The Problem With Military Lawyers
The leaders who have placed lawyers in the chain of operational decisions are at fault.
by Francis P. Sempa
December 17, 2021, 10:08 PM
by Tom Raabe
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In a thought-provoking article in the National Interest, the Cato Institute’s Justin Logan contends that U.S. foreign policy is run by too many lawyers (full disclosure — I am a lawyer), and suggests that we’d have a better foreign policy if there were more historians and political scientists in senior foreign policy positions. Social science and social scientists, Logan argues, have much to offer policy-makers regarding analyses and possible solutions to foreign policy issues and problems.
Logan notes that America has benefited in the past from policy-making social scientists such as Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft (who was also a general), Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Robert Gates. And he further highlights the past insights and sound advice (much of it ignored, presumably by lawyers) provided by such international relations scholars as Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz. Logan also mentions that many academic scholars opposed the Iraq War and the surge in Afghanistan. He concludes by noting that “scholars and historians haven’t gotten everything right, but their voices are underrepresented at the principals level in Washington.”
Logan neglects to mention, however, that much of academia these days views the United States as a racist imperial power that is largely responsible for the world’s problems from climate change to global inequality. There are few academics today that would be comfortable promoting the hard-headed realpolitik views of Hans Morgenthau or the strident anti-communist views of James Burnham.
https://spectator.org/the-problem-with-military-lawyers/
