"Persuasion Beyond Logic: The Importance of Rhetorical Training for Military Officers"

About the Author

Megan McIntyre is a PhD student at the University of South Florida where she works as Mentoring Coordinator for the University's First Year Composition program. Her research interests include writing pedagogy and practice as well as the intersections of rhetoric, writing, ethics, and politics.

Contents

Introduction

Donald Rumsfeld and Operation Iraqi Freedom

Winning Hearts & Minds: The Way Forward in Afghanistan

Rhetorical Training & Effective Intercultural Communication

An Overview of Rhetorical Training

Conclusion

Works Cited

Introduction

It is a fundamental mistake to see the enemy as a set of targets. The enemy in war is a group of people. Some of them will have to be killed. Others will have to be captured or driven into hiding. The overwhelming majority, however, have to be persuaded.

– Frederick Kagan

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.

– Aristotle

General Barry R. McCaffrey begins his foreword to Suzanne Nielsen and Don Snider’s 2009 American Civil-Military Relations by declaring that “senior military leadership must be objective, expert, and determinedly nonpartisan” (xiii). Though General McCaffrey certainly means that senior flag officers must be experts in military history and strategy, he suggests that their capabilities must go beyond these traditional areas of expertise. Later in his foreword, General McCaffrey explicates these three key traits (objectivity, expertise, nonpartisanship) and argues that the military “must broadly develop selected officers for service at senior levels and convey to them their responsibility to be expert at their assigned political-military roles” (xv). Part of this training for senior flag officers charged with negotiating the treacherous political waters surrounding military policy must be rhetorical.

Beyond General McCaffrey’s broad recognition of the need for officers who can mediate the relationship between the civilian leadership, whose goals are political, and the military, whose goals are first strategic, there is also a particular event that should serve as an impetus for a renewed focus on rhetorical training: the implacability of then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. At the moment when persuasive abilities were most necessary, “many senior flag officers,” says General McCaffrey, “were ill-prepared to respond effectively” when faced with Secretary Rumsfeld’s “arrogance, disingenuous behavior and misjudgments” (xv).

Not only are rhetorical skills necessary for navigating American civil-military relations, such skills would also be a vital complement to the cultural and language training now compulsory for military officers at all levels of rank. The emphasis on counterinsurgency strategy, which requires an increased focus on cultural training, necessitates a new way of understanding the modern use of force. General Rupert Smith, in his book The Utility of Force, suggests that by 1991, the “industrial army became effectively obsolete” (269). Instead of a world in which two armies meet on a battlefield, uniformed and easily distinguishable from civilians, the reality of post-industrial conflict is far less neat: “A single massive and culminating event” has been replaced by “a series of events which may serve to deliver the desired political outcome” (404). It is under these circumstances that officers operate in theatres of war, specifically Iraq and Afghanistan, in which the focus is not on the destruction of an opposing military power as much as on winning the sympathies, the “hearts and minds,” of the people. In such conditions, an awareness of how ethos (credibility), pathos (emotional appeals), logos (logic), and kairos (timeliness) operate in conversation (and how these appeals combine with attention to particular cultural norms) to form persuasive, ethical, and culturally appropriate arguments could prove to be an invaluable tool in the battles for the hearts of the Iraqi and Afghan people.

Because of the disastrous consequences of senior flag officers’ inability to communicate effectively with someone as certain and uncompromising as Donald Rumsfeld and because of the increased emphasis on intercultural communication, senior officers need sustained rhetorical training. In what follows, I will discuss the consequences of the breakdown of honest discourse between Donald Rumsfeld and the military officers advising him on the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the importance of rhetorical training for negotiating intercultural communication in areas of conflict. I will also suggest ways in which rhetorical training fits into the cultural training already underway in many military institutions and briefly sketch the necessary components of a rhetorical curriculum.