I'm glad Jason brought up the Milburn piece. I think there are some interesting points in his article and it is definitely a useful piece to generate discussion on civil-military relations.

Where I disagree with Milburn is on his notion that military officers have some sort of "moral autonomy" because of our position. While I think we all have our own individual moral code that we adhere to, I don't think military officers as a whole have a higher or "better" moral autonomy by which we should judge our civilian masters. To me that smacks of military elitism and exacerbates civil-military tensions.

I also agree with one of the critiques made by Dr. Kohn (I believe) on Milburn's piece about the false dichotomy Milburn lays out of "either acceptance of responsibility or wholehearted disobedience." I personally don't like the use of the term disobedience. I think the piece is much more palatable if you replace disobedience with dissent. It is always an officer's right to dissent if an order is illegal, immoral, or unethical. That individual should give voice to their dissent and if they feel strongly enough, take actions commensurate with the strength of their convictions. However, the use of the term wholehearted disobedience, at least to me, implies some type of active subversion.

Lastly, I disagree with Milburn's piece when he states, "military leaders are committed to challenge their civilian masters if the policy appears to be unconstitutional, immoral, or otherwise detrimental to the institution." My problem is with that last clause "otherwise detrimental to the institution." To me that is far too broad and if every officer in the Army must evaluate every order on whether or not he or she thinks it will be detrimental to the institution (according to whose judgment or standards by the way), we would never accomplish a mission.

On this not, if you haven’t had the chance, I highly recommend the following article:

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Militar...tryker-brigade

I won't comment on the speculation of the article that his personal doctrinal views possibly cultivated a dangeorous command climate that resulted in higher casualties and the killing of civilians. I wasn't there and I don't think you can comment on that unless you had the experience of being in the unit.

However, reading this article made me think of the "detrimental to the institution" line. Did this CDR view the COIN doctrine and ISAF guidance as "detrimental to the institution" and therefore blow it off in favor of his own personal doctrinal ideas? And is that OK? What does it mean for our profession when we have a BDE CDR in combat that apparently blew off higher's guidance to focus on what he deemed “right” or important: counter-guerilla and guerilla hunter killer teams. If you believe Milburn’s argument, I guess this is OK? I'm not so sure.