Lobotomizing the Thinking Machine

How to break the American military

During a training event in September, 1821, a brigadier general of the Rhode Island militia passed down a simple order to a regimental commander: dismiss the regiment from the parade field. The colonel refused, and the brigadier “arrested” him — not taking him into custody, but seizing his sword and removing him from command.

The arrest of Colonel Leonard Blodget instantly produced a riot. Men in the ranks shouted at each other to “fix bayonets,” and the battalion commanders rushed their men off the parade ground in separate directions to break the regiment apart and prevent compliance. Militiamen standing near the brigadier beat his horse with the butts of their muskets to drive him off the field, as brigade staff officers “advised the general to retire.” He did, galloping clear of an increasingly dangerous scene.

Brought before a state court-martial, Blodget explained that the regiment he commanded had a custom of ending its training by marching off the field together. The regiment was dismissed from a spot alongside a nearby bridge — a place connecting the communities that sent companies to militia training days. It was a custom of citizen-soldiers founded in mutual respect, sending everyone home from a central point that linked them together. In that light, the order to stop doing it and dismiss the regiment on the field was taken as an act of deliberate disrespect, an unwarranted attack on the culture of mutuality. He couldn’t obey the brigadier, Blodget told his superior officer, because “his officers and men were opposed to the order.”

This isn’t how we usually think the military works. As Brigadier General Jospeh Hawes replied before the court-martial, command authority “descends, and not ascends.” As you might expect, Hawes won, and Blodget was convicted. But he also lost, as the convening authority, a major general, set aside the court’s sentence and returned the colonel to his command without punishment, citing “the contrariety of opinion heretofore existing on the question decided by the court.” Look, he effectively said, it’s wrong, but lots of people think a militia commander can’t give an order that violates local social custom, so….

In fact, this is kind of how the American military has worked. Yes, you have to obey orders. But there are limits to coercive power, and a deep strength in the model of servant leadership. Officers eat last for a reason. As I’ve written before, American soldiers and sailors have gone on strike more often than people tend to realize, in moments when their leaders have lost their trust. The first and most powerful way to secure obedience is to earn loyalty.

Iron Mike gets it

In the language of classical liberalism, the USMA professor Elizabeth Samet has argued for the foundational presence of willing obedience in the American military, a “premise that the only obedience worth soliciting and maintaining is one born of love not fear… Freely given and prompted by a love of country, liberal obedience cannot partake simply of restricted professional and technical, or immediate, circumstantial considerations. It must instead be entirely compatible with the intellectual enlargement that distinguishes the liber, or free man.” (If I had a dollar for every time my drill sergeants said stuff like this….)

Military officers leading American troops have seen the same thing. Famously, Ulysses S. Grant wrote in his memoirs that the men who followed William Tecumseh Sherman were “strong and sturdy, so that he had sixty thousand as good soldiers as ever trod the earth; better than any European soldiers, because they not only worked like a machine but the machine thought.” The ability of the thinking machine explains the well-known lethality of LGOPs: They keep going when their officers are dead or separated from them, and figure it out on their own.

Devils in baggy pants

Today, the American military is shrinking in the face of a growing recruitment crisis, and the US Army expects to be about 10,000 soldiers lighter. Some of the reasons are easy to see, and news stories say that the problem is “due to the military's high standards for future soldiers,” which turn out to be these: “Applicants must have a high school diploma, must not be obese, must be of good moral standing and not have a criminal record.” If you’re a morbidly obese felon with dreams of Top Gun school, sorry.

But that’s nowhere near the whole thing. Armies are built on mutual loyalty, respect from bottom up and from top down.¹ Officers return your salute. The perception or suspicion of contemptuous leadership is fatal to cohesion, fatal to retention, and fatal to recruiting, the latter because people who join the military tend to have friends and family in or from the military who encourage them to do it — or friends and family who say that shit no, bro, stay away, things are really screwed up right now.

And so I’m baffled that anyone is baffled. The current recruiting crisis has many roots, but I have no doubt at all that loss of trust is a big piece. First over vaccine mandates, in the face of evidence that the available vaccines are much less effective and much less safe than advertised. Servicemembers always get a lot of shots, and do it without complaining, but this one is different. Forcing this shit onto people is a trust-breaker, and militaries don’t thrive in the presence of broken trust.

More importantly, the Biden administration opened with an “extremism stand-down” in the armed forces, haranguing and interrogating troops about politics with varying degrees of clumsiness. An all-volunteer military in a constitutional republic has no business telling servicemembers which political views are acceptable or unacceptable, and no business asking anyone about their views in the absence of very narrowly defined personal behavior that causes specific suspicion. Listen up, troops, we don’t trust you, we need to make sure you have the right politics, we’re suspicious of your views, but anyway, follow me! Political struggle sessions are bizarrely incompatible with military service in a free country; fearing extremism in the ranks, leaders had a duty to fish with a hook rather than a net. A mandatory stand-down for everyone in uniform — over their potential for extremist thought — wasn’t an expression of faith in people who’ve chosen to serve. It was, flatly, bad leadership: Today’s training session is we don’t trust you. That’s why recruitment is down, or a part of it. (Retention seems to be holding steady, but will be worth watching.)

Clearly a high-trust environment

The low-trust military is part of the low-trust politics of a low-trust society. It’s the Schism at work: We’re healthy from the bottom up, and sick from the top down. A sloppy culture of top-down suspicion and disdain is not the thing that builds healthy institutions, and the American military is not getting healthier. Contempt is poisoning us, whether it’s from a Justin Trudeau or a Lloyd Austin. The signs are hard to miss, and the reality seems increasingly hard to defeat.

1. I claim no expertise on anything happening in Ukraine right now, but the performance of the Russian army appears from here to suggest the limited effectiveness of armed forces built on conscription and coercion.