Ah! My cue!

I'm sure you can anticipate that my reaction to the latest Pentagon defense of Rumsfield only reinforces my belief that Rummy is politicizing the Pentagon.

The Constitution's spare description of the roles of Command-in-Chief and military, as implemented by law delegating managerial authority to the Secretary of Defense, results in a defacto command structure with an implicit yet recognized wall between the civilian and military levels:

The American people
The President
The Secretary of Defense
-------
The military

The wall that separates military professionals from civilian overseers is beneficial because it establishes, in theory, mutual respect. The military respects civilian authority; civilian authority respects military professional judgment. As long as the wall stands, civilian authority remains legitimate and military judgment is untainted by politics.

Rumsfield has torn that wall into tatters, by trying to enlist the professional military in his purely civilian political fight. It's not the place of the military to take sides in an argument between factions of civilian authority. To do so is the first step of defiance along the path of throwing off civilian control completely.

For the military to appear to defend any Secretary of Defense is tantamount to trying to influence the choice of their own civilian overseer. It's a conflict of interest. It's improper. It's over the line.

What just makes it more offensive is that we consider it a matter of propriety for our soldiers to generally keep quiet on the subject of civilian politics, and to express themselves only in mime through their right to vote. The military is gagged by custom, and therefore nobody should have the right to put words in their mouths. It's simply wrong for the Pentagon, at the direction of its civilian political appointee the SecDef, to try to rebut a civilian editorial on a matter of civilian politics by claiming the silent support of the troops.

I'll bet I've finally changed your mind now, right, Tom?