Joe Biden's MRAP advertisement has been modified. As Politico reported on Monday, the initial version included a quick view of retired Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland of the US Army, who led the Coalition's campaign against ISIS (Daesh, those crazies, you name it) from 2015 to 2016, but with his name tag blurred. All the same, he was recognizable in the video, and some people asked him if that meant that he was endorsing Biden. MacFarland did want to be seen endorsing a candidate, and so asked the campaign to remove him from their television spots. (See Jacqueline Feldscher, "Biden campaign removing retired general from ad after he objects," Politico, 19 October 2020.)
As I noted in my previous column, I am also not endorsing a candidate. However, I was taken aback by MacFarland's (now-deleted) LinkedIn post, which Politico incorporated into its story: “I'm not a political person, but this isn't about just me. I object to the use of ANY military personnel in uniform in political ads — full stop."
That is simply unworkable. An important point in Joe Biden's political campaign is his argument that he is more qualified than Donald Trump to serve as commander-in-chief of the US armed forces. He has at least a prima facie case. To highlight his understanding, he notes his role in sponsoring the massive adoption of MRAPs for the War in Iraq. How one would make an effective television advertisement of MRAPs without troops is rather unclear to me.
I do not mean to take this as an opportunity to complain about a retired general—not at all. The use of his image in the advertisement was legal, but his request was reasonable. What's not really reasonable is the notion that uniforms don't belong in political advertisements. That sounds like an assertion of some moralistic American Exceptionalism, in which wars are crusades and enemy actions crimes. This is a politically unhelpful view.
In contrast, as Clausewitz famously wrote, and as every war college student must be taught, "war is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means." For representative governments, the commitment of military force is a two-level game, in which support for war must be maintained amongst the people, if war is to be successfully prosecuted by the military. This has been true since the Athenian Assembly debated the invasion of Sicily. And this means that the details of military matters must be subject to debate, review, and even rejection by the electorate.
To catch the voters' attention about the MRAP, Joe Biden's campaign needed to show those vehicles in a realistic setting. This time, that included some uniforms, and that should not stop.
James Hasik is a senior fellow in the Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University, and a senior fellow in the Scowcroft Center on Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council.
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