—pay some attention to his blueprint for reform. The recent dismemberment of CONARC, the forced retirement of some 25 general officers, the selection of General Haig to become Vice Chief of Staff, the reform of the promotion system, and the 1 January 1973 revision of the Army’s OER system are all cases in point.18 Reform, from within, is in the air. Indeed, if the Army could speak with one voice, it might respond by quoting Mark Twain, who was in London in 1897 when he read his obituary in an Associated Press release picked up by English newspapers: “Reports of my death,” he cabled the Associated Press in New York, “are greatly exaggerated.”
The Army brass can hardly be blamed for not being sorry to have lost Lieutenant Colonel King, but if they feel the same way about the loss of Major Josiah Bunting it’s probably fair to say that they haven’t yet thought their problems through. Bunting, Virginia Military Institute honor graduate and First Captain, multiple athlete, Rhodes Scholar, Vietnam veteran, and Assistant Professor of History at West Point, resigned from the Army shortly after publishing The Lionheads *, since placed by Time Magazine at the top of its list of the best novels for 1972.19 Now a civilian professor of military history at the Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island, Bunting left the Army because he had lost faith in “the system,” most particularly in the ability of any young officer to make changes from within the Army.20
* Josiah Bunting, The Lionheads (New York: George Braziller, 1972, $5.95), ix and 213 pages. (Also available in paperback, Popular Library, $.95.)
Bunting’s novel is set in the Delta in the months following the 1968 Tet offensive. The principal protagonists are Major General George Simpson Lemming, commanding the 12th (Lionhead) Infantry Division, and Colonel “Shuffling George” Robertson, commanding the riverine brigade of the division. The principal characters are few, the plot line simple (but all the more pointed for that), and the characterization superb. The crunch comes when General Lemming, worrying about the low body count totals amassed by Robertson’s brigade, proposes a combined heliborne-riverine assault to trap a Viet Cong battalion. At the last moment General Lemming cancels the heliborne assault force, required by the basic plan to pin down the VC battalion while the lumbering riverine force moves into position. Why? Well, the Secretary of the Navy is scheduled to visit the division area, and what better way to impress him than by a successful operation conducted by a “pure riverine” force? The attack goes off, the riverine force is ambushed, 16 men are killed and 70-odd wounded, but the operation can still be labeled a success because the “VC KIA by BC” total is 158.
But not so in the minds of Captain Knapp and Major Claiborn, Colonel Robertson’s plans and operations officers. Knapp writes up an after-action report that assesses the operation as only a qualified success. “The provision of helicopters, which would have enabled the brigade to proceed according to plan, would have minimized friendly casualties and enemy exfiltration.” Claiborn and Knapp present the report to Colonel Robertson, who knows that it’s all over for him if he signs it but that, given the exceptionally large enemy body count, his stock will rise automatically with General Lemming if he keeps his mouth shut and destroys the report. Robertson ponders the irony that the Secretary of the Navy never did show up after all (he was diverted up towards Da Nang to decorate some Marines), signs the report, and is relieved from command.
In the end, General Lemming gets his third star, Colonel Robertson retires, Major Claiborn (against the dire warnings of Infantry Branch) turns down an assignment to Carlisle Barracks in favor of a tour as deputy professor of military science at a college in Montana, and Captain Knapp leaves the service. Private Paul Compella, among those killed in the abortive assault, has the new gymnasium named for him at Torrington High School in Connecticut. “In war,” Bunting writes, “those who understand the least are the ones who get killed.”
The themes are familiar by now: integrity vs. ambition, professionalism vs. careerism, feeling vs. callousness, Sam Damon vs. Courtney Massengale. But it would be unfair to Bunting to suggest that he deals in stereotypes. Lemming (an inspired choice of name!) is far more complicated than Massengale and immensely more talented as a tactician; and Robertson would have puzzled Sam Damon, especially if Damon had seen him reading Anthony Trollope while flying point-to-point in a slick. “What is particularly galling,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., USA, “is that the army is better than this, yet there is enough truth in Bunting’s assessment to make the charges hurt.”
We temporize and apologize for those who violate our standards rather than rising up in outrage and indignation and casting them out with the scorn and opprobrium they deserve. . . . The Army can, and should, . . . ensure, for we lesser mortals, that integrity, character, moral convictions, tenacity and fighting ability pay. As Major Bunting’s book makes painfully clear, some no longer believe that they do.21
Like Just’s Military Men, Bunting’s Lionheads is must reading for serving officers. It remains to be seen whether Bunting’s forthcoming nonfiction book, centering on bureaucratic sycophancy in the Army, attracts attention on the same level as The Lionheads. One thing is certain, however: Bunting will be heard from again, hopefully as well as in The Lionheads.
As I write this, the list of books and articles attacking military professionalism, from one angle or another, seems to go on unendingly. In September there was Robert Boyle’s Flower of the Dragon: The Breakdown of the U. S. Army in Vietnam, of which Noam Chomsky has written: “Boyle succeeds, as no one else has, in giving the grunt’s-eye view of a dirty colonial war. He shows how the Army collapsed under the weight of the ugliness of its tasks.”22 In December, Saturday Review of the Society devoted almost the entire issue to “the consequences of the war.” Among the 12 articles was Seymour Hersh’s “The Decline and Near Fall of the U.S. Army.” Hersh, whose earlier book, Cover-up,23 revealed the story of the Army’s inquiry into events surrounding My Lai, writes that the Army was saved from “out and out ruin” only by the presidential decision to pull it out of Vietnam. And in January 1973 came Lieutenant Colonel Anthony B. Herbert’s Soldier, which takes as its theme that “the whole damned U.S. Army in Vietnam was crazy.”24
The most common weakness shared by these books (Just and Bunting excepted) is their failure to introduce any sense of historical perspective. Everything bad is made to appear as though happening for the first time. This is demonstrably false and very misleading for the public whom the authors presumably seek to “inform.” One can range the history of warfare all the way from the retreat of the Athenians from Syracuse, through the Battle of the Somme, to Operation Smack in Korea, and in the process he will find the prototype for every hero and every villain.25 If so, then why all the fuss?
Two possible reasons are offered by Charles Ackley, a retired Navy chaplain, in The Modern Military in American Society. * “I am convinced,” he writes, “that the problem of military power, especially in America, cannot be comprehended in less than moral terms.” Moreover, what has happened in Vietnam “is troubling because it happened coincidentally with the military’s coming of age as a dominating institution in America.” If Ackley is right on either count, we might well share his concern to find out more than is now readily available about the thinking of military men themselves, their patterns of thought, the scale of their values.26
*Charles Walton Ackley, The Modern Military in American Society (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972, $10.95), 400 pages.
Ackley’s opening chapters trace the history of American ambivalence toward the military; the account, though brief, is generally valid. Then come five chapters that serve to tell us, systematically, rather a lot about the way the officer corps: of the various services think and write. The chapter titles are suggestive: the priority of reason, the risk of the irrational, the fascination for the concrete, the tendency to structure, the tendency to excess. Within each chapter one finds a brief historical treatment of the topic followed by separate analyses of how Army, Navy, and Air Force writers have approached the topic since World War II.
Ackley’s picture of the Air Force is one of a service preoccupied with “image” and “professionalism,” the latter defined largely as expertise in the handling of sophisticated weapons (not situations, not people, not problems—but weapons). Lacking the long and sobering traditions of the Army and Navy, Air Force writings seem almost blithe by comparison with the somber tone of the older services. They are less foreboding about the nature of man and his inventions and almost eager at times to get on with the show.
Imbued with an idea that has indeed revolutionized the world, but fragmented into crews and individuals serving the marvel of a machine which rarely allows for the meeting of persons except on its own terms, it is perhaps not to be wondered at that Air Force personnel have given less thought to the constructive use of power except as pure deterrence. . . . One is left with the deep suspicion that the belated, sudden surge of interest in civic action in the Air Force is on the part of many, and especially the hierarchy, a grasping at any straw for victory.27
Ackley worries some about each service, but it is clear that the Air Force—enamored of technology, less instructed by calamity than the other services, fascinated with the concrete (“the most ancient and persistent of idolatries and dead ends”)—worries him most. Ackley ends his book with a plea for finding ways to “humanize” the modern military. He doesn’t take up the so-called “electronic battlefield” specifically, but he hardly needs to, after reminding us that “in the age of power the gravest temptations for its misuse lie precisely with those who are called to manage its most ultimate expressions,” too many of whom seem trapped by a “pathetically shortsighted, if not blind, refusal to look beyond the technology of weaponry and war to the utterly crucial problem of what values can survive their development and use.”28 Ironically, the proof of Ackley’s pudding is that most officers will consider him “too philosophical,” a criticism that may say more about them than about the author.
Officers who find Ackley too much the philosopher (or too much the chaplain!) may feel themselves more comfortable with Colonel Donald F. Bletz, USA (Ret), who raises many similar questions in a more traditional, military, pragmatic way.* Colonel Bletz’s concern is with “military professionalism and the politico-military equation in the United States,” a much more accurate description of his book than the title it bears.
*Donald F. Bletz, The Role of the Military Professional in U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Praeger, 1972, $16.50), xiv and 320 pages.
Bletz sees the military input to foreign policy as traditional and legitimate but now under fire and inevitably headed into a period of decline. He traces the history of military professionalism in this country and devotes considerable space to institutional and educational determinants affecting the military officer’s perception of foreign policy. On the way, he poses some hard questions: Can a military professional allow himself to be caught up in the ideological fervor with which a democratic society takes on a military venture, such as Vietnam? (No, because he loses his objectivity and hence his professionalism.) When his advice is sought on the use of force, has the professional the right to question whether the relevant political considerations have been given adequate weight? (Yes, and his duty is to recommend the nonuse of force when he thinks that appropriate.)
Vietnam is very much on Bletz’s mind, leading to two interesting suggestions: (1) that the time has come to adopt “There is no substitute for a clearly enunciated national objective” to replace a more famous phrase; and (2) that we must come to recognize and define “professionalism” on at least two different levels: the technical level, which emphasizes military technology; and the politico-military level, which may require training and orientation altogether different from that of the first level. In blunt terms, he is asking whether success as a combat commander at brigade or wing level—the route to star and flag rank—qualifies a man for the kinds of decisions and leadership he will later be called upon to exercise.
Colonel Bletz, calling on almost thirty years of experience from private soldier to colonel, calls in question many of our assumptions and personnel practices. And he doesn’t fail to point out that many young officers are very much concerned indeed when they look back at United States policy since World War II and see Don Quixote at work rather than Sir Lancelot. The profession of arms in this country, he concludes, needs to take a hard look at itself, and time is running out. Near the end of his book, Colonel Bletz summarizes the problem now facing all of us:
Someday and somehow the war in Vietnam will come to an end. Regardless of how this comes about the American military professional can expect to receive little of the credit for whatever positive results may come from it. The profession can, on the other hand, expect to be the recipient of most of the blame when the post-Vietnam finger, pointing starts in earnest, if in fact it has not already started. This blame will be directed from the political left and right for quite different reasons, but it will come and it will tend to weaken rather than strengthen the American military profession.29
Another way of looking at it may simply be to wonder whether it is not an appropriate time to reshuffle the deck on “military professionalism.” Of what is it now composed? How should it be defined for the future? Our critics will always be with us. Maybe the time has come to show them by our example, that we can, on our own, ferret out the crucial questions, struggle with them, suggest meaningful answers.
Where else can that be done more effectively for the Air Force than in the pages of this journal?
United States Air Force Academy
Notes
1. “The Military and American Society,” Foreign Affairs, 49, 4 (July 1971), 698-710.
2. Military Review, 52, 7 (July 1972), inside back cover.
3. Walter Millis, Arms and Men (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1956); Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957); Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1960).
4. Huntington, pp. 7-18.
5. Not everyone was convinced See, for example, Lieutenant Colonel Zeb B. Bradford, Jr., USA, and Major James R Murphy, USAF, “A New Look at the Military Profession,” Army, 19, 2 (February 1969), 58-64. They criticized Huntington’s “artificial conceptualization in terms of conventional social theory” as having the effect of limiting the potential scope of expertise to “the management of violence.” Agreement is hard to reach, even physicians now and then taking their knocks. Vern L. Bullough’s Development of Medicine as a Profession (New York, 1966) implied that the medical profession’s purpose is a self-seeking altruism, that under the guise of protecting the public it advances its own social and economic power.
6. The Profession of Arms (London: The Times Publishing Company, Ltd., 1962), p, 63. This pamphlet, the best 65 pages ever written on the topic, has been used as a basic text at the USAF Academy since 1964. In October 1970 Sir John came to the Academy to update his views on those aspects of the profession that are of special relevance to “Today and Tomorrow.” See his The Military in the Service of the State (The Harmon Memorial Lectures In Military History, nr 13, USAFA), available on request.
7. “The Military Profession as a Competitive Environment,” Air University Review, 16, 6 (September-October 1965), 2-9. Thoughtful contributions from the same time frame Included Martin Blumenson, “Some Thoughts on Professionalism,” Military Review (September 1964), pp. 12-16; Edward L. Katzenbach, Jr., “The Demotion of Professionalism at the War Colleges,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (March 1965), pp. 34-41; and Allen Guttmann, “Political Ideals and the Military Ethic,” The American Scholar 34, 2 (Spring 1965), 221-37.
8. Lieutenant Colonel William L. Hauser, USA, “Armies and Societies: Three Case Studies,” Military Review, 52, 7-9 (July, August, and September 1972). Pages 4 and 5 of the July issue contain the generalizations cited here. See also his “Impact of Societal Change on the U.S. Army,” Parameters: The Journal of the Army War College, 1,3 (Winter 1972), 9-17, and the eight-part series by Haynes Johnson and George C, Wilson, “Army in Anguish,” Washington Post 13-20 September 1971, now available in paperback (New York: Pocket Books, 1972, $1.25), 192 pages.
9. Once an Eagle, p. 579 (paperback).
10. Ward Just, Military Men (New York: Knopf), pp. 11-12.
11. Ibid., pp. 5, 6, 62.
12. New York Times, 25 June 1972, et seq.
13. Just, pp. 121;”26.
14. Raphael Littauer and Norman Uphoff, editors, The Air War in Indochina (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972, $8.95 cloth, $3.95 paper). For a brief review highlighting the general conclusions of this study, see Air Force Magazine, September 1972, p. 176.
15. See his chapters 5 and 8 especially. “Outsiders: One Major” is presumably about Major Josiah Bunting, while “The Colonel” is assuredly David H. Hackworth, the most decorated officer of the Vietnam war, who was reported in the 5 January 1973 New York Times as now working as a waiter in a cafe on the Gold Coast of Australia. “He said he went to Australia to lead ‘a more creative, truthful, and worthwhile life than I have been living for the last 25 years.’”
16. For example, Family supplement to the Air Force Times, 17 February 1971; Saturday Review, 6 May 1972, pp. 29-32. Parts of these articles and others that appeared in The New Republic and the Ripon Society’s Forum later made their way into the Congressional Record.
17. For a review that highlights King’s most obvious exaggerations and distortions, see Military Review, 52, 9 (September 1972), 104-5.
18. Most of these developments can be followed In the New York Times; see, for example, the issues of 6 July 1972, 8 September 1972, 28 September 1972, 16 November 1972, and 3 January 1973.
19. Time, 1 January 1973, p. 62. In a “A Selection of the Year’s Best Books,” Time listed 20, 10 fiction and 10 nonfiction. The first entry under fiction (not in alphabetical order as to authors or titles) was The Lionheads.
20. Bunting has been widely interviewed and reported upon. For examples, see Saturday Review, 29 July 1972, pp. 7-12, and Family supplement to the Air Force Times, 3 January 1973, pp. 4-10. His resignation was covered In Life, Time, Newsweek, New York Times, and Washington Post.
21. Military Review, 52,7 (July 1972), 107-9.
22. Robert Boyle, Flower of the Dragon: The Breakdown of the U.S. Army in Vietnam (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, $6.95). Chomsky is quoted in The Washington Monthly, 4, 7 (September 1972), 4.
23. Seymour Hersh, Cover-up (New York: Random House, 1972, $6.95), 305 pp. See Lee Ewing’s flattering review, Air Force Times, 26 July 1972, p.34.
24. Anthony B. Herbert, with James T. Wooten, Soldier (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973, $10.95), 498 pp. Herbert, who became something of a cause célèbre In 1971 with his charges about war crimes in Vietnam, bad his book selected by the Military Book Club as its offering for March 1973. Most of his major points came out earlier in an interview published in Playboy Magazine, 19, 7 July 1972), 55-76, 191. Cf. Wilson Carey McWilliams, Military Honor after My Lai (New York: Council on Religion and International Affairs, 1972, $1.75).
25. Thucydides, Bk VII, Ch 7; “I cursed, and still do, the generals who caused us to suffer such torture, living in filth, eating filth, and then, death or injury just to boost their ego,” is one survivor’s comment from Martin Middlebrook’s First Day on the Somme (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1972, $8.95), p. 297; for Operation SMACK (7th Infantry Division, Korea, January 1953), see Walter G. Hermes, Truce Tent and Fighting Front (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1966), pp. 385-89.
26. Ackley, pp. 16, 21, 12.
27. Quotation from Ackley, pp. 139, 142; foregoing summary based on pp. 129-31, 167, 191, 194, 237, 240.
28. Ackley, pp. 323, 273.
29. Bletz, p. 272. For a collection of views often paralleling those of Ackley and Bletz, see Bruce M. Russett and Alfred Stephan, editors, Military Force and American Society (New York: Harper Torchbook # 1719, 1973, $4.95). For comparative studies, see, on England, J. C. M. Baynes, editor, The Soldier In Modern Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1972, $13.50); and for an international view, Jacques Van Doorn, editor, Military Profession and Military Regimes (The Hague: Moulton, 1970).
Major David MacIsaac (USAFA; Ph.D., Duke University) is Associate Professor of History, USAF Academy. Other assignments have included five years with the Strategic Air Command as a personnel officer in Texas and Spain; AFIT student as Duke; and adviser to the Deputy Chief of Staff for Training, Hq Vietnamese Air Force. His articles and reviews have appeared in Air Force Magazine, Mid-America, The Social Studies, and the Review.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
Air & Space Power Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor