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We want to welcome to VeteransRadio today Dr. Mark Moyer.
Dr. Moyer is a professor at Hillsdale College.
He's also the director of the College's Center for Military History and Strategy.
He has had a fascinating academic career.
He got his BA from Harvard, but he got his PhD from Cambridge.
He went on and taught as a professor at the University of Marine Corps University.
He taught at Texas A&M University, the Foreign Service Institute.
He was a senior fellow at the Joint Special Operations University and has worked as a consultant
on senior leadership of Special Operations Joint Task Force for Afghanistan.
These all weave into the many, many things he's written on that we could talk about.
There's just no way we can get it to it all.
He's written on Vietnam.
He's written on special operations.
He's talked about issues that have, you know, administrations that have gone awry in working
with the military.
And his most recent book is Masters of Corruption, How the Federal Bureaucracy Sabotaged the
Trump Presidency.
So lots of things to talk about, but Mark, thanks for taking some time to talk to Veterans
Radio.
Yeah, great to be talking to you and the veteran community.
Well, you've got, as I say, an interesting background academically as a historian, but
having worked, if you will, inside the government and now outside at Hillsdale College, and
I think you're a member of the Hoover Institute Working Group on the Role of Military History
and Contemporary Conflict.
So you're thinking about a lot of these issues, and kind of one of them I maybe wanted to
start with is this whole idea of what really is the interplay between civilian oversight
and military operations from a historical perspective?
Yes, Will.
This is something that dates back to our nation's founding.
And one of the things I've enjoyed about being at Hillsdale's, we actually make sure everybody
understands where we've come from, but the founders recognized something that actually
didn't really become more generally known until Klossowitz in the 19th century, but
that war itself is a political undertaking and therefore you ought to have political
leadership ultimately responsible.
And so we have vested in President the Authority of Commander-in-Chief with the military reporting
to the Commander-in-Chief, and now that then requires a lot of interplay between the President
and the military, and ideally the President should be very well versed in military affairs,
and of course Washington was, and most of our Presidents who have been successful commanders,
Lincoln being another great example, FDR, understood the military.
Now we get to Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson, you run into trouble because you have a Commander-in-Chief
who doesn't understand the military, so that is one of the big problems we've had since
Vietnam is military, a President's lacking the military knowledge they need.
Barack Obama is another one who wrote a book about him, a similar problem.
And so this interplay does require, should require, Presidents who know the military.
Yeah, it's an interesting concept.
I think we'd all agree with the concept, but it's how it actually works in real life,
where the rub comes in, and you've been inside special operations, you've taught at Marine
Corps University, and sort of talked to future leaders about that interplay, I suppose, that
not every President, not every political leader really has a good set of guiding principles
or understanding of how to use the military and how to impact foreign policy.
He wrote Strategic Failure, kind of talking about somebody who didn't really have that
going in.
Talk to us a little bit about that.
Yes, and I think we see with Obama, a lot of the same problems we saw with LBJ, I think
we're also seeing with the Biden, is this lack of understanding.
Here this too relates to what the President's priorities are, and we saw that we have some
Presidents who are very domestically focused, and basically for them, foreign policy is
a nuisance that gets in the way of their domestic agenda, and so they tend to be reactive.
And that was what happened with Johnson.
He was not proactive, he didn't have a proactive strategy, he was trying to remake the country
through the great society, and Vietnam was this pesky thing, and so he would react as
problems arose.
But that's not really a good way to manage the strategy of the world's biggest power
or the military because you want to be proactive and moving, and we saw the same thing with
Obama.
I think we're seeing it again with Biden.
So it takes a lot of effort by the President and interest to actually have a more proactive
approach, to actually have a strategy because the idea of sort of reaction and crisis management,
which Bill Clinton was another one who fits in this category, that is very passive and
it leaves you vulnerable to your enemies.
Because the strategy that a President should create comes simply out of his view or her
view of the world, of foreign affairs, of domestic policy, and who should be putting
input into this as you've studied it, those who have been successful and those who have
not, where does the input for developing that policy come from?
The President should have a strong set of advisors who can help him understand the key
issues, and we've seen here too a range of people and qualifications.
You know, Robert McNamara is probably the poster child for the Secretary of Defense who
was ill-prepared for his job and gave a lot of bad advice to the President.
Like LBJ finally by 1968 figures out that McNamara has really not been doing a good job and it
ends up letting him go.
We've had other people, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who was in second Bush and then
also spent some time in the Obama administration.
I think he was someone who was much more effective.
He ends up having a big falling out with Obama and believes Obama deceived him.
He wrote a long book about it.
Then you also have the uniform military who weigh in on these issues.
We see some Presidents are much more willing to listen to what they have to say.
Others are very dismissive.
We saw with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Vietnam War that the President, especially
Johnson and also McNamara didn't pay attention to them.
What they were saying and in hindsight we can see they were actually recommending a much
better strategy than the one the civilians were pursuing.
Now of course the generals aren't always right but I think they should get greater respect
than they sometimes get.
We also saw this in the Clinton administration, the Obama administration and we know we also
in the Trump administration some cases where there was this conflict between the uniform
military or lack of respect and the Trump administration certainly went both ways where
we saw it.
It would appear to be General Mark Milley verging on insubordination towards the White
House.
Yeah, Trump said horrible things about the military and he said good things about the
military.
That whip-sawing has got to drive people crazy as well.
You have taken a lot of time to look at the issue of the Vietnam War through a historian's
lens decades and decades later you've written triumph regained and triumph forsaken which
tells me there's one more coming out.
That is trying to reimagine or reposition the Vietnam War and strip away from it sort
of the 1968 domestic problems.
Tell us when you relook at the Vietnam War if it was winnable or if it was just from
the get-go not so and politics prevailed.
Yeah, so the reason I got so involved in selling Vietnam is that at the time I was going through
college this was the early 90s.
Vietnam War was widely derided by the American intelligentsia as this unwinnable conflict
we should never have been in it and Vietnam veterans were maligned in part for their participation
in that war.
So I started reading about it, it occurred to me that so much of what the intelligentsia,
the journalists and historians were telling us was factually incorrect and that it appeared
to be guided by motives other than getting to the truth such as justifying why we protested
against the war or refused to serve in the military during Vietnam.
And so Triumph Forsaken which goes up to 63, I originally was going to do one volume on
the whole war but as I got into it I realized there's an amazing amount of information that
hasn't been shared with the public and it causes us to fundamentally rethink how the
war came about.
And so that book Triumph Forsaken goes up into July of 1965 and in that period where
the US is not yet committed to the war we see now and with the benefit of a lot of new
sources especially from the North Vietnamese side that the outcome was far from foreboding
and in fact the US was doing pretty well up until 63 when we participated in a disastrous
coup but even after that the North Vietnamese were still very wary of going to war and so
it was Lyndon Johnson through a series of misstatements particularly the statement that we're not
going to fight, send our American boys to fight in Vietnam and various other acts of
weakness that really invite the North Vietnamese to come into the war.
And then we also have lots of information now saying that other strategies including
invading North Vietnam or cutting the Ho Chi Minh Trail could have given us a different
outcome.
Yeah, it's always interesting when you get the other guy's perspective too you say the
sources from Vietnam shed a whole new light on this because you now know what, how they're
reacting to your action and vice versa.
But I wanted to ask about come back to the president's role in setting military direction
and policy and that the president should have a strategy for how to use the military and
in your writings it seems like as new items, new approaches develop maybe the presidential
strategies don't embrace them timely.
One is the concept of counterinsurgency, another is how do you use special operations
and then like technological advances, drones would be a good example of it.
How do you as a historian in the academic as you look at this and you see these kind
of advances in warfare, how does it get molded into a current strategy?
Yeah, so that's an excellent question.
That has been a big challenge in both counterinsurgency and special operations as you mentioned.
And one of the big problems you have is that senior leaders don't necessarily really understand
what these things are.
We saw this in Iraq and Afghanistan especially a lot of people throwing around the terms
counterterrorism and counterinsurgency without fully understanding what they mean or people
thinking that special operations can do things well beyond what they can actually achieve.
There's a lot of mystique around special operations and sometimes they're seen as a
silver bullet.
Now we had the killing of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs which was a major tactical victory
but for one thing those victories are few and far between but also we've seen that even
if you decapitate or remove one leader in this network of nefarious actors usually they're
able to replace that person and especially it was an issue in Iraq where we thought we
were going to get once we got rid of Saddam Hussein and his sons that the conflict will
be over but it turned out that these insurgents had a lot more staying power and so you couldn't
just use special operations you had to have conventional military forces to go in and
actually solve the problem.
The reason I'm touching on all of these veteran radio listeners and we're talking to Dr. Mark
Moyer who is the professor at Hillsdale College and the director of the College's Center for
Military History and Strategy is he's written on all of these.
He wrote Oppose Any Foe, the Rise of America Special Operations Forces.
He wrote a book called A Question of Command, Couter Insurgency from the Civil War to Iraq.
So we're talking about issues that are, he's spent a lot of time thinking about and I want
to go back to when you say senior leaders don't always understand.
Are you referring to in the military or at the cabinet level, the presidential level
over on the civilian side?
It's usually on the civilian side.
The military officers, they spent their whole careers in the military so usually, not always
but usually they have a strong appreciation of what the military is actually capable of
but you have oftentimes people on civilian side who have spent little to no time in the
military and so they don't have that understanding and once you're president or secretary of
defense, you do not have a lot of time to obtain new knowledge.
That's one of the reasons why it's important that hopefully you have people in these jobs
who already know a lot when they come to the office.
Yeah, I've heard things out of congressional offices were like, oh we don't need to catch
up on the naval fleet or the air fleet with the Chinese because we're going to use autonomous
vehicles, drones, air frames, etc. and you sort of go, I don't know if these people know
what they're talking about and that's that we kind of fall in love with finding the
silver bullet, don't we, whether it's technical advances or we'll just send special forces,
they're the silver bullet.
That's kind of a common civilian problem, isn't it?
Yeah, it is.
That's certainly been an issue with special operations forces.
I mean, that's how Bill Clinton thought he was going to solve Somalia by sending in Delta
Force to Somalia.
Bush initially was hoping they could deal with Saddam Hussein and then Obama thought
we could basically get rid of much of our military because we could rely on these special
operations forces.
Usually we tend to overestimate the power of these things and we're seeing this now
with new technologies.
People thinking that artificial intelligence is just going to totally change how war is
fought but if you look at what's going on in Ukraine right now, war there actually doesn't
look a whole lot different than it used to.
Obviously you have new technologies that can be important but, you know, seldom are they
going to fundamentally transform the way that wars are fought.
Yeah, I don't think I can have a conversation these days without somebody bringing up AI
and how that's going to impact things.
And then as you say, you look at Ukraine, that's just a basic old bloody artillery war
sprinkled in with some new technologies so maybe what's old is new as well.
So I do have a question that I want you to elaborate on though, Professor Moyer.
And that is this idea that everything the civilian side wants, and I'll say primarily
the president wants to get done, gets implemented in a straightforward fashion according with
the policy that he's setting out.
The federal government doesn't work that way, does it?
Generally not.
It depends too on how high of a priority the issue is for the president, but even then
we've seen just about every president has complained that some part of the bureaucracy
is not doing what he wants, you know, whether it's the State Department or the Defense Department
or the Department of Justice.
This does tend to be worse with Republicans, I think, because typically the federal bureaucracy
largely votes Democrat and so they tend to be more sympathetic to Democratic presidents,
but a lot of the bureaucracy is obsessed above all with sort of self-preservation more than
anything else.
And so you do see oftentimes, and I certainly saw this in my time as a trouble pointy, that
agencies will come up with all sorts of tricks to do what they want rather than what the
White House wants and you have about 4,000 political appointees who are set to the federal
agencies and that was one of those in the Trump administration.
Oftentimes in our agency, there's certainly the case, most of the political appointees
don't know the landscape nearly as well and so career bureaucrats have a lot of different
ways they can try to slow things down, they can hide money and I saw a lot of that.
And then again in my agency where I worked, the Agency for International Development,
we had top political appointees who in some cases weren't really interested in coercing
the bureaucracy, which is what they're supposed to be there doing is getting the bureaucracy
to do what the White House wants.
And so you had a lot of instances where what the White House wanted was not actually implemented.
I think we'll see that change if there's a second Trump administration because I think
they've wised up, but that was certainly a huge problem in the first Trump administration.
And you wrote about those experiences at the US Agency for International Development as
a senior political appointee and sort of how career federal employees can thwart a president's
efforts in your new book, Masters of Corruption on Encounter Books Imprint.
Because this is surprising to you when you got inside as it was to maybe somebody like
me reading it from the outside.
Yeah, so I had spent time in government before but not as a political appointee and I had
seen some evidence of corruption in the Department of Defense where I had spent most of the time
before this, but I didn't quite realize how egregious it could be or the impunity with
which a lot of people were acting.
So one of the most startling things that happened was that when I approached the human resource
authorities, when I first started getting evidence of corruption going on, they said,
well, you know, most people here don't report corruption.
It's a good thing you are.
They didn't fully explain why people didn't report it, but as I later found out, it's
that if you report corruption, the bureaucracy is going to attack you and that's what happened
to me and I ended up getting fired based on a fraudulent accusation that some of these
bureaucrats put forward.
Meanwhile, the actually corrupt individuals managed to hold on to their jobs.
Yeah, it's a sad but interesting story, Masters of Corruption.
So, you know, bringing you back to the point of your role at Hillsdale College, can you
tell us what the Center for Military History and Strategy focuses on?
Yeah, so we are focused on a couple things.
One is teaching military history to the students here.
It's a subject that has been eliminated at nearly all other colleges.
We're about the only place that still has faculty who specialize in military history
and we've set up a minor in military history that students can take as part of their studies.
We also hold some big events with major speakers on military history here on campus and we
do open those to outside visitors and we bring in some distinguished scholars to bolster
our capabilities here.
We are looking, I think, eventually to offering graduate degrees.
We're still fairly early in developing the Center but over the longer term that is one
of the other things we are contemplating.
I have to say those who regularly listen to Veterans Radio are interested in military
history.
I think there's a lot to learn from it, both our mistakes and our successes and we really
do appreciate you spending a little time with us today.
Dr. Mark Moyer over at Hillsdale College and we'd love to have you back another time.
Okay, great.
Well, thanks for having me on.
And I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio today.
I am Jim Fossone.
It's been a pleasure to be your host.
I'm a Veterans Disability Lawyer at Legal Help for Veterans and you can reach us at
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