By Gil Barndollar
Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer was fired last month, a consequence of President Donald Trump’s foolish decision to pardon three servicemen who were either convicted of or awaiting trial for crimes committed in combat. The president has been rightly excoriated for these pardons, which dishonor the U.S. military and may degrade good order and discipline. But amid this uproar, Americans should note the bigger lesson: Endless wars, especially endless counterinsurgency or counterterrorism wars, slowly chip away at both a military’s ethics and its critical war-fighting skills.
This is not to say that the men Trump pardoned in November were victims or automatons. Army 1st Lt. Clint Lorance, only three days into his deployment, chose to order his men to shoot two Afghan civilians and then lied about it. Army Maj. Mathew Golsteyn chose to kill a suspected enemy combatant and hide his body. And Navy Special Operations Chief Eddie Gallagher chose to pose with an enemy corpse — and likely did far worse — but was saved by the incompetence and malevolence of his prosecutors.
Military leaders will say their men are being shamed by “a few bad apples” in the ranks. And that is basically true — willful atrocities by American troops have been rare in the post-9/11 wars, though hundreds of thousands of civilians have been “collateral damage.” The vast majority of American troops deployed to combat overseas have “kept their honor clean,” in the stirring words of the Marines’ Hymn.
This piece was originally published by the Chicago Tribune on December 4, 2019. Read more HERE.