http://washingtonexaminer.com/the-obama-military-complex/article/2553919The Obama-military complex
BY BRIAN HUGHES | SEPTEMBER 29, 2014 | 5:00 AM
Why can’t President Obama and his military leaders just get along?
That’s the question that soon emerged after senior military officials suggested combat troops could eventually be used in strikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, an apparent rebuke to a president who has ruled out the possibility of U.S. combat personnel in the Middle East.
In reality, the dust-up is the byproduct of an inherent conflict between Obama and those tasked with waging war.
The president and his generals don’t share the same definition of victory, the Pentagon isn’t bound by the political restrictions influencing Obama’s decision-making, and military officials will always err on the side of having too many tools to eradicate a threat to the homeland, analysts said.
“For military people, when they are confirmed, they promise to tell Congress their unvarnished opinion,” explained Lawrence Korb, assistant defense secretary under President Reagan. “The president has to take into account the military, State Department, DHS, CIA — as a politician you have to be able to sell it to the American people.”
Another factor aiding the blunt talk from Obama’s military team, Korb added, is that “you can’t fire a service chief except for cause.”
When Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently left open the door to deploying combat troops against the Islamic State, it was hardly the first awkward tango over policy between Obama and his generals.
Early in his first term, Obama complained about feeling boxed in on deploying more troops to Afghanistan after Pentagon officials aired their preference for a surge of forces there. As Obama weighed congressional authorization for airstrikes in Syria last year, even some of his most senior allies complained that he lacked a cohesive blueprint.
In the most vivid reminder of the long-simmering suspicions between the two camps, Obama was forced to fire his top Afghanistan war commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, after the general aired complaints about the president’s strategy in an interview.
Obama’s former defense secretary, Robert Gates, also criticized the president’s plan to seek congressional approval for airstrikes in Syria in 2013. And now he’s ripping Obama for ruling out the use of combat troops against the Islamic State.
The president’s predecessors encountered similar problems.
Then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki faced enormous resistance from President George W. Bush’s inner circle for suggesting to Congress in 2003 that not enough troops were being sent to Iraq. Ultimately, Bush agreed with Shinseki’s conclusion and sent more troops there — after the chief of staff retired.
Perhaps most famously, President Truman sacked Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of the United Nations forces in the Korean War, when the general went rogue and contradicted the administration’s policy by calling for a more expansive war.
The dilemma over how to best deploy Pentagon resources is particularly vexing for Obama, a president whose path to the White House was paved by a call to end messy wars in the Middle East.
But some analysts said that despite the inherent power struggle between the White House and leaders of U.S. forces, Obama has stoked frustrations. And they argue that perceptions of the president, at least among a growing chorus of military critics, were hardened well before the rift now playing out in public.
“There was a feeling that this is a president who had trouble making choices. What he ended up doing was creating more options, and now you have a classic debate over this strange definition of boots on the ground,” said Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke chairman in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“It’s a legacy,” Cordesman added, “where the military still has great concerns that when given a mission, will it be properly resourced?”
