I was too busy to respond to the flood of comments on yesterday’s post “Tim Walz’ Military Record Redux” in real time. The reactions were in three broad categories.
Too Much Attention to a Trivial Topic/Democrats Get More Scrutiny Than Republicans
First off, I couched the whole post in terms of the perspective of military culture. My late father was a retired Regular Army First Sergeant, I served in the Regular Army and deployed to Desert Shield as a Field Artillery officer, and I’ve spent the last eleven years teaching mid-career officers. As noted in the post, things that seem trivial to civilians can spark heated outrage among veterans and those still serving.
Second, I stated multiple times in the post that this issue would have next to no impact on the election.
Third, the fact of the matter is that Walz is a relative unknown on the national scale. Like his counterpart, J.D. Vance (who was more famous but still unvetted) that means lots of old stories known only to locals suddenly get a national airing.
Vance has already—rightly—been the subject of a massive pile-on, as his introduction to the national stage has not gone well. He comes across as, to coin a phrase, weird. And weird things he’s said and done over the years that got very little national attention are suddenly national stories.
That’s what’s happening with Walz now. He exaggerated his military record, his running mate touted said record in introducing him, and now those old claims are being examined.
This is not unusual. This is what’s happened with Vice Presidential nominees going back as far as I can remember. And the scrutiny is, quite rightly, more intense when they’re unconventional rather than someone who had, like Harris in 2020 or Joe Biden in 2008, been through the scrutiny of their own presidential run. This was true even before our current hyper-polarization. See Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 or Dan Quayle in 1988.
Disdain for the National Guard
Speaking of Dan Quayle, his Vice Presidential nomination was the first time that I understood the disdain that active duty veterans had for the National Guard. At the time, I was a newly commissioned Second Lieutenant who wouldn’t go on active duty for a few months. There was considerable pile-on to the effect that Quayle’s service in the Indiana Guard made him a de facto draft dodger because it was well known that being in the Guard meant that you wouldn’t get drafted and that there was essentially no chance that you’d be deployed.
We saw this resurface years later when George W. Bush ran for President in 2000. Once again the charge was that a well-connected father was able to get his son out of combat service by stashing him in the Guard. This was contrasted with his opponent’s honorable service in Vietnam as a combat correspondent. (Amusingly, very much like the present controversy, in that Vance served as a public affairs Marine.) We saw it again in Bush’s 2004 re-election with the controversy known as “RatherGate” or “Memogate.”
All of the above, by the way, got way more attention than the kerfuffles over Walz’ exaggerations.
To be sure, the National Guard that Walz served in from 1981-2005 wasn’t quite the Guard of the Vietnam era. As part of the reorganization of the armed forces in the wake of the abolition of the draft in 1973, the Guard became somewhat more deployable.
As noted in the post, it was well understood prior to the mid-aughts that the Army Guard (unlike the Army Reserve) was a Break the Glass in Case of Emergency force, not a ready reserve.
First, a post-Cold War reorganization put most of the Reserve Component’s combat arms units into the Army National Guard and its service and service support units into the Army Reserve. Pretty much any deployment of scale meant that assets that were only or mostly in the Reserves would be called up; we didn’t need Guard combat units. Famously, a Georgia Guard unit was called up for Desert Storm but wasn’t certified as sufficiently trained to deploy until the war was over.
This is further complicated by the fact that the Guard has a primary role as a state militia available for the governor to call up to handle emergencies, especially natural disasters. For another, the Guard is disproportionately populated by state and local civil servants and first responders. Calling up the local Guard unit can decimate the local police force and fire department. Not to mention school teachers like Walz.
More importantly, the Guard is simply poorly trained. This isn’t a knock on them but a reality of the organizational construct. A Regular Army Field Artillery unit trains regularly. A Guard artillery unit, by contrast, has weekend drills twelve weekends a month and has a two-week annual training period, usually during the summer. Most of this time is spent taking care of routine administrative work, common task training, holiday parties, rifle qualification, and the like. There’s just not much time for training.
Because the Active Duty force was not large enough for the demands of the Global War on Terror, the decades-long understanding of what the Guard was changed. Around the time Walz left, we started calling up Guard units for combat deployments with some regularity despite all of the aforementioned issues. It caused considerable consternation. It’s literally not what people thought they were signing up for.
Regardless, over time, the nature of the Guard simply changed. People who didn’t want to deploy got the hell out. And, while “one weekend a month, two weeks in the summer” remained inadequate to have proficiency in combined arms operations, a regular deployment schedule produced seasoned units with a lot of experienced veterans to train up the new hands. The Guard of 2024 or 2014 and the Guard of 2004 were simply not the same animal.
By the way, this clip of Walz “insulting” the Guard by referring to them as “19-year-old cooks” is going around as a gotch smear. But that’s not how I interpret him at all. He’s just stating a fact: these are volunteers with a modest amount of training, not seasoned riot police. They’re not a magic bullet and can often make a situation worse. (See also: Kent State.)
I would acknowledge, though, that my comment that “24 years in the National Guard of Walz’ day is not 24 years of real service” was over the top. As @James R Ehrler and others pointed out, Walz’ unit was available for disaster response missions. And, of course, he did deploy to Europe to support the war in Afghanistan. What I should have said was simply that 24 years in the National Guard is not the same as 24 years of active military service. For that matter, considering that Walz spent most of those 24 years as a high school teacher and coach, he was certainly serving the public in a very valuable fashion.
Joyner Hates the Dems!
These takes always amuse me. As noted in the OP, I’ll vote for the Harris-Walz tickets despite various misgivings about it. The alternative is a Lunatic-Weirdo ticket.
Beyond that, my track record on analyzing these things fairly is pretty strong. More than twenty years ago, I defended John Kerry—for whom I did not vote—from slurs against his exemplary military service. When the first inklings of the group who would eventually call themselves the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth came out in May 2004 (“Former Mates Allege Kerry ‘Unfit’“), I wrote,
There’s nothing new here, just a renewal of the debate over the Winter Soldiers hearing and Kerry’s anti-war activities. Presumably, these things have been factored into voters’ minds at this point, to the extent anyone much cares thirty-odd years later. Further, this is in some sense the mirror image of the chicken hawk argument. Since all they’re doing is assessing purely political matters, I’m not sure why the opinion of Kerry’s former Navy mates should have any special weight.
What is relevant to the question of Kerry’s fitness to serve as commander-in-chief is his present maturity on defense matters. Given the advantage of thirty-odd years additional seasoning and reflection, what are Kerry’s views on Vietnam now? More importantly, what is his vision for the war on terror and our future in Iraq? It’s still very early in this campaign but Kerry will need to give a much more coherent view on those issues than he has so far.
When the full-fledged charges came out two months later (almost 20 years to the day ago), I wrote (“Swift Boat Nuts?“):
Drudge is continuing to flak the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth who, frankly, sound increasingly like lunatics.
[…]
Kerry has charged other Vietnam vets, with a rather broad brush, of war crimes and included himself in that number. I’ve never given much credence to either of those things. While I think those statements, which he’s never repudiated, help make him unfit to be commander-in-chief, these sort of allegations strike me as wholly incredible.
And I won’t rehash my long series of posts about Sarah Palin here.
While I’ve certainly been a partisan at the past, I’ve just never had problems criticizing individual actions of those I support or defending those I don’t support from charges I consider unfair.
