The Pentagon should remember the value of professional dissent

Professional dissent can drive innovation and offer differing points of view for the leadership of the institutions in which we serve and work. It is especially important for military institutions tasked with fighting wars and expending the nation’s blood and treasure through conflict.

Today, there is reportedly a fear that exists within the U.S. Department of Defense. Highly qualified officers are being pulled off of promotion lists for vague and unclear reasons. Army senior leaders have been fired for reportedly not aligning themselves with the ideological aims and culture wars of current Defense Department leadership.

The ripple effect is that this fear can inhibit dissent within the American military, especially because it needed today during the U.S conflict against Iran.

For a time in my career, I was a prominent critic of the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency doctrine and of U.S. strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. From 2007 to 2013, I wrote commentaries and gave public speeches and lectures to military and civilian audiences directed at the U.S. Army and Department of Defense.

As a serving Army officer, I was careful to stay within my lane. I did not question policy decisions made by American presidents in both wars, such as President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and then stay and occupy the country for eight years or President Obama’s decision to “surge” additional troops into Afghanistan in 2012.

Still, it was clear that my efforts during those years ruffled a lot of feathers in the ranks of army officers and likely in the Defense Department. That’s because I said that their operational approaches in Iraq and Afghanistan and their larger military strategies were not working. In 2012, I went so far as to say that the United States deserved an F grade for its failing strategy in Afghanistan.

But not once did senior leaders tell me to shut up and to stop producing professional dissent. Thinking back on those times, it is encouraging to remember that the U.S. military — from the Pentagon to U.S. Army leadership — tolerated my dissent, even if many of those leaders disagreed with it, some of them stridently.

It is hard to imagine a current U.S. service member offering similar criticism toward the operations against Iran. In this Department of Defense’s atmosphere of fear — where U.S. military officers and civilians are being polygraphed for allegedly leaking sensitive information — consider what might happen if an officer published an essay criticizing the operations against Iran and asking hard questions on whether they are achieving U.S. objectives.

A serving officer criticizing an operational approach or military strategy is different from criticizing the policy and actions of a presidential administration. Gen. Douglas McArthur did exactly that in early 1951 during the Korean War, when he publicly argued for taking the war to the Chinese homeland and possibly using nuclear weapons against China. That was not professional military dissent; it was disobedience and an outright challenge to policy. President Harry Truman was right for relieving McArthur because of it.

In 2008, when my promotion packet was in front of the selection board that could promote me from lieutenant colonel to full colonel, a Wall Street Journal reporter wrote an article titled “Officer Questions Petraeus’s Strategy” on my early criticism of the army’s counterinsurgency under Gen. David H. Petraeus.

It never occurred to me that my professional dissent could somehow hurt my chances for promotion to colonel. I trusted that the promotion board would base its decision on my performance as a lieutenant colonel in combat during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and when in command of a cavalry squadron in west Baghdad in 2006.

As I expected, the board based its decision on my performance in combat, and fortunately, I was promoted to colonel.

With the war against Iran entering its seventh month , along with the likelihood of future U.S. military conflicts, it is especially important today and in the future for the Department of Defense to allow service members to express professional military dissent without damaging repercussions.

History offers a compelling example. In March 1968 during the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War, Army helicopter pilot Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr. saw the killing of innocent civilians in the village of My Lai. He reported his observations to senior leaders, which eventually led to a full investigation.

Hopefully, the Department of Defense will embrace the spirit of professional dissent from today’s service members to ensure the intellectual baseline for an effective, moral and ethically driven U.S. military.

Gian Gentile is a retired U.S. Army colonel and former director of the military history program at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.