The United States is not the first nation to have civilians in charge of the military. But as one of a very few, the difficulties with that arrangement are exposed for all to see. In Cage Fight, Bruce Thornton of the Hoover Institution (which analyzes war and the military) uses his reach to put together five essays from key observers on exactly those problems. It is most enlightening.

From ancient Greece right up to the Biden administration, overseeing the military has shown to be fraught with problems. The ancient Greeks executed leaders of a battle they won. They then lost the war. Julius Caesar defied the Senate by bringing his troops into Rome. They stabbed him to death for it.

In the US Civil War, not only did Lincoln have difficulty with his military leaders (corrupt and ineffective General McLellan actually ran for president against him while the war was still raging), but the country was not nearly as unified into two camps as has been generally portrayed. For one thing, slavery was hardly generalized. The south, had a population of about nine million, and four million of them were slaves. But just 3000 whites owned most of those slaves. Slavery meant little or nothing to most southerners (“A rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight”). Meanwhile in the North, groups like the Copperheads wanted nothing to do with a war they could not relate to either. New York City rioted for four days over the draft, which the rich could buy their way out of and the poor immigrants got swept up in. So getting support for the war was about as preoccupying as the war itself. Lincoln did not like the way the generals were conducting the war, and shuffled the deck to get better results. He clearly succeeded in that. Score one for the civilians.

More recently, we have seen the results of civilians directing modern wars, and failing miserably. The United States has not won a war since General Eisenhower had free reign in World War II. President Roosevelt steered clear of decision-making and second guessing him. So did President Wilson in WWI, much to General Pershing’s benefit.

Not so Truman in Korea, who up and fired Douglas MacArthur, or Kennedy in Cuba’s Bay of Pigs invasion, who ordered air cover rescinded the night before the landing. Johnson (and specifically Secretary of Defense McNamara) in Viet Nam, Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, Trump in Syria and Afghanistan, and Biden, who simply pulled the plug on Afghanistan in a disastrous retreat the military was somehow unprepared for (despite Trump’s declaration of it a year before). All thought they knew better than their top military advisers, and all failed miserably.
In clear, cogent writing, the five essayists show that the military held its nose and obeyed, as civilians directed them into disaster after disaster, overruling the military experts and pursuing wrongheaded tactics instead.

At the other extreme, there are three examples of the military leadership out of control in public.

Trump comes under deserved fire for first putting four generals in his White House, all of whom left in disgust or shame. Then he tried to co-opt the military into policing demonstrations, which is not its job. Disobeying an order is insubordination, but this order was itself unconstitutional, putting the military is a bind. He did manage to get them to clear a path so he could take a ridiculous photo of himself holding up a bible in front of a closed church, for which Joint Chiefs of Staff head General Milley publicly admitted he should not have done. Nor should he have been there for the event itself.

Milley then unaccountably took the ball and ran with it himself when he personally called his counterpart in China to tell him not to be concerned about Trump’s threats to go to war with China, with the threat of nuclear weapons. Milley said as long as he was there, he personally would ensure that did not happen.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Thornton says that the various generals who condemned Trump for his fascist tendencies in the 2020 election “were all likely violations of 10 U.S.C. Section 888, Article 88, of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that applies equally to retired generals and admirals and forbids officers from disparaging their commander in chief.” This is the real separation of church and state. When applied at all.

After WWII, the military brass put on a spectacle to be ashamed of, as the leaders of all the branches publicly disparaged each other’s service in an attempt to get more funding for theirs. They belittled each other in Congressional hearings and in the media, decrying the others’ feeble expertise, their mission, their history, their accomplishments – anything to make themselves look more important to the nation. It got so embarrassing that Congress had to pass a law resetting the Joint Chiefs, their roles, and what they could or could not say.

Then in Korea, the military was beside itself in being forced to racially integrate. Every excuse in the book popped up its ugly racist head. Eventually, though “the army discovered that integration did not lead to racial incidents, breakdown in discipline, lower morale, or loss of effectiveness.” Today, 40% of army personnel is Black.

Meanwhile, it turns out it is hardly the case the internet is unique cause of “the collapse of objective reality.” The invention of writing itself, according to one essay, has been the conduit for charges and countercharges, threats and actions that did not pass muster with truth. Secrets and especially top secrets became a plague. Misinformation, disinformation and outright lies have abounded throughout history. The internet is merely the latest conduit.

The five essays are written with clear, compact precision, if I dare say, military precision. They lay out the facts as best we know them from history, and make the case that civilians running the military is an iffy proposition, but no better than the military itself running everything.

In the three disasters of Viet Nam, Afghanistan and Iraq, Thornton says, the bottom line is “In not one case did the president who initiated the hostilities conclude them before he left office. If those three successive failures told us anything, it was that the policy hub emanating from the White House had grown too confident of its own quixotic infallibility, unchallenged by a divisive Congress that was supine in matters of war.”

In a word, hubris, as the Greeks called it 3000 years ago, when they succumbed to it. ( )