America's worst national security threat
Comes from within, and we should be very worried
Memorial Day had additional meaning this year for me. “The people of the United States,” began the final military order of my 25-year career, “express their thanks and gratitude for your faithful service.” At the end of May I retired after over 9,100 days in cammo, and as those last days passed by, my final uniformed thoughts are to warn my fellow citizens of a threat to America far worse and more real than Cold War’s “missile gap”—a trust gap, a national stomach cancer, eating America from within.
My basic training began in the summer of 1998, before Al Qaeda attacked America’s embassies in Africa, when the military’s top officer repeatedly said he preferred overwhelming force and didn’t believe in “fair fights.” That simpler time changed while I was still at West Point. 9/11 came during our senior year, and President George W. Bush’s “doctrine of preemption” speech at our graduation sent us to war. My classmates and I spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We might have known then that short wars of necessity bring Americans together. Long wars of choice divide Americans just as much.
What we could only see now, after years of hindsight, is that even the military’s place in society can change. Loved-by-all after the Second World War, despised-by-some after Vietnam, it felt in the late-1990s that our military would always hold a privileged place in society.
Not anymore.
The military is the last and only trusted institution in American government. But that trust is being chipped away by partisan divisiveness, political opportunists, and most insidiously, from inside the military profession itself.
Trust is the bedrock of our armed forces. It binds troops to citizens, and the gravity that, at the worst moments, pulls together soldiers in solidarity. Lose that trust and we lose our national defense. Division destroys.
Gallup polls show societal trust at historic lows. 25 years ago, American overall confidence toward institutions averaged 41 percent, and today that trust has fallen to 27 percent. Congress is down, the Supreme Court is down, law enforcement and the medical system—down, and down. The single part that seems relatively stable across those 25 years is the military. In 1998, 89 percent of respondents expressed confidence in the US military. In 2022, it was 90 percent. But Gallup’s not the only poll.
The Ronald Reagan Institute’s National Defense Survey conducts its own annual poll about Americans’ confidence in the US military. In November 2018, this survey found 70 percent of Americans trusted the military. By this past November, it was 48 percent.
Lies, damned lies, and polls, I know—but there are solid reasons for alarm. The first is the natural partisanship in society that, in turn, infects the military. An army is made up of citizens, and our citizens are divided. This division likely follows into the force.
Far worse and less natural, politicians routinely use the military as props. Particularly if they’ve never worn a uniform, pols surround themselves in a sea of uniforms, in order to bask in the cammo-glow. Even more common nowadays, politicians use the military as a target to score points with their base. Some look to drag the military into a “culture war,” and one prominent politician has even described the most-senior officer in the US military as “treasonous.”
If politicians pull the military into culture wars, some from inside are pushing the military into the fray. The retired ranks, which I will soon join, have some members with very loud megaphones. The loudest may be disgraced general Michael Flynn, who seems hell-bent on waging an insurgency against the country he once swore to protect. Or Doug Mastriano, a retired Army colonel and former candidate for the US Senate in Pennsylvania, was part of the attack on the Capitol on January 6th. Another, an Air Force Academy graduate, recently sentenced to two years in prison, also joined that mob just after posting on social media that he was prepared for a “Second Civil War.” (Historical note: Our Civil War was only possible because so many West Point graduates chose violent partisan politics and voted for secession with their feet and took up arms against the US government.)
There are two ways to overcome this trust gap.
First is the recognition that our public institutions are the people who serve America. The partisans have taken aim at the doctors and public health experts, the cops and the lawyers—we cannot continue to let these pillars fall. We must speak up for service in all forms, military and otherwise.
Second, astonishingly, the military claims to be a profession but does not police itself. Lawyers face a bar, doctors face boards, academics face committees—the military has no professional equivalent to hold its members accountable—which is why its retired members, including Michael Flynn, and those that attacked America on January 6th, have never been formally sanctioned by the military profession.
The military loves standards. Surely one to adopt immediately is that insurrections don’t begin in uniform. The military must organize, under the authority of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, some effective way to express the profession’s disfavor for such dishonorable acts. This should be incoming-chairman Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.’s first act in the position.
The military must do its part to restore trust—we’ll never be good until we remove the rotten.
The missile gap was a mirage. Today’s trust gap is real. There’s no better way to honor our fallen, on this and every Memorial Day, than bridging this gap.