Analyzing Those You Can’t Offend

Elisabeth Bumiller has an interesting piece on how much of the military brass is frustrated that Barack Obama won’t make up his mind quickly and has instead decided to think things through before escalating in Afghanistan. I agree with Spencer Ackerman that Bumiller’s mystery military analyst closes the piece with strong points:

A military policy analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing senior Pentagon leaders, said that “the military lives in a very rarefied environment,” and that “they are not out there every day having to meet citizens who say, ‘What the hell are we doing?’ ”

Senior military officers, the analyst said, “are smart guys, but they do not have the daily pulse of the American public in their face. They tend to interpret politicians who give voice to it as being weak, but none of this works if the public gives up on it.”

In some ways, though, I think the most interesting thing about the piece is the stated reason given for anonymity. Somebody out there is—or at least is being represented as—sufficiently afraid of alienating the top commanders in the uniform military that he won’t kiss the White House’s ass in public. A few weeks back there was what I thought was a pretty overblown controversy about General McChrystal making some comments on Afghanistan which led to a lot of rending of garments about civilian control of the military. I don’t think the public having some sense of what generals think seriously undermines anything. But what I do think tends to undermine our democracy is the kind of dynamic on display here.

We learn about defense policy issues through journalists. But to successfully cover the defense establishment, you need to have good sources inside the defense establishment. And to cover it with perspective, you’ll also want to talk to outside experts and analysts. But those experts and analysts face the same problem as the journalists themselves—in practice, they’re heavily dependent on goodwill from the military. And for that matter there’s a similar dynamic in congress—the politicians who the press takes seriously on defense matters are the ones the Pentagon takes seriously, which is to say the ones who play to the military’s desires and sensibilities. The saving grace of the situation of the situation is that the defense establishment is so gigantic that it contains a diversity of views on many subjects. But it also excludes a huge number of perspectives and creates a systemic bias in favor of big defense budgets and protracted military engagements. What kind of a world are we living in, after all, if military analysts who agree with the President of the United States are reluctant to say so in public? I think the people involved are generally trying their best, but the incentives are bad.