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.
