NOT TAKING ORDERS SITTING DOWN?:

Firefight at the Pentagon: What may seem on the outside an unstable and even ad hoc system of power sharing has, without a doubt, been a key to two centuries of military success. (Jean Edward Smith, 4/06/03, NY Times)

With John F. Kennedy...civilian power at the Defense Department came to its apogee. The combination of an inexperienced president and a take-charge secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, led to a total shake-up. The secretary imported a coterie of hard-driving academics--including two Harvard law professors, John McNaughton and Adam Yarmolinsky--to help him take effective operational control of the sprawling defense establishment.

For the first time, the office of the secretary had the requisite staff and intellectual capacity to wrest military decision-making from the services. Under Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, civilian judgment supplanted battle-tested precedent, and the United States carried out the eminently logical but tactically catastrophic escalation in Vietnam.

In the decades after, presidents tended to be hands-off and the relative power of the civilians in the Pentagon ebbed. The Powell doctrine of overwhelming force came to hold sway, and in the 1991 Persian Gulf war the military called the shots. Political control was not relinquished--Dick Cheney, then the secretary of defense, fired the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Mike Dugan, for talking out of turn--but for the most part traditional command relations resumed.

Until now. The current administration bears an uncanny resemblance to that of John F. Kennedy: an inexperienced, somewhat detached president and a decisive, high-profile secretary of defense have teamed to once again assume operational control. Donald Rumsfeld's defense intellectuals--an oxymoron akin to "military music"--have done precisely what Robert McNamara's whiz kids did in 1961: substitute their theoretical concepts for traditional doctrine. The ideological slant is different--this time it's neoconservatism--but the effect on the decision-making process is the same.

History rarely repeats itself, and the failures of Vietnam do not necessarily mean today's transition is unwise or unworkable. What we saw last week, however, was that this time the men with the stars on their shoulders aren't going to take it sitting down.

Then they should be fired for insubordination. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 6, 2003 12:42 PM