Politicians and the Military

...Generals, after all, are men...

...He thereby pre-empted what always has been a soldier's task, and inflated and dignified beyond absurdity what was previously a small issue...

...Yet they had been stuffed with I&E programs which did them no good when familiar organization collapsed...

...While they called for some punishment, they did not justify a convulsion in Washington...

...Without the Walker case, the recent directive by Defence Secretary McNamara, which rammed the already over-padded gag on the American military right back to their brass tonsils, would never have been written...

...That is really the point Fulbright made and McNamara accepted...

...The guidance written by the Army for the Army was also picked up by the Navy and some sections of the Office of War Information (OWI), which never developed a doctrine of its own...

...Until recently, however, civilian authority never encroached on a soldier's freedom of speech as defined by custom...

...Troop indoctrination about the nature of the enemy or any other subject will never of itself harden an army...

...Having thus dampered military interest in the subject, McNamara next named 13 civilian VIPs in early January to determine how troops should be indoctrinated...

...Its slurring tone made a cause célèbre of the Walker case which, left alone, would have cooled...

...When he got called down, attention focused on his legitimate activities because politicians insisted on making Walker what he is not...

...This is cited as a horrible example, along with the inevitable it-canhappen-again moral...

...And when institutions are treated as if they were inferior, they are on the road to becoming inferior...

...Yet the guidance (manual) controlling indoctrination was written in thirteen and a half hours by a major and, having proved suitable, lasted the War...

...Taken in its broadest sense, the ban means that a troop leader or the Army itself cannot talk to soldiers about the virtues of their own cause or the vices of the enemy's...

...I will not indoctrinate troops if ordered...

...And it is not the Army's task to evangelize the country...

...In eight press releases in January styled "Muzzling the Military," Senator Thurmond charged that Pentagon censorship has become oppressive and frivolous, that Troop Information and Education (I&E) programs are compelled to take a limp line against Communism, and that suppression of service-sponsored public seminars on this subject are part of a widespread insidious plot to soften the American fiber...

...Had they been more extensively schooled to "hate" Communism while remaining halfbaked warriors, they would have been no less vulnerable to the seductive methods of their captors...

...The World War II guidance reads: "Information which does not inform, counsel, warn, stimulate, remind or instruct with the purpose of training the mind for war is innocuous and of no value to the military service.' Men are not easily fooled...

...These contrasting and equally oblique attitudes give vast dimension to problems by nature onequarter inch high...

...His actions were scatter-brained, unomcer-like and contemptuous of the best interests of the Army...

...It follows, then, that how troops should be indoctrinated is not to be answered by philosophers and pedants...

...But when command is slack and soldiers doubt that their collective power has been sedulously developed, I&E lectures on tangential topics are an additional affront, resented and brushed off because they are time-wasting...

...Both the National Security Council and the post-Korean commission on prisoner-of-war conduct, in fact, recommended such activity...

...One Army commander has said: "I no longer express a political opinion even in my home...

...In the past, through the inspired sweat of a few working staff officers, it has been successfully conducted without heavenly guidance: White House, Congress and the Secretariat were content to have it that way, knowing it was no real brain-twister of fateful consequence to the nation...

...He is the accidental and miscast catalyst...

...From the beginning, the Troop Information program had a position on the USSR and emphasized the need for resistance to penetration by Communist propaganda...

...Walker was relieved and admonished (1) for trying to influence his soldiers as voters, and (2) for villifying prominent Americans whose politics he execrates...

...To Senator Strom Thurmond (D.-S...

...it does intimidate the average general...

...To Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara he is a walking argument why soldiers should be seen and not heard until civilians put words in their mouths...

...If there were no choice between swallowing this package whole or rejecting it, it would be unfortunate...

...In a cogent and wellreasoned confidential directive to his senior commanders in December, General Decker, Army Chief of Staff, reaffirmed their duty to do so...

...Troop indoctrination is not an intricate task...

...Army materials, such as the Frank Capra Why We Fight films, got multi-service use...

...Senator Barry Goldwater [R.Ariz.] joined him briefly, then lost interest...

...McNamara didn't start this trend...

...Taboos and offlimits areas are not delineated absolutely...

...For Walker is an odd one...

...Official attitudes are conducive to making the officer body wary about Communism as a topic for troop discussion...

...it began in the Eisenhower years...

...To Senator J. William Fulbright (D.-Ark...

...S. L. A. Marshall, who served as the chief historian of the European Theater of Operations in World War II, is currently the military analyst of the Detroit News...

...It happens to be wholly misleading...

...senior officers feel pressured into know-nothingism...

...So it is hardly remarkable that the nation feels forced to make a choice between two equally untenable extreme positions...

...Policy, plans and programs were shaped by a half dozen relatively junior staff officers...

...There is, however, a difference between conspiracy and bureaucratic arrogance...

...Still, World War II ended OK for our side, and troop indoctrination, despite its crudeness and some late-day infiltration by Communists, was never blamed for the "sell out of China" or the intransigence of the Soviets...

...It was not subsequently proved too stupid or naive at a function which today is allegedly too sensitive for soldierly handling...

...His swan song to the Congress when resigning was maudlin, inaccurate and peculiarly unmilitary in its self-pitying tone...

...The executed plan for the indoctrination of enemy POWs was drafted by a lone field officer during one lost weekend...

...They were green, ill-trained for war and wholly ignorant about how to resist interrogation, evade capture or reorganize for self-help in a compound...

...As never before, U.S...

...Were it not for his indiscretions he might be indoctrinating yet, with no opposition...

...It is ironic in the extreme that Walker should become the central figure in a national debate about whether the curb on the whole military is not senselessly restrictive and damaging...

...The irony is that the Senator was advising on the management and mentality of soldiers when he himself has never spent a day in uniform...

...Yes, there was red tape...

...That, at any rate, was the implication of Senator Fulbright's July memo...

...foreign policy...

...McNamara asked for guidance, and he certainly got it...

...Nothing could be more absurd than to make a hero of a fumbler or cite his case as proof that an institution is deserving of greater trust and fuller freedom of action than it is being given...

...when he opens his mouth, his emotions run away with his judgment...

...THE AIM OF ALL INDOCTRINATION SHOULD BE STRONGER FORCES' Politicians and the Military By S. L. A. Marshall Last Spring when Major General Edwin A. Walker made news by being relieved as Commander of the 26th Airborne Division in Germany for breaking tradition, custom and regulation in the way he indoctrinated his troops, it was inconceivable that before year's end his case would fill the sky like the murk of the genie released from the bottle...

...On the other hand, public seminars are obviously a dubious outlay of officer time and taxpayer money...

...no person of high rank ever interfered...

...They failed because they had been failed in the hard school of soldiering...

...The censorship is insensibly constrictive...

...Had there then existed the same barriers to information flow and resolution of official positions which now choke the Pentagon, the operation wouldn't have gotten off the ground...

...Fulbright, in effect, instructed him that when Americans put on military suits they lose perspective on all else, especially foreign policy...

...The sinner and his transgression had no great intrinsic importance...

...they are defined more by usage and common sense than by letter...

...When an organization feels sound within itself and fitted for its mission, it becomes open-minded to instruction on any subject by its own leaders...

...Indeed, if the boundaries were not rather flexible, Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur could not have indicated their party leanings while serving in the field...

...indoctrination designed to enlighten the soldier on the nature of the world struggle and the virtue of his own cause is purely secondary...

...armed forces has always operated on a rather loose rein...

...C.) and to Birchites he is a martyr crucified for the purest patriotism...

...Suddenly, it is as vital as space conquest, made so by Walker's folly and McNamara's signature...

...It anticipated by three years the formation of the United Nations and urged support of this ideal...

...But for Walker's flannel mouth, there would be no national controversy over serious issues which he hardly personifies...

...For the greater part of two centuries, it has proved safe enough without censorship...

...There have been occasional jars, of course...

...The hard issue for which he was disciplined was too narrow and local to have national significance...

...Commanders have never been forbidden to indoctrinate against Communism...

...The sea was uncharted, the pilots utterly green...

...The primary aim of all indoctrination should be building stronger military character in forces...

...There is no substitute for the methodology and the relentless grind of technical instruction and exhausting exercise afield, which gives the individual confidence in his role as a fighter and the unit a feeling of superiority in its military task...

...Implying a large trust in the judgment of the officer corps, this system, while not foolproof, is congenially American...

...True, the services will sometimes blunder and wander far afield, especially when they are so close-ridden that they endeavor to look like all things to all people...

...when part of their freedom of thought and speech is arbitrarily restricted, they are less apt to be forceful in councils where their voices and judgments should dominate...

...But they were not unprecedented or criminal...

...Nevertheless, such a stalwart as Lieutenant General Arthur Trudeau, for speaking long and eloquently to the public on the subject, has felt the heavy hand of official disapproval...

...The memo should have been attacked, but when Thurmond, bridling at it, instead championed Walker as the perfect figure of a modern major general, a good cause began hobbling along on clay feet...

...But he has doubletimed it with notable help from Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Arthur Sylvester, who, like most publicists in their first fling at a security job, quakes at the shadow of an imagined danger...

...When he led the troops at the Little Rock affair, for example, he consistently answered the wrong questions and replied "no comment" to harmless queries...

...This approach has been periodically challenged by Nervous Nellies from the outside...

...When strangulation threatened, however, the Army chose to ignore the order and clear materials on its own...

...But the assumption has always been that it is better to risk the mischief of some chump or firebrand than to stultify the whole armed establishment by suppressions which questioned both its patriotism and institutional discipline...

...Politics is a kimono-like word, though, covering everything and touching nothing...

...His caution is widespread...

...It had been directed that what the Army wished to publish would require clearance from the OWI and the Office of Strategic Services...

...It doesn't stop Trudeau...

...He was off range in his crusades against Communism, indoctrinating his troops as aggressively as he might hit a bunker line...

...The result would be the wrong emphasis and the downgrading of the primary object...

...But once their authority over indoctrination is taken away, their right to dispose all training time toward the all-around upgrading of military power is invaded...

...he is the personification of a devious effort by the military to mould and harden U.S...

...It isn't safe...

...Now how different—a Senate committee holds ponderous hearings on the subject...

...Unlike Continental armies, freedom of expression in the U.S...

...Ideological cross-currents as they had to be put to troops, what with Russia an ally and other tyrannies stamped enemy, were more confounding than today's...

...Senator Thurmond isn't raising a false alarm when he says this...

...The McNamara memo proscribed political discussion at troop formations...

...According to Thurmond, American POWs in the North Korean camps were the dupes of their Communist captors because they hadn't been schooled to hate Communism...

...Most of those who collaborated in one degree or another in Korea were captured in the first year...

...There were no assists from political commissars...

...Although there must have been vague passes at it earlier in our history, World War II iniated our first formal experience with troop indoctrination...