The Wall Street Journal published an account of American soldiers fighting in Russia (paywalled) at the end of World War I to commemorate the centenary of the armistice. Leaders were unable to explain to the soldiers why they were in Archangel fighting Bolsheviks when they had been drafted to fight Germans. Things became even more tense once the Germans surrendered and supplies ran short just in time for the Russian winter.
Initially commanders did what commanders do–they assured their higher headquarters that all was going well and morale was high. It wasn’t and it wasn’t. Eventually the senior officers had to acknowledge that troops were on the verge of mutiny.
Looking back at the Polar Bear Expedition in light of yesterday’s dog and pony show on the Mexican border highlights an age old problem for militaries, one we would do well to fix. The first officer to tell his masters, uniformed and civilian, that things are going badly will almost certainly be first ignored, then relieved, and finally besmirched. Only when word gets back to the home front and politicians face angry families, or when military disaster becomes undeniable, will senior officers drop their insistence on optimism and positive news.
The WSJ story makes it clear that is what happened in Archangel. I recently rewatched A Bridge Too Far, in which the intelligence officer who predicted disaster was cashiered before the operation. Phil Klay published a brilliant reflection on his own Iraq service in America on Veterans Day that recounted the disgrace of the PSOD (read it for yourself–it is well worth the time). Finally, yesterday, we got to witness commanders on the ground assuring the Secretary of Defense, himself a distinguished combat commander, that soldiers laying wire along the Mexican border to defend the mightiest nation on earth against a few thousand tired migrants were both deriving great training value and maintaining sky-high morale. As usual, the soldiers themselves were not having it, and we are left with the uncomfortable acknowledgement that field commanders are more likely to say what their bosses want to hear than to tell the truth. That military professionals just accept this practice as a necessity of promotion (and I do not exempt myself from this criticism) says nothing very good about the military profession in America in 2018.
American soldiers are not Roman centurions and they are not the French Foreign Legion. The citizen soldiers of a democracy deserve better. Our society lavishes praise on the “heroes” who lead our military, but we collectively are not worthy of such praise if we can breezily lie when it suits us. Leonard Wong and Stephen J. Gerras identified the problem in a well-regarded paper, but senior leaders have not made fixing it a priority. We should not be surprised–everyone in a position of authority rose through the system in which casual and obvious dishonesty was required. It would be surprising if they turned on a culture that has rewarded them so greatly. The tragedy is that these are not evil men and women. In my experience, most of them are scrupulously honest in their daily lives. They do not lie to their spouses. They would not cheat on their taxes or steal a candy bar. The military has placed certain areas outside the bounds of normal rules for honesty.
We have developed a leadership culture that views positivity and optimism as fundamental characteristics of leaders, and to some extent they are. Nobody will follow a sad-sack. The danger is that it is far too easy to conflate optimism with happy talk. Telling superiors that morale is good when it is clearly not is not optimism or positive leadership–it is lying. The mutineers of Archangel showed where it leads. Secretary Mattis should never have asked a commander on camera how morale was–answering with anything short of “excellent” would have been career suicide. In asking the question, the Secretary was essentially soliciting a lie for public and presidential consumption on national television. In doing so, he signalled every uniformed leader that such casual dishonesty was not only acceptable but expected.
I should point out here that I am not assuming that morale is bad. Perhaps it is great, although I doubt it. The point, rather, is that the colonel’s answer moves us no closer to knowing the state of morale at Camp Donna than we were before the Secretary asked the question. If we ask ourselves the simple question, how would the colonel’s answer have differed if morale were good or bad, we recognize the problem. The U.S. military has been fortunate not to face an existential threat since about 1944. Since the turning points of World War II, we have faced some terrible combat at places like Chosin and Khe Sanh and Falluja, but no military leader (outside a few watch officers at NORAD) has faced a decision on which the fate of his nation hangs. Officers have been free to answer with their careers in the forefronts of their minds, knowing that the immense national power of the United States would mitigate any negative consequences. Even when troops rebelled, as they did in Archangel and on occasion in Vietnam, the consequences were unlikely to be disastrous.
Only a culture of radical honesty, fostered from the top, will overcome the cost-benefit analysis that leads officers to tell “little white lies” that in the aggregate are neither little nor harmless. When I was a young captain, my battalion commander used to say, “don’t [urinate] on my back and tell me it’s raining.” When military senior leaders start responding that way to obvious happy talk from ambitious colonels, we’ll be on the right path.
James W. Vizzard 