Civil-Military Disagreement? Yes. Crisis? No.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey made headlines yesterday when he told the Senate Armed Services committee that his professional military advice to President Obama would be based on conditions on the ground. Framed that way, the story has more than a bit of dog-bites-man feel to it and, quite frankly, it does not warrant the breathless coverage it has thus far received. The headline provided by the Daily Beast is particularly egregious, "Can Obama Keep his Generals in Check in the War Against ISIS?"

Spoiler alert: yes.

Dempsey’s core message — I do not recommend combat action for U.S. ground troops now, but I can imagine circumstances in which I would recommend combat action for U.S. ground troops — is both sensible and well within the norms of proper civil-military relations. In fact, had he said otherwise — had he said, for instance, that he was prepared to commit in advance never to change his military opinion regardless of how the war unfolded — Dempsey would have grossly violated civil-military norms.

Proper civil-military relations depends on military leaders offering their candid professional opinion, and on professional military opinion being shaped by the realities of a war, not arbitrarily truncated by wishful thinking or other political constraints.

The problem for Dempsey, of course, was that his Commander-in-Chief had repeatedly and publicly committed himself to such arbitrary wishful thinking. In ruling out a combat role for U.S. ground troops in the new war he has launched in Iraq and Syria, President Obama was announcing bad policy.

But under democratic civil-military relations, the civilian leaders have the right to make and announce bad policy. They have, as I have argued elsewhere, the right to be wrong. When they are wrong, presidents should be held accountable — by independent commentators pointing out the mistakes, by Congress exercising its oversight function, and ultimately by the voters. Just not by the military.

Civilians have the right to heed the military advice they want to heed, but they do not have the right to hear only the military advice they want to hear.

Gen. Dempsey was telling the Senators (and by extension the public and, of course, the rest of the Obama administration), that he would exercise proper military professionalism and adjust his advice as circumstances warranted even if it meant telling the president something he did not want to hear. He also made clear that the president would be free to choose otherwise, if Obama so determined. (And, by the way, Gen. Dempsey in his testimony also revealed that the president’s policy was not quite as bad as it sounds. Although President Obama has repeatedly ruled out a combat role for U.S. ground troops, he also apparently told Dempsey that if the situation on the ground changes to make a combat role necessary, then Obama wanted Dempsey to alert him to that new reality. In other words, despite what he said publicly, apparently Obama privately had a more sensible approach to the war he was launching.)

That is not a civil-military crisis. That is just how civil-military relations is supposed to work.