Over at QandO, McQ takes issue with my post on the military.

Judging from email, comments threads, and blog reactions, there seems to be enough misunderstanding of my post that I think a follow-up is in order.

First, I do wish people would refrain from quoting only that particular paragraph of the post. Farther down, I do explain that I have lots of respect for the military, and that I recognize and understand that the hierarchical mechanisms the military uses are necessary to fight and win wars.

When that particular paragraph is plucked and excerpted out of context, I come off like some Army-hating commenter from the Democratic Underground.

I will cop to a bit of hyperbole. But not much. If a nation were run the way the military is–where citizens were told what to wear, where to live, where income was distributed by the government, where all of society were run by government-dictated, top-down hierarchy–it would most certainly fit the definition of “totalitarian.” So I don’t apologize for using that term.

“Unquestioning drones” was probably over the top. I didn’t mean to suggest that military people aren’t trained to think critically. Of course they are. But they are trained to follow orders. And if, ultimately, you don’t believe an order makes sense, or you have moral or philosophical objections to it, you are generally still expected to follow it.

Again, I have no problem with the military being run this way. My criticism of Wright was that he wants the egalitarianism, income equality, and free health care the Army provides, but in arguing for all of that, he neglects to mention that all of those things are wholly contingent on enlistees giving up a many of their rights. I think it’s telling that a liberal like Wright overlooks this point. It in some ways reveals what some people on the left would be willing to forgo (or force the rest of us to forgo) on the way to universal health care, mass income redistribution, and/or pick-your-favorite-leftist-policy here. Look no further for many leftists’ (and “national greatness” conservatives’, for that matter) fondness for the idea of mandatory “national service” for young people, essentially a year or two of indentured servitude, be it in the military or working for some Peace Corps-like program.

As for how dissent is treated in the military, I think McQ misunderstands my point. I didn’t mean that ideas and strategies aren’t discussed and debated in the military. On the contrary. I spoke at West Point a few years ago, and I was very impressed with the openness of the academic environment there. In fact, it was more open than many state universities I’ve visited or spoken at. Several of the cadets I spoke with openly and vigorously debated foreign policy, the merits and demerits of using the military for “nation building,” and we even discussed libertarian hot-button issues like the drug war. In fact, one economics professor at West Point wrote his dissertation on the dead-weight loss of the drug war, and from what I could tell from a couple of conversations with him, was pretty doctrinaire libertarian.

My point about dissent pertains more to orders. And no, I don’t mean orders to rape or murder. What if, for example, a member of the military refused to go to Iraq because he believed the war was wrong, futile, illegal, and/or immoral? As it turns out, he’d be court martialled for it. Evan Wright’s fantastic book Generation Kill reports several scenarios early on in the war in Iraq where incompetent, gung-ho, commanding officers issued orders that the Marines Wright was embedded with knew were flat-out wrong–they needlessly imperiled both the Marines and innocent Iraqi civilians. In some cases they carried those orders out, to disastrous effect. In others, a Marine on the ground refused to follow the order, and despite the fact that everyone knew the orders were wrong and the person who ordered them incompetent, that Marine was later punished for his insubordination.

Again, I want to emphasize that despite these examples, and despite my opposition to the war in Iraq, I not only understand why these policies are in place, I think they should be in place. I happen to think the court-martialled soldier was right about Iraq. But I also understand why it was necessary to court-martial him.

My point was only that that (1) these are the policies in the military, (2) they’re essential to the efficient operation of the military, (3) they aren’t policies that would be compatible with a free society were they applied outside the military, and (4) to celebrate some the quasi-socialist characteristics of the military without mentioning the required loss of rights enlistees endure that’s necessary to to achieve those characteristics, as Wright did, is both disingenuous and somewhat revelatory about someone like Wright’s support for individual liberty and personal freedom.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 9:40 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.