Abstract
Arguments in favor of the topmost senior officers exercising “principled resignation” in opposition to policies, decisions, or orders that they find immoral, unethical, or disastrous for the country weaken the military profession and endanger American national security. A member of the Joint Chiefs, a combatant commander, or a topmost war commander who “resigns” would be injecting themselves improperly into a policy role, opposing civilian authority, and undermining civilian control of the military. The act would be politicizing for the military and likely fail to change what the officer opposes. Most importantly, their act of personal conscience would poison civil–military relations long into the future; civilian trust in military subordinates not to undermine support for policies and decisions with the public and other political leaders would decline. Even more than today, they would choose their senior military leaders for compatibility and agreement above other traits.
When we discuss “resignation,” we rarely if ever mean it in the literal sense of resigning one’s commission and forfeiting all retirement benefits earned over a career of uniformed service. In the common parlance of the national security community today, resignation means a request for relief, reassignment, or retirement by a senior general or admiral because of a belief that some policy or decision will require immoral or unethical behavior, or do something that will cause a disaster for the country. We are not talking about refusing an illegal order; officers are taught, and expected, to refuse to carry out illegal orders.
Certainly, most any officer can leave active duty without explanation once they have fulfilled their contractual obligation, unless stop-loss policy is in effect or they are being retained for some special reason: Investigation, malfeasance, or the like. Officers serve at the pleasure of the president, but they continue in service by their own consent.
Individuals have their own standards of morality and ethics, personal and professional, and of what might be catastrophic for the military or the country. I agree with Don Snider and James Dubik that “soldiers and leaders who fight on America’s behalf” are “moral agents” as Dubik puts it (Dubik, 2015c; Snider, 2015b). However, people vary in background, experience, and belief, and often disagree about what is moral and ethical; Dubik cites easy examples of common understanding. Individuals do have choice in these matters; decisions are personal and people abide by them to varying degrees in a variety of circumstances.
Yet a growing number of officers, and some thoughtful scholars—Snider (2014, 2015a, 2015b), Dubik (2014, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c), Cook (2004, 2008), and Burk (2009), most prominently—while admitting differing personal standards, have suggested that officers who receive orders that so compromise their morality or ethics, or promise such unnecessary catastrophe for the country or their troops, must have the possibility of “principled resignation.” In a powerful, carefully phrased and argued article published some 7 years ago in a volume on civil–military relations, Burk constructed “a conceptual space between obvious obedience and obvious disobedience to civilian control.” He admitted up front that he meant “principled exceptions, allowing us to say—speaking loosely—that under some conditions military professionals may have discretion to do what we usually and ordinarily would say was wrong, or to do what they were not plainly authorized to do” (Burk, 2009, pp. 150, 149). 1
At lower levels, in the heat of battle, this seems true. We know that much obedience in the military is not blind nor are soldiers always obedient. Much of what Burk, Snider, Dubik, and others write makes sense: the need for thought, choice, and wisdom in the performance of duty. All admit the arena for disobedience is extremely narrow. One can think of many examples—real, hypothetical, and even, perhaps, apocryphal—where lack of compliance may be appropriate and even praiseworthy. Officers, sometimes highly successful ones, do not always obey orders. In his memoir, General Stanley McChrystal recalls a colonel (“thoughtful, talented, and pleasingly iconoclastic”) who “could also be headstrong and slow to carry out changes with which he didn’t fully agree.” Obviously, McChrystal “could live with that,” as he wrote, because that officer went on to a most responsible position at the center of our counterterrorism campaign as a three-star general (2013, p. 153).
Furthermore, there is a long history of military leaders opposing civilian decisions while remaining on active duty, keeping their views to themselves, or close associates, out of the public eye or waiting until retirement to express themselves. On occasion, their opposition takes inappropriate or professionally improper form, perhaps most often on yearly military budgets but also in other areas and sometimes on decisions to use force as well. The tactics might involve leaking information to the press, going surreptitiously or even openly to Congress, animating retired officers or lobbyists or contractors, and more. But once civilians decide, that kind of behavior most always stops. There may be grumbling; staffs may talk on background or not for attribution to the press, there may be requests to review the decision … but active opposition usually ceases. 2
But resignation by one of the dozen or two most senior uniformed officers on moral or ethical grounds over a legal order, or over policy or a decision, runs exactly opposite to normal practice, leading to a very different conclusion. My view in this article is that members of the Joint Chiefs, the four-star combatant commanders, and a three- or four-star combatant commander commanding a war or campaign is a special category of officer. They should not, indeed cannot, “resign.” Once they accept such an assignment, they do not have the same choice that lower ranking officers possess to decide to leave the service, precisely for the reason of the impact of their action on civil–military relations.
Resignation by one of these officers over matters of policy, or over a decision or series of decisions, would not escape public notice. Controversy would be immediate. Their action would inevitably become a political event because in essence, resignation by a general or admiral at that level would constitute acute disagreement with a decision or policy that is the proper responsibility of civilians to make and decide. In effect, the officer would be pitting their judgment, or their personal definition of morality, against the authority of the political leadership acting for the United States. The officer would be contesting civilian authority: in essence, refusing a legal order (no one in this discussion is writing about illegal orders) and ignoring their duty. An officer “resigning” would be crossing the line from advising to making (or attempting to make) policy or a decision properly belonging to their civilian superiors. It does not matter whether the officer speaks out or leaves silently, and here, while I applaud Peter Feaver’s sound thinking on resignation, I don’t limit the discussion to resignation in protest (2015). Any request for early retirement or reassignment, other than for personal reasons such as family or health, is unacceptable. The press, the rumor mill inside the Pentagon, and the larger media world would publicize or even sensationalize the act and pursue all avenues to explain it and unpack the officer’s thinking and motives. That is what occurred in 1997, when Air Force Chief of Staff Ronald Fogleman asked to retire a year short of his 4-year tenure (Kohn, 2001). If the issues are important enough to induce a top leader to leave, the controversy might induce the Senate to intervene, for in order to be advanced to retired status, a flag officer must gain Senate approval.
Thus, resignation inevitably causes, to a greater or lesser degree, a civil–military blowup. As Feaver states, resignation is “a public political act of defiance against a sitting Commander-in-Chief” (2015). Thus, Dubik’s attempt to have principled resignation remain consistent with civilian control of the military simply doesn’t work (Dubik, 2015c). Once public—even without any statement or explanation by the officer—resignation challenges civilian control. Depending on the circumstances, the precedent and the example set for peers and officers all down the line and in the future could threaten the effectiveness of the armed forces and a foundational principle of American government. In my judgment, that in and of itself violates professional military ethics.
Resignation Intrudes Upon Civilian Authority in Policy and Decisions
First of all, top military leaders who resign over legal orders breach the barrier between their own function of advice about, and execution of, policies and decisions by their legal and constitutional superiors. We are not talking about “dissent.” Snider (2015b) conflates that with resignation while Dubik (2015c) points out the difference between “voice” and “exit.” What they don’t emphasize (which Feaver does) is that the top military have many appropriate venues to disagree with their bosses: in the private consultations within the Pentagon and at the White House, in the interagency system of discussion at successive levels, and in front of Congress. To make their views known, they need not resort to such improper behaviors as leaking information or disagreement to the media, quiet meetings with congressional staff, and the like. Disagreement and dissent, in private in the White House or Pentagon or elsewhere before a decision, is part of the advisory function of senior officers. When before Congress they are asked for their personal professional opinion, their advice (with its potential for dissent and disagreement with a policy or decision) can, and often does, become public. This is functional and part of the policy and decision process.
Nor are top officers “co-responsible” with their civilian bosses for the final decisions on policy, war, and peace, as Dubik (2015c) asserts. Military leaders participate in these by law and necessity, but their role is different and subordinate; it is an “unequal dialogue” as Eliot Cohen made clear in his superb study of civil–military relations published in 2002. He points out that officers no matter how high in rank and responsibility rarely if ever possess the background, experience, knowledge, authority, or responsibility for the final decisions of war and peace and in some cases of strategy. They have spent their lives managing violence; focusing on tactics, operations, and support functions; and developing skills of leadership and command. The higher realms of international politics, the constraints and influences of domestic opinion, economic and financial considerations, and more are far from familiar (Cohen, 2002, chapters 1 and 7).
Constitutionally, these decisions are the proper responsibility of the political leadership that, in this era of interventions and conflicts short of total or existential war, must include nonmilitary factors and implications, sometimes even to the point of influencing how military operations are carried out. The president is commander in chief, putting him or her at the top of the chain of command. Congress issues orders in the form of laws, which must be obeyed. There is no exemption in the Uniform Code of Military Justice for disobedience on the grounds of the moral or ethical character of an order or its wisdom. Nor does military case law support disobedience to legal orders. 3
Even a hint or threat of resignation would be improper: A direct attempt to intimidate or negotiate with civilian bosses rather than advising them of various courses of action. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote of his astonishment at General David Petraeus’s offhand comment: “For some reason, he felt compelled to tell me with half a chuckle, ‘You know, I could make your life miserable.’” Gates possessed “a pretty good poker face … so,” he didn’t “think Dave knew how taken aback I was by what I interpreted as a threat” (2014, pp. 68, 67).
Resignation Won’t Work
Second, resignation is impractical. How will an officer decide what is immoral or unethical in the absence of common standards? Burk’s vague definition—“what we usually and ordinarily say was wrong” boils down to gut instinct. A military commander or member of the Joint Chiefs cannot know all of the circumstances or implications involved in a decision or policy; they cannot predict what might be unsuccessful, unnecessary, disastrous, or catastrophic from a larger political, national, or international prospective. Almost no officers are trained or experienced in applying the wide lens of raison d’etat nor it is their function or responsibility to do so. Those considerations might put morality and ethics, or the outcomes of a policy or decision, in a very different light than that of an officer applying the norms and standards of the military profession. As Carl von Clausewitz emphasized in his classic treatise, war is an extension of politics, which is why the Prussian theorist endorsed military subordination to civilian authority.
While resigning may salve the conscience of an officer, its practical effect on the particular policy or decision behind the rupture is likely to be negligible and even deleterious. An officer would find it difficult to compete with the prestige and authority of the White House in a dispute over policy, unless a hue and cry is undertaken by the opposition party and then the issue becomes politicized. Even Douglas MacArthur, who disagreed with Truman’s limitations on the prosecution of a most confusing, unpopular war in Korea, and tried to undermine them, failed in the end. While there was talk of impeaching the president, the issue immediately became the hallowed principle of civilian control. MacArthur “faded away” just as he predicted in his valedictory to Congress. Such would be the fate of any resignation. Depending on the issues, a resignation would cause a media splash for a few days followed by mostly private exchanges within the national security community. Very quickly the public frame would shift from the issues at hand to civilian control—the authority of the president, the propriety of the officer’s action, and the like. That has been the historical experience, from long before MacArthur’s insubordination all the way down to the present.
Civilians would be likely to replace an officer who resigns with one who would be reliably compliant so as to avoid political problems in the future. I once asked Curtis LeMay if he ever considered resigning. LeMay disagreed bitterly with many decisions of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, which he served as chief of staff of the Air Force. He responded “no,” certain that his bosses would replace him with some toady who would do what the civilians wished. LeMay believed it was better to stay in office and fight for his ideas.
Resignation Undermines the Military Profession
Another danger in resignation is the potential harm to the military. Any senior officer replacing one who “resigned” would, to many in the force, seem weak, or pliable, or uncaring for the troops or lacking in moral or ethical values; their credibility with subordinates all down line in the uniformed ranks would be compromised to a greater or lesser extent. And, as Feaver points out, the act “inevitably undermines and politicizes … successors, making the military advisory system that much less effective the next time around” (2015).
By walking away, an officer would be abandoning the people under their care, most of whom do not have that option, in effect distancing commanders from their troops. During the 1960s, the opposition to the Vietnam War would have rejoiced in a high-level resignation—the more the better—not only in loosening public support for the war but also in hopes that other soldiers might follow suit. Indeed, a high-level resignation might reverberate down the line, undermining faith in the civilian leadership, hurting morale, and complicating the leadership of commanders at every level.
An issue divisive enough to provoke a resignation might influence peers to do the same. More than one or two additional resignations at the top would immediately and widely be proclaimed a “military revolt,” lowering the reputation and prestige of the armed forces, and their legitimacy in American society, by calling into question their loyalty to civilian control. The ensuring political crisis could undermine the armed forces for a generation or more among the political leadership as well as the wider public.
Resignation Threatens Civilian Control of the Military
Last, if resignation, even in the very narrow circumstances posed by Snider and Dubik, became a norm at the top of the military establishment, it would poison civil–military relations. All professions insist on ethical behavior, but the military sets for itself a higher standard, rightfully so given matters of life or death, responsibility for the survival of the nation and for the lives of American youth. When officers accept the most responsible, most sensitive, and most powerful military assignments, they have the moral and ethical obligation, personally and professionally, to ponder the implications of their behavior: for the country, for the people under their command, and for the military institutions they lead and represent.
Officers will naturally disagree about what is moral or ethical, particularly in ambiguous situations under conditions of great pressure and stress. It’s only common sense; these are inherently subjective and unpredictable matters even to a group of people stereotyped (wrongly) to be quite alike in opinion, attitude, perspective, and experience (Clifford, 2007, pp. 103–128; Cook, 2008, p. 11). Politicians know this; they go to considerable lengths to avoid a high-level military resignation since it implies a disagreement so important and so irreconcilable that an officer would end his or her military career. For civilians, the politics are likely to be messy, given the confidence and respect the public places in the military. Some years ago, a four-star officer, interviewing to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was asked by every civilian official who interviewed him what might induce him to resign. 4 In 2006, George W. Bush feared resignations from his commander in Iraq and one or more of the Joint Chiefs, all of whom opposed the “surge” of reinforcements for the Iraq campaign. The president went to the Pentagon to persuade them, hoping to head off, in his National Security Adviser’s words, “a split between him and the military” that “under those circumstances would be a constitutional crisis and would doom his strategy” (Hadley, 2015, p. 157). 5
A high-level resignation would immediately become a precedent where none exists today, increasing the propensity of civilian officials to vet candidates for the Joint Chiefs and combatant commands for agreement with policy, pliability, compliance, and loyalty rather than competence, experience, judgment, and other characteristics generally thought to be necessary for such positions.
Fear of resignation would further chill an advisory relationship that already involves more distrust than is healthy. Candor would diminish: officers reluctant to probe too aggressively lest they seem to be threatening to resign, civilians reluctant to reveal their inmost thoughts and motivations lest their candor provoke resignation or be spilled in public should a breach occur. Diminished trust could well lead to the exclusion of the military from the most sensitive meetings in which the issues are most candidly hashed out and the decisions finally made, as occurred during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960s. The result would lessen the quality of national defense overall.
Entirely New, and if Established, Very Dangerous
In my judgment, we are discussing this issue because the United States has not faced an existential war for a generation since the end of the Cold War. Surely, advocates for resignation would not apply it to World War II, when Army Chief George C. Marshall opposed the North African invasion of 1942, because he thought it a waste of time, resources, and lives, drawing the allies into the Mediterranean away from the decisive campaign planned for northern Europe and prolonging the conflict and the bloodletting. (Marshall remembered threatening seriously to resign only once during that war, in anger, and reflected later that he was wrong to do so; Bland, 1991, pp. 300, 502–503, but see also pp. 203, 591; Kohn, 2009, pp. 281, 282, 288–289.) Nor would its champions apply it to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 when the president rejected military recommendations that could easily have led to war with the Soviet Union. In the 1980s, I had a conversation with Leon Johnson and Jacob Smart, two retired four-star generals involved in one of the most famous air raids of World War II: the August 1943 attack on the Rumanian oil refineries at Ploesti. Smart, then one of the four colonels on Army Air Forces Commanding General Hap Arnold’s brains trust, conceived and planned the raid: going in at low level from long range to surprise the defenses and destroy the targets. Liking the idea, Arnold sent Smart over to North Africa to sell it to the bomber crews who would fly the mission. Johnson, then a colonel commanding one of the bomber groups, believed it would fail with very high losses. I asked him why he didn’t refuse to fly the mission. Johnson looked at me incredulously. Refuse to fly a mission ordered against a critical target in an existential war against Nazi Germany? I doubt Johnson, who won the Medal of Honor in the action, had ever been asked the question. I don’t think either he or Smart ever thought about such a thing.
There exists no tradition of resignation in the American military. One reads or hears of an example that almost always turns out to be a polite euphemism for the sudden removal of an officer who is being fired, like the relief of General Stanley McChrystal in June 2010. 6 The most frequently cited instance of resignation has been that of Air Force Chief of Staff Ronald Fogleman, who asked in 1997 for early retirement a year short of finishing his 4-year term. Fogleman disagreed with a number of decisions by the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Air Force, and his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs. But, as he made clear in an interview a few months after retiring, he left quietly so as not to turn the issue into a question of civilian control. Whether this worsened the situation, as Feaver argues in his essay, I doubt (2015). Explanations by Fogleman would have highlighted all his conflicts with his bosses, giving the impression of a resignation in protest, and opposition to civilian decisions and thus civilian control—exactly what Fogleman was trying to avoid. He believed that his advice and perspective were no longer respected by his superiors and that the Air Force needed a new chief in order to meet its assigned responsibilities and serve the civilian leadership and the country effectively (Kohn, 2001).
Perhaps the only real resignation of a senior American flag officer over policy occurred in 1915, when Rear Admiral Bradley A. Fiske offered to resign and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels accepted. Fiske was the operations aide to the secretary, “the most important position” in the Navy as Fiske described it in his memoirs (before there was a chief of naval operations; 1919, p. 526). But the circumstances were nothing like today. Fiske clashed repeatedly with Daniels over naval administration, operations, Daniels’s priorities, preparations for war including the size, configuration, and deployment of the Navy, and much more. Fiske leaked material to the press, went around the Secretary to Congress, and published articles in prominent magazines differing with the secretary both before and after he left the position but while still on active duty. The wonder is that Fiske, a leader in the push for naval modernization at the time, lasted as long as he did and escaped outright firing (Coletta, 1979, chapters 10–15).
Certainly, soldiers at all levels, in all the services, have the moral obligation in all circumstances to do the right thing. They are, as Snider and Dubik assert, moral agents who possess consciences and the obligation to exercise their professional judgment (Dubik, 2015c; Snider, 2015b). But the right thing is, first and foremost, their duty to follow legal orders. Every officer at some point in their career has to take to their subordinates orders the officer dislikes or believes are wrong and motivate their subordinates perhaps to risk their lives. 7 Above all else, military service is about the nation and not the individual. The very essence of soldiering from ancient times to the present has been sublimation of the individual to the group, to the point of self-sacrifice. One of my colleagues in discussion asserted that in those few situations where the unethical, immoral, or catastrophic results were certain, the moral imperative trumps the legal. That is exactly wrong; it privileges one person’s definition of moral or ethical over duty to the country. Ours is a government of laws not individuals.
In the end, the consequences must govern. An officer who has devoted a lifetime to the nation’s defense, and who has risen to a position of the highest influence and responsibility, must obey professional obligations. Commissioned officers must obey legal orders from their superior officers in the chain of command, including civilians whose authority is written in the constitution and in law. For the top dozen and a half or so of the most senior officers in the American military, muddying that up with a personal calculation of morality and ethics, or of what could be disastrous, would certainly threaten civilian control. The choice to resign, in what would surely be a complex, ambiguous, and possibly critical situation, would be a threat to the military profession and to the national security of the United States.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
Portions of this article were presented to a conference on military professional ethics at Fort Leavenworth and to a session on civil–military relations at the Society for Military History annual meeting both in April 2015. The author thanks colleagues at those events for their comments and Thomas Searle, Scott Silliman, Charles Dunlap, Thomas Keaney, Robert Killebrew, and Alexander Cochran for their help with specific points and for reading a draft of this article. Other friends and colleagues, military and civilian, contributed thoughts and perspectives that contributed to my thinking over the years.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
References
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