School of War - Ep 104: Peter Feaver on “Wokeness,” Politics, and the Military

Episode Date: January 2, 2024

Peter Feaver, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Duke University and author of Thanks For Your Service: The Causes and Consequences of Public Confidence in the US Military, joins the show to talk about the state of civil-military relations in America, and to call for a truce on the issue of “wokism.” ▪️ Times      • 01:46 Introduction      • 2:40 Precedents     • 4:18 Citizen soldier to today      • 11:40 Expanding fissures     • 18:46 Downsides to a high approval rating     • 25:04 Isolationism and “wokeness”     • 33:56 Sloppy discourse     • 38:16 An echo of the ’90s     • 41:11 Progress     • 48:28 Race/Sexuality/Gender     • 55:03 A bit of Sparta in Athens Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

It's not an especially happy time for the part of American life referred to as civil military relations. Our services, with the interesting and notable exception of the Marine Corps, are struggling to meet their recruiting goals. Congress mounts one complaint after another about the military's leadership. Some on the right, for example, say it's too woke, and some on the left say it doesn't take seriously enough endemic problems in society like racism and sexism. And the results are, well, pretty much everyone is, mad at everyone else. But are any of these accusations well-founded? And what does any of this mean for our country's ability to fight and win wars? Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous.

The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people who are not seen... We should bite down the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram. And also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to be joined today by Peter Fever, who is a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University. He's the director of the Duke program in American Grand Strategy. He is the author of numerous publications, including most recently a book, Thanks for Your Service, The Causes and Consequences of Public Confidence in the U.S. military. Peter, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks for inviting me.

So this is the first conversation we've had on this podcast on the broad subject of civil military relations, which is a robust field of academic study, and we're going to dive into it here for the first time. And before we get into your work, I just want to be a robust field of academic studies, and we're going to dive into your work, I just want to, it occurred to me preparing for this to ask the following question, because I think I know the answer, but I'm not entirely sure. Is there any historical precedent for the precise structure of the American military, you know, in comparison with our global responsibilities today? That is to say, you know, the United States is a country with truly globe-spanning responsibilities, but we have, and we have a large military, as one might expect, not large enough, some would argue, but nevertheless a large military. some, as you might expect in those circumstances, but it's an all-volunteer force. It seems unusual.

Is it unusual? Are there precedents for this? Well, I've learned painfully never to say there's no precedent. Never in history has anything like this happened because there's always a historian out there who will find some obscure reference. Of course, the British Empire was ruled with a very relatively small professional force, although they sometimes would press gang folks in. So it wasn't quite volunteer in the way ours is.

But the American experience and the present configuration is a combination of precedence, if you will. So you can find a precedent for each dimension, but what's unusual is them all coming together at the same time. And it's particularly unusual for folks in our professional lifetime, right? That there's not anyone who has a muscle memory of managing this particular set of challenges. Got it. And the subject of your book is, as the title suggests, confidence in the military, which I take from your findings remains generally high. And you were exploring the reasons for that, but also the fissures and causes for concerns.

I also take it that that situation is not necessarily the standard in American history, right? We've had complicated attitudes towards the military overtime, and maybe that's a good place to start before we talk about the present day. What is the sort of, if you like, natural resting point or original attitude towards standing militaries or the military in the United States? Well, traditionally, by which I mean up until World War II, the traditional view was that the public loved the citizen soldier that rallied to the bugle and came to defend the Republic, whether they were the Minutemen of Revolutionary War or the folks who answered the call

in the Civil War or mobilized for World War II, and then went back to civilian life. And those veterans were showered with benefits. In fact, much of our entitlement state was built up in the shadow of the Civil War, searching for new ways to thank the veterans and reward them for their service. And of course, the GI Bill after World War II, significant socially altering way of thanking the veterans who served in World War II. But then we'd go back to a small traditional military, I sorry, a small professional military that was really quite tiny for the size of the country, mostly out of sight fighting on the periphery, not central to the experience of the everyday American

and the subject of some suspicion. So there's a strong anti-militarist streak in the American tradition that goes all the way back to the anti-federalists who were very worried about even creating the teensy, standing army that was created when the country was founded. But even that, they said, was dangerous. there's always been a suspicion of the standing army in the United States. Then you fast forward to the Vietnam War, which broke the back of the peacetime conscriptions. After World War II, we kept conscription or restarted conscription because of the Cold War,

but not for total mobilization of the society in wars. We're fighting small wars, particularly in Southeast Asia, become increasingly unpopular. the draft proves unwieldy and deeply unpopular by the end. And so the United States shifts to an all-volunteer force. And for the first decade or so of the all-volunteer force, there was residual respect for the military. I think it's partly due to sort of a hangover from the greatest generation, a lot of veterans still in the civilian population in the 70s,

but low confidence relative to what it's been for the last 30 years. and deservedly low because the military of the 1970s was in bad shape. In fact, the chief of the U.S. Army called it hollow. And, you know, when I teach my students about this, I say the movie you have to watch to understand what that time frame was like, what is Stripes, where you join the military when you fail at everything else. You can't even be a taxi driver. Well, then maybe the Army is for you.

Stripes captures that bottom level, level. of respect or confidence that the public had in the military. If I, Reagan, sorry. No, I was just going to add on that note, when I was in the service, when you serve as officer of the day,

you carry a sidearm, which always felt a bit vestigial. And, I mean, in theory, Al Qaeda could attack, you know. But in general, I certainly never had any recourse even to think about needing my sidearm, let alone actually needed it.

And my understanding is that if we go back to the 70s or early 80s, you had a sidearm as officer of the day because you might need to draw it because life in the barracks was tough and the people who were there maybe didn't want to be there and didn't want to follow the rules so anyway that this my understanding squares with yours so then you you get the i think that that captures it well and then you get the the shift that begins under regan so there's a there's a there's a regan is very critical of the state of the military that he inherits but then he promises that he's going to rebuild the military, there's a massive defense increase. And within four or five years, you're getting movies like Top Gun, which is a very different vibe about the American military. And the military that Reagan builds then achieves the great victory in the Desert Storm. And that's the first sort of spike up in high levels of confidence, what I would call, you know, super high confidence. And basically from 91 to say 2020, that has been the experience.

So for much of Americans today, they only remember the period of high confidence in the military. They think that's the normal, but that's really just a snapshot. Now, the book comes out of an article that I wrote 25 years ago or 20 years ago, I guess, where with another colleague, I was looking at the data in the late 90s, I'm saying, I think the Desert Storm peak is starting to wane, and I think we're about to see a decline in confidence for a variety of reasons. And if you post that, when I publish that article on a graph and then trace confidence after that, confidence spikes up immediately afterwards and stays high for the next 20 years. So a resounding rebuttal of my prediction because of 9-11. So we get into a war frame, and that's one of the key drivers of high confidence.

When we're at war, the public rallies to the flag and puts high confidence in the military. So about five years ago, I said, let me dig into this question again. Why was I wrong? Let's get a better understanding of public confidence in the military. Ironically, I end up more or less where I did in that article saying public confidence is high, but hollow. I'm expecting it to go down. And indeed, in the last year or two, we have seen a market drop in public confidence. and for reasons that are explainable, if you understand the underlying dynamics that drive confidence.

Let me make one more point, and then I'll let you ask a question. The one other point is it's still the case, even after the decline of the last several years, that public confidence in the military is high relative to other government institutions. And so when I talk about confidence in the military, it's always important to keep in mind what's happened to confidence in other institutions. And what's striking there is the decline across the board in confidence in civilian institutions most markedly over the last 20 years in the Supreme Court. So when I started in this business, it was the military and the Supreme Court were held in high esteem, but not Congress, not the presidency, not bureaucrats. Why is that? And we had

an explanation. Now it's just the military relative and the Supreme Court has dropped dramatically. You have a great line in the book, too, about the situation that used to obtain in the court, or you have four conservative justices and four liberal justices in one person, and perhaps confused in the middle. I laughed. I don't know if everyone laughed when they read that line, but I did. Well, let's get into it then. What is the source of the hollowness that you diagnose and why do you predict that we are going to,

you know, see these fissures expand and see some drops in confidence? And I really have to, you know, I think I and probably most listeners are really, relying on you because I was never good at math, so I can't really get into this survey data. I have to rely on the political scientists to make sense of it for me. Well, I think it's hollow for two broad reasons. One is that if you look at the drivers of public opinion, and I identify six of them, five of them are likely to trend downward because of demography, because of just the inevitable trajectory we're on. So the first one is the war frame. Well, we're not at war.

If we get in a shooting war with China, God forbid, I would expect a rally to the flag and confidence to increase. But for a while, we're more in a Cold War kind of situation. And that has a different dynamic than when we have 150,000 troops in hostile territory getting shot at. Secondly, performance. The public has high confidence in the military because it believes the military is good at its job. there's an open debate about how good has the military been at the wars it's been asked to fight over the last 20 years. I think we were starting to have that debate in the wake of the Biden administration's catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan. But then that debate got sort of short-circuited by the Russia's invasion of Ukraine and attention has shifted.

But gradually, I think we're going to return to that debate. And I hope you will return to this in questions because there's an interesting dynamic. in the data that shows how the military is so far avoiding, you know, the tough questions and accountability on that. But that's performance. Third is professional ethics. The public believes that the military is ethical and behaves properly. However, as you know, there are some, there's evidence that the military, that's not true.

So there's real serious problems of sexual assault, sexual harassment that the military has to get a hold on. There's occasionally stories of really horrible corruption. I'm thinking about the Fat Leonard case in the Navy. These are problems that I don't think have reached widespread awareness in the public, not as wide, say, as the tailhook scandal in the immediate aftermath of Desert Storm. But if they became widespread, then that would drive down public confidence. The fourth driver is social contact.

So people who have family members or they themselves have served. That we know is shrinking. That's shrinking inexorably because of demographics. People with family members who serve have higher confidence than people who don't. But over the next 10 years, there are going to be fewer and fewer families that have that. And then there's a partisan dynamic, and maybe we'll get into that the moment, but Republicans used to have super high confidence, almost to the point of identity, that if you were a Republican that meant you had high confidence in the military.

If you had high confidence in the military, that's a good marker that you were Republican, right? That has changed over the last two years. We can talk about why. So that's the one big reason. All of those drivers are not trending positive and some of them are trending sharply negative. The other big reason I would say it's hollow is because of the sixth factor that drives public confidence, which is social desirability bias. This is a jargon term from political science that says people give the answer to pollsters like me that they think is the correct answer. to give, but may not be their true attitude.

However, if you use techniques to tap into what they really think, you can find out that they might be misleading you, might be saying what they think is correct, but not their true attitudes. When you use those survey techniques, you find out that somewhere between eight to 27 points of the high confidence that the public expresses in the military is actually a function of this social desirability bias. What's the exact number? I don't know.

I hope other folks will ask that question and dig into that more. That was a surprising finding to me. I thought it would be some, but it's much higher. The data suggests it's much higher than I expected. Well, that means that when the permission structure around public attitudes to the military change, then you could see a dramatic change very quickly. And this brings me back to the Republicans, right? Starting in around mid-September 2020, President Trump started to attack the military.

His own military officers rhetorically attack, I mean, criticized them by name and using some of the great tropes of the left, you know, from the 1920s and 30s and claimed that the military wanted to go to war so they could sell weapons, this kind of thing. He was saying this about his own senior military. That created permission space among Republicans to take a different look at the military. that's been echoed by Tucker Carlson and other Republican elites. And I think that creates an opportunity for Republicans who, any Republicans who do have social desirability bias driving them to say they have confidence, suddenly it becomes okay for them to say, no, I don't. And so you could see the reported number dropping dramatically.

So I want to get into that. But before we do, can I ask one sort of more big picture question before we get into these pieces of the puzzle, which is, I mean, I want to get into these pieces of the puzzle, which is, I mean, obviously when you say, if you say to me in general, though we have all these concerns, confidence in the military is high. I suppose my natural response is, well, good. I'm glad. Better that confidence the military be high than confidence in the military be low. That seems healthy. On the other hand, you know, are there liabilities to that? Some of what you've just laid out certainly suggest that there are, you know, that there are ethical, you know, big ethical questions.

Fat Leonard scandal is a great example. It seemed to go, you know, larger. unaddressed in public opinion, seems like the public ought to care about stuff like that. There are these performance issues and we can get into what share of the blame the military specifically and the officer corps deserves for, say, Afghanistan. I would argue certainly some. You know, it's not all politicians and civilian policy leaders. You know, I think of, in my mind, this is the opposite of political science. This is my impressionistic take on things.

There's a kind of conservative for whom, and this is separate from the issue that you want to get into and I want to get into as well. But traditionally, say the last 20 years is a kind of conservative who thinks very highly of the military, thinks the boys and girls in uniform are basically all heroes. And they deserve everything we can give them because they've all seen such, such terrible things and, you know, served our country. And, you know, the reality is that's a partial truth at best. And it's hard for me to think of my father's generation, which was a generation of, you know, mass conscription. It's hard for me to think of anyone from his generation having that attitude about the military because they would know that, you know, of course, there's heroes,

there's cowards too. There's everything in between. Most people are just in between doing their job. And some of them see combat. Most of them don't, actually. Some of them do great. Some of them just do fine. You know, it's life. It's humans. And so is there a way, I guess, to put this in the form, by comment in the form of a question, is, in what ways, if you agree with the premise, in what ways does this high approval rating actually present problems for civil military relations? Well, you put your finger on, and this is one of the major motivations for the study. If the one motivation was, why was I wrong 20 years ago, the other motivation was trying to tap into this odd condition where we have high approval of the military and low propensity

to join the military. Thanks for your service. I'm glad you're doing so I don't have to. And what are the pros and cons of that kind of unusual condition that we find ourselves in today. Like you, I would think high confidence in the military on balance is a good thing.

And so I don't, but I want the military to focus on deservidness. Earn the confidence. Don't, but don't be focused on propping up public attitudes to the military, focus on being worthy of enjoying high confidence. And then if you don't get it,

just soldier on because for most of American history, you didn't get it until the the gun started firing. You didn't get that boost in public esteem until the guns started firing. However, you point to some of the downsides of the current condition. And I would call that pedestalization. And it's really embedded in the title of the book, which is somewhat ironic. Thanks for your service. Because it's a phrase that many, many men and women in uniform or veterans have experienced, say, in an airport. If they're walking around in their uniform or if someone just finds out that they're a veteran,

then it reflexively what comes back is thanks for your service. And many people in uniform say, that makes them feel awkward. Some are heroes, but many were not heroes. And they know they weren't heroes. They just were doing the job that they chose and assigned. They did it well, but they don't deserve to be put on a pedestal. And yet that's what happens to a certain extent. And the polling data show evidence of pedestalization.

It's a precarious place to be. You can be knocked off the pedestal very quickly. And I would say when President Trump switch from saying my generals and maybe hugging the generals too close to attacking the generals, that's a case of the precariousness when you put them on a pedestal. But the other downside is if you're up there on a pedestal, you're looking down on the civilians. You know, you can't help but be looking down.

And there's some evidence of that that when you ask veterans, should the Americans feel guilty for not serving post-9-11? Post-9-11 veterans say, yeah, the civilians who did not serve in uniform should feel guilty about that. And, you know, that contains within it the seeds of alienation. That could be a problem. particularly as we're moving into a period where fewer and fewer people have served and will have served. So there are reasons to worry about it.

And then the third phenomenon I'll mention is this partisan blame game when it comes to battlefield performance. Because what the data show is that thus far, public doesn't blame the military for negative outcomes, does credit the military for positive outcomes and tends to view the situation through a very partisan lens saying the civilian leaders of my party and the military did well. The civilian leaders of the other party are responsible for the failure in Afghanistan. And Democrats and Republicans each play that game. And of course, that or have that perspective, that gives the military an opportunity to sort of hide behind whichever civilian is doing the questioning. And that's not healthy for the kind of introspection that a professional military

should engage in after an outcome as unpleasant as unwanted as what we experienced in Afghanistan. Yeah. I'm here to testify and I can provide evidence that the officer corps absolutely has a role to play or had a role to play in ultimate defeat in Afghanistan. Well, let's let's get into the politics of it then, because we keep kind of circling it. To go back a few minutes in our conversation, you talk about the ways in which polarization, partisanship, contributing to a weakening in confidence in the military, particularly on the right. And you sort of began your account with President Trump and cited Tucker Carlson. And you and I have discussed this issue before. I think we come out of from different directions. Let me, let me start here. Are we in the, the account

that you just gave, it seems to me that there are at least two strands that are woven together there. One is an old-fashioned kind of right-wing skepticism of militarism. I don't know exactly what the word is I want. Is it an old-fashioned right-wing isolationism that sees potentially the military not as its friend or not as its friend in, you know, the enterprise of coming up with the right kind of American foreign policy, but potentially an adversary. And that's certainly, for example, with Tucker Carlson on display. And that's a piece of it. There's another piece of it, though.

Like, if you're going to talk about folks who are criticizing the military and military leadership for this and that, he would have to cite, for example, mild boss, a Tom Cotton, who, whatever he is, he is not an isolationist. So there must be other grounds for his critique, right? And I think part of what he or someone like other guest on School of War, Congressman Mike Gallagher criticized, comes under this banner of wokeness, quote unquote, wokeness. And those two things seem to me to be, in your account, you're sort of putting them together. And I would propose for purposes of discussion that actually they're separate.

They're both on the right. And indeed, isolation is we can kind of find both on the right and the left. But it's certainly alive and well on the right. And then the wokeness critique seems to live on the right purely. And sometimes you find people who have both lines of skepticism in their minds. And sometimes you find people who have just one or the other. Is that fair? Do you think it's fine to analyze it like that?

Yes, I think that that's right. And I would go further to say that I think President Trump's calculation was even more, you know, visceral or simplistic than that. He didn't like the fact that some of the retired generals said critical things about him in the press and were being praised by others for their role in saving the Republic from President Trump. And so he just went after, you know, in a. The friend of my enemy is my enemy kind of way. And I don't think it was more thought through than that. That doesn't mean it's not pernicious, right? He also engaged in interfering with the chain of command,

which was seeking to hold Eddie Aller responsible and a couple other soldiers responsible for, all right, that was a sailor, but hold them responsible for potential war crimes. And there was a case where unusually the commander-in-chief intervened to score what appeared to be partisan points, but at the expense of good order and discipline. And so that's different, but I think it creates permission space for Republicans to say different things than they might have said, say, in the Bush era, or that's not going on. You're absolutely right that a significant tranche of the Republican critique of the military

is just the old-fashioned neo-isolation. It's a neo-isolationist version of a strand on the far right that's been there. It was very powerful in the 1930s, as you know, Father Kaufflin and others who were strongly urging that the Americans stay out of World War II. Whatever we get in war, we get bad things happen. And let's just hunker down and stay safe here, hiding behind the two oceans. That perspective is alive and well. And it is there in both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, the farthest right wings of the Republican Party, they kind of meet. Then there's a different critique, which is, has been leveled by what I would call serious hawks like Senator Cotton,

Senator, I'm not Senator Congressman Gallagher and others that suggest that the Biden administration has made changes, not suggest. of course the Biden administration has made changes, criticizing those changes and criticizing the military for going along with those changes. And this is a different kind of critique. I think it's also picked up by the neo-isolationist right, for whom it's, you know, it's one more brick to throw, but it's for the hawk wing, I think it's a more narrow concern. But it has a pernicious effect, I would argue, because it has the effect of making the military combatants in our culture wars. And I think we need to take the military out of the culture war and make the civilians fight the culture war and not target the military or not hide behind the military. And then, of course,

the military has to be very careful how they talk about these issues so that they don't unwittingly become seen as if they were combatants. So let me give you a classic example, which is Senator Tuberville's hold on 300, now 300 general flag officers. When you talk to folks and say, do you see any end in sight? No one sees end in sight. So we could easily get to 600 by the end of the calendar year. And that's a significant fraction of our force. Anyway, At the root of that is a legitimate policy dispute about how to handle health care for service women in the post-Rovey-Wade era, in the era of Dobbs. That's a policy dispute. That's an area where Congress has the whip hand.

Congress can pass a law and can set the policy. But if Congress doesn't set the policy, then the executive branch has discretion to do. And in that space, when Congress didn't pass a law specifying what could and could not be done, Secretary Austin made a decision that went against the norms that had been established in the row era, but now we're in a new era. So what are the new norms? Anyway, he decided to to create a policy that was, you know, the flip side of what it had, what it had been previously. this created a legitimate policy dispute between civilians. And I think reasonable people can debate which, you know, which policy is the right policy.

My critique is by holding the military hostage, we've, we meaning the Republicans in the Senate have, at least Senator Timberville has, made the military the combatant in this war. And that's the problem. Likewise, if the, if Biden administration changes the policy on how transgendered individuals will be treated in the military, as is the commander-in-chief's prerogative until Congress passes a law otherwise, then we expect the military to salute and implement that law because it's legal. In fact, we also expected the military to implement the opposite policy that President Trump had decided. and we expected the military to implement the previously opposite policy that have been decided late in the Obama administration, and then going further back in history to implement the policy that the Obama administration had in their first term, right? We need the military not to be deciding these issues, but to be obeying the civilians who decide these issues. And I think it's a mistake to criticize the military when they are abiding by the policies that have been sent.

attack the Biden administration if you think the policy is a mistake, change the law if you think the policy is a mistake. But I want to take the military out of the partisan fight as much as possible because it has the effect, otherwise it has the effect of politicizing the military. Let me pause there. Well, look, I mean, it's how could one criticize, right, the proposal in the sense that at a high level. I mean, obviously it would be better if the military remained thoroughgoingly apolitical and civilians could have it out on this or that issue of policy. I can't disagree with you there. But it does seem hard, as indeed we are, as we're living it, it seems hard to live that in practice.

If only for, I mean, the simplest reason would be that uniform members of the military are going to have to defend. They're going to have to, A, they're going to have to do the policy, of course, and your point is well taken. They can't help that. But they're going to have to defend it too. And I mean, I don't have the clips to hand, but I'm quite confident I could go find clips of officers and spokesmen, you know, in uniform, you know, essentially defending the policy that Senator Tuberville is objecting to. Does that make them responsible for it? No. But yet, there they are.

They're in the, they're in the middle. They're in the middle doing something that conservatives don't like the conservatives take to be a, you know, a radical innovation in a bad direction. And, you know, you could kind of play that out issue after issue, like the military is doing the thing and the military is defending the thing. And moreover, just to sort of step back for a second, you know, this is on the issue of, quote unquote, you know, woke or wokeness, this is part of a broader political debate, you know, that doesn't just touch on the military, but across, kind of touches on every, in the conservative critique, right? It touches basically every American institution because of a particular conservative point of view is that there is a march through the institutions that by the left that is largely that is nearing completion. That is these institutions look different than they did 20 or 30 years ago. You can see all kinds of different manifestations in that. And there are sort of the prominent bug bears of the right right now.

You know, DEI officers and policies is a common one. And, you know, we could go find other examples. You know, you see this in the military. The military is doing it. The sort of progressive politics in America have made a move. Conservatives are making a counter move. And as much as I would like to say, great, Peter, that let's all sign a truce. Like, it is hard to imagine practically how.

How do you pull the officers out of this? Yeah. To be clear, I don't want the military to be the ones. in the front lines defending the policies. So I think that's a mistake when the Democrats are doing it now, but when I was in the Bush administration, we were doing it when we were trying to, you know, advance the proper public support for the Iraq War. David Petraeus was our best spokesperson. So it's not a, what both parties do it. The issue here is that it should be Secretary Austin, not General Millie in the front, you know, on point defending the policies.

It should be Secretary Kendall, not General Brown, the chief of staff of the Air Force, who's on point. It should be the undersecretary for personnel, not the lieutenant general for whatever. And that's the first step. The second step is the military needs to talk about values, but be careful and do it in a way that doesn't, isn't clumsy. It makes them sound like cultural war. warriors when they're not, right? And I have a certain amount of sympathy for generals when they're

being forced to talk about these issues, right? They didn't study these issues. They're not trained public affairs experts, and they are going to use the language that they hear common. And in a Democratic administration, one kind of language is discourse is going to be dominant. And you're going to hear those buzzwords repeated by the military, whether or not they're fully on board with all of the ideology that comes along with it. It's just maybe sloppy discourse. And so that's why I tell the military when I'm teaching them on the subject, you got to be very careful. Don't use the phrase DEI. That phrase doesn't mean in 2023 what it maybe was intended to mean when it was invented. It means something very different. Do talk about, however, than

need to recruit Americans from all walks of life. And we have to forge out of very different backgrounds, a common cohesive fighting team that is mission focused. I think the military can talk about their challenge of recruiting and training and building cohesive units in just the way I described without using the words DEI, even though some of the activities that fall under DEI might have that same, you know, the most noble ones might have that same goal that I just described. And ironically, I think Congressman Gallagher is quite eloquent on the subject. He spoke at Hillsdale. And if you go, you know, last year, I think at a conference on the subject is mostly criticizing the military for wokeness. But if you fast forward to the end of the speech,

He talks about how it was the integrated Marines at the Chosen Reservoir who were fighting and, you know, achieved that it wasn't a victory, but a tactical success that allowed the army, the military to escape and fight another day. And Congressman Gallagher credits President Truman for integrating the military and that if we had not been integrated, they might not have fought as well. And I think that captures exactly the way folks should talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Of course, he did so without using those terms. Or when he did use those terms, he was using them as example, what not to say. And I think there's actually more consensus on the underlying values. And a lot of the debate is at the level of how we talk about it rather than what we mean. Not all of it, but a lot of it, particularly when you're talking about how the,

the military feels about this, as opposed to maybe political appointees. Is there an echo of the 90s here that is, I'm just old enough to have some memory of politics in the 90s, which I followed, you know, nerd that I was from high school. And I seem to recall a great deal of distaste on the part of the right with the Clinton administration's approach to this or that issue in the military. Absolutely. So what are the parallels? Well, this was when the Clinton came in and wanted to change to the way gays were allowed to serve in the military, he said it's time for to let them serve openly.

And the military was not ready for that change. Even members of his own party, Senator Nunn, who was sort of the leading Democrat hawk on the Senate, was not ready for that change. And of course, Republicans opposed that change. And so that produced a civil military crisis in the Clinton administration. And he had to walk that policy back. And it's clear that he hadn't thought it through. President Clinton, the candidate Clinton, didn't really know much about civil military relations. And I think he thought it was an easy win that he was going to score in the first 100 days

and just did not realize the buzzsaw he walked into. And it became a big challenge. But if you fast forward to the Obama administration, when they implemented, effect essentially the policy that had been so controversial in the Clinton years, they implemented that with almost no controversy at all. And so that issue had been defanged by changes in society. And this is a very important point. Let me back up and make this point.

If there's a problem in civilian world, it will show up in the military. If there's, you know, obesity, suicide, sexual assault, whatever is the problem that is in a civilian world, it will also be in the military because we're drawing the military from the civilians. That's point one. Point two, the military is different from civilians because it's self-selected in. But point three, the military can't be so different that it never keeps pace with changes in the civilian culture to include changes in civilian values. And I think if you track the last 30 years of attitudes towards gays and lesbian serving openly in the military, you see that. As society's views evolved, so too did the militaries, so did the military. And things that were controversial 30 years ago proved to be not in the tens.

No, it's interesting. I mean, race, some would criticize this, but the racial integration of the Truman administration, which then, by, I mean, by the way, tremendous racial unrest, as you know, in the military for decades thereafter, to read as a very fine novel of the Vietnam War called Matterhorn, which goes into great detail on the subject. It was bumpy. And then at some point, and I'm speaking from experience here, it sort of went away. I mean, the Marine Corps that I served in, race issues were not at the top of anyone's agenda or mind and the sort of romantic vision that Congressman Gallagher describes of the chosen

reservoir matches with my lived experience of Marines from all kinds of racial and ethnic backgrounds essentially. So there's tremendous progress in the military, but it, and as you point out, it didn't happen immediately. And of course, when Truman did his policy, it was enormously controversial at the time. Yeah. And it was an example of pushing the military ahead of where civilian society was. That was an integrated military in a Jim Crow South. Right. So that, that was a tremendous challenge for, in the 50s and 60s and 70s, Colin Powell's success as chairman, just an enormously capable leader. And of course, he had the good fortune to serve at Desert Storm and great achievement. He was a hero. He was more popular than President Clinton by far. And he, of course,

was an African-American. That seemed to symbolize that the military had solved this problem. And I do think the military has done better than many pockets of civilian society. But this is where we have to bring in new changes in American society. And now I'm thinking about after George Floyd's murder, there was a ferment in our civilian culture that also showed up in the military. And there were many, many servicemen and women, African Americans and servicemen of color, who said, they had experienced some kind of racism that the George Floyd murder resonated with them in a way that was different from how it was resonating with their, say, white bunkmates. And it was, therefore, President Trump's Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, who said, we're going to institute DEI a training to deal with this race issue because in the wake of the George Floyd murder, we realize we're in a different time. And so I think it's a mistake to say that there's no racism in American society.

Our servicemen and women don't have to deal with it anymore. They are dealing with it. And how widespread it is, it is a matter for empirical study. But it does exist. And so that's why some attention to it is warranted. Just last year, I think the Air Force had to relocate a number of enlisted folk, or actually, some of them may have been officers, because their kids were subject. to racial harassment when they went to schools off base. And so they had to move from that base to a different location

where their kids would not be targeted for race reasons. Well, that's happening in America of 2022. And that's an issue that the military has to wrestle with. So I think that is part of what is driving it. Now, having said that, let me just quickly give the counter argument that maybe you're going to give. If that's the only thing the military is focused on, then the military is not going to be effective. And so the best leaders are the leaders who say, we're going to recruit from all walks of life, we're going to get them mission focused, mission ready.

If there's problems of racism in the ranks, we're going to deal with it. If there's problems of sexual assault in the ranks, we're going to deal with it. Why? Because we want to keep the military focused on the enemy who is seeking to exploit our divisions. And the best encapsulation of this is a recruiting ad that General Brown did a couple years ago. I don't know if you saw it. But his listeners should go Google it. He's well known for a speech he gave in the wake of George Floyd murder. Yes, that's powerful too.

But I think his ad is even more powerful because he talks about how he obviously is a African-American. But when the visor comes down, that doesn't matter. all the enemy knows is I'm going to come and kick his butt. And it just captures perfectly. I think what I would say is the right focus for the military today. Yeah. Look, I mean, there's a lot there to respond to. And actually, I was going in a particular direction.

And now I sort of want to go in others. But I mean, of course, I think a lot of the conservative, no, no, I think a lot of the conservative critique of this issue set is rooted in a suspicion that the ideology surrounding DEI, the kinds of people who are DEI, professionals actually rather than push towards the kind of vision that you outline or, you know, the Gallagher chosen reservoir vision of, you know, I will go out and use a word that I take these professionals not, they don't like, you know, have a colorblind military, that this kind of ethic actually pushes in the other direction for a very color conscience, conscious, excuse me,

ethic that again in the view of those making this conservative critique actually makes the problem worse rather than better but where sorry you should feel free to respond to that but where i was actually going with the with the original comment was and i i take your point and i don't mean to say there is no racism in america or no racism in the military but if you read i mean to read what it was like to be a marine in the in the in you know a marine coming from the potentially the Jim Crow south and serving in vietnam in the 60s where you have racially organized gang violence as a sort of regular phenomenon. I mean, that, again, just going from my own experience,

not a significant phenomenon in 2010. And so, I agree. And I'm not sure that anyone is claiming otherwise. I hope. Yeah, yeah. And so here's the broad claim. Racial relations in the military broadly better than they were 50 years ago. And then the set of issues around sexuality,

also, as you point out, though hotly controversial in the 90s, I was in the fleet marine force for the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and I am here to report from personal experience. It was essentially a big nothing. Like, nothing happened. Nothing happened. We went to bed one day and Don't Ask Don't Tell was in effect. You woke up the next morning.

It was gone. And I suppose the thing that happened was those who had been living in a closeted experience no longer had to. And what happened was that life was better for them. But in terms of the daily functioning of the unit, nothing changed. And no one today, to my, that I'm aware of, there's certainly no credible figure on the right making trouble about the issues around sexuality and the military, or certainly there's no one that I'm aware of arguing for, you know, re-segregation. It's gender. Sorry, this is where it just taking me a long time to drive towards it.

The set of issues that seems to not be going away is the set of issues around gender in terms of the right-wing critique. The trans issue is obviously alive and well as a matter of political. debate and even though the Obama administration brought about gender integration of ground combat arms unlike the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, which is it's gone. It's a non-issue today. That question of gender integration does keep coming up. You do see conservative politicians raising that again and again. I don't know at a deep level what the reason for this is. Maybe society will continue to evolve, as you put it, and that issue will go away. But that does seem to me to be of the three, the one that kind of has at least sitting here in 20203, some

sticking power on the right. Right. And I would say it's also the issue where the policy has flip-flopped dramatically over the last half dozen years. And so that's a particularly fraud issue for the military because they've had to abruptly change course 180 degrees. What I would say is when the cultural issues were debated, whether it was allowing African-American to serve in the integrated units, women to serve gays, lesbets. At the time, the issue was highly fraud, and the arguments used against it recur. And so that's one reason why, you know, the military or leaders, civilian leaders with long historical memory is say, well, wait a second, we heard these critiques before and we survived. So we don't think that we're in an apocalyptic

ending moment in this policy debate. That's the first point I make. But the second is the more important one, which is these are matters for the civilians to decide. Elections have consequences, and the voters will decide this issue by electing in Congress and then the executive branch, the leaders who will set these issues. And Congress has the right to make the policy issues. One of the mistakes that Clinton made in the early 90s is he didn't work with Congress. And initially he didn't work with Congress. And Congress sort of said, this is ours to decide. And we're going to decide it.

In a similar way, Congress could impose on the Biden administration a set of policies that the Biden administration doesn't want. What makes this issue so difficult is that our political system is as divided as the country and divided in a way that can't settle the issue. And so we're not getting the resolution that comes from the political process. We're getting cycling. And then the last point I want to make, which brings it back to the book, is one of the things that the polls show is that the public does not want the military to be politicized, but calls politicization when the military agrees with the other party. So Republicans don't think the military is being partisan when the military is agreeing with Republican policies.

And Democrats don't think the military is being partisan when the military agrees with Democratic policies. And so that creates this pernicious effect where the military is deemed politicized just for obeying whoever is the new political leader. the White House. And so ironically, the public's not a very good umpire. You know, that ideally, we want the public to punish the military entirely if they get involved in any partisan politics. But actually, the public is okay with it as long as they're on our side. And of course, this is where military professional has to come to into play. The military as a professional has to resist these efforts to be dragged into partisan politics, even though the public might give them a small reward in the short run because in the long run, it's a negative for political professionalism.

I mean, sorry, for military professionals. Yeah. Can I, I want to be respectful of your time. We've been going for some time here, but can I ask you a political philosophy question as opposed to a political science question? My best. So I wonder if on some level, though it could be managed better in the kind of compromise that you're outlining, if it were achievable, would no doubt be healthier in some ways for the body

politic. But if in some ways the dynamics that we've been talking about for the last 45 minutes or are a bit inescapable, and they're inescapable for the following reason, which I'm going to propose as a hypothesis and then let you pick it apart, that, you know, we live in a democratic society. There's a liberal society in the old-fashioned meaning of the 18th century meaning of the term. and that liberalism brings with it a kind of progressivism. There's a working out of certain principles in our society towards greater equality, right? It would be one way in which it functions. And you've made the point several times over the course of our conversation that our society

seems to be in some ways evolving. And so you have a society devoted to certain liberal principles. And if anything, generation after generation being a little bit more liberal than it was the last. And that's the nature of life in a liberal society. And then you have the military. And the military, I'm going to start speaking like a conservative here and say something that conservatives might agree with. There needs to be something a little bit less liberal about the military, for the military

to be effective. For example, the concern with equality. The battlefield is not a place that is friendly to sort of universal application of of the principle of equality. The battlefield is a place where you learn that actually how much resources you bring to bear and how strong you are and how fast you are and how prepared you are. Well, it makes a big difference. We are not all equal on the battlefield. That's a sort of flippant way of describing something deep that I'm trying to point towards. But the headline would be there needs to be something about the military that is not fully liberal in order for it to do its job of defending the liberal

society. You know, it can't, you know, there needs to be a bit of Sparta in the Athens, if you will, to speak in another kind of bumper sticker way of putting it. But we have a party in our country devoted to the acceleration of progress. And when that party is in power, it gets to set policy for the military. And so that party frequently is in a position of driving the military in a direction of greater progress, sometimes in ways that conservatives in 2023 would, in retrospect, look at and totally sign off all. Again, no, no one rightly. is criticizing Harry Truman for the integration of the military in 2023. And in other ways, they're going to complain and they're going to be upset because not

only because it offends their sort of political principles, but because they have an argument to make that actually something is happening that they think will make the military less effective at its job. And so it's this sort of, well, it's a situation. It's a dynamic that first see how you resolve. Sorry, go ahead. You're a manor Sam Huntington. Oh, have I.

Okay. I've independently derived. down. Well, this is why Sam Huntington is so popular because his description of civil military relations accords very nicely with what military officers, you know, come up with on their own kind of thing. So, and there's some truth to it, too. That is not a, it's not a myth. Obviously, the military can't be filled with pacifists. Maybe there's a role of not maybe. There's a definite role for pacifists in our civilian society. And there are a useful profit out there, warning. us about the dangers of war, they should not be commanding battalions. So you have to be willing

to kill. You have to be willing to suffer the deprivations. You have to be willing to give up some of your civil rights. So you know very well that when you join the military, you're giving up some of your First Amendment rights. When you're in uniform, you can't speak as freely as you can now that you're in civvies. And that's necessary for the functioning of the military to be effective at its mission. And so that's where for me the plum line is mission effectiveness. And if you can identify a policy that is

keep preventing the military from being mission-capable and mission-effective, then we should not do that policy. But much of the pearl clutching falling on the fainting couch over this or that policy claims that it has big effect on mission, but in fact does not. You know, and some of the older views that to be an effective military, you have to be macho, you have to be something of a knuckle dragging, you know, hairy-chested individual like we saw in the Russian military, that that's what is necessary. Well, it turns out that to fight today, somebody can fly a drone who's really good at Xbox might be more valuable on the battlefield or just as valuable, let's say, as some people who channel the other more ancient Spartan virtues. And so I think that the nature of warfare,

sorry, the character of warfare is changing. And with it is the composition of the kind of of individuals who could contribute to mission, but always you have to come back to mission. And so that's why I've told the Biden administration, I said, it's a certainty that somebody somewhere in this organization, as large as this, is screwing up in some way and maybe over-emphasizing this or that policy to the detriment of mission. And so if Senator Cotton identifies in a case of that, Congressman Callagher has a case of that, they should pass that on to Secretary Austin, and Austin should be the first to correct it because he should be all about mission. But there's many things that are alleged to hurt mission that are actually mission congruent. And one of them is helping to

recruit from all walks of life and then forging a team out of that. And so I think there's probably going to have to be give and take from all sides in this political award. I want a political cultural battle, and I want them to battle it out mono on mono among civilians rather than punching their way through the uniformed military. Maybe if we were in peacetime and we didn't need the military, didn't face a threat, we could afford to do some of the targeting of the military that I see today. but unfortunately we live in a world that's too dangerous. And so putting a hold on 300, now it's going to go up higher. General flag officers having no end in sight.

That's too costly to mission in our current environment. That's a gift to the Chinese that keeps giving day after day. We've got to stop those kinds of measures, even as we continue to debate the legitimate policy disagreements that are at the root of that particular example. Peter Fever, author of Thanks for Your Service, The Causes and Consequences of Public Confidence in the U.S. military. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you making the time.

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