{"id":3147,"date":"2009-07-02T04:06:50","date_gmt":"2009-07-02T04:06:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3147"},"modified":"2009-07-02T04:12:01","modified_gmt":"2009-07-02T04:12:01","slug":"political-commissars-in-camouflage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3147","title":{"rendered":"“Political Commissars in Camouflage”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Tony Corn<\/strong><\/a> opens fire at the SWJ<\/strong> <\/a>with a 33 page broadside <\/a>against ….well….many targets… of the Defense Department\/ military academia\/civilian political status quo. I can’t say that I agree with every point in this brutal, turbocharged jeremiad, but some of Corn’s targets deserve the abuse he heaps on them, and he nails a few of my pet peeves, including the chronic neglect of strategy and grand strategy by the American elite (civilian appointees even more than flag officers, in my view).<\/p>\n

You will agree and disagree with Corn as he has a high density of concepts and references here, often expressed in polemical terms. He also throws in a gratuitous dose of anti-Clausewitzianism to add salt to the wounds of some readers, if the political angle is not providing sufficient friction \ud83d\ude42 :<\/p>\n

From War Managers to Soldier Diplomats<\/strong>: The Coming Revolution in Civil Military Relations<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

….There was of course a price to be paid for the failure to distinguish between political partisanship and political literacy. The risk was to end up with an officer corps focused exclusively on tactical and operational matters, and so lacking in political literacy as to be unable to relate military means to political ends, i.e. to think strategically. It did not seem to matter much at the time for two reasons. In the nuclear age, strategic thinking was seen as being too important to be left to the military, and was therefore quickly taken over by civilians. In addition, those same civilians (including Huntington) tacitly shared the conviction famously expressed by Bernard Brodie in 1946: \u201cThus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have no other useful purpose.\u201d And indeed, if the main raison d\u2019etre of the military is not to win, but to avert, war, why take the risk of having officers develop an \u201cunhealthy\u201d interest in politics by emphasizing the strategic level of war?<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

ADDENDUM:<\/strong><\/p>\n

My take, four years ago, on the emerging class of “soldier-statesmen<\/a>” (I try to be so far ahead of each curve that it brings me no recognition whatsoever. LOL!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Tony Corn opens fire at the SWJ with a 33 page broadside against ….well….many targets… of the Defense Department\/ military academia\/civilian political status quo. I can’t say that I agree with every point in this brutal, turbocharged jeremiad, but some of Corn’s targets deserve the abuse he heaps on them, and he nails a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[360,361,304,425,25,336,89,39,150,270,372,187,558,127,211,13,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-21st-century","category-america","category-defense","category-government","category-horizontal-thinking","category-intellectuals","category-international-law","category-military","category-military-intelligence","category-national-security","category-non-state-actors","category-politics","category-social-science","category-strategy","category-terrorism","category-theory","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}