Looking on the bright side #1: SECDEF Gates

Issues have come and gone over this last month, and they'll have to enter history without my imprimatur. But I will try in the next while to work back through a few of them, using the "if you can't say something nice..." standard*. I intend to mention a few technological, political, and other developments that deserve more attention or praise than they seem to have received.

As a start: the two speeches early this week by the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, about what he thinks is wrong with the culture of the professional military.

Gates starts out miles ahead simply by not being the man he replaced at the Pentagon, the odious Donald Rumsfeld. And even though Gates has implemented essentially the same Administration policy and administered the same gigantic budget that Rumsfeld left him, he has defended and explained his policies in ways suggesting that he has noticed, thought about, and attempted to address opposing views. This is in contrast to the haughty sneering-away of opposition so familiar from the Rumsfeld days.

In back-to-back speeches this Monday to the Air Force leadership at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama and then to the Army leadership at West Point, Gates revived what had always been the best part of Rumsfeld's approach in the Pentagon. This was a willingness to challenge the cautious, yes-man aspects of today's professional military culture. Rumsfeld gave all such questioning a bad name by his contemptuous disregard for professional military judgment in the runup to the Iraq war. But Gates still had a point -- and he made it in a surprising way.

The surprise was Gates's invocation of the late Air Force colonel John Boyd as an example of the qualities he wanted to see more of in the professional military.

Boyd -- whom I met in 1979 and spoke with frequently** until his death 18 years later -- is usually invoked by military careerists as exemplifying what they wanted to see less of. He was fearless, impolitic, impolite, self-taught, bullying, and tremendously creative and insightful. (For details, see Robert Coram's wonderful biography, Boyd.) Eons ago, Richard Cheney, in his incarnations as Congressman and Defense Secretary, went out of his way to listen to Boyd. If he had remembered anything about Boyd and his emphasis on the "moral" elements of combat before going into Iraq, America's strategic situation would look different today. But many military careerists absolutely despised Boyd -- perhaps responding to his view of them.

Imagine, therefore, the amazement of the Bush Administration's current Secretary of Defense praising Boyd in a speech to the Air Force brass, thus (as described by Boyd's friend Chet Richards):

Boyd, who was a brilliant, eccentric and stubborn character, had to overcome a large measure of bureaucratic resistance and institutional hostility.

He had some advice that he used to pass on to his colleagues and subordinates that is worth sharing with you. Boyd would say — and I quote — “One day you will take a fork in the road, and you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go one way, you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises, and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club, and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go the other way, and you can do something, something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted, and you may not get good assignments, and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors, but you won’t have to compromise yourself. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you have to make a decision: to be or to do.”

For the kinds of challenges America faces and will face, the armed forces will need principled, creative, reform-minded leaders, men and women who, as Boyd put it, want to do something, not be somebody.

There is a lot more in Gates' two speeches, many aspects of which have been discussed in the New York Times, Time, Slate, the LA Times, and the Atlantic's own blog family. I am sure that John Boyd himself would have argued back about parts of Gates' speech. (For instance, Gates was invoking Boyd to advocate greater use of UAVs, the remotely-piloted unmanned vehicles. I suspect Boyd would have regarded this as reliance on tech-gimmickry.) Still: these speeches showed a remarkable breadth of mind, and deserve recognition.

Update: The estimable Phil Carter tells more about the speeches and their implications here.
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* This means that I will not be saying much about the Hillary Clinton campaign's recent electoral math, according to which the "Undecided" votes in Michigan obviously are votes for Barack Obama when she wants to say that the whole primary should count, and obviously are not for Obama when she wants to compare their respective popular-vote totals.

** "Talking with" Boyd often meant holding the phone for hours on end while he revealed his latest insights into human nature, the elements of conflict, the Second Punic War, etc. My wife, like the spouses of John Boyd's other friends, learned to start reading a long novel or watching Gone With the Wind when she heard me say, "Oh, hi, John, what's up...."