Courage Under Fire: Gen. Fogleman Shows The ‘Right Stuff’ About Military Order And Discipline; Sen. Lott Does Not

(Washington, D.C.): The media feeding
frenzy over the case of First Lieutenant
Kelly Flinn and the predictable response
from several congressional quarters —
notably, female Members of Congress and
liberal Democratic Senator Tom Harkin
(D-IA) who have assailed the Air Force
for its insensitive handling of an
“affair of the heart” — have
put into sharp relief one of the most
serious threats currently facing the U.S.
military: social experimentation
that threatens to destroy the good order
and discipline essential to an effective
fighting force.

The good news is that the Air Force’s
senior military officer, General Ronald
Fogleman, yesterday stood up for the
armed forces in the face of a
stupifyingly ill-informed attack by Sen.
Harkin. When the Senator charged his
service for “looking
ridiculous” as it brought charges
against Lt. Flinn over her acknowledged
adultery, Gen. Fogleman pointed out that
her adultery was only the precipitating
cause of the first female B-52 pilot’s
disciplinary problems: “This
is an issue about an officer entrusted to
fly nuclear weapons who disobeyed an
order [and] who lied. That’s what this is
about.”

‘There You Go Again’

The bad news is that Senate Majority
Leader Trent Lott has decided for the
second time in a month to place endearing
himself to the Nation’s media elite and
political establishment ahead of U.S.
national security interests. First, Sen.
Lott decided to support ratification of
the controversial Chemical Weapons
Convention — despite the fact that
defects he identified as unacceptable
remained uncorrected. Now, he has
signaled an indifference to the
most fundamental requirement of a
military organization: that rules and
orders be faithfully executed and that
disobedience, and especially mendacity,
be severely punished.

Even more troubling is Sen. Lott’s
apparent “political
correctness” about efforts to remake
the U.S. military in the image of the
worst of American civilian society.
Amplifying on his astonishing statement
of the day before — to the effect that
the Air Force was “badly
abusing” Lt. Flinn — the Majority
Leader told a press conference yesterday
that, “We have just got to account
for the fact that men and women are going
to have relationships that lead to
marriage and perfectly wholesome
relationships and we should not wind up
punishing them by dragging them through
courts-martial in every instance.”

Not only does this statement appear,
on its face, to be singularly ignorant of
the facts of the Flinn case; it also
displays an appalling insouciance about
the toll sexual libertarianism takes on a
military organization. As it happens, a
letter made public yesterday from the Air
Force enlisted woman who was married to
Lt. Flinn’s lover, puts into sharp relief
both the fact that adultery tends
to break up marriages more often
than it leads to “wholesome
relationships” and the
deleterious impact such triangles
involving service personnel can have on
the good order and discipline required by
the armed forces.

The Bottom Line

As syndicated columnist Patrick
Buchanan wrote in the Washington
Times on 21 May: “Whatever the
modernists say, adultery is a breach of
trust, a breach of faith, an act of
deceit and a primary cause of family and
social breakdown and human unhappiness
from divorces to violent death.”
Surely, Lt. Flinn is not the first person
in uniform to commit adultery, nor will
she be the last. If she is not subjected
to the prescribed judicial proceedings
and punishment, however — not only for
having engaged in such activity but for
disobeying a direct order to cease doing
so and then lying about that disobedience
— the Flinn case will set a precedent
whose detrimental impact on the U.S.
military may be incalculable.

While Sen. Lott’s betrayal of his
purported conservative attachment to
“family values” and the best
interests of national security has earned
him once again the lavish editorial
praise of the New York Times, it
stands in stark contrast to Gen.
Fogleman’s courage under fire and further
diminishes Sen. Lott’s stature as a
present, to say nothing of future,
Republican leader.

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