On the matter of Defense Department inspector general reports, the Examiner editors are even more right on the money than their editorial indicates — albeit with one caveat about how they used the example of the Vietnam War to make their case.
As to the main point of the editorial: Yes, despite what President Trump said, carefully redacted defense inspector general reports should be shared with the public, rather than kept under wraps. The public deserves as much information as it can get (aside from military secrets) to decide whether to support how it uses their money and risks American lives in foreign missions.
Two additional points on this are apposite. First is the overall state of the U.S. armed forces in which its needs, its practices, and its available resources are right now ill-matched.
The bipartisan National Defense Strategy Commission last fall concluded that national security is “at greater risk than at any time in decades” but that the “available resources are clearly insufficient.” Furthermore, while the Pentagon is working on reforming its procurement practices and finding other efficiencies, the savings achieved will not come close to providing the resources needed elsewhere in the military budget. Indeed, the commission said, the Defense Department is “very near the point of strategic insolvency.”
In that light, any anomalies unearthed by IG reports become all the more important, especially for the ability to assess the overall value of the Afghanistan mission in light of other national security priorities.
The second relevant point comes from World War II. One main reason Franklin Roosevelt chose Harry Truman as his running mate in 1944 was that Truman had emerged from the Senate’s back bench by competently chairing a special committee investigating waste and corruption in the U.S. war effort. The committee was tremendously successful, exposing problems and helping overall war-fighting capabilities, even though military brass at the time feared it would get in the way.
If, while fighting brutal totalitarian powers around the whole globe, our armed forces actually benefited from active oversight and transparency, surely they can successfully conduct the limited engagements now at hand without being stymied by a little sunlight. Any time someone says serious transparency is a hindrance to war-fighting, the best refutation comes from the Truman Committee.
The editorial, therefore, was spot on. It also was right to use the Pentagon Papers as an example of how hiding information, in the name of protecting military capability, can actually harm U.S. strategic goals.
The only quibble comes in its assessment of the Vietnam War as necessarily a doomed effort that (reading between the editorial’s lines) wasn’t worth fighting. Volumes have been written about the worthiness of that war, and some of us (probably a minority) still believe it was a moral and somewhat useful mission.
But whether the war was or wasn’t wise — or whether it would have been wise if fought more intelligently — what really merits re-evaluation is whether it was indeed “doomed,” or instead was winnable. A very strong vote for the latter argument comes from former Defense Department special assistant James Robbins. His 2010 book, This Time We Win, offers a spirited, carefully documented thesis that a combination of bad politics, bad strategy, and bad media caused the U.S. to lose the will to fight a war it actually was winning on the battlefields.
The debate on this will always continue, of course. It just behooves us, in trying to learn from history, at least to keep it an open discussion — as open as the inspector general reports should be.
