This post comes from eMMissary Christian Nattiel. An Army Lieutenant who was the first African-American Rhodes scholar from the United States Military Academy, Christian is an Infantry officer and recent Ranger School graduate. In this article he speaks a bit about his experience at Oxford and how he learned to bridge the oft acknowledged gap between the civilian and military during his time there.
For military service members, especially those on active duty, attending graduate school is a joyous time. Sleeping in your own bed, living by a predictable schedule, and wearing civilian clothes are just a few of the perks to enjoy. Alongside that, we also bear the responsibility of serving as ambassadors to the student body for our respective branch of service. During our training, we are often inculcated with the idea that this responsibility is a negative one. In other words, do not do anything that will bring discredit to the Department of Defense. I will contend that this is a reductive understanding of our ambassadorial duties. At graduate school, we have a positive responsibility to both brighten civil-military relations and solidify the trust of those around us in our government.
Understanding the terrain
It is no secret that the gap between military and civilian society is widening and has been for decades now. The Pew Research Center reports that scientists have recently supplanted military service members as the country’s most trusted professionals (Gramlich, 2019). This declining trust is especially the case for young people who push our technology forward in Silicon Valley (Zegart & Childs, 2018). Before you start building any bridges between the two societies, however, you first need to acquire a proper lay of the land, and ensure you are clear-eyed while doing so. Essentially, the task here is to discern where you fit into the kaleidoscopic intellectual community that is graduate school.
For many of us, service in the military is a family business, or at least a community one. Some of us join because career military service was our lifelong aspiration, while some others view their time in the military primarily as a means to social ascension. Of course, there are many other reasons that people join. Either way, there is at least one underlying assumption you likely had before you swore your oath: that your country will only order you to do the right thing. In my view, this sense of ethical trust we service members have in our government is the key variable for distinguishing where you fit in the various set of perspectives your fellow students will have about what it means to be American in the current state of international affairs.
Albeit that trust is undoubtedly a multivariate phenomenon, I will assert that some of the initial fissures that led to our civil-military gap emerged from the fault lines in our country’s cultural geography. Figure 1 depicts a map of America’s ‘rivaling nations’ from Colin Woodard (2011) book, American Nations. To county-level detail, Woodard (2011) recounts a sociopolitical history of our country to elucidate how the peoples in different regions have had overlapping, yet distinct ideas about American values since the 17th century. Anyone who has served in the military, moreover, knows that the military has a predominantly Southern culture. Marley and Hawkins (2017) coin the phenomenon of Southern overrepresentation in the military as the ‘Southern military tradition.’
Figure 1. Graphical depiction of the different cultural nations within the United States. Adapted from ‘MapLab: America’s Rivaling Nations,’ by L. Bliss, 2018, CityLab. Copyright 2011 by Colin Woodard.
Anecdotally, as a service academy graduate raised in Florida and Georgia, I assumed that because my classmates were from each congressional district of the country, I had a good understanding of our country’s cultural diversity. I assumed wrong. Everyone at West Point held a Common Access Card. The way that we discussed American history was always from a perspective that our dark days were temporary blemishes, rather than defining characteristics of our way of life. While we discussed ethics at length, we never openly questioned the justice of our wars, perhaps in fear of seeming political and/or unpatriotic.
In both business and graduate school, however, I encountered many Americans whose perceptions of the military were based on entirely different assumptions. They were usually either raised or educated in a different American ‘nation’ than I was. I remember some of my classmates expatiating about how the military exploits the poor, that we are warmongers, or that we are blindly obedient to a government with deceptive, imperial, and profit-minded intentions. These narratives about military service were certainly shocking in juxtaposition to the “thank you for your service” that we often hear in other places. Nonetheless, I am thankful for my classmates’ candor, as their challenges both strengthened my intellectual backbone and illuminated a new way for me to serve.
Bridging the gap
In order to both brighten these conversations and narrow the civil-military gap, at least three tasks are in order. The first is to read widely in just war theory, international relations (especially as it relates to the current debate about interventionism versus retrenchment), American intellectual history, and our current affairs. Those topics had nothing to do with my areas of focus during graduate school, yet I found that a strong foundation in them was necessary to parry the more aggressive comments I encountered. In addition, having this knowledge base will demonstrate the depth of our military’s ethical approach to the application of power by land, air, sea, space, and cyberspace. The second task is to ruminate on why we are an apolitical military. It is common knowledge that we are apolitical so that the military remains subordinate to civilian authorities, but this superficial answer begs the question of whether that subordination is desirable when civilian authorities lead the country astray. My working answer is that we must remain publicly apolitical for two reasons: 1) in the words of the late Senator Arthur Vandenburg, “Politics stops at the water’s edge,” and 2) because the power of the vote must forever remain stronger than the power of the sword. The final task is to encourage those with strong opinions to step up and lead. Our government will only represent the values of those who contribute their voices. While these tasks themselves may not be sufficient to lay every bridge necessary, they should be a fine place to start.
References Bliss, L. (2018). MapLab: America’s rivaling nations. CityLab. Retrieved February 28, 2020, from https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/08/maplab-americas-rivaling-regions/566555/.
Gramlich, J. (2019). Young Americans are less trusting of other people – and key institutions – than their elders. Pew Research Center. Retrieved February 29, 2020, from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/06/young-americans-are-less-trusting-of-other-people-and-key-institutions-than-their-elders/.
Maley, A. & Hawkins, D. (2017). The Southern military tradition: sociodemographic factors, cultural legacy, and U.S. Army enlistments. Armed Forces & Society, 44(2), 195–218. https://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X17700851
Woodard, C. (2011). American Nations: a history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America. Penguin Books.
Zegart, A., & Childs, K. (2018). The divide between Silicon Valley and Washington is a national security threat. The Atlantic. Retrieved February 28, 2020, from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/growing-gulf-between-silicon-valley-and-washington/577963/.