Something is broken between the civilian and military leadership in America, and this broken relationship may partially explain the images of chaos we saw this week. For at least the past three administrations, the top brass has attempted to manipulate the behavior or at least constrain the choices of presidents by withholding information, presenting limited options or simple ignoring the instructions of the president. This is not entirely the fault of the generals though, as the administration of an empire is serious business, and subjecting it to the whims of the public would be disastrous. This is why democracy and empire are incompatible.
Let’s go through a short timeline of Biden’s history with military leadership as well as a similar dynamic present during the Trump administration.
1) During Obama’s first term, Biden famously told the president that he could not trust military leadership, and that if he asked them for withdrawal options they would play for time. A Washington Post article describes Biden’s attempts in 2009 to encourage President Obama to distrust his generals:
He only had a few seconds with the president, and he used them to press Obama to think about the possibility of failure in the months ahead. Would his ego allow him to concede that his war strategy wasn’t working? Would he stand up to the generals who would muster mountains of data and insist that they needed just a few more months or a few thousand more troops to make it work? Biden was sure the strategy would fail.
2) Obama’s experience would ultimately come into alignment with Biden’s fears, as military leaders refused to present the president with plans he wanted - those that would ultimately allow for a drawdown during his presidency. Here are a few excerpts from a long Politico piece called Obama vs. the Generals:
“The White House was convinced that the military had a vested interest in escalating the conflict,” says a former White House official. “They felt manipulated.”
As one retired general puts it, “If you said, ‘We need 40,000 troops,’ they’d immediately say, ‘20,000.’ Not because they thought that was the right number, but they just took it for granted that any number coming from the military was inflated.”
Over time, of course, a White House tendency to split the difference is bound to create perverse incentives for military planners, making mutual mistrust self-reinforcing. “If you believe the mission truly requires 50,000 troops and $50 billion, but you know that the White House is going to automatically cut every number in half, you’ll come in asking for 100,000 troops and $100 billion,” says the aforementioned former White House official. “The military eventually starts playing the very game the White House has always suspected them of playing.”
3) This pattern repeated in the Trump White House. Whatever the level of Trump’s commitment to his statements, we know his efforts to leave Syria and drawdown in other theatres were at least partially ignored. Here are excerpts from a Johnathan Swan article in Axios about the relationship between the Trump admin and military leadership:
Bannon insists that he frequently demanded the Pentagon answer basic facts about the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, including where billions of dollars in U.S. aid were going and how many troops and contractors were on the ground. "They literally would not give you any information. And the information they gave you was bullshit. In every presentation, they say you're 18 months away from turning the war around. Always. You're always 18 months away."
Trump would grow more and more frustrated. He had become convinced that the Pentagon was working against him, boxing him into staying in countries that he broadly viewed as terrorist-filled gas stations in a desert.
When it came down to it, Trump was indecisive. In the view of top officials, he did not seem to want to own the consequences of a precipitous withdrawal. This allowed the Pentagon to dismiss his tweets and rants and maintain the status quo. They stuck to the National Defense Strategy — a document they fully believed Trump hadn't bothered to read. Some senior officials also deliberately deceived Trump. "What Syria withdrawal? There was never a Syria withdrawal," Jim Jeffrey, Trump's special envoy to Syria and the anti-ISIS coalition, told Defense One in a post-election interview in November 2020. "We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there," he said, adding that the real number of troops in northeast Syria is "a lot more than" the roughly 200 Trump initially agreed to leave there in 2019.
What all these excerpts demonstrate is a consistent feeling from the military that if they are to succeed in their mission, they cannot be subject to the fickle concerns of presidents. In some undeniable sense, they are probably right. If wars take decades to fight and win, what option does the military have other than to try and sideline the changing preferences of each incoming administration? But what happens if a president is prepared for this dynamic?
I think this is what we are seeing. The chaos in the streets of Kabul is the result of Biden putting his foot down and demanding a specific timeline even after advisors explain that it’s not enough. I suspect that from Biden’s pov, if he expressed concern about Afghan allies or even Americans getting out of the country before making any large changes, he would create a new opportunity for the military to play for time. I do not think what we saw was the result of incompetence (though there’s plenty of that) so much as a complete lack of trust.
Though I am sympathetic with the president here, I also understand the position of the generals. They know that they have a job to do whether or not the public has the stomach to finish wars they initially support. As I said at the beginning, this is a fairly basic conflict between empire and democracy. If we want an empire, it requires the kind of long-term planning and consistent commitment that cannot be subject to regular democratic review. But we shouldn’t want an empire, and as we’ve seen, democracy is incapable of administrating the wars.