Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta
WASHINGTON – US military chiefs are moving to shore up discipline after a series of public relations disasters that have angered Afghans and Americans back home, officials said Friday.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta plans to stress the importance of good conduct in a speech to troops at Fort Benning, Georgia later on Friday, officials said, reinforcing a message from Army and Marine Corps leaders.
Panetta will be emphasizing that the US military’s power ultimately depends on the character of those in uniform and how they carry themselves, especially while on missions abroad, Pentagon officials said.
“The problem with these incidents is that there is a price to be paid. It not only hurts us in terms of lives that are lost, but also sometimes it impacts on the very mission we are engaged in and also hurts morale,” Panetta told the Army Times in an interview published Friday.
“There are a few bad apples out there that can impact by virtue of doing the kind of stupid things that sometimes they do,” he said.
Panetta’s trip to Fort Benning follows a string of damaging incidents, including a video of Marines urinating on Taliban corpses, photos of soldiers posing with body parts and the inadvertent burning of Korans that sparked deadly riots in Afghanistan.
The high-profile examples of misconduct threatens to tarnish the military’s image and undermine already declining support for the war in Afghanistan, analysts say.
The commandant of the US Marine Corps, General James Amos, recently issued a bluntly-worded “white letter” distributed to the entire chain of command on what he suggested was a breakdown in discipline.
“We are allowing our standards to erode,” Amos wrote in the letter, published by the Marine Corps Times. “A number of recent widely publicized incidents have brought discredit on the Marine Corps and reverberated at the strategic level.”
Amos has since embarked on a tour of Marine bases across the country to hammer home his point, and will head to installations on the West Coast later this month, his spokesman said.
“He’s going to be travelling around the Marine Corps to address these issues personally,” his spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Joe Plenzler told AFP.
“You have to bear in mind the Marine Corps and Army have borne the brunt of a lot of hard fighting on the ground in a fairly morally bruising environment for the last decade plus,” he said.
“This is one effort to kind of grab everybody by the face masks, especially the leadership …and set that expectation, and just make sure we’re all moving in the right direction.”