foreign policy
politics
Should Retired Military Officers Stay Out of Politics?
New York University
Foreign Policy Research Institute
0
0
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
July 27th, 2020
Retired generals and admirals should avoid speaking out publicly, especially on matters related to national security. While there is no doubt that they have the right to do so, their interventions should be regarded as belonging to a special category: they have normative power that affords them unwarranted influence, precisely the kind that needs to be guarded against, for it has the potential to warp political discourse and, ultimately, to damage the ideal of a reliable, professional, apolitical military.
When senior officers retire from the military, they hang up their uniform, but when they chose to enter the public arena—either as talking heads on cable news, or as writers of tell-all books or op-eds—they bring with them the patina of an insider, one who knows ‘how things really work’. They are not interviewed by anchors because they are average citizens, or for their pedestrian opinion; rather they are prized as someone who, by dint of their previous service and position, has some superior perspective. Ask yourself this: how are they identified? Is it as Ms. Smith or Mr. Jones? No, of course not: it is as General Smith and Admiral Jones. Their appeal, as a guest or as an author, stems largely from their role as an expert. They allow us, the public at large, to gain an insight into ‘what should have happened’ or ‘what the country needs now’.
It is precisely this privileged perspective that is worrisome. We value their input into political discourse because they, in ideal-typical form, represent the correct answer, one that is free from the blood and snot that sullies partisan politics. They are not compromisers or self-promoters: these are men and women who have made a career out of getting stuff done and providing the best military advice possible, unalloyed and pure. We listen to them, hanging on their every word, waiting for them to provide us with the ‘gotcha’ moment when they explain how this politician got it wrong, or that politician lacked moral courage, or the other politician equivocated.
And so, you may ask, what is the problem with that? As politicians take the quotidian test of steering the ship of state, is it not a good thing that there is an answer key out there for the rest of us to consult so that we might check their work? A ruler—straight and true—by which we might measure their suitability?
This is exactly the problem: the assumption that generals provide this metric. The logic is that, because they have served, they bring with them the best attributes of the profession of arms. Moreover, our contemporary political and popular culture demands that we support and respect the troops: those who denigrate or question their expert or moral suitability are themselves cast out as pariahs, as less than patriotic. This assumption of infallibility, and therefore superiority, is often unfounded, as the arrogance of McChrystal, the deceit of Petraeus, the hubris of McMaster, and the venality of Flynn should demonstrate.
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