Firing Line

- [Emcee] The Defense Distinguished Service Medal is awarded to General Stanley A. McChrystal, United States Army.

- After a life in service, what is your assessment of how strong the military is as an institution?

- Well, Margaret, we don't know.

We've not had a test like this in any time I can remember in American history.

- [Narrator 1] In Afghanistan, McChrystal was in charge of a broader strategy of counterinsurgency.

- [Narrator 2] McChrystal was the man who transformed the Joint Special Operations Command into the organization that killed the two most notorious terrorists of the 21st century.

- Please take your seats.

- We are in an era now when there's been an unprecedented purge of military leaders, not for incompetence or misbehavior, but for political affiliation.

- [Margaret] What does General Stanley McChrystal say now?

- [Announcer 1] "Firing line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, the Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, and by the following.

- General Stanley McChrystal, your long career in the military has been dedicated to upholding the ideals of the Declaration and the US Constitution.

What role has the military played in sustaining constitutional government?

And what are the limits of that role?

- I think the military has played an important role all the way back to the days of George Washington when he turned down the opportunity to be a dictator, although he was encouraged by many people, some in the military, to do that, and he instead bowed to civilian power.

Throughout our history, the military has had a pretty good track record of being subservient to civilian leadership.

Now there have been political military officers and there have been fits and starts, but generally the military has been apolitical.

During my entire service, when you were with your peers, you never talked about politics.

You didn't know what officer was a Democrat, or Republican, or whatever they might be 'cause it wasn't considered appropriate to do that.

And so we were an apolitical organization.

And that was sacred because what you don't want is a military that is identified as supporting one part of a political faction or another, because then they become part of the equation.

And the military actually should be separate and aside.

They should be there to protect the nation and then policymakers should make policy.

- After a life in service, much of it at the Pentagon and on the front lines of wars America has been involved in, what is your assessment of how strong the military is as an institution?

Can it withstand a two-year or four-year interlude of perhaps an intensely partisan leader of the military or an intensely partisan president?

- Well, Margaret, we don't know.

We've not had a test like this, at least in my lifetime, and any time I can remember in American history.

We are in an era now when there's been an unprecedented purge of military leaders, not for incompetence or misbehavior, that's always appropriate and required, but for political affiliation or for following policies that they had been instructed to follow in previous administrations.

And so the problem is when you start to purge people out of an institution, that necessarily weakens it.

And it's not always obvious initially.

The Army and the Pentagon still look as strong as ever.

The Navy's got the same number of ships.

But the military's based on a culture, and that culture is one of respect, it's one of service.

It's always been one of being apolitical.

And I don't think we'll know how weak it is until the wind blows hard.

And then suddenly we'll find out whether we've actually damaged the structure beyond repair.

And that's a question I think about a lot.

- It concerns you.

- Yes, ma'am.

What will it take for our military to get back into what I would consider a healthy state?

I'm sure there's some people that say, "Get rid of the people who believed in DEI or other issues.

It makes us a better military."

I just have a different view.

- Right.

- But I think the military has to be a mirror of American society.

And if America doesn't see itself in the military and if the military doesn't see itself in society, then you have this natural separation.

And we've actually, with the volunteer military, we've always had the danger that the military would become so professionalized that they would be a separate entity.

- Independent, yeah.

- And you don't really want that, at least I don't.

When we go to war, I want every zip code at risk.

I want every part of society fully invested.

- I mean, in your estimation, is the culture that you talk about in the military, is it, in your experience, strong enough to withstand a two or four-year period that is quite different from the one you're familiar with?

- I think the military culture is strong, but I'm not convinced that it's unbreakable.

I think that there's every likelihood that we've weakened things and it will be difficult to repair it.

- I recently welcomed Secretary, former Secretary of Defense, four-star general Jim Mattis to this program, along with Ryan Holiday in a conversation about stoicism.

You recently joined Ryan Holiday on his podcast, "The Daily Stoic," and our discussion was about how the ancient philosophy of stoicism, which has influenced not just our founders, but it is also influencing contemporary American leadership.

How does stoicism influence you?

- I believe in stoicism.

I'm not a fanatical stoic.

But I would argue that I don't think, in our modern society, it's given much more than lip service now.

- Uh-huh.

- There are some people who confuse stoicism with manliness or stoicism with being very extreme in your beliefs of something.

Actually, my interpretation of stoicism is you have a set of responsibilities, you live up to those responsibilities.

Some of those are responsibilities to yourself.

They're responsibility to values.

And you don't necessarily do what's in your immediate best interest.

You do what's required by these values you've decided to embrace.

And so I don't see enough leaders willing to do that now.

I see way more leaders who will say certain words, but then in the moment of pressure, they will fold.

- What do you most hope the next generation of Americans will carry forward?

- I hope the next generation looks at what they've seen in previous decades, recent decades, and they decide to reset, and they try to say we are going to focus on character.

When we look at a political candidate, we are not going to start with their position on a certain issue.

We're gonna start, are we electing the right person?

And I think that's a smart move because we never really know what a president's gonna face, but we do know that if we get the right character, that they will bring that into their decision-making.

I think that this next generation needs to demand that of themselves and they need to demand that of each other.

We've had an era in which we celebrate individual achievement, or wealth, or celebrity.

In many cases, it's really against the best welfare of society, but we've said that's a smart person because they've been able to navigate the system and beat the odds, play the system.

And I think what we've got to do is make that not something that people can be proud of.

They should be ashamed of it.

- Yeah.

Why is character the most important quality in a president?

- Because it guides what they do.

At the end of the day, character is reflected in what we do.

It may be based on our values and the discipline we have to follow it.

But at the end of the day, it governs your actions.

And so a president, if they are faced with many different options to do something, if character is the lens that they look through, now they'll also consider other information, but if character is that lens, we know we're gonna get a decision that's as good as that person is capable of making.

It'll never be perfect because you're choosing between two bad options in many cases, but we know that it is for the right reasons.

And that's really important.

- You spent your life leading Americans from every background.

What have you learned about national unity by serving along people of different religions, different backgrounds, different places in the country, perhaps who don't even vote like you?

What have you learned about the cohesiveness of both the military and civil society?

- Yeah, my personal experience in the military and otherwise is you don't like the people you don't know.

You don't like the people in the other town.

You don't like the people of a different religion unless you know them.

From my first assignment in the military, I commanded a platoon of paratroopers in 82nd Airborne Division, and they were from all different backgrounds.

There were African-Americans, there were whites, others, and they came from very different economic backgrounds than I had been privileged to enjoy.

And yet, when you get in the dirt, when you're doing the mission, it becomes a great equalizer.

And over time you start to understand the really biggest difference between us is the life journey.

It's not that I'm smarter or anything else.

And if I'd had their life journey, I would have their perspective.

And so I think that we need things that force Americans to interact.

- Is military service one of the few remaining institutions in this country that teaches Americans that they belong to something bigger than themselves?

- I think it is.

Schools should do that, and to a degree they make a great effort at doing that.

But the military is a time when you devote a certain part of your life to go do something.

And then every day in the military, you're reminded that you are serving something large: the flag, the nation, fellow citizens.

And that repetitious reminder is very, very important.

- Why?

- Because if people are doing something that's dangerous, or it's dirty, or it's tiring, you start to say, "Why am I doing this?

I'm not making much money."

You need a reminder that says you're not doing it for the money.

You're not doing it so that you're not tired.

You're not doing it to stay safe.

You're doing it because it matters.

And if you can start to respect yourself for that, and hopefully if society adds on to that with the respect from society, then suddenly you reinforce in people the willingness to take those kinds of actions, to do that kind of work.

- Why do you think the ideals of the Declaration of Independence have endured for 250 years?

- I think the ideals of the Declaration have endured, but subject to everybody's personal interpretation.

They're certainly unevenly viewed.

Some people will grab on to the idea that I've got rights to do whatever I want, and yet those rights affect other people.

And yet if you look from one angle, you do that.

I think, more broadly, they work.

- Yeah.

- I think that's the thing.

They've found that the ideas in the Declaration of Independence have produced a democracy which, however imperfect, has delivered for the American people.

- Yeah.

You've written, quote, "The framework of rights we enjoy rests uneasily on the responsibilities we choose to bear."

What responsibilities must accompany the freedoms that have been earned?

- Many of us now are American citizens by accident of birth.

We did nothing to get that.

And we think that if we pay our taxes and if we vote, that we have checked the blocks of what we have to do.

And of course we both know not nearly enough Americans even vote.

- Yeah.

- And so I think what we've done is we have cheapened what it means to be a citizen.

Because the reality is a nation is not something God created.

It's a covenant between people.

And that rests upon the idea that we will help defend each other.

We will help do all the things that a group has to do to make a society work.

And we have to accept those responsibilities and not look around and say that person needs to do it and that person needs to do it.

And we need to be more direct about calling people out who don't.

- What do you mean?

- I think if somebody is not living up to their responsibilities as a citizen, they shouldn't be able to just go off the grid or do whatever they say and still enjoy all the rights.

Now that's pretty extreme.

Robert Heinlein said years ago, "You should get citizenship after you serve in the military."

And I'm not saying that.

But what I'm saying is if somebody wants a role in society that has some kind of stature, whether it's leading a business or serving in Congress, they ought to be a pretty good citizen, and we ought to look at 'em hard.

And if they're not a good citizen, they shouldn't be judged positively by the people.

- Name a few characteristics or things that would identify a US citizen as a good citizen.

- Yeah.

- What are the responsibilities besides voting and paying taxes that would make a good citizen?

- I think if you're looking at what those things, one would be serving when required.

And sometimes that's military service, sometimes it's other service in times of need.

It's not staying on the sideline.

I think it's understanding that we have a responsibility to every other American.

And that means Americans who don't have the same opportunity we have, maybe not the same privileges.

I think we need to protect the rights of every other citizen just as zealously as we would protect ours.

Because as soon as they lose their rights, all of our rights are in danger.

- The Declaration, you know, while it did launch our nation's independence through acts of violence, a war, it also is very clear about when war is justified and when violence is justified.

And those grievances were intended to explain why violence was justified in those circumstances.

Are there values or ideals there that still guide us or guide our principles and how we think about when it's appropriate to engage in war?

- It's a really interesting thought because I think you could break violence in two groups.

You could say there is violence at home.

There are violence to protect you or your loved ones or violence to achieve some political end.

Because time and again in America, we've seen spasms of that.

And it always causes us to reflect when are we actually weakening the thing we care about if we pursue violence, and yet when is it our requirement to water the tree of freedom with the blood of patriots?

War is another thing because we're a nation state.

And if we weren't a democracy, we'd still be a nation state.

And nation states often have interests that bring them into conflict with other nations, and then the question of war comes up.

Now, I personally believe there are times you should go to war that are justified, and they have to be legal and moral, but it's always in the eye of the beholder.

But once war becomes a tool, a tool of something that isn't carefully moored to our values, then I think war loses any justification.

- It's been 52 years since Richard Nixon ended the draft.

You have been a supporter and a leader about the need to implement a form of national service.

This idea has been in the ether for some time.

In fact, William F. Buckley Jr, in the original "Firing Line," cited a line from his book "Gratitude," which he wrote in 1980, proposing just the same concept.

Let me show you what Buckley thought then.

- That the state should have an interest in virtue, as that old radical Alexander Hamilton insisted it ought to have, does not strike me as a radical departure.

George Washington believed in universal conscription.

I don't.

But I do think that we live in a society in which young people and older people don't give any evidence of gratitude for what it is that we inherit.

And I'm looking for the redevelopment of an ethos that causes people to want to show that they are willing to reciprocate.

- You and Buckley agree that there continues to be a need to have some kind of national service be compulsory for Americans in order to be able to, well, in Buckley's words, be grateful for the opportunities that we have in this country.

But you say we ought to give Americans the opportunity to serve.

What do you mean by give them the opportunity?

- Well, it's important to understand, I never thought about national service beyond military service until about a year or so after I got out of the military.

And then I'd been asked a question of do I believe in a military draft, and my answer said, well, I actually believe in a wider idea of service, that every young American ought to be given the opportunity to do at least a year of full-time service, when they're immersed in the experience.

And here's what I believe.

It's not to have them pick up trash, or to build trails, or to do other work.

It's not the work they do.

- Yeah.

- The outcome or the output is the citizens we create.

And if we think about being a citizen, it is this idea of responsibilities, embracing them.

And if you are an actual investor in something, you care more about it.

If you're invested in the nation, you take more interest in it.

And so I think that what we've done is we've shrunken down the opportunities.

So what we need is an opportunity, and I'm of course a believer that opportunity ought to be mandatory now, where once you've done this, you may not enjoy it in the moment.

It's like the military.

You don't wake up every morning whistling zippity-doodah.

- Mm-hmm.

- But when you've done it for a while, you take this sense of satisfaction that says, I didn't waste my time.

I made a difference.

And we have a lot of Americans who never have the opportunity to have contributed.

You know, I tell people sometimes, what would it be like if you're waiting for an airplane and they're giving priority boarding, and they say, usually they say all military members... What if they say, "All young Americans doing national service board first?"

For a lot of young people, they're never gonna be honored like that.

They're never gonna be applauded.

They're never going to step back from something, "I built that, I did that."

We need to give them that opportunity.

And then I think they'll feel differently about the whole.

- They may also feel differently about other Americans.

In recent decades, you have visited the battlefield at Gettysburg more frequently than any other destination.

Why?

- A few reasons.

My father first took me there when I was 10 years old, and then I had reason in the military to go a couple of times after that.

But after I retired from the military, or actually in the last few years of my career, my wife Annie and I would go up and we would spend the night up there just because it's a quiet place and I love history.

It makes me think.

As I think more about it though, I think there's a duality to Gettysburg.

On the one hand, the battlefield is now beautiful and there are monuments to heroism and sacrifice.

And there's a clarity to the leadership decisions that I find fascinating.

These people did an amazing thing under great pressure.

But there's the other side of it.

We had about 150,000 Americans try to kill each other in the worst way they could.

And there were more than 50,000 casualties.

Every building in Gettysburg was full of wounded after the battle.

So I think we need to remember that on the one hand, war and Gettysburg are something we should look at and we should pull the best lessons from it, but we should use the other half of it as a cautionary tale, that war, even civil war, is never as far away as we like to believe.

- Well, I mean, in your book "On Character," you reject the notion that another civil war is unthinkable.

You wrote, quote, "North and South tore at each other less than a century after uniting to create a nation.

Founding fathers were not long dead, and our unique republic was not yet taken for granted by a population ignorant of history.

Of course it could happen again."

Really?

- I believe that.

If you go back to the American Civil War, the North and South were not different.

They were connected economically, different systems, but connected economically.

So it made no sense to fight each other.

And yet they first used political and societal disagreements, slavery being a key part of that.

And then it started, after the release of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," it started to be this tribal, I don't like those people because they're northerners or they're southerners.

And once you get to that point, where the people you don't like are the enemy, then the idea of killing them becomes much more acceptable.

I hear people in our society today, "Wow, we ought to kill this group.

We ought to do this stuff."

And I think if they got close enough to war, or particularly a civil war, they might have their eyes opened.

- Because the reality of war is so much different than they imagine?

- The reality of war is different than they imagine.

It's not surgical.

It's not what we see on TV.

It's not cruise missiles.

It's where the cruise missile lands.

The reality of a civil war, and I experienced a couple in Afghanistan and Iraq, they take on a special bitterness to them, a special ugliness to them, as people decide that they not only have got to win, they've got to destroy this other group of people.

And it's often people from, in Iraq, we had neighborhoods that were mixed neighborhoods before the war.

And the war came, people from one side started killing the people who were their neighbors just before.

- You describe yourself as intensely patriotic, but not overly patriotic.

What makes you most proud to be an American?

- I think it's the idea that America does have a set of values and morals and demonstrated willingness to live up to those that I want to be a part of.

And of course that exacerbates the frustration when you see shortfalls, when you see us not being what we should.

You wanna believe in your team.

I wanna wear the jersey.

I wanna cheer for us.

But I'm frustrated when we knowingly aren't the people we either claim to be or know we should be.

- Is that why you're not overly patriotic?

- Well, I think that- - You see danger in reflexive, unquestioning patriotism.

- [Stanley] Yeah.

- Why?

- Because I think if you don't think about it, you just automatically run to the banner.

If somebody raises the banner, it's because you are this group, or you are that group, or you're an American.

I think that's dangerous because we start to get arrogant with that.

And I think that in recent years, people have used patriotism almost as a political club: flag pins, and flags, and talking about... You don't love America because you believe something different than I do.

America is a pretty big idea.

It's got a spectrum of views.

And it's designed to be that way.

And the day we stop having a spectrum of views, spectrum of religion, spectrum of all the things we have, then I don't think we're the country that I grew up to believe we are.

- General Stan McChrystal, thank you so much for joining me.

- My honor, Margaret, thank you.

- [Announcer 1] "Firing line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, the Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, and by the following.

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