Presidents and Their Generals: A Brief History
... But in this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes and Presidents having to publicly stand up to their Generals at the beginning of their administrations.
“The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” Article II, Section 2, Clause 1
(image via wikimedia commons)
Civilian control of the military in these United States is not without tension. Yesterday, in a fifteen-minute speech, President Joe Biden pushed back against the Generals in calling for the end to the twenty-year old “forever war” against Afghanistan. “Biden pulled the plug in an unsentimental, sober address, with the only passionate notes reserved for the U.S. military personnel who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq over the two decades, including his late son Beau,” wrote Susan Glaser in The New Yorker. “The civilian leaders essentially overruled the generals on this,” is how a lawmaker briefed on the deliberations put it to Politico. But also in that story is strong White House pushback against the notion that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan were “running the Pentagon.” Why so much tension in such, well-defined a clear chain-of-command organizational structure.
Presidents, in the modern era, often have had to go through these public pissing contests with their Generals. The media is alerted through leaks. And the mettle of Commander-in-Chief gets tested, often early on in an administration. Remember when Obama was “boxed in” by the Generals less than one year into this first administration? That contretemps also involved Afghanistan, and Joe Biden, then the Vice President, was in the thick of that one as well.
The September leak of (General Stanley) McChrystal’s confidential report on the need for more troops helped box in Obama and quickly became grist for the Republican political mill. Even before that, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), chairman of the House defense appropriations panel, complained of what he saw as a pattern of news reports from the military in Afghanistan promoting a buildup. And while Obama has a retired general of his own in National Security Adviser Jim Jones, the 65-year-old Marine four-star has not been the counterweight that many of his admirers had predicted.
President Obama later fired McCrystal and replaced him with General Petraeus. That didn’t turn out too well, either. Bob Woodward later wrote in a scoop for the Washington Post Style section that in 2011 none other than Roger Ailes tried to enlist Petraeus to run against Obama in the next upcoming election. Petraeus, in due course, declined Ailes’s offer, eventually leaving the Obama administration after a sex scandal. There is always an element of competition-among-alphas with Generals and “their Presidents.” 31 of the 46 Presidents were veterans; 12 reached the rank of General. Of all the professions, only the law has produced more Presidents than Generals. But why does a Commander-in-Chief in a clear chain-of-command organizational structure have to "stand up" to his/her Generals?
Further, why do Republican Presidents seem to have an easier time with their Generals than their Democrat counterparts? Is it because six former Generals -- including Dwight D. Eisenhower in the modern era -- have been Republicans? Is it because as a “law-and-order” party, the GOP largely gives in to the demands of the Generals? Are there more republicans in the military than Democrats? Trump — a Republican — certainly threw the balance of civilian control out of whack when he pardoned military officials that were actually convicted of Iraq war crimes!
George Bush didn’t have a particularly easy time of it, and neither did his first-Boomer-President predecessor, Bill Clinton. Clinton, you’ll remember, famously avoided the draft in the military during Vietnam and thus entered the Oval Office with heightened civilian-military control issues. It went from being a serious campaign issue to a serious governing one after he attained the office of the Presidency. From Louis McCoy of the American Security Project:
The Clinton Administration’s clumsy initial approach to civil-military relations — the appointment of Les Aspin as Secretary of Defense, the decision to try to allow gays to serve openly in the military, an initial dismissiveness of military concerns led to near a near insubordinate response among the uniformed military. President Clinton’s quest to find senior leaders who were not openly hostile to his administration led to the promotion of a number of leaders later derided by Bush Administration insiders as “Clinton Generals” — all of whom were rapidly pushed out of the door.
The Iraq War, or more precisely Bush’s mishandling of it, precipitated the rapid decline in the civilian and military relationship during the course of the Bush administration. Initially Dubya recorded the highest approval ratings in the history of Gallup (!) when he declared the War on Terror. Then things went sideways. Secretary Rumsfeld, who had previously been SecDef under Ford, was a large part of the unhealthy civil-military relations under Bush the Younger.
(McCelllan and Lincoln via wikimedia commons)
But perhaps no President in history has had greater blowback from “his Generals” as Lincoln did with the arrogant and hyper-competitive George McClellan. McClellan was appointed by Lincoln to lead the Army of the Potomac against General Lee in 1861. While McClellan began in a promising manner, building the army, he ultimately proved to be a sluggish leader in the field (some have argued McClellan was stalling for a peace). Lincoln and McClellan ultimately exchanged a flurry of letters on how to win the war. McClellan did not listen to orders from his Commander-in-Chief, and was rightly replaced. McClellan then ran for the Democrat nomination and won it under the banner of ending the sanguinary Civil War. The election was ultimately a landslide. Lincoln won 55% of the popular vote, with an estimated 78 percent of Union soldiers casting their ballots for a continuance of his Presidency. McClellan won three states: his home state of New Jersey, Kentucky and Delaware. But, of course, Generals usually don’t take civilian-military conflicts to that — how does one put it? — extreme.