One could argue, quite reasonably, that there is much to improve in regards to civil-military relations within the US Government and, in particular, the US Department of Defense. For those who work for or with the Pentagon bureaucracy and despair at the seemingly endless red-tape and inane processes - take heart - things could be worse. This is evidenced in a recent Standpoint opinion piece entitled The MoD -- Unfit for Purpose by Anonymous. Based on several e-mails received by SWJ we are quite confident that Anonymous is who he says he is -- a military officer who has worked several years at the UK Ministry of Defence. Here are several excerpts -- have a stiff drink before reading the entire article at the link and be sure to peruse the comments that follow...
... Most people still believe that the MOD is essentially a military organisation. It is not. It is an organisation dominated numerically, culturally and structurally by civil servants and consultants, many of whom are unsympathetic to its underlying purpose or even hostile to the military and its ethos. You just have to spend a few days at the MOD before you realise that the culture there is not just non-military, but anti-military...
The contrast with the US Department of Defense could not be greater. The Pentagon is a first-rate military organisation (at least in terms of status) where the MOD is not. At the Pentagon, every military person is expected to be in uniform; and it's the civilians who feel and recognise that they are the supporting cast. Military officers are frequently loaned to other ministries such as the State Department and they continue to wear their uniforms there. The reverse is true in the UK where the Civil Service and its "unions" not only resist the wearing of uniforms but also any systematic secondments (as opposed to hand-picked placements) from the military.
The MOD has slipped from being one of the top five ministries to one of second or even third rank. Moreover, even if our top generals wanted to oppose some aspect of defence policy, they would find the MOD's structure is now rigged so that civil servants increasingly come between them and the government...
Worse still, the civil servants who now dominate the MOD are a different breed from those who staffed it in the 1980s. In those days there were still many civil servants who had served in the Second World War or Korea, or who had at least done national service. They respected and understood the armed services; they believed an effective military was important and had usually learnt essential skills of leadership and management. They were loyal to the Queen (then the head of the Civil Service), to the Civil Service itself and to its code, and to the service arm they were working for. They have all gone.
Their successors tend to see the services as a tiresome anachronism, peopled by unsympathetic, old-fashioned social types. For many of them the MOD, with its part-time minister, is merely a stepping stone to greater things...
Because the services haven't had the budget increases they need to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military is running out of everything. We're running out of trucks, for instance. And when things break they aren't being replaced. Increasingly one gets the impression that the civil servants don't care if the forces are broken - their careers will not be affected. But it may also be that some civil servants and a body of politicians, from both Left and Right, would actually be happy for the military to be broken in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then they will have truly achieved the Europeanisation of Britain's armed forces along the lines of a purely defensive "UK Defence Force". War will somehow have been abolished - until, of course, it returns at a time of our enemies' choosing.
Read the entire article at Standpoint.