An Army Man Won’t Be the ‘Loose Cannon’ Poindexter Was

For those who see the “brass” as the brass, regardless of service identification, the appointment of Army Lt. Gen. Colin L. Powell as director of the National Security Council must have been most disturbing. After the perfidy and arrogance of Vice Admiral John M. Poindexter, the last thing they wanted to see was another pompous military stuffed shirt as the President’s national security adviser.

But Colin Powell is no John Poindexter, and one reason that he is not is that he is a general rather than admiral. At the risk of sounding parochial--which I undoubtedly am--there are profound differences among the military services, and nowhere is this more stark as between the Army and the Navy. They literally occupy two different worlds.

A naval officer, especially as captain of the ship-of-the-line, is the closest thing to an absolute monarch to be found in America today. Not only does his ship provide its own world, of which he is absolute master, he more often than not operates independent of the day-to-day scrutiny of his immediate superiors.

One small example makes the point. There’s an official military acronym--UNODIR (pronounced “you know, dear”)--that is used frequently by the Navy, but almost never by the other services. Translated as “unless otherwise directed,” it is used to signal to one’s superiors that one is about to take a particular course of action unless told otherwise. The conventional wisdom is that once the message is sent the radios are turned off so that no countermanding order can be received, and the captain then does what he damn well pleases.

The effect of these peculiarities of the naval service is that cooperation, coordination and compromise do not come easy to admirals raised in that tradition. Some transcend that heritage, but many--and Poindexter is a case in point--do not. Poindexter’s handling of Iran-Contra matters was evidence that the UNODIR mind-set dictated his approach to national security affairs.

Army officers, especially infantrymen like Colin Powell, come from a different tradition. From the time he began his military career as a young second lieutenant commanding a rifle platoon, he had to coordinate his actions with the platoons on his right and left, and to elicit the cooperation of those providing supporting fire. Operating under the direct scrutiny of his company commander, he learned that he could not always get his own way, that compromise was an essential part of an infantryman’s life.

During his experiences under enemy fire during two tours in Vietnam, the need for coordination, cooperation and compromise was relearned at every level of his almost 30-year military career, from commanding the Second Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division as a colonel to commanding the Army’s V Corps in Europe as a lieutenant general.

Not only does he know his way around the battlefield, he knows his way through the Washington bureaucracy. He served as executive assistant to the secretary of energy in 1979, senior military assistant to the deputy secretary of defense from 1979 to 1981, senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger from 1983 to 1985, and most recently as deputy national security adviser in the White House.

Infantrymen have a reputation for doing the hard-slogging, dirty and unglamorous tasks that receive little public attention or acclaim, but nonetheless make victory on the battlefield possible. And that’s what’s needed on the NSC now--concentration on the fundamentals that have so long been ignored: Coordinating the efforts of the State, Defense and Treasury departments in support of U.S. national policies, encouraging cooperation among the Executive departments and with the Congress in order to build and sustain a national concensus on national security issues, and working out the inevitable compromises that will be required.

With their lust for power and their need for public recognition, too many NSC directors regarded these tasks as beneath their dignity, and American national security policies suffered as a result. As he has proved in his almost 30 years of public service, such tasks are not beneath Gen. Powell’s dignity. They’re his bread and butter. It’s “back to basics” time, and Gen. Colin Powell is just the right man for that job.