Since the conclusion of WWII, many observers have noted that the United States seems to have lost its way in terms of the formulation and implementation of a consistent foreign policy and there are no shortage of explanations as to why. Naturally then, there are many factors that could account for the inconsistency of our nation's foreign policy, including the turnover of personnel between Republican and Democratic administrations (whose views about policy can differ considerably) and economic downturns. Mark Perry expands and deepens the investigation of the former factor by analyzing the bureaucratic infighting within both the political (mostly civilian) and military establishments within and across the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama in his 2017 publication The Pentagon's Wars: The Military's Undeclared War Against America's Presidents.
Perry's thesis is that the stability of the nation's political-military bond that is the cornerstone to our democracy (separating us from other countries that, to their detriment, have failed to find a balance between civilian and military power) is not as stable as it appears. While there is plenty of blame to be assigned to both sides of the relationship, Perry warns that "over the last twenty-eight years, the brilliance of our battlefield leadership has not been matched by those in Washington who are responsible for making certain that our soldiers, sailors, and airmen (and women) not only have what they need to win, but are backed by strong leaders who speak their minds" (Perry, 2017, p. 297). In other words, military leaders have come to strongly disagree with various administrations, yet by not raising strong objections at critical points in the decision-making process are letting those same presidents go ahead with major foreign policy decisions without having their assumptions checked and all options thoroughly explored and vetted. Where did this increased resentment come from and why?
It all starts in the 1980s towards the tail end of the Cold War, with two major changes that impacted the nature of warfare and the military itself. The first of these major changes was the "Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)" which entailed a major technological shift in how wars are fought, going from traditional ground wars involving large amounts of machinery, inaccurate heavy weaponry, and personnel to wars fought by "lighter and more mobile forces" backed up by advances in stealth and surveillance technologies brought on by the age of computers (Perry, 2017, p. xiii-xiv). (Think drones, satellites, stealth bombers and laser-guided weaponry.) Accompanying the RMA was the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act (Goldwater-Nichols Act for short) which revised the chain of command by taking out the heads of the armed services (Joint Chiefs of Staff) from command positions and assigning them to either an advisorial role (JCS chair) or merely to that of training and equipping soldiers (other military heads). Both the RMA and Goldwater-Nichols forced the four branches of the military closer together, but this integration made the civilian-military and intra-military infighting worse as military readiness clashed with the realities of achieving battlefield success.
Often, the result of this friction was for administrations to appoint friendly military officers to head the JCS or other military branches during the course of the eleven military operations in four countries in the Middle East as part of the War on Terror. Of course, none of these Middle East interventions ended in a clear U.S. victory, but instead resulted in stalemates with terrorist groups at best or at the worst, failures (i.e. Abu-Ghraib, the slaughter of majority Shiites by Saddam Hussein's Sunni militias, civil war in Iraq, Libya and Syria), as new RMA-inspired combat doctrines forced commanders to make the army function as not only war-fighters but also peacekeepers and nation-builders when administrations and military leaders failed to plan properly for "the day after" the battle (Perry, 2017, p. 250).
Overall, Perry's The Pentagon's Wars presented an intriguing and thought-provoking, yet disturbing behind-the-scenes narrative of the United State's foreign policy misadventures through the end of the Obama administration in 2016, showing how devastating intra-and-inter-agency fighting can be in carrying out foreign policy. Now, enter candidate-and-now-President Trump, who promised to beef up the military budget and its personnel in order to "start winning wars again" and who repudiated the nation-building failures of the past, especially attacking Hillary Clinton's part in endorsing the Libya intervention as a "cruise missile liberal" or "liberal interventionist" (Perry, 2017, p. 295-296). Will such a strategy overcome the difficult transitions and gray-areas for the civilian-military relationship in the Goldwater-Nichols era? Or does it fail to recognize and address the underlying issues of this critical relationship, dooming us to repeat history not only in the Middle East but also now in Asia? We shall see.
Works Cited:
Perry, Mark. (2017). The Pentagon's Wars: The Military's Undeclared War Against America's Presidents. New York: Basic Books.
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