Will Our Generals Ever Shut Up?
The Military’s Media Megaphone and the U.S. Global Military Presence

"To grasp the changing nature of military influence domestically, consider the military’s relationship to the media. Its media megaphone offers a measure of the reach and influence of that behemoth, what kinds of pressures it can apply in support of its own version of foreign policy, and just how, under its weight, the relationship between the civilian and military high commands is changing.

"It’s true that, in June, the president relieved Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal of duty after his war-frustrated associates drank and mouthed off about administration officials in an inanely derogatory manner in his presence -- and the presence of a Rolling Stone magazine reporter. ("Biden?... Did you say: Bite Me?") But think of that as the exception that proves the rule.

"It’s seldom noted that less obvious but more serious -- and egregious -- breaches of civilian/military protocol are becoming the norm, and increasingly no one blinks or acts. To take just a few recent examples, in late August commandant of the Marine Corps General James Conway, due to retire this fall, publicly attacked the president’s “conditions-based” July 2011 drawdown date in Afghanistan, saying, "In some ways, we think right now it is probably giving our enemy sustenance."

"Or consider that, while the Obama administration has moved fiercely against government and military leaking of every sort, when it came to the strategic leaking (assumedly by someone in, or close to, the military) of the “McChrystal plan” for Afghanistan in the fall of 2009, nothing at all happened even though the president was backed into a policy-making corner. And yet, as Andrew Bacevich pointed out, “The McChrystal leaker provid[ed] Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leadership a detailed blueprint of exactly how the United States and its allies were going to prosecute their war.”

"Meanwhile, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, on a three-day cross-country “tour” of Midwestern business venues (grandiloquently labeled “Conversations with the Country”), attacked the national debt as “the most significant threat to our national security.” Anodyne as this might sound, with election 2010 approaching, the national debt couldn’t be a more political issue.

"There should be, but no longer is, something startling about all this. Generals and admirals now mouth off regularly on a wide range of policy issues, appealing to the American public both directly and via deferential (sometimes fawning) reporters, pundits, and commentators. They and their underlings clearly leak news repeatedly for tactical advantage in policy-making situations. They organize what are essentially political-style barnstorming campaigns for what once would have been “foreign policy” positions, and increasingly this is just the way the game is played."