Huntington's Modelby Stan GoffI was roaming through a Barnes & Noble bookstore last week, when I ran across a book written by my old team leader from 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment –D (Delta Force). The book oddly enough, was entitled Inside Delta Force. The author, my old team leader, is Eric Haney.
Paging through the book, I found a photograph of our team that got the shit shot out of it on the "Chalk 4" helicopter in a pre-H-Hour mission for Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of Grenada – an invasion that should go down in the annals of invasions not just for its cynicism, but for the utter goat fuck that it was in its planning and execution. In the photograph, we had been posed by who-knows-who in a cluster, apparently preparing for our departure from the island. The grime and the funk of the operation was still on us, and we were wide-eyed with fatigue and stale adrenaline.
I flipped over to page 300, I think it was, where Eric described the whole debacle in dramatic detail. He'd changed a few names for whatever reason, and mine had been changed to Stan Johnson. Maybe he thinks I'm still on active duty somewhere. Fat chance!
It all made me feel strangely nostalgic, not about being shot at, but about having grown so much older I think, about how far I've journeyed since then, almost 20 years ago.
Later that day I stopped for coffee at a much better, privately owned, book store, The Regulator in Durham, where I almost passed by a volume in the Military History section called American Soldier: Stories of Special Forces from Iraq to Afghanistan, edited by Nate Hardcastle and Clint Willis . On a reluctant impulse, I pulled it down, and there on the cover of this anthology was my name. My publisher for Hideous Dream had given permission to include a substantial portion of my book, and Eric's. There were accounts going all the way back to Vietnam, mostly written by the actual participants.
What struck me about this coincidence of books was that most of what I had run into was written by former enlisted men – sergeants like me.
Memories started to itch, and some old scars connected like dots in my head.
In 1986, I started having problems at Delta. I'd begun quarreling with and alienating the Masonic inner circle there a year earlier, when I had "embarrassed" them in an exercise in Panama, where – playing the role of an enemy – I had defeated my own squadron. That same year, the unit was embroiled in a fraud scandal that implicated virtually the entire unit, and the investigations had started an orgy of finger-pointing and betrayal that wrecked morale and ignited a purge.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1986, I was called into Sergeant Major Mel Wick's office and summarily relieved as an "operator," my security clearance suspended, and told to start looking for a job. The rumor upon which my relief was predicated was that I had, while in El Salvador in late '85, taken a woman who was a former FMLN guerrillera into Ambassador Edwin Corr's bedroom at his palatial residence in Colonia San Benito while he was away and shared carnal pleasures with her on the presidential representative's very sheets.
In a way, I would have liked to have claimed the rumor – if for nothing else its iconoclasm – but, alas, it is not true. That didn't matter. I was purged.
Pending the reinstatement of my security clearance, I had to look for an assignment where an Airborne Ranger Infantry Sergeant First Class could work without access to classified material. That's how I happened to get assigned, as a Military Science instructor, to the Department of Military Instruction at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.
At West Point, during the first freshman semester of Military Science, dismayed baby-faced Plebes file into the classroom expecting to be instructed in the ways of warriors.
Instead, they are subjected to a highly selective version of US military history that tracks the development of the US Army officer corps through the funhouse lens of something called Huntington's Model of Military Professionalism.
At first, having reviewed my course material thoroughly to ensure that my cadets could survive the gauntlet of examinations, I thought this semester was just another sadistic extension of the "fourth-class system," that mindless tradition of sleep deprivation, generalized subjugation, and hazing that West Point freshmen endure for their first nine months.
I was wrong.
All US would-be military officers are indoctrinated in Huntington's Model.
Samuel P. Huntington, the great cultural racist and intellectual Cold Warrior, developed a crackpot theory of "military professionalism" and the "civil-military relationship" that was decades ago adopted as the official "theory" for the US armed forces officer corps.
At West Point, this indoctrination is almost a Skull-and-Bones-like, semi-hypnotic brainwashing, because it is inflicted on cadets who enter the classroom in a post-traumatic somnambulant state. Unlike the Bush boys, however, no cadet is ever forced to lay in a coffin, reciting his sexual history to his fellows while he whacks off.
Huntington's Model, which I promise not to belabor over much here (out of compassion for the reader), describes the ideal military officer as a kind of Prussianized version of doctors, lawyers, and corporate managers – "professionals" – professionalism mechanically defined by three attributes: specialized technical knowledge, a "sense of corporateness," and a broad, liberal education.
The latter means a college degree.
Huntington also makes the patently absurd claim – in his definition of the civil-military relationship – that the military can be apolitical, a bizarre assertion from a man who claims to have been influenced by the great Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. (Clausewitz begin his theory of war with the premise that "war is politics continued by other means.")
Huntington's Model provides a theoretical justification for the reproduction of a class system in the military, a system and a justification uniquely fitted to the post-WWII US military.
Looking at his criteria for a "professional," it becomes immediately apparent that experienced enlisted people in the military meet two of those criteria. They have technical acumen on par with most officers, and they share fully in the military culture (sense of corporateness). The distinction, then, rests on a formal university degree, a credential described by Huntington as a "broad, liberal education."
There are some very practical reasons, based on pure military logic, for hierarchy in the armed forces. The most obvious is that the defining activity of an armed force includes killing, dying, maiming, being maimed, and destroying property. These are, to put it mildly, counter-intuitive behaviors, often committed in pursuit of a political objective that is little more than an abstraction for those obliged to do all the mayhem. The more removed from the experience of the soldier that objective is, the more difficult it is to convince the soldier of its merits once he (and occasionally she) is confronted with a credible enemy who gives as much as s/he gets. So, along with an ideology of militarism, that leverages deeply irrational male sexual terrors, a system of draconian discipline has to be established to ensure the majority of the troops will fight, instead of flee or shoot their officers, when the shit hits the proverbial fan.
But Sam Huntington was working on his military professional model in the 1950's, and by then discipline for the military had been axiomatic for centuries. Huntington's "contribution" was, in fact, to develop a theory specifically suited to the needs of America's first full-fledged, standing, imperial post-WWII military.
Why would he be so keen on this definition of professionalization for the armed forces?
He expressed open admiration of Prussians, but the feudal customs of the Prussians (which, by the way, infect all large military organizations around the world to this day) had been adapted and modified to reinforce a sense of tradition that maintained a kind of cultural continuity through the many technological, doctrinal, and structural changes in the conduct of war. These changes are reflective of the society in which these military organizations are embedded. Only the military ethos is Prussian.
That ethos should not be confused with the practical needs of a vast, modern, mechanized (and now computerized), military force, designed to project itself internationally, across a spectrum of conflict potentially ranging from minor police actions to reassure a few pasty-faced bankers, to something called Total War, in which the objective is the destruction of an entire society.
The clue to the riddle here is what Huntington's Model calls the military officer: "a manager of violence." Emphasis on manager.
A standing military organization consisting of hundreds of thousands of people and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of equipment and supplies, employing state-of-the-art technologies, and spreading itself across five continents… has many of the characteristics of… say… a multi-national corporation. This magnitude of size and complexity carries with it a complex and highly specialized division of labor, which in turn requires a vast administrative apparatus to keep it synchronized.
This is at least part of the definition of bureaucracy.
Bureaucrats do not need leaders in the Homeric-warrior-hero sense. They need managers.
Bureaucratized class societies like ours reproduce themselves, that is, maintain their own structures and relations. An important mechanism for this social reproduction, in the civil and military sectors, is credentialing.
Once those West Point freshmen finish pinging through the gauntlet of their Plebian Year, they spend the next three years being indoctrinated in how to maintain control over untrustworthy, dissembling, sly and treacherous enlisted swine – all this coded now in the co-opted language of right-wing PC. Included among the sly and treacherous are those enlisted people upon whom they will utterly depend for their success, the NCOs.
The tiny handful of enlisted people with whom I taught at West Point were a kind of bold, experimental excursion to expose the cadets to the "good" NCOs. In most cases, though, the perverse cadets preferred us to the officers, and so that experiment has long since been terminated.
This points us to an important arena of class struggle, I think.
From this stroll through Delta and West Point, I need to reorient the reader back to Eric Haney's book. Inside Delta Force is a paean to special operations and militarism, glossing over the masculinist-racism of the unit. But in places Eric also raises uncomfortable questions about US foreign policy, and describes – as my own book did – the actual experience of the people behind the wretched Special Ops mystique. In our case, these are the experiences of enlisted people who in many ways transgressed the invisible boundary between enlisted people and the credentialed "managers of violence."
And it's well-written.
Both of us, in our time on active duty, became people upon whom officers would rely, but find hard to control.
The real point I want to emphasize is that Eric Haney and I wrote books at all. And that they were published.
Nothing so contributes to the reproduction of class in our society, aside from property relations, as the institutionally enforced intellectual division of labor. It dissects knowledge into academic ghettos, and it attempts to freeze working class people out of the intelligentsia altogether. Credentials!
Capitalism needs its credentialed mandarins, and the mandarins often define even who are the "legitimate" critics of capitalism. Specialization and credentialing are the keys to this legitimation, and the keys to the exclusion of would-be transgressors.
Those of us who lack the credentials must be excluded from the intelligentsia, because the inclusion of our voices, the legitimation of our voices, calls into question the legitimacy of the whole fucking system.
I feel this personally, both as a former enlisted man and as a leftist. As a leftist, I have sometimes encountered powerful pressure to circumscribe my own role, and to limit my own public discourse, to criticism of US military policy… to serve the revolution only as a witness.
Leave theory to the experts. Just like the military.
The comrades at Freedom Road don't pull that shit. They include plenty of working class intellectuals.
Working class people can and must become intellectuals. We can and must study diligently, debate, self-criticize, re-study, and continually sharpen our ability to play intellectual hardball.
We can't be lazy about it. It's always easier to pretend you know something than it is to learn about it. It's always easier to be cute than it is to be rigorous. It is easier to talk trash than practice the humility of the serious student. We have to work, harder than the bourgeoisie, because we are at war.
But we can never allow ourselves to be intimidated by advanced degrees – just as we cannot become anti-intellectuals. We can never afford to contain ourselves within predetermined specializations. The experience of working class intellectuals will enrich theory. Our stories will keep things real. Our practice will define the future.
And we deserve to be heard. |
