Then-defense sercretary Robert M. Gates may have been the civilian leader of the world’s largest military, but his position did not come with household staff. So, he often joked, he disposed of his leaves by blowing them onto the chairman’s lawn.
“I was often jealous because he had four enlisted people helping him all the time,” Gates said in response to a question after a speech Thursday. He wryly complained to his wife that “Mullen’s got guys over there who are fixing meals for him, and I’m shoving something into the microwave. And I’m his boss.”
Of the many facts that have come to light in the scandal involving former CIA director David H. Petraeus, among the most curious was that during his days as a four-star general, he was once escorted by 28 police motorcycles as he traveled from his Central Command headquarters in Tampa to socialite Jill Kelley’s mansion. Although most of his trips did not involve a presidential-size convoy, the scandal has prompted new scrutiny of the imperial trappings that come with a senior general’s lifestyle.
The commanders who lead the nation’s military services and those who oversee troops around the world enjoy an array of perquisites befitting a billionaire, including executive jets, palatial homes, drivers, security guards and aides to carry their bags, press their uniforms and track their schedules in 10-minute increments. Their food is prepared by gourmet chefs. If they want music with their dinner parties, their staff can summon a string quartet or a choir.
The elite regional commanders who preside over large swaths of the planet don’t have to settle for Gulfstream V jets. They each have a C-40, the military equivalent of a Boeing 737, some of which are configured with beds.
Since Petraeus’s resignation, many have strained to understand how such a celebrated general could have behaved so badly. Some have speculated that an exhausting decade of war impaired his judgment. Others wondered if Petraeus was never the Boy Scout he appeared to be. But Gates, who still possesses a modest Kansan’s bemusement at Washington excess, has floated another theory.
“There is something about a sense of entitlement and of having great power that skews people’s judgment,” Gates said last week.
Read the whole thing if you can stand having your envy buttons pushed this close to the season of love and good will.
I should be careful writing this because my reaction is somewhat at odds with my, um, general take on things. As a good conservative/libertarian, I usually don't care much for class warfare. People are individuals and deserve to be treated as such, whatever their race, religion, sex, age or even their wealth-and-privilege status. One of the things I find attractive about the military, in fact, is that it strives to be -- not is, but strives to be -- the very model of a meritocracy.
And it is, in fact, up to a point. It matters little what walk of life you came from. If you know your stuff and perform as ordered, you can thrive in the military. But there is this stark, unbending line between the officer class and the enlisted class, and it is never, ever to be questioned. So, while, officers, too, can prosper based on their individual efforts, there is also a lot of cover for complete a-holes. It's that old thing about absolute power corrupting absolutely.
So, yes, I guess I'm confessing to class envy. I spent three years in the Army with an almost visceral dislike of officers that made it hard for me to consider them as individuals to the point where I could tell the good ones from the bad ones. (The really, really good ones, stood out starkly, of course, as they seem to in every walk of life.) Obviously the disparities between ranks (they hath their privileges) grows the higher up the ladder one goes. By the time someone becomes a general, he's been deferred to so often that he no longer questions his right to deference.
What makes this worth writing about, I think, is that this kind of arrogance matters in ways more important than the fodder it provides for envious loathing. Generals, after all, can pick any thousand soldiers and order them all to their deaths. It's easy to see how they can divorce themselves from the consequences of such orders. And it should be obvious why we cannot allow them to do it.
