The Bureaucratization of the Military, Part 2: The Nutcracker

 

This piece builds on Part 1 of the series. It morphs the balancing scale in Part 1 into a nutcracker based on the increasing Societal Imperative pressures and complex security environment that place a premium on the Functional Imperative.

Public trust in the military is falling. By some resorts it is now down to 45% and probably still falling. A Nov 30, 2022 editorial in the Wall Street Journal blames the erosion on woke politics. Thomas Spoehr, a retired Army Lieutenant General, wrote in an article in the Daily Signal:

If the U.S. military is going to reverse this dangerous decline in confidence, it is going to have to look inward and resolve to earn back the trust of Americans using the examples of Meyer and Shinseki to guide it.

Senior military officers must do everything they can to remain apolitical and tell Congress and the American public the inconvenient hard truths. As in most cases, the right path is normally going to be the most difficult one. But that’s the best choice for America.

One of the most troubling symptoms and examples of this problem is the Army missed its 2022 recruiting goal by 25%. An article on Yahoo News stated:

While some Republicans blame the COVID-19 vaccine or “wokeness” for the Army’s recruiting woes, the military service says the bigger hurdles are more traditional ones: Young people don’t want to die or get injured, deal with the stress of Army life and put their lives on hold.

They “just don’t see the Army as something that’s relevant,” said Maj. Gen. Alex Fink, head of Army marketing. “They see us as revered, but not relevant, in their lives.”

Many young people do not know anyone in the Army and are unfamiliar with the jobs or benefits it offers. Fink said trust in government institutions, including the military, has declined, particularly among this group.

“They just don’t perceive the Army as being in touch with the modern, everyday culture that they’re used to,” he said.

Fink said about 10% in the surveys say they do not trust military leadership, based on the way recent events or missions have been handled. That could include the Afghanistan withdrawal or use of the military during racial unrest and protests in the United States.

While MG Fink and other Army managers seem to take pains to say the shortfall is not from the Woke ideology, the facts seem to belie it. They do not serve because they do not trust the military and they do not see the value in the United States. That is precisely what the Woke ideology seeks to accomplish.

This dynamic turns Huntington’s balancing scales into a nutcracker that threatens to break the military.

On the bottom arm, the Woke ideology does several things:

• It creates an environment where our target recruiting population does not feel the need to serve through disconnecting them from our history and traditional core values. See the Reconstructing History series, starting with the first part. This is also designed to destroy trust in traditional institutions.
• It diverts key resources from preparing the military to fight in an increasingly complex environment and maintaining the Functional Imperative. This includes diverting leaders’ attention away from security issues and the time spent in mandatory social justice training from training to fight and win in this complex environment.
• The Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) initiatives, especially those parts descended from World Systems Theory and Critical Theory (see Critical Thinking and International Relations Theory and The “Critical” in Critical Theories) distract our attention from key competitors as DIE adherents see them as disadvantaged states struggling to find their place in the world after centuries of colonial subjugation.

On the top arm, the complex environment and threats do several things:

• The US faces at least two peer/near-peer adversaries in China and Russia. By some definitions of war, especially Multidomain Operations (MDO), the US is already at war with China. The Chinese incursions into US and Canadian airspace reinforce this point.
• The US supplies, armaments, ammunition, and weapons systems to Ukraine deplete US reserves that could make responding to other threats more difficult. Arguably, the US is fighting a proxy war with Russia now and is preparing for a hot war with China over Taiwan and the control of the Pacific.
• Several other states, such as Iran and Korea pose potential nuclear and assymetric threats to U.S. interests.

The two arms of the nutcracker place enormous pressure on the military. While the military will not cease to exist, it could lose the capability to engage in its Functional Imperative and maintain national security. If we are not careful, the debacle in Afghanistan could perhaps happen again elsewhere. We also certainly lost a lot of trust and confidence with our security partners over that disaster.

So how do the military managers respond? They seem to go further towards the bureaucratization of the military in an effort to protect careers and perhaps the institution. See Creating the Monster: The American Bureaucracy and The Rise of the American Bureaucracy, as well as the Power Shift series, starting with the first part.

Once trust is broken, with our citizens and security partners, it is hard to recover. The military did it after Vietnam through an intense emphasis on professionalism, not a bureaucratic response.

Part 3 will look at the transformation from a professional military to a bureaucracy.