The Consequence of Character

Chronicling the spread of an invasive species killing military leadership

I recently wrote an article entitled “Rise of the Gutless Air Force Colonel.”

The thesis of said article can be summarized thusly.

• Colonels were once the crusty, abrasive curmudgeons who would dependably make disruptive decisions and piss off every man and his dog in the process.

• To make Colonel, one needed to be (a) exceptionally competent and (b) difficult to get along with. Having a face like a slapped ass was a tie breaker.

• Their boldness wasn’t for sport. They were guardians of the flame of operational excellence. They painted the boundary line separating those who execute the mission from the staffs meant to support them.

• At some point, that all changed. Colonels became enforcers for the staff, molding the norms of operational units according to the visions of detached bureaucrats stitched into swivel chairs in distant cubicle farms.

• More distressing, colonels stopped challenging things. They started keeping their heads down. They responded to a corporate carrot-and-stick promotion game by becoming pliant, malleable politicians ferrying the whimsy of the empowered.

• In the old days, generals were afraid of their own colonels. They knew pissing them off was a headache. A great way to die of agonizing, resistance-fueled friction before losing a war.

• These days, generals keep colonels as loyal house pets. Each bearing a toothy smile and barking out “yes” on command.

And it all happened because it was exactly what the Air Force wanted.

Here’s a link if you’d like to absorb it in full.

Rise of the Gutless Air Force Colonel

I’ve been encouraged by the way responses to the piece cut across lines separating rank, perspective, service, and even ideology.

It’s obvious from the reactions that everyone, regardless of where they stand on anything else, agrees that raising colonels who avoid risk, lead without principle, or are easily tamed by fear is a recipe for disaster. Especially given their proximity to and control over the engines that innovate how we fight.

What’s fascinating is the intersection of this narrative with the recent purges of senior officers for reasons unrelated to duty performance or military competence. For reasons of political alignment.

I wrote another piece recently proposing that

(a) this recent purge is nothing more than a continuation of something that’s been accelerating since the mid-90s, and

(b) it’s bad.

If we don’t create a fire-break, this is a trend that could swallow our military’s effectiveness, public confidence, and a lot more.

You can read that piece here.

At the Pleasure of the President

So, if you’re buyin’ what I’m sellin’ and we mix these two vials of snake oil together, we can drink a cocktail that makes the picture even clearer. Or maybe gets us drunk enough to see past its cosmetic layers.

I see a broader problem threatening our military readiness, intellectual independence, and leadership. It is driven by a failure to distinguish between types of authority, and to therefore apply a type of authority in the wrong context.

This is like accidentally planting bamboo in your back yard. Once it takes root, it grows prolifically, kills everything else, and can never be removed without burning and salting your entire plot of land.

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Two Types of Authority

There are myriad ways authority can be understood. There are two relevant to this set of issues. Military authority, and political authority.

The exercise of military authority is about guaranteeing teamwork, instilling selflessness, drilling fundamentals. Obedience is required, but it’s mission-bound. It has an operational purpose of team integrity and unison. These things must coexist with adaptation, innovation, and the evolution of tactics as an adversary reacts. Which requires everyone to be vocal. To share and test and debate what’s going on between their ears, or perhaps within their hearts.

Military leaders understand combat requires individuals to take the initiative. To do things that are not specifically written into a contract. Discretionary effort only happens when leaders change minds, not just policies. This explains why value systems are important to military authority. Values like trust and integrity keep teams cohesive even when they disagree.

The baring of rationale and disagreement provide the mutual vulnerability to build trust. The expectation is not that every subordinate will agree with every superior in deed, word, and thought. The expectation is only that the leader’s commands will be dutifully carried out regardless (or, in the parlance of my Ohio ancestry, irregardless). Bitching is fine. Just keep rowing while you do it.

George Patton famously slagged off his superiors constantly. Patton’s troops slagged him off constantly.

But they did so while slaying enemies under his brilliant operational guidance, adapting and innovating together in the harshest circumstances. Patton’s mouthing off was tolerated because he continued to carry out his orders even as he verbalized disagreement. The enemy was too busy sucking on molten steel to notice.

There is a tether in military authority between the power wielded and the underlying rationale for it. Military necessity is that tether.

It doesn’t exist when we cross into the political realm.

We may think of military authority as heavy handed in popular culture, but it’s tame as a kitten compared to the ruthlessness of politics.

Political authority, in the current American tradition, means total loyalty. Thou shalt not speak out of turn. Speaking against your political superior is a professional death sentence and could get personal.

Political authority seeks message control. Manufacturing consensus on often divisive or controversial issues is difficult. It is simplified by influencing people to think a certain way and then keeping them from changing their minds. The path to both of these outcomes is a party line of approved propaganda. Political authority enforces talking point discipline.

Value systems? No. Politics is about serving particular interests. You can usually identify them by the number of dollar signs hanging off their backs. Values are occasionally coincident with interests, but it’s growing more rare. Less rare is the corporate practice of pretending to care about values or principles when they are merely a smokescreen to obscure interests people would be a lot less likely to support, fund, or work themselves into an early grave to advance.

The key with political authority is that it demands total allegiance. You cannot be even a little bit misaligned. Being 1% independent in what you express, even if you are still aligned in action, defeats the other 99% of what you do and who you are.

And the punishment for political transgression is professional death. Everyone is disposable. Neither Patton nor Chuck Norris nor Jesus himself would be spared after stepping out of line in today’s political power structures.

If your words or actions defy political authority, you will be fired, ostracized, daggered by leaked Kompromat, and find your personal fortune set aflame. No mercy will be shown, lest others with a courageous impulse create more trouble, risking the contagion of free thought.

The exercise of this type of authority is, of course, antithetical to military unity, camaraderie, and shared endeavor.

While military people will die for each other, politicians prefer to kill each other.

Military currency is respect. Political currency is currency.

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Good military leaders have character. And one of the ways we know their character is the moral courage to speak up. To challenge conventional wisdom. To risk harsh judgments to advance something important.

In the abstract, this is not controversial. I don’t know anyone who thinks colonels should muzzle themselves or play it safe. And I don’t know anyone who believes our policies and norms should encourage them to do so.

And yet, it’s happening. And when we look at a live example, things that I’m presenting as clear and simple get murky.

Colonel Ben Jonsson will soon retire from the US Air Force after an exceptional career spanning more than a quarter century.

Before going any further, I’ll be transparent and bring my bias into the conscious realm.

I know Ben a little. We flew C-17s together a couple decades ago. I was a newly qualified instructor pilot and had a hand in his mission-ready training and early progression.

He was an excellent pilot. Studied hard, asked a lot of questions, and was a superb teammate.

While we’ve spoken precious little over the years, I’ve remained aware of Ben’s sterling reputation as a leader and operator. He’s put together a strong performance record and made himself a sought after commodity.

It was no surprise to me when I learned he’d been a successful wing commander and worked his way onto the list for Brigadier General.

But he will retire never having worn that rank.

In summer ‘20, Ben wrote an Op-Ed which was published in Air Force Times. You can read the full 825 words by clicking on the snip below, which provides a glimpse of the subject matter for the uninitiated.

I won’t summarize Ben’s message or give my thoughts on it. I’ll tell you why in a moment.

Let’s just say that in the context of summer ‘20, the message was relatively sanguine. The country and the military services were wrestling with questions of racial equality and justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Ben had some thoughts about how the Air Force’s senior officers could improve their approach to the subject.

But what seemed like an effort to nudge his peers and service toward a different thought process became increasingly controversial with time, as DEI policy and anything perceptually adjacent became radioactive.

By the time Jonsson was nominated for 1-star promotion, the Op-Ed was a couple years in the past, and had borne him no real professional adversity. He was just another guy with an opinion on a particular issue sitting in the long shadow of two-plus decades of elite performance.

That all changed when politics took a step further into the perimeter of military discourse. Promotion holds became a normalized tactic in political skirmishes between the Senate and White House. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) placed a hold on Jonsson’s promotion and froze him out. The Air Force extended Jonsson’s nomination in summer ‘24 in the hope of pushing his confirmation through. That season passed and time has run out.

He will not be promoted. And it’s got zilch to do with military effectiveness, leadership potential, actual results, or angels dancing on the head of a pin.

It’s purely because he showed the world who he was, and one person with the power to define him by this one act is choosing to do so. That’s politics.

There’s a reason why I haven’t delved into what Ben said in his Op-Ed or told you whether or to what degree I agree or don’t.

The reason is that I don’t consider the content of the Op-Ed to be important in assessing his leadership ability, which should be most of what we care about to promote someone to Brigadier General.

What matters to me is that he had something to say and the guts to say it.

We need more people like that. For all the kerfuffle over DEI policy, there’s an inconvenient and unflattering truth lurking underneath the sound and fury. The fact that many officers who are now vocally disparaging DEI policies didn’t say jack shit about them when it was potentially risky to their perfume collections to do so.

They kept their heads down. They played it safe. They towed the line. Now they’re boxing with someone else’s gloves. They’re the fair-weather Patriot fans who can be overheard in the bar these days saying “I never liked Belichick. He was always overrated.”

The hold on Jonsson’s star ends the career of someone who has the fortitude to say what he believes. It reduces the leadership quotient of the Air Force, a service in dire straits and in dire need of people with actual spines.

And on that note, let me express a particular disappointment in Gen. Dave Allvin, the Air Force’s Chief of Staff. Pre-election Allvin obviously wanted Ben Jonsson to be a Brigadier General last summer, when his approval would have been part of extending the nomination another year.

Despite believing Ben belongs at the next level, post-election Allvin is dead silent on the matter. He’s keeping his head down. He’s playing it safe. He’s not rendering independent advice, but saying what he knows will keep him out of the crossfire and free to maneuver in support of the budget and other things. But mostly the budget.

Our system, in one observable muscle movement, is rewarding political compliance and punishing political misalignment, even though it occurred years before the current political faction was in charge.

And this is because political authority is being exercised in a context where military authority is appropriate.

There is a counter-argument, and it’s not without merit.

It’s that if officers don’t want to get dragged into the culture war, they should refrain from wading into radioactive subjects like racial disparity. If they don’t want to be subject to political authority, they shouldn’t play politics but should stick to operational matters.

There’s wisdom in that as an individual prescription. But at the systemic level, we should lament an incentive structure unlikely to lead us to the operational result we owe to the American public in exchange for their $1T in annual investment. You do not win wars with amoebic managers masquerading as flag officers.

We’re letting politics infest operations. That’s unlikely to end well for us.

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There is a place for politics in the military establishment. The doctrine of civilian control means at the senior-most level, officers and politicians will have collaborative and overlapping roles that culminate with the one in uniform ceding to the direction of the one not.

But we’ve long since let that stable, reliable doctrine metastasize into an invasive species capable of killing America’s most traditionally reliable and trustworthy institution.

If you’re going to plant bamboo in your back yard, do it carefully. Surround the roots with a protective basin limiting how far the plants can spread. And then watch for exceeded limits and manicure incessantly.

I think we’re planting bamboo without thinking clearly. Our system is working exactly as our laws contemplate. This is crowding out military leadership in favor of uniformed politics, which is eating our value system.

Is that what we want? Or should we be having a bigger debate about legislative intervention to plant the bamboo more carefully?

If this is not what we want, we should be bombarding the Capitol switchboard and demanding legislative intervention. Or at least something more than a group impersonation of a garden slug.

If this is what want, well … caveat emptor.

I don’t know. I’m just watching from a distance. There’s an element of fun, but the feeling of doom puts a real damper on it.

Tony Carr is a retired Air Force officer, former Amazon operations director, and independent writer on leadership, management, operations, and defense.