'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Rumsfeld and the cautious generals

President Bush came out swinging yesterday to offer what WaPo reporters called, "an unequivocal vote of confidence in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld."

And to show just how seriously he considered this matter, he even took time out from his long weekend to issue a special statement denying claims that Rumsfeld completely ignored the professional advice he'd gotten from the generals in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq and at several stages since...

This brass-vs.-suits contest inside the Pentagon over the conduct of the Iraq war is not a new issue Check for example this JWN post from November 2003.

What is new is the willingness of small numbers of retired US flag officers to come out publicly not just to criticise Rumsfeld but also to issue a four-year-overdue call for his resignation. The IHT yesterday identified a fifth retired general who had done this.

But here's the thing. There are literally hundreds of serving flag officers in the four branches of the US military. (If someone has time to verifiably research the exact number that would be grand: just post the number and a link in the Comments here.) David Ignatious wrote in yesterday's WaPo that,

When I recently asked an Army officer with extensive Iraq combat experience how many of his colleagues wanted Rumsfeld out, he guessed 75 percent. Based on my own conversations with senior officers over the past three years, I suspect that figure may be low.

I think an answer needs to be built from a number of components... One of these is of course that we have a valuable and long-engrained system in the US of civilian control of the military.

That's grand, and it's a basic component of democracy. I am totally not calling for a military coup here!

But still, even within that system, there has to be a way for basic professional expertise to be made available to the (civilian) policymakers at all levels in a purely professional and unpoliticized way. Shinseki tried to do that, and was canned. He was then replaced as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the nation's top military officer) by two Rumsfeld yes-men in turn, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers and then Marines Gen. Peter Pace.

Rumsfeld, of course, is the person who makes the recommendation to the White House regarding who to nominate for that job. So he has made it crystal clear that he only wants a yes-man in the job.

There are other powerful ways in which the country's top officers are trained (or "incented") to be loyal yes-men, too. One of course is the whole tenor of basic military training, which is such as to inculcate and value the blind following of orders and the setting aside of personal considerations and analyses... (But then, regarding operational matters, the military wants to encourage innovative, out-of-the box thinking in mid-level officers... So there's quite a bit of a tension there.)

And then, there's the pay structure. And not just the structure of the pay and benefits for serving officers, which already and understandably incent people toward behavior that will ensure promotion, but also-- and this is crucial for top-rank people coming near the end of their careers-- the structure of the military pension scheme in which an officer, once retired, will then find himself for the rest of his (or her) life.

Expectations about pension levels have been mentioned by many reporters when discussing the very cautious behavior of the highest-ranking officers... So I thought I'd go over to the DOD's Final Pay Retirement Calculator to see what difference it would make for me, if I were a senior-level officer coming toward the end of my career in, say, 2010, having served for 30 years at that point... (I kept the default "expectations" regarding inflation rate etc that are given in the bottom half of that web-page.)

So I found out there that if I retired in 2010 as a Colonel (O-6), my monthly pension would be $7,609. Not shabby at all-- especially given the many other perks and benefits that military retirees get in this country, to say nothing of opportunities for lucrative consultancies, etc...

Ah, but if I'd been a loyal officer and got to retire at O-7 level (Brig.-Gen.) level in 2010, instead, then I'd make $8,664 per month. ($12,660 more per year.) But if I'd been even more "loyal"-- to my superiors, to the Secretary of Defense, etc-- I might be an O-8 (Maj.-Gen.) and pull in $9,767/month instead (a further increase of $13,236/yr.)... Or an O-9 (Lieut.-Gen.), and retire at $10,780/mth.... or an O-10 (full Gen.) and get $10,901/mth.

I have to tell you a few things here. Firstly, the incentive is certainly there for a serving high-rank officer "just to keep quiet for a couple of further years" as s/he heads toward retirement... and certainly to avoid doing anything dramatic that might force him/her to resign from the force at the existing rank, if need be, in order to protest the policy. And also, to do nothing that might jeopardize that vital next promotion, that could-- over the course of 35 more years of life after retirement-- add up to huge amounts of actual $$$.

Second, I find all these retirement levels (and all the pay levels for still-serving officers at the top end of the scale) quite obscenely high. The serving generals in this country live very nicely indeed, with all kinds of country clubs, subsidized housing and transportation, tax breaks, etc... They form a special class of pampered and very powerful individuals who nowadays roam the world trying to run programs and projects in scores of different countries... And when they retire, many of them find well-paid additional jobs inside our country's bloated military-industrial sector.

I, with my pathetic little income as a writer, have to subsidize all that? (FCNL tells us that 42 cents of every dollar I in taxes goes to the military now.) And the grunts out there in the field risking their lives in obedience to Bush's scary and destabilizing war plans are supporting the generals' lifestyle, too.

So the very least we should all expect from these guys, given how nicely we are all treating them, is that they should candidly give the country and its citizenry their best professional estimate of whether a proposed war-plan will work, or not.

Shinseki tried to do that, and got canned for it. But why have we not seen any other generals trying to "storm the ramparts of the SecDef's office" since then?