Senator Barack Obama recently gave an interview to the Military Times family of newspapers, in which he made the following remarkable statement:
I don't know a higher [military] priority than making sure that the men and women who are putting themselves in harm's way, day in and day out, are getting decent pay and decent benefits ... These are just basic requirements of a grateful nation.
Lest anyone think I'm taking a partisan stance, I should point out that Senator John McCain's website makes almost the exact same assertion:
There can be no higher defense priority than the proper compensation, training, and equipping of our troops.
Sadly, it is an example of how skewed our national debate about roles and missions of our Armed Forces has become that these assertions are accepted without challenge. Such statements threaten to turn our fellow Americans in the profession of arms into that oddest of military aphorisms, the "self-licking ice cream cone" - an object that exists for no other reason except to consume itself. The statements above are popular because they make us feel good that we are taking care of folks who are shouldering a burden the nation is deeply ambivalent about them bearing. But we use such illusory comfort as an excuse to turn away from hard choices about roles and missions in the coming years.
Let's set aside for the moment that fact that Commander in Chief is only one of the many roles given to the Chief Executive by the Constitution, and that the excessive focus on the "CINC test" is completely out of proportion to what the founders intended. What both candidates have gotten wrong here is the old adage of "Mission First, Troops Always." This is a hard and necessary lesson learned and internalized by military leaders, from the most junior NCO to the most senior general and admiral. Simply put, it's the idea that no matter how much you want to take care of those under your command, your unit's assigned mission has to come before their personal well-being. It's one of the toughest lessons of military leadership to internalize, but it's also essential to a professional force that contains a core identity of Servant of the Nation. We've already lived through a previous period where this mantra got reversed - during our missions in the Balkans, when deployed forces were told repeatedly that force protection was to be the number-one priority of the force. The illogic in this is not hard to spot - if the top priority here is taking care of our soldiers, then the easiest way to do that is to not deploy them into harm's way. In the words of an old saw, "A ship in harbor is safe, but that's not what a ship is for."
Want a better way? Rather than sending out feel-good platitudes about "honoring those who serve", let's create a strategy that's worthy of their sacrifice. Rather than build an elaborate construct where we shower our troops with praise and benefits even as we ask them to take on more ill-defined missions, let's give them, as I put it during the primary season, a "coherent, consistent vision of American power."
If you do that, then the resourcing, the training, the equipping follows. It won't be easy - it will involve difficult choices that nobody wants to make. But if you set those conditions, then, in the words of those who know, "we need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through."