Tag: service

To Serve or Not to Serve

This post first appeared on the Center for Security Policy Studies blog https://csps.gmu.edu/2020/03/09/to-serve-or-not-to-serve/ on March 9, 2020.

Prospective national security professionals may be forgiven for avoiding the federal government in the current political climate. Watching President Trump, members of Congress, and cable TV personalities impugn the integrity, competence, and patriotism of  national security officials does not paint a picture of a happy, fulfilling career. Disapproval of administration policies, like family separation or the President’s pardoning of accused war criminals, further discourages recruiting. Nevertheless, young people with talent, integrity, and an interest in national security should pursue opportunities to serve.

National security professionals recognized early that President Trump’s approaches to both national security and the federal workforce would pose staffing challenges. Dan Drezner wrote four Washington Post columns on the subject (see here, here, here, and here). Eliot Cohen initially encouraged people to seek positions but to “keep a signed but undated letter of resignation in their desk” to remind themselves of the requirement to identify their ethical redlines and to resign if required to violate them. He quickly reversed himself after deciding the administration would make honorable service impossible. Benjamin Wittes argued senior professional staff  should stay on to ensure high quality professional advice unless ordered to do something unethical.

What has happened in the three years since these questions began circulating?

Nothing good.

The number of applicants taking the Foreign Service exam dropped by 34% in 2017 and a further 22% in 2018. President Trump appointed a high percentage of political supporters to ambassadorships, and Trump-appointed ambassadors are removing their career deputies at an alarming rate. Career prosecutors at the Department of Justice quit the Roger Stone case in response to political pressure, and the Attorney General initiated investigations of the FBI and Hillary Clintonwhile cooperating with the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to produce political dirt on Joe Biden. The president personally attacked career diplomats and military officers who obeyed congressional subpoenas.

This hostile climate is exactly why talented young people of high ideals and integrity should seek careers in national security now and why more senior public servants should encourage them to do so. The most important feature of the U.S. national security apparatus is its non-partisan professionalism, while the most dangerous feature of the current administration is its disregard for the norms of American governance.

The antidote to personalization of the bureaucracy is not abstention or “deep state” resistance. National security professionals can best ensure the continuation of America’s proud tradition of non-partisan service by maintaining high professional standards while remembering Eliot Cohen’s exhortation to identify redlines. National security professionals who value our professional norms should be seeking out talented young people and recruiting them to serve.

Administration hostility is creating vacancies as more senior people choose to depart, giving young staffers opportunities to serve in responsible positions at younger than normal ages. Public service attracts people who value making a difference over personal gain, but that does not mean public servants lack ambition. Rather, their ambitions often focus on achieving good policy outcomes along with personal advancement. The former may be difficult in an administration that does not value professional expertise, but that difficulty can, paradoxically, help young staffers develop greater expertise. To have any chance of making good policy, their proposals will have to be more tightly reasoned and carefully supported than might be the case with friendlier political appointees.

Indeed, serving under a difficult administration may actually have positive side effects. New professionals can build the habit of executing policy dispassionately, at the direction of elected leaders, as well as the courage to explain and advocate policies that may not be popular with superiors. Professional staffers serving inexperienced and erratic decision-makers can unlearn some of the bad habits that their elders adopted, like presenting throwaway courses of action to limit superiors. A national security professional who begins in this environment and endures with her integrity intact is likely to be a formidable policy-maker in the future.

Finally, nobody should ever enter public service without a sense of duty, and duty does not end because the administration is hostile or incompetent. If anything, weak political appointees increase the duty of competent public servants to do their best within their ethical boundaries. Anyone hoping to have a career in national security should understand that she will have to serve in administrations with which she disagrees and under leaders of whom she disapproves. A young graduate entering public service in 1980 during the Carter administration and serving 40 years would have also served under Presidents Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, GW Bush, Obama, and Trump. Secretaries of State would have ranged from Al Haig to Madeline Albright. Given that broad diversity, any public servant could expect to disagree with some or even many of the people she would have to serve and policies she would have to implement. New staffers, however, have more to gain and less to lose in the current environment. Even with accelerated responsibility they will be farther from the political appointees than their more senior colleagues. Signing that letter of resignation in the desk drawer will cost them less than a mid-grade staffer who is halfway to retirement.

People who value rational, evidence-based, morally defensible national security policy can either enter the arena with their eyes open, or they can cede those entry level positions to people of lesser qualifications and greater ethical flexibility. Today is the perfect time to join, knowing that it may be a trial by fire.

The Cost of Service in a Partisan Age

This post appeared originally at the Center for Security Policy Studies blog https://csps.gmu.edu/2019/11/09/the-cost-of-service-in-a-partisan-age/ on November 9, 2019

Delegation (left to right): Alexander Vindman, Joseph Pennington, Kurt Volker, Olena Serkal, Volodymyr Zelensky, Rick Perry, Gordon Sondland, Olena Selenska (First Lady), Ron Johnson at Zelensky’s Presidential Inauguration, 2019
Photo from Wikimedia Commons

The Trump administration has challenged American norms of civil-military relations. Candidate Trump signaled that he would reverse established law and attack commonly held norms when he promised to reauthorize waterboarding, and he further challenged tradition by appointing an unusual number of serving and retired generals to senior positions and referring to them as “my generals.” In this hyper-partisan environment, the military has struggled to maintain a non-partisan position. Maintaining it became unexpectedly harder last week when a serving military officer, LTC Alexander Vindman, was drawn into the impeachment inquiry, and the president subsequently attacked him personally.

Faced with this challenge, the military’s priority is to remain outside the partisan fray and maintain its position as a trusted national institution. Political actors, including the president, are attempting to use the military’s prestige to bolster their positions. This prestige, however, rests on the tradition of non-partisanship.

Decisions about when and how to go to war are inherently political because they have political consequences, but the military has traditionally provided advice on matters with political implications while scrupulously avoiding any participation, even indirectly, in the partisan contestation of elections. In a time when every question is contested on a partisan basis, every answer becomes partisan. The military must tread an extremely narrow path to fulfill its obligations without straying any further than necessary into partisan conflict.

Testifying truthfully before Congress should not be a partisan issue, but there is no way to avoid appearing partisan in modern politics. Refusing to testify is perceived as partisan by the one party; agreeing to testify is perceived as partisan by the other. Assertions that LTC Vindman could be court-martialed for testifying are far-fetched, but he has been vilified in the conservative media and will likely retire at his current grade despite his stellar credentials.

LTC Vindman’s situation presents a dilemma for military leaders attempting to sustain non-partisan norms. So far, senior military leaders have neither criticized nor defended Vindman. There are no grounds for criticizing him, but to defend him would place the military establishment in direct conflict with the president and create the appearance that the military is taking a side in the impeachment debate. For military leaders, the priority should remain protecting the military’s non-partisan legitimacy. This may, unfortunately, include tolerating unfair treatment of one of their own. Up to a point, the institutional legitimacy of the military is more important than the mistreatment of one individual.

Opponents of the president may be tempted to make Vindman into a heroic symbol of resistance. They would be wise to resist the temptation. Conservative adulation of Lt. Col. Oliver North after he testified to Congress regarding the Iran Contra Affair in 1987 reinforced the growing perception at the time that the military was closely aligned with the Republican Party, which subsequently undermined the military’s credibility and prestige. [1] 

The real test will come if the president and his supporters continue to attack Vindman publicly or attempt to take legal action against him. Retiring as a lieutenant colonel may be unfair, but it is a small price to pay for defending the norms of civil-military relations. If Vindman testifies in open hearings, the president and his supporters are likely to engage in public character assassination in order to undermine his testimony. The president has already shown his willingness to intervene directly in military legal proceedings.

Military leaders can be excused for accepting some costs to Vindman in exchange for protecting the military institution, but they cannot allow him to be prosecuted or maligned publicly by the president in a way that could make him a target. If the president pursues his standard playbook of innuendo and harassment, he will place military leaders in a lose-lose situation – either publicly contradict the president in a highly-charged partisan matter or publicly abandon an officer to be persecuted for his honorable service. The president should understand that unfounded public attacks risk reluctant repudiation by his senior military leaders, and those leaders should privately signal their willingness to do so before it becomes a public spectacle.

Senior uniformed and civilian military leaders must prioritize the military’s non-partisan integrity in a highly partisan environment, but they must realize that they risk the same dilemma as LTC Vindman. Whether he chose to testify or not, his actions were bound to be seen as partisan. Now, military leaders will face the same problem if the president forces them to choose between defending Vindman or abandoning him. The president and his supporters will view the former as partisan resistance, and Democrats will view the latter as partisan acquiescence. The president should avoid creating that dilemma, and military leaders should let him know now, before it again bursts into public view, that they too will speak truthfully and publicly if forced.

[1] Peter Feaver and Richard H. Kohn, Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security (MIT Press, 2001).