"It's more than human nature can deliver," says defense expert Edward Luttwak, to expect Army generals who built careers around artillery to turn around and scrap a new artillery system like Crusader. Similarly, can one really expect the top Air Force generals -- most of whom were fighter pilots -- to back taking money out of fighter jet production so that it can be reallocated for more bombers and unmanned drones? Arrogance and bad manners from Rumsfeld and Cambone may have complicated matters, but transformation requires hard choices that simply cannot be sweet-talked away.

But the mix of the antagonism over regional defense policy -- particularly in the Middle East -- and the transformation debate has produced a level of antagonism between civilians and military at the Pentagon that is actually far greater than it was under Bill Clinton. And no one is more surprised than the military itself.

"By the time the Clinton era was ending, a lot of the military guys still held the view that we really don't like Clinton, and boy, if we got a Republican in here, it would be oh happy day and we could really ramp up the budget and go to town," says one former career officer who remains in close touch with members of Joint Staff. Only it didn't turn out that way. "They throw their lot in with the Republicans. The Republicans come to office. And wham! They're worse off than they were at the end of Clinton. Even though they're going to get more money in the budget, they're going to have little or no say-so over where it goes or how it's done. The relationship between them and the new overseers is testy at best. It's very strained."

The rude awakening the armed services got in February 2001 points up a too little appreciated fact about the Clinton Pentagon. As a group, the American military never lost its distrust and even enmity toward Bill Clinton. And they are far more positively inclined toward George W. Bush. But in terms of calling their own shots, the brass never had it so good as it did under the former president -- particularly after Clinton's first couple of years. Clinton-era defense officials were seldom in a position to go head to head with the generals on truly important matters, with some simply lacking confidence in their grasp of military affairs. Because of that they were often ready to defer to those in uniform.

Others at the Clinton Pentagon were seasoned defense professionals -- men like Defense Secretary William Perry and Undersecretary Walt Slocum -- who had as deep a grasp of military affairs as anyone who has ever served in their posts. But they still operated in the larger knowledge that their civilian superiors lacked the political clout to back them up in a major confrontation with the military. Out of necessity, defense officials reached a modus vivendi with the military, and the two sides ran the Pentagon by consensus.

Despite the lip service he paid to "transformation" on the campaign trail, what the military expected from George W. was Bush redux: more or less unquestioning support for the armed forces. But they soon learned that Rumsfeld and his new team had taken a very different lesson from the often fractious relationship between the military and the outgoing administration. While Rumsfeld and Co. were no less sour on Clinton defense policies, they also believed that the civilians needed to bring the military to heel. "They thought the uniformed military had run roughshod over the process at the Pentagon," explains one retired Marine with long service at the Pentagon. "They thought the civilians really needed to take over, and that attitude became very evident in the first couple of weeks."

Though major defense cuts began under the first Bush administration, the political tenor of Bush I was almost perfectly suited to the officer corps: culturally pro-military and ideologically middle-of-the-road conservative. The ideologues who populated the Reagan Pentagon were occasionally irksome to the Joint Staff. But they were united by a common goal: their opposition to the Soviet Union. And given the historical moment -- the arms buildup that hiked funding for numerous weapons programs while seldom cutting any -- latent ideological tensions seldom came to the fore.

By contrast, Bush II, though also willing to spend, is far more ideologically conservative and doesn't share the reluctance that earlier Republican administrations had at scrapping weapons programs. Most important, these appointees have the political clout and the willingness to fight with the military to get their way, and have been, in their own way, beneficiaries of the historical moment -- the successful prosecution of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The new team turns out to be as likely to dismiss professional military advice as the old team was to accept it. And that accounts for the case of whiplash that the Pentagon brass has suffered for the last 18 months.

What makes civilian control so important is that military officers have a tendency to become consummate ideologues, too -- not of a political ideology but a corporate one, the ideology of the professional military. They're reared in the culture of their service branch, build careers around war-fighting doctrines that are often outdated by the time they become heads of their services. They have an understandable tendency toward risk aversion and an equal tendency to conflate the interests of their services with those of the country. Civilians bring a fresh set of eyes to the problems of fighting wars. They tend, in short, not to be blinkered by preconceived notions and intellectual rigidity.

But if the civilians themselves are hidebound ideologues, then much of the benefit of strong civilian control is lost. It's just the blind leading the blind. And in Iraq that could get us into a heap of trouble.

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