Mac-Coleman

31 January 2014 –    

Still looking for George Washington

After a 30-year career in the Air Force, I found myself in 2009 working for the State Department in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  I monitored U.S.-funded military training contracts in one of the most dysfunctional countries on earth.  My fellow contractors and I tried to teach Congolese soldiers to stop being thugs, rapists, and murderers and to become professional soldiers.  Our ambitious goal was to build a foundation upon which the Congolese people could build a cohesive nation. 

Most of the soldiers were unpaid, former rebels more loyal to their tribes than to the government in the faraway capital of Kinshasa.  They had guns and would routinely take food from stores without paying.  They also stopped cars on the road to shake down the drivers for money.  We were stopped this way many times.  The officers were barely literate and stole their soldiers’ pay.  They also compelled their soldiers to force Congolese villagers to dig for gold and diamonds.  Because everybody in the DR Congo is hungry, we could get soldiers to show up for training by feeding them lunch.  Pretty basic stuff. 

We contractors couldn’t solve the fundamental social and political problems that resulted in the deaths of more than five million people in the Congo between 1998 and 2005.  Nor could we stop the disease and violence, which still prevails.  But the training contracts continued because U.S. strategy was to keep a light presence in the Congo and to stay involved until such time as the situation may allow decisive U.S. action. It was a pragmatic and sensible strategy that cost little money, no lives, and produced little adverse publicity.  I agreed wholeheartedly with it. 

In late 2011, I developed and taught a course to help professionalize senior Congolese officers.  Until then, our courses had focused on lower ranks.  In this fifty-hour course, I showed senior Congolese officers how to lead military forces in such a way that Congolese people could rally around them for support and protection.  This would help change the military from being part of the problem to becoming part of the solution in a country full of insurgents. 

It became apparent to me that even a simple strategy such as ours in the DR Congo succeeds only when those on the ground—soldiers, contractors, or foreign service officers—approach their tactical mission with professionalism.  The best we as tactical applicators of the State Department’s overall strategy could realistically hope for was to influence one Congolese soldier at a time.  On the strategic level, we succeeded just by being there.  On the tactical level, we nonetheless did a professional job because we couldn’t do anything less.  My course attempted to achieve something grand, even when the strategy didn’t demand something so ambitious.      

One of the basic tenets of the course that the tradition set over two hundred years ago by military leaders such as George Washington is a good model for how professional, apolitical foundations for a new nation are built.  I told the corrupt colonels and generals that I was looking for a Congolese George Washington who would rise above regional disputes and violent reprisals and be a man around whom a cohesive Congo could grow.  I indeed searched for a Congolese George Washington, knowing how unlikely it was to find one.  I still hope that one of these military students will remember his mission and one day will have the courage to stand up when the moment is right.     

Our nation’s leaders must understand the basic lessons of the DR Congo.  When our leaders craft strategies on the international scene, using the instruments of national power to accomplish them, they must exhibit the same courage, commitment, and willingness to sacrifice that their soldiers, foreign service officers, and contractors show when they implement the strategies.  The President and in his associates have exhibited few of these virtues.  They seem to float from one international calamity to another, resolve nothing, and leave messes for others to clean up.  Despite their abuse of the process, our so-called leaders continue to have – without deserving it -- the loyalty of virtuous Americans who bravely execute their shallow plans.  In reality, these leaders are no more worthy to be called George Washington’s successors than are the corrupt officers in the pest holes of the world.     

No one will think of them when they are gone.