Over the past ten years or so an increasingly large number of tenured professionals in both the military and law enforcement communities have taken early retirement. So devastating has this unprecedented exit from the ranks been that the Air Force has offered significant financial bonuses to pilots in a vain effort to maintain its combat readiness. Similar situations are being experienced in other branches of the military. And although less noticeable because of its multiple and varied jurisdictions, law enforcement has experienced an even greater problem.
What little has been written about this retreat from service has been generally linked to the financial disparities between the public and private sector. Now we recognize that money is a significant motivational factor in our society. Yet to think it is the sole motive of such long term professionals, is to do a real injustice to those who serve, labeling them as simply mercenaries, just in it for the buck – nothing more.
What is more important, and certainly more convincing, is the private commentary from these men themselves; who out of ear-shot of the ever present media, will in moments of candor disclose some very politically-incorrect facts. Facts whose very existence compels the ever watchful guardians of ideological purity to withhold them from the public.
They reveal commands to provide logistical support to persons and Governments complicit in everything from genocide to international drug trafficking. At the same time these professionals wonder why our occupying troops remain barracked in over one hundred self-governing and mostly peaceful countries around the world. Here at home they recoil in dismay knowing that the actions of average America citizens are increasingly criminalized by aggrieved-group legislation. While simultaneously observing that the powerful heads of those same aggrieved-groups engage with impunity in multi-million dollar shake-down operations. There is therefore amongst such men a widespread feeling of betrayal. A sense that they are being forced to carry out policy that flies in the face of a lifetime of moral learning.
Some, particularly those in more confined and restricted positions; have interpreted this as a matter of personal rancor. They feel that they have essentially been forced out due to some ill defined malevolence from above. Others, those whose positions have allowed them to adopt broader more concrete perspectives, and see as it were the bigger picture, don't tend to personalize the issue. They in fact see it for what it is, a slow but markedly deliberate effort on the part of government to displace moderates and traditionalists, and place into positions of power a more radical and ideologically motivated cadre.
In the simplest terms this politicization, with "affirmative-action" hiring and promotion1 being one of the more obvious and odious examples, has resulted in organizations that are less effective, and perhaps more importantly, less representative of the views of a free people.
What has happened is not an imaginary betterment through diversity, but that military and law enforcement, those organs of state authority and power, have experienced an unprecedented politicization. An alarming and direct attempt to de-democratize these institutions and to make of them armed agents of ideological control.
Were such dramatic changes fomented in the Agricultural Department or Park Services, it would be cause for concern. Military and law enforcement agencies are however those organs of governance that are exclusively empowered to compel and control through the use of deadly force. In many societies and throughout history, such organizations, as often as not, use their military powers in the suppression of their own people; therefore such disturbing changes must be viewed with uncommon alarm.
Consider also that as our society continues to fragment, the traditional norms and mores that compel compliance are also breaking down. Thus an increasingly radical government can no longer maintain control based primarily on traditional western morally grounded social sanctions; since such beliefs fly in the face of new governing ideologies.
Just as governments do not go to war out of strength, but out of weakness, (the strong government being able to accomplish its goals by other means). So too are more authoritarian methods of social control signs both weakness and alienation. Anyone visiting fortress Washington DC can certainly bear witness to this fact.
Those with longer memories will recall that every Soviet police and military command had a political officer. One whose official authority was at least equal to that of the normal commanding officer's, and as a practical matter – superior. The underlying reason for this was of course to maintain ideological purity, and to ensure that orders, no matter how repugnant to common morality, (or common sense) would be carried out.
Indeed, if there was one moment in time where the existence of the Soviet government could be said to have teetered on the razor's edge. It was on the cool night of 20 August 1991; when military tank units refused orders by hard-liners of the State Committee for the State of Emergency to open fire2 on the thousands of Muscovites who heroically gathered at the Russian parliament building to cry out for freedom. Instead they joined with family and friends, supported Yeltsin and the non-communists, and in doing so issued in the fall of the Soviet's empire.
The question must be asked: what would have happened if those close cropped young tank crews had obeyed orders and murdered their own people? What if they would have cast aside family, ethnic and cultural bonds, as their Communist bosses had commanded? If they had been more ideological pure communists, better indoctrinated, politicized and compliant, the Soviet Union might well stand today.
It is of course difficult to murder one's own kith and kin. The Soviets knew this as do our political commissars. CIA documents3 tell us that the communist hard-liners were far more successful in their use of violence in January of 1991, when troops of the elite KGB Alfa detachment – plus the so-called OMON or Black Berets assaulted and killed peaceful Lithuanians and Latvians. This "success" was due in no small measure to the fact that these troops were ideologically and ethnically different from their victims, in this case renegade ethnic Russians and Poles from the Latvian Interior Ministry.
Tragically, the U.S. government, increasingly isolated from the people and their traditional values, and compelled by an alien ideological imperative at least as old and bloody as the French revolution; has, as have the Soviets' and others before and after them, chosen to subjugate the people in order to save them. To rule the ignorant masses, and with an iron fist to mold them, in order to achieve some Clintonesque/Hollywood version of ideological utopia. And not coincidentally, gain for themselves power and riches greater than the Emperors, Kings, and Lords of lore and old.
Having spent some twenty years in law-enforcement as a student, practitioner and professor; I find this Soviet-like aspect of government's policy more alarming than any other. Is it a descent into paranoia to see such dramatic command-staff changes as a harbinger of totalitarianism? Or is it a fool's denial of fact to see them as not?
- Army Publications and Printing Command, Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action, Document Number: AR 690-12.
- Three persons were shot after a fire-bomb was thrown at a tank.
- History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1999: At Cold War's End: US Intelligence on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1989-1991.
Lawrence A. Starr writes from Oberlin, Ohio.
