I will be the first to tell you that military officers, especially senior leaders colonel and up, need to stay out of politics in and out of uniform. If our 2016 presidential election taught the nation anything, it’s that partisan generals – both active duty and retired – are not a pretty sight.
But that isn’t what I am suggesting in this piece. Healthy civ-mil (civilian-military) relations require that our general and flag officers be of service to our elected civilian leaders (GOFO for brevity— “flag” is for the Navy). That means they shouldn’t be working against the policy of the president/commander in chief (CINC). That also means they should stay above the partisan political battles over national policy. That doesn’t mean they should remain ignorant of policy, should be distant from the president, or should worry about being seen as political when they are fulfilling their role correctly to influence policy.
Don’t get into partisan politics, but do get into policy: by earning the trust of the president and congress.
If you are a GOFO in the senior command and advisory sphere (3 and 4 stars most likely) you are in the policy discussion. If you want your policy suggestions to be taken seriously, you need to build trust with the President and Congress.
Many of the great military leaders I’ve met have repeatedly said, “trust is the coin of the realm.” It’s not just critical in tactical fights in Fallujah, Mogadishu, or Zabul. Trust is critical in the operational headquarters in Kabul, Baghdad, and Tampa. Trust is the most critical weapon for the fights in D.C., if you are a GOFO. Yet as the Department of Defense and our military culture pushes to ensure our military leaders look apolitical at all times, we seem to have lost the ability to build trust with the occupants of the White House and the Halls of Congress.
Many of my colleagues have expressed surprise and anger that President Trump recently over-ruled the military leaders and deviated from “the plan” in Syria. I must have been watching a different TV channel, because I have heard President Trump say for years that he wanted to crush ISIS and go home. So, how was it a surprise that the President decided to pull out our troops? Was he following the plan as he understood it, while the military was reading it another way?
Better question, why did the military think that the President supported their view of the plan for Syria? They assumed he trusted their advice and bought into the military plan. Clearly, he didn’t.
Trust Between Politicians and Military Officials Key
I am not saying that better relationships between the relevant four-star officers and the President would have changed this particular outcome -there is a lot more to this withdrawal. I am saying there is a history in America, during very brutal wars, of the military being listened to in the bleakest of situations. Let’s look at a couple of role models for our current and future GOFOs to follow if they would like to actually have an impact on policy-making with the President and Congress.
George Washington is a good place to start for American audiences. He was trusted in a way that few officers have been in our nation’s history. He held so much trust from our fledgling government that his Army was older than the government itself. He was fighting an insurgency against the greatest land force in the world and if he lost the war, all the government members would have been hung as traitors.
Think about that. The U.S. government trusted this general to basically run a war from 1775-1783 even though he was losing a lot of battles and telling them it was going to be a long slog. He was trusted even though his strategy amounted to waiting until the British Army got tired of war and withdrew their forces. Study his life and learn how he developed trust with his political masters. This is an extreme case of trust building that you hope your nation never needs to experiment with.
On the topic of great “Georges” let’s move to World War II. If Washington was the best of 1700s America, George C. Marshall was the best trust builder of the 1900s. Marshall is one of my all-time favorite military leaders because he understood statesmanship as well as generalship and was an advisor and confidant to not just American leaders, but leaders from other nations. His humility, honesty, intellect, and instincts were on display before, during, and after the war. He built trust to such an extreme level that a President asked him to get a stubborn Congress to make the hard and correct choice to launch the Marshall Plan to save Europe.
Marshall learned to build trust by watching others fail at this task, and by emulating those that did well. Many great books explain his technique, but I would suggest General Fox Conner by Rabalais and The Words of George C. Marshall from the George C. Marshall Foundation to learn more. Of all my leadership experiences, attending the Marshall National Security Seminar in Lexington and getting to know Marshall probably impacted my career the most. I took his trust building lessons to Afghanistan and developed relationships that last to this day.
Let’s roll back a century to look at one of the other all-time trust builders. Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, during the United States Civil War, built a level of trust with President Lincoln that has hardly been surpassed in GOFO-CINC history. Here, again, we had a general fighting a brutal war that was costing thousands of lives in each battle (often tens of thousands) and the President gave him the reins to fight however he needed to achieve victory. While so many were blasting Grant as a butcher who was good at getting his men killed and a drunk that wasn’t fit for command, Lincoln stuck by his man.
Grant’s memoirs contain probably some of the best trust-building examples you can find, as he built trust upwards, sideways, and downwards in his organization. I also like the recent Chernow Grant biography for other people’s views of how Grant built trust. No greater sign of trust for me between these two exists than the leeway that Lincoln gave Grant to dissolve Lee’s Army at Appomattox Virginia. Could you imagine a General on a modern battlefield being able to quickly develop terms for conflict-resolution on the spot and demobilize, disarm, and reintegrate (DDR) tens of thousands of enemy fighters? Believe me I’ve been in the reintegration field since 2002, and I find no record of that level of trust since Appomattox Court House.
There are modern examples of generals who had the almost complete trust of the U.S. president and even held the trickier congressional trust coin. Powell and Schwarzkopf in Desert Shield/Storm come to mind. Lt. Gen. Graeme Lamb of the UK mastered the art of trust building with elected leaders in numerous nations after September 11th when he was a senior leader, and has retained it in retirement.
The list is actually shorter than you think, when you try to find GOFOs that have been able to develop and retain the trust of elected leaders from different political parties and keep it during an entire war or career.
policy victory starts with trust
A few of the trust building activities I have used or observed with presidents, prime ministers, and legislators include: sharing meals (especially late dinners or breakfasts), writing letters and emails, small meetings with honest dialogue, sharing favorite sporting activities, meeting spouses, getting to know their friends, understanding their sense of humor, respectful joke and story-telling, extending congratulations and condolences, giving books, enjoying a beverage, traveling together, talking about family, taking vacations together, helping them build difficult relationships, and even sometimes taking the blame for them on issues that save face for America. Every elected leader is different so you will have to prepare yourself, but don’t ask your intel shop to help you bridge this divide. Ask your policy and strategy people to help. You have POLADs, FAOs, strategists, and protocol folks on your staff for a reason at the three-and four-star level.
So, while you are a young officer trying to get your NCOs and enlisted troopers to trust youYou Want to Drive a Conversation? Better Get On the Bus, start thinking about how to develop trust upwards too. As you rise through the ranks start looking at examples of senior leaders that were able to pocket the most valuable coin of the realm, the ability to get an elected leader to truly trust you and take your counsel.
Victory in war may very well depend on your ability to authentically connect with the president or congress and while avoiding becoming political, make yourself heard in the policy-making world. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. This is a PhD level leadership technique and the risks for failure can be catastrophic. That doesn’t mean generals and admirals should fear trying to build trust with the president or congress, just that they need to be careful and remember in the end, the elected leaders do not need to listen to military advice.
