The de-moralized military
Bacevich, Andrew J.
The De-Moralization of the Military Why the Kelly Flinn Story Matters By A.J. Bacevich The tale of Air Force First Lieutenant Kelly Flinn is absorbing for so many different reasons that, oddly...
...Besides, fighting that fight is not the business of soldiers...
...Central to the mindset of that generation is the firm belief that its members have an inalienable right to sex on their own terms and without consequences...
...hether the military leadership likes it or not, Kelly Flinn is no creation of radical feminists demanding adherence to the rules of political correctness...
...Senior military officers—none of whom got to the top on the strength of their credentials as social philosophers—cling obdurately to the proposition that soldiering is and must remain a distinctive calling...
...The real problem, revealed with particular clarity now by the Flinn incident, is growing confusion over—and hostility towards—the culture of the military, its content and its claims to legitimacy...
...Throughout military history, license rather than prudishness has characterized the warrior class...
...Meanwhile, civilian elites, increasingly ignorant of the realities of warfare and military life, profess to be puzzled by the very claim that the services should govern themselves according to a distinctive set of rules...
...ultimately it may harm American democracy...
...To the arbiters of elite opinion, the very idea that a junior officer's (consenting) sexual shenanigans might have professional implications is patently absurd...
...And even the unadorned facts of the case are compelling: the indisputable evidence of Flinn's misconduct, including disobeying orders and lying to her superiors...
...Their obligation is to satisfy the demands of both...
...Flinn's error, as she explained in a plaintive appeal to Air Force Secretary Sheila E. Wid-nall, was simply that she had fallen "deeply in love with a man who led me down the path of self-destruction...
...Undertaking such a reassessment assumes that civilian elites will acknowledge the need for such a culture and that military leaders can forgo the temptation to define military virtue as simply the inverse of civilian vices...
...Flinn was in bed with my husband having sex...
...Unless they do, civil-military antagonism will continue to escalate, with both sides attempting to score points by exploiting the failings of the likes of Kelly Flinn...
...Indeed, it is ludicrous...
...Yet if the military seeks to affirm its claim to cultural distinctiveness by declaring itself the last bastion of old-fashioned morality, it will certainly lose...
...After all, the melodrama of a high-flying career laid low by illicit sex is as undeniable as it is distracting...
...There was speculation, reported in the Washington Post, that this might impede Keller's rise...
...and the highly publicized allegations of sexual misconduct by senior military officials such as the sergeant major of the Army...
...But what the Kelly Flinn saga tells us about relations between men and women is an old story...
...The real need, therefore, is to reassess the requirements of modern military professionalism, taking into account the myriad forces that are transforming both American society and the conduct of warfare...
...Sex suffuses the marketplace, pervades the world of entertainment, creates fashions, fads, and celebrities, and insinuates itself into the political agendas of institutions ranging all the way from the local school board to the corporate boardroom and the halls of Congress...
...Those relations are in perilous disarray...
...More to the point, unless we are going to segregate the armed services from the remainder of society, military puritanism is unsustainable...
...Yet this sudden discovery of sexual restraint as a core value of military professionalism is patently fraudulent...
...That adultery, for example, might disqualify an individual from positions of trust and responsibility has passed beyond the ken of those who inhabit elite circles—a fact affirmed most resoundingly by the most recent presidential elections...
...Rather, the mediagenic aviation pioneer and Air Force officer is at one and the same time the offspring of America's vaunted sexual revolution, a typical—one might say, even exemplary—member of her generation...
...This is their peculiar burden...
...More generally, the editors of the Times, in high dudgeon, loosed a broadside at "an embattled military culture that has a lot to learn about handling sensitive personal matters...
...It will lose not because it sets standards of sexual behavior at variance with those prevailing in the nation's executive suites, but because the people who join the military—bright, ambitious, libidinous, and patriotic young Americans like Kelly Flinn—view those standards as archaic and irrelevant...
...The important thing is what the Flinn case tells us about relations between the military and American society— at least those segments of society that shape public opinion...
...Camp followers did not accompany armies on campaign simply to wash socks...
...the sex scandal at Aberdeen Proving Ground and other army training bases...
...Taken together, all of these embarrassments might lead to the conclusion that the military has a sex probA.J...
...The Pentagon's defenders for their part complain that military institutions are being unfairly obliged to pay homage to the imperious gods of political correctness...
...neither is entirely satisfactory...
...Soldiers today find themselves perched between social and strategic imperatives not easily reconciled...
...Especially on matters related to sex, civilian elites now insist on an item-by-item justification of traditional military norms and practice...
...The denouement was not long in coming: "Less than a week after we arrived to the base, Lt...
...The Air Force rejected this contemptible—and one might also say antiquated—defense, and rightly so...
...Thus, when the Air Force announced its discharge of Flinn, the New York Times editorial board used the occasion as an opportunity to ridicule the military's "antiquated adultery rules...
...Flinn and her advisers will surely have no trouble selling a bathetic made-for-TV morality play in which the nation's first female pilot of B-52 bombers undergoes the "ordeal" of seeing her once-promising military career destroyed by unfeeling superiors...
...In the long run, to engage in a series of civil-military showdowns over sexual issues will only undermine efforts to insure that American soldiers remain tough, competent, disciplined, and politically responsible...
...Bacevich The tale of Air Force First Lieutenant Kelly Flinn is absorbing for so many different reasons that, oddly enough, people will be tempted to underestimate its importance...
...Of late, the brass has tended to define military culture in opposition to those tendencies in the larger American society that it views with evident distaste: self-absorption, permissiveness, moral relativism, and the erosion of self-discipline and individual responsibility...
...As a result, in the eyes of some military officers, policing sexual behavior offers a pretext for asserting the difference between soldiers and civilians, between "us" and "them...
...This, in turn, inspires commanders to conclude that the defense of the marriage bond might serve as a convenient platform for demonstrating the military's commitment to its self-proclaimed "higher standard...
...That society, as they see it, is distinguished above all by its preoccupation with sex...
...From the outset, of course, the promise of sex without consequences has been illusory...
...And when things went awry, Flinn—like Paula Coughlin, the whistle-blower of Tailhook fame, and the young recruits at Aberdeen who fancied that sleeping with their drill sergeants might "advance their careers"—all too predictably sought protection behind the banner of traditional femininity...
...From Flinn's own point of view, it would appear that the two halves of her identity meshed nicely with each other...
...the recklessness with which Flinn encroached upon and destroyed the marriage of a fellow airman...
...the astonishing ease with which the aviator and her advisers gulled the media, not to mention an influential swath of Congress...
...lem, and many are the critical onlookers who have concluded precisely that...
...the conflict over gays in the military...
...And having set aside their own antiquated customs, the senior executives at the Times see no reason why others—the military included—should not follow suit...
...Both explanations contain elements of truth...
...Reversing the tide at this late date, if still within the realm of possibility, far exceeds the capacity of even the mighty American military machine...
...Yet the Air Force deludes itself if it imagines that in purging Kelly Flinn from its ranks it has checked the contagion threatening the distinctive culture to which it insists military men and women must still adhere...
...The prospects that either condition will be met are remote...
...Neither soldiers nor civilian elites show any inclination to surmount the mutual prejudices and suspicions in which they have invested so much...
...The announcement took note of the 48-year-old journalist's dazzling career and rapid rise to the upper echelons of the paper's editorial staff...
...More directly than their fellow citizens, they must wrestle with the challenges inherent in the nation's apparent determination to remain a free-wheeling democracy even as it assumes the role of global hegemon...
...In short, the matter of Kelly Flinn commands attention because it is of a piece with other equally tawdry but more substantial controversies: Tailhook...
...Indeed, for the military to imagine that it can sustain a relevant, vibrant culture by venturing onto the battlefield of contemporary sexual mores is itself fanciful...
...Obviously not...
...That disarray undermines military effectiveness...
...If they stray too far in either direction—either toward isolation and praetorianism or toward excessive accommodation with civilian val-ues—they court disaster...
...When it comes to describing the essence of the way of life that they are determined to preserve, however, they flail about ineffectually...
...It is a contest in which neither side is likely to prevail and in which the nation as a whole stands ultimately to be the loser...
...According to the testimony of Airman Gayla Zigo, whose husband became the object of Flinn's attention and vice versa, Flinn would show up at the Zigo home "always in her flight suit flaunting the fact that she was an [Air Force] Academy graduate and the first female bomber pilot...
...As with adultery, so too with any number of other manifestations of traditional military culture...
...It left out the piquant detail that Keller, married to another journalist, had only weeks before attracted press attention for his own sensitive personal matter: His "deliriously happy" mistress had just revealed that she was six months pregnant with their child...
...Bacevich is executive director of the Foreign Policy Institute at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C...
...For starters, that contest has, in large part, already been decided...
...Coincidentally, that same day the Times announced the appointment of Bill Keller as the paper's new managing editor...
...When it comes to discerning acceptable standards of behavior, the military need not take its cues from the foibles of high-profile news organs...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 38
