Why Is the Reputation of the U.S. Military Going South So Fast?
In the years and months since the U.S. withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, public respect for our armed forces has been plummeting toward levels not seen since the end of the American war in Vietnam.
This new wave of skepticism is coming not just from the left, which has long been leery of the military, but also from the right. In a recent Gallup poll, public confidence in the military was still relatively high at 60 percent — much more than any other major public institution — but had declined sharply, especially among Republicans.
Conservatives are expressing concern about more than the collapse of U.S. nation-building efforts in the Middle East. Earlier this summer, the Republican senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama denounced the Pentagon’s leaders as too “woke.” He is now holding up the promotion of hundreds of senior officers, which has left the Marine Corps without a commandant for the first time in 164 years, the Army without a chief and, as of this month, kept Adm. Lisa Franchetti from assuming the top position in the Navy. She would be the first woman in the Navy’s two-and-a-half-century existence to hold the post.
Tuberville and his ilk apparently believe that abortion access and drag shows at military bases have been a corrupting force on our servicemen and women, so it might be helpful to look back at some actual moments of moral and strategic failing in the ranks of the American armed forces to get a sense of perspective. GENERALS AND ADMIRALS, CRIMINALS AND CROOKS: Dishonorable Leadership in the U.S. Military (University of Notre Dame, 399 pp., $38) is subtler than its title indicates. It is actually a thoughtful study of the ways in which power corrupts.
The author, Jeffery J. Matthews, a historian at the University of Puget Sound, depicts recent U.S. Navy leadership as especially bad. In Matthews’s telling, the modern Navy has had three major scandals that involved admirals. He reminds us that in the 1980s, Vice Adm. John Poindexter was in the middle of the Reagan administration’s benighted scheme to facilitate the illicit sale of high-tech weapons to Iran in exchange for hostages held in Lebanon and illegally use the profits to fund an anti-communist insurgency in Nicaragua.
The Navy’s next two episodes were even worse, Matthews suggests, because they involved entire subcultures within the service and showed that, when cleaning house, the Navy deployed investigators not to probe the actions of its top people but to protect them from outside scrutiny. In 1991, there were widespread complaints of sexual abuse at the “Tailhook” convention of naval aviators in Las Vegas. Navy investigators let leadership off the hook. Unsurprisingly, the inquiries were found to be “purposefully inadequate,” Matthews writes, after public pressure forced the Pentagon to look again.
It turns out that the Navy chose not to question any of the more than 30 admirals and Marine Corps generals who had attended the alcohol-soaked gathering. In addition, the Pentagon found that the rear admiral in charge of the Naval Investigative Service didn’t pursue the inquiry seriously, because he did not believe that women should be in the military.
Amazingly, the Navy comes off even worse in Matthews’s account of the “Fat Leonard” scandal. Between 2006 and 2013, dozens of senior naval officers accepted bribes from a Malaysian defense contractor in exchange for overlooking his inflated invoices. Matthews portrays the Navy’s Pacific Fleet as a RICO-ish criminal enterprise.
Leonard Glenn Francis, the contractor for whom the affair is named, even penetrated the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, a connection that helped him quash inquiries into his activities. One party he threw in Manila for American Pacific Fleet officers featured a “rotating carousel of prostitutes.”
Ultimately, the bribery scheme cost American taxpayers at least $35 million. Legal cases are still pending, but so far more than 30 Navy officials and contractors have been convicted or pleaded guilty, including one admiral who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for committing federal crimes while on active duty, which is another naval first.
One of the lessons Matthews draws is that the American military tends not to investigate senior officers as vigorously as it does junior ones. Another is that Congress has to get involved to remedy that tendency. The Navy did not take Tailhook seriously until the Senate Armed Services Committee put all its officer promotions on hold.
Of all the top leaders in American history, probably no one got away with breaking rules and disregarding orders as much as Douglas MacArthur. The consensus on him among historians has been that he was indeed insubordinate, but that to survive as a general long enough to defy three presidents — Hoover, F.D.R. and Truman — he had to be pretty effective as a commander.
Not so, James Ellman argues in MACARTHUR RECONSIDERED: General Douglas MacArthur as a Wartime Commander (Stackpole, 277 pp., $29.95). Reviewing MacArthur’s performances in World War II and the Korean War, he concludes that the general was a mediocre commander who lacked interest in details, packed his staff with incompetent bootlickers and often lied in trying to justify his actions.
And, of course, he was quite insubordinate, with an alarming tendency to ignore orders and contradict stated policies. In a charge I hadn’t seen before, Ellman alleges that, while Truman sought détente in the Korean War early in 1951, MacArthur took it upon himself to aggravate relations with China and thus extended the war by two years, a period during which more than 13,000 American soldiers died. Truman fired MacArthur shortly thereafter.
By contrast, Lt. Gen. William Simpson, a more capable Army general of World War II, is hardly known today. So it is good to see the veteran armor officer William Stuart Nance’s COMMANDING PROFESSIONALISM: Simpson, Moore, and the Ninth U.S. Army (University Press of Kentucky, 196 pp., paperback, $30) cast an appreciative light on his style of leadership, which was best displayed during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-45.
The lanky Texan commanded a force of 341,000 men and got along with everyone, including Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, a man who was arguably the British version of MacArthur and who, Nance writes, “might well have given Patton an aneurysm.” Simpson, low-key and quiet, kept his cool.
To be honest, the resulting look at Simpson’s approach to command style is a bit dull and repetitive. But that may be the point: In war, slow and steady tends to beat fast and flashy. In any case, they’re both better than incompetent, amoral and corrupt.
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GUNS N GEAR
“James Ellman argues in MACARTHUR RECONSIDERED: General Douglas MacArthur as a Wartime Commander (Stackpole, 277 pp., $29.95). Reviewing MacArthur’s performances in World War II and the Korean War, he concludes that the general was a mediocre commander who lacked interest in details, packed his staff with incompetent bootlickers and often lied in trying to justify his actions.
And, of course, he was quite insubordinate, with an alarming tendency to ignore orders and contradict stated policies. In a charge I hadn’t seen before, Ellman alleges that, while Truman sought détente in the Korean War early in 1951, MacArthur took it upon himself to aggravate relations with China and thus extended the war by two years, a period during which more than 13,000 American soldiers died. Truman fired MacArthur shortly thereafter.”
I see Ellman is a member of the MacArthur Haters Club. It is my view that MacArthur haters at the level demonstrated by Ellman are biased in their assessment of the General and have a political axe to grind. Mac was a Republican after all and a prominent undeclared candidate for the Presidency in a country filled with Communists hiding under “Democrat” Party legitimacy. He is frequently vilified for his role in breaking the Bonus Marchers Occupation of Washington DC, but what is not mentioned by his detractors is that it was an illegal attempt to overthrow the Federal Government and replace it with a Communist one. The organizer and leader of the Bonus march was a Communist Party member and a Soviet agent who reported directly to Stalin. With the Bonus occupation in progress, he assessed that he might be able to provoke a successful insurrection and asked Moscow for permission to try, which was granted. Had MacArthur not responded aggressively, there might have been a successful Communist coup long before the era of the current Deep State and the stolen election of 2020.
Douglas MacArthur had a significant amount of personal shortcomings and other traits that were out of style with the American People by the 1940’s. He was a 19th Century General in many ways as shown by his habit of talking about himself in the 3rd person and issuing memos from “General MacArthur’s Headquarters” instead of the commands assigned designation. On the other hand he was noted for leading from the front in his career up through WW1 when he was a Brigadier General, and later he was often present and exposed in forward areas when he could have easily been far to the rear. Aside from the Philippino Field Marshall’s Cap, he was not prone to wearing his extensive awards and decorations on his uniform like some Boy Scout with a merit badge sash. That is not the case with our modern soldiery.
If we look at the accusation of being mediocre and insubordinate, it is arguably the case that we are still dealing with the same bias. in the St. Mihiel Offensive in 1918, Allied units shattered the German lines in front of Metz and opened that important linchpin town up to easy capture. MacArthur had advanced elements in the outskirts of the city and they were of the opinion that the Germans were giving way and that it could be captured easily. If so, the capture of Metz would have unhinged the whole German front, as it was the main rail hub for them in Eastern France. MacArthur agued with Pershing and his staff about cancelling the Argonne Offensive and maintaining the momentum toward Metz. He was overruled. Pershing halted the St. Mihiel Offensive without taking Metz and launched the Meuse-Argonne Offensive instead, which produced high casualties and some legendary exploits to the record of American Arms, but no decisive breakthrough. Would you rather serve under a general who is concerned about preserving his soldiers lives by practicing economy of force and common sense or a general who has little regard for the human cost of war? This situation was repeated in the Pacific War when Nimitz wanted to take Iwo Jima and Okinawa and MacArthur argued that those operations would be unnecessary to the goal of isolating the Japanese islands and would be extremely costly in lives. He was right.
MacArthur fought the whole campaign in the SouthWest Pacific with shoestring forces that were undersupplied due to higher priorities elsewhere. Despite this, he pushed the Japanese out of that theatre with clever and often low casualty advances that were often brilliant. One of the higher supply priorities in Washington’s view was the lavishing of material on the Soviet Union. MacArthur chaffed at this in light of the trickle of men and supplies coming his way. Was this insubordination again? Is it unprofessional too complain about undersupplying American soldiers in combat in order to keep the Communist Soviet Union from being defeated? If you think so, you probably see nothing wrong with stripping the US military or arms and ammunition and sending it to Ukraine.
Moving to Korea, it is clear that MacArthur’s plan for the Inchon landing was masterful, while the alternatives endorsed by the Joint Chiefs and others would have been ineffective half measures at best. He was only able to get JCS to go along with it because he assured them it would work and would be less costly in lives. He also told them he would take complete personal responsibility for it if it failed. We have not seen that in an American general since then. This notion above that; “… Truman sought détente in the Korean War early in 1951, MacArthur took it upon himself to aggravate relations with China and thus extended the war by two years, a period during which more than 13,000 American soldiers died. Truman fired MacArthur shortly thereafter.” is laughable. How do you have detente with an enemy who is in active battle with your armed forces and outnumbers them at the front by 8 to 1? How exactly do you aggravate relations with someone you are already at war with? MacArthur argued that in war, there is no substitute for victory. What he meant was, if you are going to fight, you might as well fight to win, and fighting to not merely lose or for something else aside from victory was illogical, immoral, and ultimately defeatist. The fact that MacArthur was right and Truman was wrong is evidenced by American military experience since that time. The record is atrocious for those advocating Truman’s stance. In 1950, China was not a nuclear power and even the Soviets only had 4-5 A-bombs and no bomber capable of reaching North America with them and returning. There was no way there would have been a nuclear exchange and a 3rd World War if the Yalu bridges and Manchurian sanctuaries were bombed as MacArthur advocated. This mythology of Truman’s wisdom and MacArthur’s folly on this point of order is one of the greatest falsehoods enshrined in American History. The present facts bear this out. Today the festering malignant results of allowing the DPRK to survive in 1950 has us looking at the very real possibility that they will land a few nukes on us in the near future. There certainly is nothing but mediocracy and incompetence wearing stars in our military now. Winning wars is just as out of style as MacArthur himself, and generals taking cellphone selfies on that last plane out of failure is the new standard of leadership. We will soon live to regret that.