What Today’s Army Officers Can Learn From George Washington (February/March 1983 | Volume: 34, Issue: 2)

What Today’s Army Officers Can Learn From George Washington

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Authors: Don Higginbotham

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February/March 1983 | Volume 34, Issue 2

A FEW YEARS AGO, writing in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the distinguished historian Henry Steele Commager charged that while civil-military relations had been healthy during most of the nation’s history, the relationship had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. Something close to “reverse principles” now governed our thinking, and the official line now held “that the military should never be challenged, that it is not the business of people to inquire into or to challenge what the military does, [and] that it is proper for the military to make wars on its own. …”

To be sure, we will have our disagreements about the truth of Commager’s assertion. Some may respond that all military men do not think alike, that there is hardly a monolithic military establishment in America, and that hawkish civilian leaders in the Pentagon are a greater threat to world peace than the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In any event, few would disagree that the military career of George Washington casts light on what should be the first principles of civil-military relations.

As a wealthy young colonel of militia, commanding Virginia’s frontier forces during the French and Indian War, Washington displayed scant understanding of the problems of his superiors, civilian or military. Quick to fault others for obstacles not easily remedied in a backwoods conflict marked by shortages, Washington unfairly blamed Gov. Robert Dinwiddie for a variety of ills and went behind his back to appeal directly to Speaker John Robinson of the House of Burgesses. On a later occasion Washington circumvented another superior, Gen. John Forbes, who was preparing to construct a road from Raystown, Pennsylvania, westward for an assault on French Fort Duquesne. Washington complained to his Virginia friends that a more southerly route made better sense; Forbes, he said, had been duped by Pennsylvanians who hoped to use the Raystown artery later to corner the Ohio Valley trade. Washington was clearly biased in favor of a route that would benefit his own colony. Forbes was right when he commented sadly that the young colonel’s “behaviour about the roads was no ways like a soldier.”

Washington, in fact, was a good soldier, but in a very narrow sense. A first-rate combat officer, he was brave and tenacious, even inspirational. Yet he could never see the big picture in his youth. There is surely irony in all of this, for his most notable weaknesses as a field-grade officer were to be corrected in time and become the area of his greatest strength as commander in chief in the War of Independence.

HOW DID HE BROADEN his horizons? He spent two crucial decades as a provincial legislator. In the Virginia assembly he learned how political bodies behaved, how the legislative mind perceived things. Most important, he became more aware of the English tradition of civil control of the military. This tradition, absent elsewhere in the eighteenth-century world, held forth in British America. In the Colonies the provincial legislatures