On the Ingratitude of Republics: From Carthage to the Pentagon

It is a peculiar and perennial folly of republics to believe that the political arts and the martial arts are one and the same. Worse still is the pernicious habit of judging the latter by the fickle standards of the former. History provides us with stark, bloody object lessons in this regard, wherein great powers, in their decadence, chose courtiers over conquerors and sycophants over soldiers. The consequences were, invariably, catastrophic. One need not be a prophet, but merely a student of human nature and statecraft, to see the same unwise pattern emerging in our own time.

Consider the Roman Republic—a subject upon which I have often ruminated. There you had Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, “Pompey the Great.” A competent general, to be sure, but more significantly, a master politician. He cultivated the Senate, he understood the optimate cause, and he was, above all, a man of the establishment. His command against Mithridates was ratified through the proper channels, his triumphs were celebrated by the right people. He was, in the parlance of our day, a “team player” within the political structure.

And then there was Gaius Julius Caesar. A military genius of a different order, whose conquest of Gaul was so spectacular, so unprecedented, that it inspired not merely admiration in Rome, but a deep and abiding fear. The political class, the Catos and the Ciceros, did not see a hero securing the frontiers; they saw a populist threat to their own privileged position. They sought to prosecute him, to strip him of his command, to drag him back to Rome not for a triumph but for a trial. The Senate, in its profound foolishness, believed it could manage the popular Pompey and destroy the formidable Caesar. The result was not the preservation of the Republic, but its utter destruction in a bloody civil war. They preferred political pliability to martial excellence, and they reaped the whirlwind.

One finds an even starker precedent in that other great commercial republic, Carthage. The Barcid family, and Hannibal in particular, were the saviors of their state. For years, Hannibal Barca fought Rome in Italy, on Roman soil, with a mercenary army and against all odds, winning stunning victories at Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae. He was a master of his craft. And how did the Carthaginian oligarchy reward him? With jealousy, with political obstruction, and with a deliberate refusal to send reinforcements or supplies. They feared a successful general more than they feared the Roman legions at their gate. They preferred their own comfortable commercial interests and political sinecures to the unglamorous, hard-minded task of winning a war. The consequence was the total defeat of Carthage, the razing of their city, and the sowing of their fields with salt.

The lesson of these episodes is not subtle. It is a principle as clear as any found in our constitutional text: a nation that mistreats its most successful warriors in favor of politically convenient functionaries is a nation courting ruin. It substitutes the judgment of the camp for the intrigues of the court, and it invariably makes the fatal error.

Which brings us, lamentably, to our present circumstance. One observes with a sense of weary recognition the treatment of two of our own most capable generals: Michael Flynn and David Petraeus.

General Flynn was the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a warrior with a deep understanding of asymmetric threats. He fell victim not to any battlefield failure, but to a political process—a pernicious and, it now appears, deeply flawed investigation, wherein the might of the federal government was turned against him for the crime of being associated with a disfavored political figure. The against him were ultimately dropped, but the reputational destruction was the point. The establishment proved it could break a three-star general who stepped out of line.

Then consider General David Petraeus, the architect of the Surge in Iraq, a scholar-warner of immense stature. His military record is nearly unblemished by failure. His transgression? The sharing of classified notebooks with his biographer, with whom he was having an affair. A serious error, to be sure. But compare the bureaucratic hounding he endured—a felony charge, the end of his public career—with the serene impunity enjoyed by political appointees who have handled classified information with a negligence bordering on the criminal. The difference is not the severity of the act, but the political utility of the actor. Petraeus was a warrior who had become too large a figure; he had to be cut down to size.

This two-tiered system of justice, one for the politically favored and another for the militarily formidable but politically inconvenient, is a poison. It tells every young officer with talent and ambition that fidelity to the chain of command is less important than fidelity to the prevailing political winds. It discourages the bold, the brilliant, and the unconventional—precisely the minds we need to win the wars of the future.

The Roman and Carthaginian oligarchs made this fatal calculation. They believed their political games were the real contest, and that the generals were but pieces on their board. They discovered, too late, that the board was the world, and the pieces were legions. We seem determined to repeat their error, to our great and certain peril. The Constitution does not prohibit stupidity, but it is a grievous thing to watch a Republic embrace it with such fervor.

I noticed this today, with a youtube video retconning Continental Marines by adding a woman to the group in costume. I have no objection to women being in the Marines, if they can make the cut, but retconning history about who did what is a slap in the face to those who fought, and shows the rot of political involvement has gotten very deep where it goes into the Marine Corps birthday message. I fear it will be very hard to cut out.

The Root of the Rot and the Antidote of Principle

To identify a folly is but the first step. The duty of the jurist—and the citizen—is to probe the cause of the malady. The mistreatment of successful generals is not mere happenstance; it is the predictable output of a diseased political system. The underlying reasons are as old as politics itself, yet they have been perfected in the modern administrative state.

The primary engine of this injustice is the prioritization of political equilibrium over meritorious achievement. A republic, particularly a large and powerful one, develops a ruling class. This class—a self-perpetuating consortium of senators, bureaucrats, media figures, and assorted courtiers—values one thing above all else: its own perpetuation. A brilliant general, fresh from the field of victory, is a wild card. He possesses a currency the political class can never mint: the authentic allegiance of the troops and the admiration of the populace. He is not beholden to their networks, their fundraisers, or their unspoken codes of conduct. He is, in a word, dangerous.

Caesar was dangerous because his dignitas, earned in Gaul, outshone that of every senator in the Forum. Hannibal was dangerous because the merchants of Carthage could not control him; his loyalty was to his father’s oath and to his army, not to their balance sheets. The political class does not ask, “Is this man a great captain?” It asks, “Is this man manageable?” A Pompey, for all his triumphs, was ultimately a creature of the Senate. He could be flattered, bargained with, and controlled. A Caesar could not. The establishment will always choose the manageable mediocrity over the unmanageable genius, for its own survival depends on it.

In our own context, this manifests as the tyranny of the “process.” Generals Flynn and Petraeus were not brought low for legitimate crimes in any proportionate sense. They were brought low because they violated the unwritten codes of the ruling class. Flynn’s sin was consorting with a political movement deemed déclassé and disruptive to the established foreign policy consensus. Petraeus’s sin was, in essence, becoming too large a figure to be left unattended; his transgression provided the necessary pretext for his defenestration. The offense is not the action itself, but the opportunity the action provides the establishment to reassert its control. It is a prophylactic punishment, meant to warn others who might dare to step outside the approved corridors of power.

The second reason is the bureaucratization of virtue. In a healthy republic, martial virtue—courage, audacity, strategic acumen—is celebrated as a public good. In a decaying one, these virtues are subordinated to the “virtues” of the bureaucracy: adherence to procedure, sensitivity to political goals, and a suffocating risk-aversion. The modern Pentagon, in many ways, has become a captive of its own civilian bureaucracy. A general who wins a war but offends the sensibilities of the Deputy Undersecretary for Diversity and Inclusion is seen as a greater problem than a general who loses a war but files all the proper environmental impact statements for his forward operating bases. This is madness, but it is the predictable madness of any system where process has eclipsed purpose.

As for remedies, one must not seek a silver bullet where none exists. The disease is one of political culture, not of specific statute. However, the cure begins with a relentless return to first principles.

First, we must resurrect the distinction between the political and the martial spheres. The military must be subordinate to civilian authority—this is a bedrock constitutional principle. But subordination does not mean subjugation to the petty politics of the day. The civilian leadership’s role is to set objectives; the military’s role is to achieve them with maximum efficacy. Congress must reassert its role as a check on the executive branch’s weaponization of law enforcement and administrative processes against military officers. The military justice system itself must be fortified against political infection.

Second, we must cultivate a culture that once again honors meritocratic achievement, openly and without apology. This requires a citizenry and a press corps with the discernment to see through political smears and the courage to celebrate true excellence, even when it is found in someone with whom they may politically disagree. We must despise the two-tiered system of justice that hounds a General Petraeus for mishandling notebooks while ignoring the systemic, reckless handling of classified information by political figures for personal convenience.

Finally, and most importantly, we must repudiate the notion of a permanent, infallible ruling class. The Founders gave us a Republic, not a technocratic oligarchy. The constant, grinding effort to bring every institution—from the academy to the military—under a single, homogenous political worldview is fatal to a nation’s health. It produces groupthink, stifles dissent, and punishes the very talent and independence of spirit that wins wars.

The remedy is not a new law. It is a renewal of character. It is the stubborn, unwavering belief that a nation should be led by its best and brightest, not its most compliant and well-connected. The Romans and Carthaginians forgot this, and their cities are dust. We have the records of their folly. The question is whether we have the wisdom to learn from them.