Elizabeth Samet, an occasional columnist over at Bloomberg, thinks so. Ms. Samet teaches English at the US Military Academy, and has written a book, Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point. She had, in a previous column, explained how great, yet sometimes uncomfortable it made them, that her charges were continually praised and thanked when they were out in public in uniform. Her observations then were mainly just the silly musings of a cloistered academic, of someone who thinks that by being in close proximity, sometimes, to people who may have served in combat, but anyway wear the same uniform as those that do, she might understand, in an enlightened, professorial sort of way, what it’s like to kill people and destroy things for a living, and have others guiltily express thanks for doing so. This column is no better. In fact, because what she is basically advocating is the return of the general emperor, it is a good deal worse. She understands how exalted service in the military is now perceived, and is essentially telling the her defense establishment associates that it is high time the generals spent some of the political capital they and their predecessors have accumulated, in the service, not of the nation, but of their own prerogatives.
Samet draws from an extensive list of military strategists, civil philosophers and historians to justify her position that the Army should “embrace, not suppress, ambition”.
She notes that Clausewitz, in his 19th century landmark treatise, “On War”, claims there has never been a great general that was not also ambitious. True enough. Ambition for honor and renown is the spark that ignites the brilliance in many a person whom history regards as great, general or otherwise. Einstein may have been a great physicist, but he was also a great propagandist and self-promoter, as competent and capable in creating and shaping the public’s perception of him as the face of scientific genius in the modern age, as he was in imagining a universe into existence. But is Clausewitz making an observation, or a recommendation? It is quite a different thing for a physicist to be an ambitious self-promoter, leveraging his insights about the nature of nature to secure personal honor and renown, than for a general commanding armies to turn the material and men entrusted to him by the republic for the purpose of its defense to the ends of securing glory and honor for himself.
History is replete with ambitious military leaders that led their nations to ruin; Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, et al. Imagine the carnage these men inflicted on their armies, their nations, the objects of their conquest, and anyone unfortunate enough to be close to them.
Alexander is generally regarded as the greatest military tactician and strategist of ancient history. His ambition resulted in a Hellenized the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond, but at the price of misery for his soldiers, and the ultimate disintegration into chaos of his quickly-formed empire upon his death. He was a ruthless avenger, killing without remorse anyone he even suspected of crossing or conspiring against him. He had his stepmother and daughter burned alive after his father, Philip II’s, death.
Caesar leveraged his military successes in Gaul and Brittany to seize ultimate power in Rome, crossing the Rubicon to march on Rome with legions provided by the republican government he aimed to usurp, instigating a civil war that struck the death knell of the Roman republic, ushering in the age of imperial rule.
Napoleon united most of the European continent, however briefly, for the first time since Charlemagne. Seizing the opportunity presented by the general chaos of post-Revolution France, he was able to turn the new French Republic into an empire, have himself appointed emperor, and embark upon a quest for imperial expansion that resulted in nearly two decades of military conflict across Europe, with hundreds of thousands of casualties, both French and foreign. In one of his final campaigns, the invasion of Russia, he left with 400,000 men and returned with 40,000.
And of course, the result of Hitler’s ambition is well-known history.
All these leaders were consummately ambitious, and their ambition yielded ruin, of not only themselves, but of whole nations. Napoleon and Caesar rose through the ranks of their respective militaries to take command of both civil and military institutions. Alexander inherited his command, but had been steeped in military tactics and lore from a very early age. Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery as a messenger on the front lines of World War I.
Though Ms. Samet is employed by the US Military Academy, and is thereby apparently immersed in a rarefied bit of Army culture riven throughout with deep currents of ambition, she still seems to be unaware of its presence. Having served with quite a few Academy graduates, I can attest, of all the attributes they may have lacked, ambition was not one of them. Even in flight school, even on an elementary written exam any reasonably intelligent eighth grader could have passed, the ambitions of four ringknockers (as we called them) to best their peers led to their ultimate expulsion from flight school for having cheated. From what I saw during my service, ambition among military officers, particularly for a certain number of them that viewed graduation from the US Military Academy and subsequent service in the Army as ticket-punching exercises in the scramble to the top, was hardly lacking.
Ambition among military officers during peacetime, or in stateside garrisons, was often expressed in downright silly ways. The longest year of my life was the year I spent in the Army in garrison between a pair of Central American deployments working for a commander who thought it the ultimate expression of devotion to the republic to work past seven every evening, though our flight hour budget had been so dramatically cut that there was hardly ever anything to do. We just idly waited for the time to pass, or worked on the next Power Point presentation slides for the next staff meeting, wherein we would all pretend that there was something significant about watching helicopters fall apart, as they and we sat grounded on the tarmac. It was the rough equivalent in the officer ranks of painting rocks and parade practice for the enlisted guys.
It won’t be long, perhaps not in my lifetime, but maybe, until an enterprising American general, fresh from some battlefield victory, returns home to face a populace shredding itself to pieces over some internal domestic conflict. He will recognize that, although the opposing sides are bitterly struggling, each has a generally exalted opinion of the military and a dismal view of Congress and other civilian politicians. It will take only the barest push of ambition to set him and the republic on the course that seems inevitable when the inherent unruliness of democracy proves too great a burden for society to bear. Every one of Greece, France, Rome and Germany abandoned the anarchy of democracy for the stability of imperial rule. The US eventually will too. No doubt, the enterprising general will pledge, like Augustus who followed Caesar, to save the republic, but in the process, just as did Augustus, will destroy it. Lincoln’s four score and twenty years of rule of the people, by the people and for the people, having lasted another century or two more beyond him, will finally perish from the face of the earth.
Governmental power, its fullest expression always rendered in its ability to impose its will through violence, operates like gravity, relentlessly pulling more power into itself. The democratic will of the governed acts as a centrifugal force, keeping the republic in motion by preventing the collapse of all power towards the center.
Eventually, just as all stars, solar systems and galaxies collapse into a black hole of infinite gravity, all governmental power in a social and economic system resolves to the center. Because government depends on force to express power and impose its will, and the forces it has developed to defend itself against external foes are generally the greatest at its disposal, when all power finally resolves to the center, more often than not, it does so as the product of some ambitious military commander ordering his troops to turn their weapons inward.
The process of centralizing rule into one man and one office is not newly begun in the US. If Lincoln’s presidency can be considered its first noticeable expression, the trajectory of an increasingly imperialized presidency has hardly faltered since, and has gathered a good deal of steam with the last three occupants of the White House. It may not be that the US experiences a military coup of sorts, such as did the examples cited (except Greece). It might simply be that a president, perhaps one with a military background, leverages his civilian control over the military into power over the population. But it could also happen that an ambitious and popular general arises to usurp presidential power.
Power depends on the ability to impose one’s will on another human, which in turn, depends on the ability to inflict pain. While the average military force is developed with the purpose in mind of defending the perimeters of a nation from external attack, throughout history, ambitious generals have routinely found ways to turn that power to their own domestic advantage.
It would seem the last thing the republic needs is generals that are more ambitious than already they are.