SUBORDINATION.

I've always been an extremist about military subordination to civilian rule in the United States. Indeed, I think that preserving a strong ethic of military subservience is probably worth a stupid, destructive war or two; I'd rather have the war than have the military act as a veto on civilian decisions over the use of force. Obviously, however, the invasion of Iraq and the potential use of force against Iran have put that this position to the test. Fred Kaplan has a nice article at Slate detailing the ways in which military officers can express displeasure with civilian orders, in particular reference to the Iran situation:

The appropriateness of military dissent is a hot topic among senior officers these days in conferences, internal papers, and backroom discussions, all of which set off emotional arguments and genuine soul-searching. "What should we have done in the run-up to the war in Iraq?" the generals are asking. "What should I do the next time?" is the tacit question stirring the conscience.

Kaplan supplies some caveats, of course. While many senior officers felt that the invasion force was insufficient and the entire mission suspect, many others believed that it could work. Opinion against Rumsfeld was not uniform, and didn't always manifest itself in terms of the Iraq War. Anyway, he goes on to summarize a discussion of the difference between retirement and resignation, and how the latter signals a far more profound disapproval of orders than the former. Read the whole thing, but I think that Kaplan basically gets it right; the decision to resign (or retire in mass) is one that should be made with only the greatest of care, because it essentially amounts to an intervention of the military into decisions that fundamentally belong to civilians. There's a difference between resignation and coup d'etat, but not as much of one as is commonly imagined. Part of the problem is that we have relatively little experience with serious contradictions between civilian and military policy preferences. The military officer may, as Sam Huntington says, be a professional is the same sense as a lawyer or doctor, but while lawyers and doctors often face serious conflicts with their clients and have thus developed a large body of ethical rules to guide their behavior, military officers in democracies have less experience with such disagreements. The potential consequence is that, if the Bush administration decides on war with Iran, we really will be entering uncharted territory.-- Robert Farley