This essay is from the redesigned and relaunched joshua.trevino.at -- where the former Tacitus is at now.

The Army is shutting down its bloggers. It is a minor move, but a telling one: the Army of the American people does not wish its soldiers to communicate, unmediated, with that people. The appeal is made to operational security, but this is at best a thin excuse for an institutional reflex that has everything to do with bureaucratic self-protection, and little to do with winning the war. The best spokesmen for the war are the soldiers fighting it: is the Army truly better off for having suppressed the tremendous battle reportage of SPC Colby Buzzell? Surely not. Is American support for the war more likely to be bolstered by a slick PAO than an earnest 11B? Certainly not. Small things tell of big things, and the big thing here is not the Army versus its bloggers -- a fight the Army will lose in time -- but the Army's willingness to shut down an entire medium of communication, information, and support between its warfighters and the American people. After a generation of increasing alienation between the Army and America, that medium is desperately needed by both.

But the Army has shut it down, and the Army will not reconsider. I was never an Army blogger -- but I did, back when the internet was still mostly novelty, once keep online a small page of quotes from my Army service, for the amusement of friends. Imagine my surprise, in the pre-Google era, when the battalion commander learned of it, and took swift action to bring it down. I complied -- what else could I do? -- but the offline listing survives.

“See, if you look in the OPORD book, you'll see that it's all left-justified. Nothing is indented.” “But that makes it impossible to read.” “But that's the right way.” “But that's the hard way....” “That's the Army way!” -- CPT Duncan, explaining the Army way to 2LT Trevino, c.1998

Among the last things the United States Army as an institution may be accused of is possession of an agile, risk-taking bureaucracy. The world's most potent fighting force is saddled with a famously self-protective, unresponsive, and inefficient internal management structure whose core mission is not the furtherance of the nation's goals, but the protection of its own interests. This unoriginal observation is not exactly a reflection of the individual warfighter (a minority of all serving soldiers in any case), so much as it is a logical perversion of his ethos. The values and habits that win in battle are ill-suited to management and execution in a large bureaucracy. This flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that holds that hiring a former military officer is a wise move: as I found to my dismay upon entering civilian life, the weird combination of low-level decisiveness and excessive deference to the authority of procedure that is the hallmark of Army leadership style is a terrible combination in an American white-collar culture that prizes its own weird combination of low-level indecisiveness and workplace informality. CPT Duncan, who explained the Army way to me nearly a decade ago, was a credit to the Army, a fine officer and an engineer leader of ruthless efficiency in the field. He also adhered, without apparent consciousness of absurdity, to the consequences of his warrior ethic in the realm of desks and offices: unreadable operations orders among them. This is not to critique the warrior ethic -- there's a good reason for its emphasis on rote, reflex, and simplifying procedure above all, as anyone who has emplaced a Claymore mine can attest. The number of soldiers and cadets who regard FRONT TOWARD ENEMY as a mere friendly reminder is either a foreshadowing of the fall of the republic, or a spur toward a Kierkegaardian exercise in forgetting.

“When the nation needs something done, what does it do? It puts a soldier on the ground, and he looks [the other guy] in the eye and says, ‘If you don’t do this, I’m going to kill you.’ And they believe him!” -- LTC Vosler to EOBC Class 504-97, c.1997

“Your first, primary and utmost mission is to blow up everything you can get your hands on!” -- SFC Taylor to EOBC Class 504-97, c.1997

But it is a complex world yet, and the Army must exist within it. Regrettably, it appears to institutionally shun that which does not directly pertain to its core missions as laid forth with admirable clarity by LTC Vosler and SFC Taylor to my Engineer Officer Basic class at Fort Leonard Wood so long ago. The failure of the Iraqi occupation is rightly laid at the feet of the Bush Administration, but it must be remembered that this failure was immeasurably aided and magnified by an Army that did not possess the institutional courage to advance its professional judgment -- particularly on force levels -- in the public square; and worse, labored for a full generation under the delusion that if it failed to prepare for counterinsurgency, it would therefore never face an insurgency. The Army tried to game the American political system, and failed. Failures happen, but it never should have attempted the experiment in the first place. In preparing for the wars it wanted to fight, it ignored the wars it had. Thus it had no ideas for Lebanon; thus it could offer no meaningful plan for Somalia; thus it dodged a bullet when Bosnia proved too exhausted to be troublesome; thus it decided to simply stand back, in the name of “force protection,” as Kosovo was ethically cleansed under its occupation; and thus it was baffled and bludgeoning when Iraq descended into horror.

This is not, then, for all the plaudits given it, an Army whose leadership well serves its fighting men. Certainly those men are well-equipped, certainly they have lavish facilities, certainly their training (at least prior to this decade of stress) is top-notch, and certainly they have resources from weaponry to medical care beyond that of any other army in history. But for all this, they lack the one thing that soldiers need above all else: the means and will to win their wars. In this, the Army appears to have internalized the valuations of the modern liberal state, in which passé concepts like “honor” and “victory” are secondary to material comforts. The United States Army was born at Valley Forge, but its stupendous logistical system now will ensure that there are no more Valley Forges -- and if there are, the Army will tell itself that perhaps we shouldn't fight that sort of war any more, and perhaps we can guarantee we don't if we just refuse to prepare for it....

“The Army reflects the highest ideals of the nation it represents -- a nation built on a unique set of values and aspirations expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution ... The Army serves as a repository of its national values and embeds them into its professional ethos. Proper subordination to political authority, loyalty, duty, selfless service, courage, integrity, respect for human dignity, and a sense of justice are all part of the Army’s identity.” -- Army Field Manual 100-5, Operations, page 1-2

“Hey, you lose your First Amendment rights when you join the Army.” -- CPT Milner to 2LT Trevino, c.1996

My consistent experience through my life, and through my own abbreviated service, is that the Army refuses to acknowledge that it exists within American society and must reflect it. It does not merely seek to thwart the political choices of war and battle that are rightly within the power of that society: it also sees itself as increasingly separate from, and apt to be betrayed by, that society. This is as much to the society's discredit as the Army's: America at large chose a generation ago to cede the Army to a self-selecting class of warriors, and America at large consistently, if often inadvertently, reinforces the Army's sense of mistrust toward it. Relations between the two are reminiscent of Athens and Sparta. The Athenians admire the warrior ethic of the Spartans, and feel vague gratitude that Hellas may call on their ranks, even as they have no desire to be Spartans; and the Spartans do their utmost to beat Athenian qualities out of their initiates and young. But there the parallel breaks down: Spartans did not see themselves as the paradoxical embodiments of “the highest ideals of the [Athenian] nation.” The United States Army explicitly does -- and when the nation's ideals differ from the Army's, it is therefore because the nation is not living up to its “highest ideals” that the Army continues to reflect. The long-term danger to a republic that this situation represents is familiar to any student of history. It is, though, a danger that the republic will ignore as long as it possibly can.

APPLY THE ETHICAL DECISIONMAKING PROCESS 03-9001.10-0003 August 1990

Conditions You must make an individual ethical decision.

Standards Apply the ethical decision-making process to resolve an individual ethical dilemma following the proper sequence.

Performance Measures 1. Interpret the situation. Is there an ethical dilemma? If so, what is it? 2. Analyze the factors and forces that relate to the dilemma. Include --

a. Laws, orders and regulations. b. National values. c. Traditional Army values. d. Unit operating values. e. Your values. f. Institutional pressures.

3. Choose the course of action which best serves the nation. 4. Implement the course of action you have chosen.

-- STP 21-II-MQS: Military Qualifications Standards II for Lieutenants and Captains

Here then is the procedure for ordinary moral sensibility in the Army context. It would be comical but for the centuries of philosophers who have indulged in similar reductionist lists and process-buiding exercises. In that light, we may congratulate the Army for having satisfied itself with something definitive in the realm of right living. We may also hope that the Army applies this very process to the question of its own identity, in the end choosing “the course of action which best serves the nation,” rather than that which best serves the Army. As we face the probability that we will, within the next few years, lose another major American war more or less through societal choice, it becomes tremendously important to look to the effects that this will have on the United States Army and its relationship with the nation. The previous lost war severed the real and compelling ties between every American male and military service, and alienated our warrior class from the cultural mainstream. It is realistic to assume a deepening of this alienation in the aftermath of a defeat in Iraq. This is not to question the judgment of the American consensus on the present war, or the rightness of the resultant resentment -- these are separate questions -- but simply to note the probability. America needs an Army that identifies with America as it is, not as the Army wishes it to be. The two ought to work to deserve one another: but if they will not, it is the Army that must bend.

It is a long way from Army blog policy to this, but they are all of a piece. I know a woman who recently returned from Afghanistan with a Bronze Star. Some Taliban tried to take hostages, and she did her bit in the rescue. We spoke, and I told her of my desultory attempts to reenter the service. Her response: “Why?” She, a respected veteran of something as close to a “good war” as we'll get in this generation, does not see a particular reason to go. If the break between Army and America is neither final nor irrevocable in the grand scheme, it is already distressingly advanced for some of our finest, who fight and suffer on our behalf.

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